photo credit: prakhar

I was reading an article today on Anywired today on 7 Signs of SEO Scams and it made me realize that there are still stack of people hiring so called SEO experts to get their site up high in the search rankings. For example guru’s that say they will give you a “ton of inbound links to your site”, which as you may be aware that incoming links are one of the MAJOR factors in Site Authority, but it is not the amount of links you have but the “quality” of links. These “quality” links take time to build, if you are creating quality content then the quality links will come.

I was reading a few of the comments and it got me thinking that although there are millions of sites out there outlining what you need to do to get your site to climb up the rankings in the search engines and appear on the front page of Google, web site owners are still expecting to much to soon. Unless you have an Authority site already that you can use as leverage or you can use a friend, collegue etc’s Authority site for leverage and get indexed by the spiders then things are not going to happen immediately.

Now I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, in fact far from it! but I have done quite a bit of reading about this and have undertaken a few simple things that I have no doubt have helped me with some of my sites to get them to rank better in search engines and stand out from the crowd. Over the last few weeks a site I run on Australian Rules Football ranked number 1 and 2 in Google for a particular game that was going on at the time! Now I thought that was quite an acheivemnt and it certainly bumped up the traffic volume which is what we are all after.

Things You Can and Should Do Now

Get some Keywords into your Page Title, for WordPress users, you MUST install the All in One SEO Pack If you have a static site that you have built in Dreamweaver then it is a must that you change the Title of each of your pages so they are not the same, that way you can target different keywords on different pages.

Another couple of things that are often overlooked are META Descriptions and META Keywords. I have found that using these on each page and keeping you main keywords amongst them works well. H1 Tags are also important and if you can get a keyword or two in there then even better!. Images!!!, again an often overlooked thing for beginners starting out with a wesite, get into the habit of naming your images and also putting in a descriptions an ALT tags on them. Another little tip I picked up is to link to internal pages from within your own site for example if was to mention AFL Football on my other site some where in an article I would link that anchor text back to the home page.

After implementing some of these changes you need to be patient! Don’t expect things to happen overnight, things alone and give the search engines time to crawl your site, it may take a couple of weeks before you can see any significant changes.

Once again if you would like a hand installing the ALL in One SEO Plugin, with optomizing your site or any other solution you find here then Contact Me.

Daniel Anderson
Budding SEO Guru

photo credit: Tim Morgan

This article came about via a few emails I have had over the last week from readers asking for an article showing how to connect your website application to a back end database. It really is not all that difficult to do and once you have read this article you will have all the knowledge you need to achieve it.

Step 1. Set Up Your Local and Remote Site.

The first thing you need to do is set up your site in Dreamweaver CS3. If you do not know how this is done then I would recommend you SIGN Up for my Weekly Design and Blog Tips Newsletter where you will immediately receive a copy of my E-Book - “How to Create a Working Contact Form”. In that it outlines how to set up a site in Dreamweaver CS3.

Once you have your site set up then we can connect to a database. Now most hosting providers like BlueHost will give you a number of databases with your hosting account. In this article I have created a new database called Example, and also a user for the database, example.

Step 2. Let’s Get Connected

Now that we have your site set up and a database to connect to let’s connect to it. Over on the right hand side you will see the APPLICATIONS Tool Pane (see below) that is where we will be doing all the work.

Step 3. Use The Connection To Retrieve Data.

Now that we have a successful connection to the database you can start doing some funky stuff. Just for this article I will pull the data from a table that I had created and display it on the web page.

For that, we need to create a Record Set. So form the Application Panel > Bindings Tab click the (+) Button and select Record Set. Give the Record Set a Name and select the other fields as you can see below.

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My last article was about creating a Pure CSS Flyout Menu. In this article I want to teach you how you can integrate that concept into your WordPress Theme so that when ever you create Pages or Sub Pages the menu structure will automatically be created. It really is SIMPLE to do.

If you haven’t read the previous article on How To Create the CSS Flyout Navigation Menu then I suggest you read that one first as I am not going to go over how to set it up from scratch.

Ok, so you have a horizontal navigation structure in your WordPress theme and you want to take advantage of the pages and sub pages facility built into WordPress and create a navigation structure to suite that facilitates the sub pages as well as the main pages in a drop down menu format. Here is how we can achieve that using PURE CSS!

First we need to find where in your WordPress Theme the navigation is located. You will usually find it in the header.php or index.php files depending on your theme. In this example mine was in the header.php file. Look for a line of PHP code that looks something like this:

<?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?>

It may not be exactly the same but it will have wp_list_pages in the line of code. This WordPress Template Tag lists all the WordPress Pages and displays them as links. If you would like to read more about this template tag, you can do so here.

All I did next was copy the CSS Code that I created for the CSS Flyout Menu (see article here.) and paste it at the end of the style.css file of the WordPress Theme and to make it easier on yourself at a later date add some commenting so that you know what that section is all about.

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photo credit: Foxtongue

For some time now I have been using a few CSS Flyout Menu’s on different projects by just copying and pasting code from different websites that I have come across. Some of you may do just that with this article. But in a project I am currently working on I thought I would sit down and actually understand what is going on behind the scenes in the CSS to make this happen. During the early days of my development this is what I used to do to get by copying and pasting examples from other sites trying to get things done as quick as possible, well not any more. Feel free to copy and paste away with this but I urge you to take the time to read what I am about to write and take it all in so you to can understand what is involved.

I have wanted to write a pure CSS flyout menu for a while now so I though now is a good a time as any to get it done. In this example I will so you how to create it. You can have a look at the end result here. I have made the different elements different colors to separate them and make it easier to look at it in the CSS markup

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I was lucky enough to be forwarded a “review copy” of Daniel Scocco’s new E-book titled “Killer Domains” last week and I thought that the readers here at Dreamweaver Spot would be interested in it as it provides some great tips and techniques on finding that Domain Name that will help make you websites stand out from the crowd and become a brandable asset.

For those of you who do not know who Daniel is (he is the other Daniel), he is the man behind DailyBlogTips.com, DailyWritingTips.com and DailyBits.com. He also appears on ProBlogger quite regularly as well. So he certainly knows his stuff and I was really keen to read this and write a review for you all.

Let me first start by mentioning that Domain Names are the “Real Estate Market” of the internet world and some people make a decent living just from buying and selling domains. Check out a few of the market places like SitePoint, DigitalPoint, DNForum and you will see what I mean.

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The other day I posted an article on creating an Email Newsletter Subscription Application using PHP and Dreamweaver, today I want to share with you how you would go about building a page that gives the user the ability to unsubscribe from that list.

First of all if you haven’t completed Part 1 then I suggest you visit the link above and set that up first.

Create a page confirm_unsubscribe.php. Now this page is going to use a Record Set to define a single record using a Dreamweaver Server Behaviour., similar to the Subscription confirmation page. The only difference is that on this unsubscribe page the record will be deleted instead of inserted.

Place a Form on the Page Insert > Form with a hidden field that has a name if “ID”. This hidden field is going to get the value passed to it from the URL String. To do that, Insert the Hidden Field onto the page and then from the Bindings Tab (the tab that is under the Application Tool Pane on the Right), Click the + Icon and Select URL Variable. Once you have done that, while the hidden field is selected click the Bind Button to bind that value to the hidden field.

Next Step is to create a Record Set that will return the correct record.

From the Bindings Panel again, click the + icon and select Record Set, give the record set a name, select the connection and the table. Where we need to make some adjustment is the Filtering. So lets change the filtering section to pull the URL Parameter “ID” from the URL String. See below.

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photo credit: Yandle

I had an interesting email from a reader recently who said that he designs simple sites for non profit organizations and whether or not the Contact Forms Using PHP or ASP would be the way to go for a Email Newsletter opt in?

In my opinion, I wouldn’t use those forms for that purpose but in this article I will show you how you can achieve this through the use of Dreamweaver CS3 and PHP.

NOTE:This is a 2 Part Series so make sure you Subscribe so you don’t miss the next article.

First thing we need to do is create a database to insert the records into. Now that I have XAMPP Installed on my Windows Vista box I can do all this locally. For this example I have created a database called EmailSubscriptions with one table called ESubscriptions.

This table has 4 fields, ID, Name, Email, Subscription. The ID column is the Primary Key and it auto incremented. The Name field is there to hold the name of the user, The Email field is a text field and will hold the users email address and the Subscription field will handle whether the user is subscribed or not, it is a Boolean field and 1 indicates subscribed, 0 means unsubscribed.

Next Step is to open up Dreamweaver and connect to the newly created Database. Here we go.

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Ok so I have decided to design my first Word Press Theme for release. Rather than set up a test install on this website I have decided to install Word Press on my Windows Vista Box here at work. Yes you can install it on Windows Vista and hey guess what it actually works. It’s great, it work exactly the same as a hosted version, there is no messing around with FTP, you can hack and change things, test plugins etc etc.

So if you are a Word Press user then your really should consider doing this. This is how you do it.

1. First grab this program called XAMPP Lite, you can download it from here.

2. Install the program, now with Vista it is recommended that you install it outside of the Program Files Directory. I chose a separate drive for my install.

I chose not to install Apache and MySQL as services in the next step, but if you want to install them as services then go ahead and place a tick in the boxes.

4. The Control Panel then launches and you can start MySQL and Apache.

5. File Locations that you need to know about.

Ok now that the install in complete and MySQL and Apache have started the home directory for the web server is located in the htdocs folder in the location that you installed XXAMP. In my case the location is D:\xampp\htdocs. If you go to your browser and type in http://localhost you should get the XAMPP Slash Screen.

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Since publishing the articles on Creating a Contact Form in Dreamweavr CS3 using PHP and also recently the article on Creating a Contact Form in Dreamweaver CS3 using ASP, I have received a flood of emails telling me how helpful they were (Thanks).

So I have decided to release an E-Book on the topic. The E-Book is called “How to Make a Working Contact Form for your Website”. To get your copy simply pop your name and email address into the sign up box on the right hand side and I will email you the link for the download immediately. You will also receive Web & Blog Design Tips on a weekly basis to help you IMPROVE your website.

The E-Book covers a few topics including Creating Contact Forms with both PHP and ASP technologies and also styling your forms using CSS.

For the beginner Dreamweaver users there is also a section on setting up a site in Dreamweaver.

Don’t Forget the Q&A section that I will be starting as part of the Web and Blog Tips Newsletter, Ask me a question via the Contact Page and I will respond via the Newsletter so that other can benefit as well

I reading an article published in the New York Times the other day and they were talking to Design Director Khoi Vinh and he mentioned in an answer to a question that their web designers still “hand code” their site rather than using programs such as Dreamweaver. In response to that here are 3 things why I think Dreamweaver is the way to go when creating your CSS. I haven’t fully handed coded a website for a very long time and tend to disagree with the fact that he thinks it “yields better and faster results.”

I would love to know how everyone else writes their code. Do you still use a text editor or use a program such as Dreamweaver? Let us know and post a comment with what you use and why.

1. The Template Pages Are Actually Quite Good
If you a beginner or even an intermediate or advanced CSS developer and are not all that confident with the whole CSS Layout thing and moving from a table based layout then this improved feature may just be your answer. Not everyone has the time to learn new things to get things done. I have written previous articles on creating CSS Layouts for a 2 Column, 3 Column, Liquid Layouts, and also Centering a Layout. But if you don’t have the time to learn these techniques then this section is for you.

File > New bingo there right in front of you are a plethora of CSS Templates to choose from. All of which provide great inline commenting so you can learn as you go. All these layouts render well in Firefox (Windows and Macintosh) 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0; Internet Explorer (Windows) 5.5, 6.0, 7.0; Opera (Windows and Macintosh) 8.0, 9.0; and Safari 2.0.

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