defeated

I shall consider myself educated on this! Thanks.

Good advice from Atticus

Google says it's important. You don't seem to get penalized for bad code (within reason), but it is possible that all the "little things" like valid code and "original content" put together make a difference. My view on it has been that if you follow the google guidelines to the letter you are giving yourself a better chance of the things that really matter (inbound links with relevant text) making more of a difference to you. I think you have to look at it as a complete package. Most things on their own may not make a lot of difference but together they can. I am currently competing with companies that have thousands of employees and massive resources. We only have two employees. If we can make the top 3 for our chosen keywords, knocking some big competitors then in my opinion it proves that the google guidelines (all of them) are important. We don't have the same number of inbound links as some of our big competitors, we couldn't have without spamming. We have concentrated on the quality of links and of our site and it works.

Are people actually going to look for your site by the name of your site? or by other keywords? It is the keywords that you should be targeting. If your site is called "mysite.com" and that is your h1 tag/title then you will be found for the term "mysite". If your site is about rare books then you should have "rare books" in your h1. "Welcome to Mysite" is worthless. "The rarest of rare books on the Web" is much better. Ideally your site name should reflect what you do.... like phpfreaks! A site about php freaks with php in the site name and php in the site content. . . . perfect.

Imho having them the same (or very similar) is a good thing. What you are saying is that here is a page with a title "mypage" and when the bots check the most important text on that page will confirm that it is indeed about "mypage". If they don't match then you have a page that is titled "mypage" and then the most important text on the page is about something else. Which should the bots pay attention to? Title or h1?

Thanks so much. My version must be corrupted. That's a relief!

Hi, When I tried to look at http://www.jackiebrownmedical.ie with ie6 it crashed on me when I tried clicking links. I don't get it. The xhtml and css are both 100% valid. I'd be very grateful if any of you could check it out to see if you get the same results. I'd be even more grateful if somebody could explain why it is happening. A lot of our site traffic still uses ie6. (mine is not to reason why......)

Sorry, It's not working for me. I get an action bar and it goes on for all eternity before finally just stopping. Here are my details.: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6

??? I don't follow. I'm using simplexml to parse the data the other end. Do you mean $xml=simplexml("<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <transaction> <name>Gordon Smyth</name> <age>15</age> <content><![CDATA[<p>Just some random text</p><ul><li>asfsaf</li><li>saasffdasf</li></ul>]]></content> </transaction>") ; That gives an undefined function error and without quotes gives an unexpected "<" error. Also I could be in real trouble if any of the CDATA contents contained quotes which is quite possible. Would I be better off writing a temp file and then deleting it? I have avoided that because I don't know how yet.... but I'm sure it's not too hard.

Hi I have a problem. I am transferring info from one site to another using xml. I can get it to work if I have the xml in a file, but I don't want it in a file. I want it in a string. I tried $xml="<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <transaction> <name>Gordon Smyth</name> <age>15</age> <content><![CDATA[<p>Just some random text</p><ul><li>asfsaf</li><li>saasffdasf</li></ul>]]></content> </transaction>" ; but the "<?xml" bit causes a problem for some reason. I'm sure I'm just doing something stupid with the syntax but I don't know what. Please help.

There are a few problems with that. Firstly I have to set up permissions on the db's themselves. Presently I am not authorised to access the db on the first site from the second. This sounds complicated to do. Secondly, I also want to post to the major jobs boards from our own site down the line which requires me to learn about xml posting. I just don't know where to start. I've wasted days getting nowhere (yes even over Christmas!)

I just read it back and maybe that is too much of a broad question. I'll break it down. I need:- [*]What to put in my posting code. eg. if(checkbox send to newsite is checked){do this to send to getxml.php on newsite} [*]What to put on a page in the new site (eg. getxml.php) to act as a receiver which sends back a message to confirm receipt. [*]How to parse the information received by getxml.php into a form I can insert into the db on the newsite [*]A clue about what I am doing!

Hi. I am very confused. I have a website where I use a simple form to post job information to a mysql db. It all works very well. Then I ran into trouble. I have another website on a different server and I want to post some of the jobs there too. I can create a duplicate db structure on the new site but I can't figure out how to do it without posting once on each site which is not an option (there are more sites on the way). I need to be able to post using the form on the original site and for the same information to be sent to various sites. I think xml is the way to go but I cannot find a simple enough tutorial to guide me through posting and then receiving and parsing the other end. If anybody has any better suggestions than xml I'm all ears. xml seems like the best solution because there are so many variables to each job that need to be passed. If anybody can come up with an experimental tutorial that just passes <name>Ian</name><job>milkman</job> to a different site and then sends back a message confirming that it's ok I'd be delighted. Oodles of gratitude in advance for any enlightenment! ps. sorry if this is the wrong section. I really am out of my depth on this one!

Thank you Martin. That is really good advice. I can't believe I didn't know about Kuler! For colour blind people like me that is gold! Love the idea of printing and then drawing on it. I may not change anything on this site just yet...... while the client is happy.... but I can't wait to get stuck into the next one with your advice. Thanks again Ian.

The colour scheme came from the logo. I wanted to use as few colours as I could because that was my brief. The original site looked like this... http://www.medrep.ie/oldsite none of the navigation will work because of redirects but that is what I had to work from. My brief was to keep the colours and three columns. Is the general consensus to only put one picture in the right col? I had a hard time finding images that conveyed both medical and sales. So I opted for a mix of both. There is no reason for the column to be there on most pages, but I have used it on a few. I don't want to add in extra unnecessary navigation. I want to keep that as simple as possible. Regarding the pill pointer in the navigation... the client loved it... I was not sure about it but it has grown on me. I'd love to be pointed to some better ideas for the <h1><h2> background grads. I did have plain text but it needed something. I can do nearly anything with a picture but designing is not my forte.

Personally I quite liked the first one. I can understand why it was getting a hard time here. On the other hand.... take a look at this site.... http://www.prosperity.ie It's not mine. It is a competitors site. I didn't think it was any good when I first saw it but they are doing really well and have won awards for it. The reason... It is so different that you either see it as crap or really good. I thought it was crap and then I realised how clever they had been. My mother could navigate the site with no problems and there is no way that you could ever forget it. I find that if you stray from more neutral colours it never gets a good response from the webdev community but that does not mean that it is bad. Unless of course the webdev community are your target audience. What your target audience think of your design is all that matters. If you are happy with the design stick with it. But there are some really good pointers in here too!

For mod_rewrite you could try http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite There are also tools available on other sites that will generate the code for you if you google around a bit.

While tradition says that navigation should go in a left menu I'm all for breaking the rules! Particularly when you have gone for such an 'In your face' colour scheme. If you want to use the same navigation style I would suggest that you make all the bars the same length and center your text below each one. One problem with across the page navigation is that you can run out of room fairly quickly. So why not add in another column in your main page. It can hold pictures on pages that do not need sub menus and sub menus on the pages that need them. Make the side column your main column. Then when you float the real main column (the main part of the page) it will appear higher up the code when google et al go to read the page. This makes sense because full pages are not always read by robots and you want your all important content to be read before any side bar crap. I would make your "created by James Little..." bit a lot smaller (8pt?), and perhaps right align it. Your name is important to you but people visiting the site won't give a crap. The bold colour scheme you have chosen could be taken as inexperience or innovation and being different. Having your name so big looks unprofessional and detracts from the site. A picture is worth a thousand words (not to google though). Get some graphical content. Be careful of colours. Don't add in too many more. Also be careful of copyright. You can get enough images for the entire site for about $30 from a stock site like istockphoto. When it cost so little don't risk getting your client or yourself in trouble!

Hi, Your page http://www.sitepearl.com/billing/public/ has some extra space below the white border which is nice but it doesn't appear on any other page. Also, why not use mod_rewrite to tidy up those ?page='s and use the opportunity to drop in some nice keywords! Like the send button on your contact form but the form itself could do with a little work to make it look nicer.... just some simple css to make it look friendly and inviting rather than having it as standard. It makes it look more professional. I haven't gone into the site in any real detail, these are just first impressions. Hope you find them useful... If you don't you can always ignore them! Defeated.

Hi all, I've just launched my second website last week. It is a Medical Sales Training Site. I wanted it to look very corporate and professional. I've integrated a wordpress blog.... took quite a while to change the css to make it look like the rest of the site. All feedback both positive and negative greatly appreciated! The address is http://www.medrep.ie

Cheers!

Hi, How do I write the following? if(isset($1 or $2 or $3 or $4)){ echo 'something' ; }

Hi, I used reCaptcha on my site but found that it was hard to read by humans as well as machines. I loved the idea of reCaptcha using the information to digitise books but have found that since changing to another captcha we are getting more form completions. the one I now use is available here http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/articles/php-captcha.php I don't think it is particularly secure but it is easy to negotiate for the user and will slow down all but persistant hackers. You can see it in action on my site at http://www.jackiebrownmedical.ie/applyhere.php?url=apply&jobref=JB-0807-9 The size and number of letters required can be changed in the script. Hope you find this helpful. Ian.

Thanks but it does that already. My reason for asking is purely for google and getting around duplicate content. jobs_ireland.php?url=jobs exists in the index but I want to get rid of it. I have changed my sitemap to reflect page=1-whatever and I have changed all my links to say page=1 but I need a permanent redirect to get rid of the original without page=. I have tried a few things but keep on getting redirect loops. Maybe it's not possible and/or there is a better way to do it. Somebody on another forum suggested I redirect from url=jobs&page=1 to url=jobs but that would cause me major headaches with having to rewrite code that I'm already struggling with in the pagination itself and again in my sitemap (sitemap is dynamic and lists each paginated page).

Hi, How do I go about redirecting from http://www.jackiebrownmedical.ie/jobs_ireland.php?url=jobs to http://www.jackiebrownmedical.ie/jobs_ireland.php?url=jobs&page=1 ??? Ian.