“Secret” Website Tools v.2

more Secret Website Tools I Use:

I’m not a big fan of those off-the-shelf, whole-site Content Management Systems (CMS) as a rule.  Don’t get me wrong - I like the convenience they can offer, and for managing large Corporate sites I think a really good CMS is probably one of the most important tools to have.

While there certainly are a lot of big websites out there, there are even more small to medium sized websites.  In my experience, installing and managing big site-wide CMS applications with all those seemingly ‘necessary’ features on smaller websites is often simply overkill - adding complexity to a website instead of advantages.  And the more complicated it is to use, the easier it is to break - this we know.

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My “secret” is a Handy little website content Spot Editing tool that makes quick work of updating websites and pages that have one (or more) areas of frequently updated content - perhaps a special Featured Product box, or an Announcements area, or… as discussed below, even a tidy little Content Management System (CMS).  This Website’s Secret tool is appropriately called:

Handy Spot Editor

Like most websites - at IntuitivebyDesign.com there are several areas that are shared by each web page - the Header, the Footer, the Left Navigation Column and the Right side Features column.

Handy Spot Editor is designed to edit a single area on a webpage, but for this site I wanted a quick and easy solution to edit 2 areas that are shared site-wide - the left and right columns.

Instead of editing each individual web page in the site every time the content in these areas needs to be updated, I use Handy Spot Editor and set-up a simple little CMS.

How?  I installed 2 copies of HSE - renaming one of them to differentiate between the two.  Here’s a couple of screenshots of the Left and Right columns Spot Editing panels:

Seems to work just fine.  In these sample source code snippets you’ll see that each column div contains code which calls the appropriate HandySpotEditor file -

Left side column:

<div id=”left”>
<script
type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://intuitivebydesign.com/folder/folder/HSEditorname.cgi?JS”>
</script>
</div><!–left–>

Right side column:

<div id=”right”>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://intuitivebydesign.com/folder/folder/HSEditornameRight.cgi?JS”></script>
</div><!–right–>

Whenever I need to update the content in either column on the website, I just log in to the appropriate Handy Spot Editor installation, make my changes, and poof - all the pages in the website are updated, automagically.

Exactly what I wanted - no more, no less, a just right website solution.

Try Handy Spot Editor out for yourself with this Demo.

If it looks like it might be a just right solution for your website editing tasks - Handy Spot Editor is exclusively available at Website’s Secret.

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“Secret” Website Tools v.1

Secret Website Tools I Use:

Like all website designer-types, I use a preferred set of website tools to automate, streamline and simplify website tasks.  Some are common text editors and graphics programs that are publicly available, but many tools are exclusive “Websites Secrets“.

Now I can keep a secret as well as the next guy/gal - honest, but some secrets really shouldn’t be, and these definitely fall into that category.  So, in the interest of intuitive websites everywhere,  I’m going to ‘leak’ info on some of my favorite website secrets, one or two at a time - starting now:

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On Time Delivery -

This is an automatic, time-delivered content management tool that makes it quick, easy and convenient to display fresh, updated content on a website - everyday - automatically - without editing the website everyday.

On Time Delivery Control Panel

On Time Delivery Control Panel

Edit and Forget it with this time-saving tool

Before OTD,  adding, scheduling and updating a websites time-delivered content could be a tedious, time  and money consuming task that involved:

  1. cranking up the ole website content editor
  2. and searching for the pages to update
  3. and editing each and every page
  4. and then firing up the ftp program
  5. and uploading it all to the website.
  6. and repeat - every single day, on every single page, on every single website

Doing this for a single website can be a full-time job.  Do it for more than one website at a time and you may need to hire some people to help keep up.

My secret, way more time and cost-effective solution is to use On Time Delivery, because…

After OTD,

  1. I just login to a websites OnTimeDelivery control panel at my convenience,
  2. and add, update, change the content to be displayed on any day of any week of any month -
    up to a year in advance if I want.

How COOL is THAT?

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Ok, that’s it for now - check back for more ‘leaked’ Secrets for Intuitive Website Solutions, perhaps something like… a Handy little web page Spot content Editing tool that makes quick work of updating website pages that have one (or more) areas requiring frequent, on-the-fly content updates …stay tuned :)

–dlperry
IntuitivebyDesign.com - Intuitive Website Solutions for Intuitive Website Advantages

Proof-Positive -Sitemaps DO HELP websites

As you may know - I’ve been a fan of Sitemaps for years:

On SEOmoz,  chenry wrote about an experiment he ran to see if submitting a Sitemap to Google and Yahoo would decrease the time it took Google to crawl and index the page.   As he said:

The results for this blog were amazing!  When a Sitemap was submitted the average time it took for the bot to visit the new post was 14 minutes for Google and 245 minutes for Yahoo.   When no Sitemap was submitted and the bot had to crawl to the post, it took 1375 minutes for Google and 1773 for Yahoo.   The averages were calculated on 12 different posts, 6 with Sitemaps being submitted, and 6 with the Sitemaps not being submitted.

Did you SEE that - 14 minutes vs 1375 minutes (22.917 hours) - just to get a site CRAWLED - much less INDEXED.

This isn’t news to me, but it is really great to see some actual facts and figures so well graphed and documented - kudos to chenry.

In the comments section for this post, Rand Fishkin (head of SEOmoz ) responds to a query about an old post indicating that Rand did not view sitemaps as useful:

With regards to my post - I actually no longer hold that opinion, so I’m going back to edit the piece. I’ve actually seen the results of Sitemaps be so positive for so many clients that despite the loss of visibility into architectural issues, I tell everyone that 99% of the time, you should be submitting as one of the first actions in your SEO campaigns.

Personally, I have ALWAYS found sitemap.xml files to be of great benefit - virtually to the point of  “if you only do ONE thing - DO A SITEMAP.”

I’m not tracking like chenry did so well in his experiment, but I am seeing benefit from the sitemap and feeds I created and submitted for another new site I’m involved with (was crawled almost immediately, and was indexed in Google within 24 hours).

I’m off to go pat myself on the back a bit for being so clever…, and maybe build another sitemap file or 2.   ;)

Free CSS Christmas Card Template

Free Christmas Card layout in CSS

Free Christmas Card layout in CSS

I am getting a little Christmas-y

that, and I’ve been commissioned to make a special e-Christmas Card.

Of course, that one is not for public use, but the same basic framed-content CSS layout is available free of charge at Abaryx.com.

As with anything CSS - the frame size can be changed, the content area size can be changed - everything can be changed.

Red Christmas card CSS layout template

Red Christmas card CSS layout template

The colors can be changed to anything you want - I picked some colors from the Christmas Tree graphic:

Add your own family photos and graphics, write your own message, maybe decorate the frame with some background detail - the sky’s the limit.

Blue Frame CSS

Blue Frame CSS

Plus, everything is defined in percentages, so it adjusts to fit different screen sizes.

This CSS template uses the ‘overflow’ parameter - learn more and see a sample page at Abaryx.com

#notes {css: sticky}

Or should it be #css {notes: sticky} ?

The ‘Fun with CSS‘ continues…

CSS StickyNotes has been added at Abaryx.com

CSS from a vintage site designers point of view

CSS from a vintage site designers point of view

dlp