Add a Scrolling Ad to Your Site

June 2, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Do you have a site with a border?

Want to add an ad for 15, 30 or 60 seconds that will stay in the border — even if your visitor scrolls down the page.

This software package is free:
Get Scroll Ad Lock here

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Advertising, Blogs, CSS, Graphics, Internet Marketing, Sales, Scripts, Visitor Experience, Web design tools 

Suggested Web Design Resources

February 22, 2007 | 4 Comments

I am often asked which resources (books, etc.) that I recommend for people who want to create web sites.

Many web hosts, such as Powweb, provide basic templates for easy creation of a web site. These can be your base for your very first web site, or can function as a quick way to set up your personal blog, a photo gallery or even a forum.

Once you have your first site created by some type of script or template, you will want to play around with it and change it. Whether you create a site using FrontPage, DreamWeaver, a web host’s templates, or code it by hand, you will probably find that you want to do things that can not be done by the standard package. That’s where coding and tweaking the site by hand come in.

HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition (Paperback)
– excellent structure, very readable and very understandable. Bite-size chunks of information and examples.

Open Source Web Development with LAMP Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP (the LAMP book will be hard to find).
My reviews of these two books.

If you’re using FrontPage, get FrontPage 2003 The Missing Manual.

Actually, all of the books at this link. I have but haven’t used the JavaScript one. The others are good. Start from the top, with Don’t Make Me Think.

Get one or the other versions (paperback / hardack) of the HTML for the World Wide Web, even if you have another HTML book. www.terryscomputertips.com/computers/web-design-books.php The CSS and PHP anthologies are not learning tools, but more reference / script libraries. The “Build your own database-driven website” book is a good example for getting going with PHP.

The Adsense Secrets” ebook by Joel Comm. Joel is “Dr. Adsense” — one of the first people to make over $10,000 per month from Google’s Adsense pay-per-click ads on his web sites. I found this book a BIG help in understanding how to create and display Adsense “pay per click” ads on my sites.
Get Adsense Secrets

Visibone.com’s “The Browser Book” is a 16-page quick-reference booklet that I use almost every day. It covers HTML, CSS, colors, fonts, special characters, JavaScript, DOM and Regular Expresions.
www.visibone.com

The Super Affiliates Handbook about selling other people’s products. Rosalind Gardner, formerly an air traffic controller, made over $478,000 in one year as an affiliate selling other people’s products on the web.

Notepad++ color-coded syntax programmers editor (free). Mostly, I use the EditPad Pro ($40, www.jgsoft.com). I reviewed Notepad++ in my November 28th issue of Terry’s Computer Tips.

Adsense Gold (Adsense Tracker script + 2 web-based PPC price lists + ebook). I waited and waited, convincing myself I didn’t need it. I finally bought it recently. It brings a whole new level of understanding web site stats and information on which pages get visited and which adsense ad formats — and ads — get clicked, without having to mess with Google’s limited “channels.”
Get Adsense Gold

SEO Elite Finally, one software package that I’m still considering — probably like my unwise delay in buying Adsense Gold. This package is all about fine-tuning your web site(s) to get high rankings in Google, MSN, Yahoo and similar search engines — and establishing incoming links from other web sites — because higher rankings mean more traffic! And more traffic means more earnings, whether you are selling stuff or have content with advertising. SEO Elite helps you get targeted traffic — traffic interested in your site’s subject.

Why get links? The more inbound links you have — links from other sites to yours — the higher you should rank in the search engines. Search engines also look at blogs for their rankings because blogs have become a major factor in Internet communications in the last year

You can sign up for Free Web Advertising via the ability to post entries to a blog designed specifically for advertising by members. Free members can post a 700 character ad once per week. Paid members can post much more often, with larger ads and HTML (fonts and images) that free members can not.

Pay attention, though — there is a special one-time offer for a paid upgrade that is not repeated. Although you can purchase a lesser upgrade later, you can not post nearly as often and you don’t get all the bonuses available if you go for the “Elite” upgrade. I wish I had…

One of the new services that I have found is LinkMetro. With LinkMetro, which is available in both a free membership and Advanced Membership modes, is a great way to identify potential web sites that you might want to link to you.

Why get links? The more inbound links you have — links from other sites to yours — the higher you should rank in the search engines.

LinkMetro’s free service helps you identify potential link partners. The Advanced Membership makes the tedious task of modifying and maintaining your web site’s link files into a virtually automatic activity. Just initiate a link request, or accept a link request from someone else, and pick where you want the link in your links directory — LinkMetro’s software will handle the rest.

LinkMetro will also allow you to easily view the pages on which your link partners have your links and make sure the links are still there.

Sign up for a free or Advanced Membership at LinkMetro. I recommend the free membership, not the advanced.

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Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, CSS, FrontPage, HTML, Internet Marketing, PHP Scripting, SEO, Scripts, Search Engine Optimization, Text Editors, Traffic & Linking, Usability, Visitor Experience, WYSIWYG Editors, Web design tools 

IE7 Web Developers Nightmare

January 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment

IT Gears has an interesting article on IE7 incompatibilities.

Looks like the author ran into a few more of the incompatiblities that I have, although I was very displeased at the look of some of my web sites when I first saw them under IE7.

My earlier IE7 articles talk about some of those bugs (like the one with the center tag).

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Visitor Experience 

I Hate IE7!

November 19, 2006 | Leave a Comment

For an “improved web browser,” Internet Explorer 7 has much in common with a stubborn mule. No matter what you want to do, it doesn’t want to do it right now.

If you happened to visit my Terry’s Computer Tips web site late this afternoon, you might have seen what I mean…

I made some tweaks to the site and was very happy with the results in Firefox. Then, I checked the pages in Opera. Again, it was great.

But, then I looked at it with IE7 — and found a mess.

Whether it was the absolute positioning changes that I was making, or perhaps a missing or extra <div> tag, or a glitch in the JavaScript, IE7 threw away almost all the content on the page and then laid out the rest of the page in a mess. Yet, Opera and Firefox displayed the pages perfectly.

I couldn’t revert to the earlier version fast enough to suit me — but I got there.

Gee, and I thought the strangenesses of IE6 were bad — at least it would usually display the contents in almost the right location.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Opera, Usability, Visitor Experience 

IE7 Bug: Bulleted Lists

November 13, 2006 | Leave a Comment

I wrote the other day about the IE7 Center tag bug. IE6, Firefox 1.5.0.7, Firefox 2.0, and Opera all displayed the pages exactly the same. And, then IE7 came along…

Bulleted lists were the first thing that I found that IE7 displayed differently from IE6, Firefox and Opera.

IE7’s default indent for bulleted lists appears to be about 60 pixels, where the others defaulted to about 8 pixels.

Where did I see the problem? In one of my WordPress blogs, where I used bulleted lists for some of the entries I had added to the sidebar.

All of a sudden, the bullets moved from the left side of the DIV, all the way to the middle of the 140 pixel wide sidebar.

After experimentation, I finally solved the problem by defining the margin-left and padding-left on both the UL and LI tags. Interestingly, I also had to define the list-style-type for the UL tag.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, Opera 

IE7 Web Design Issue: Centering

November 11, 2006 | 2 Comments

I’ve run into two problems that were fine in IE6, in Firefox and Opera, but that display poorly in IE7.

First, the <center> tag.

Yes, it has been deprecated for a while in favor of a <div align=”center”>. And, then, current recommendations call for creating a enclosing <div>and applying margin:auto or margin-right:auto; margin-left:auto.

But, this gets rather hairy very quickly.

With IE6, the easiest way to center a page was to use a <center /> tags. Firefox and Opera went along quietly and all was well, until IE7 came along.

Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t like <center> tags, at least with the combinations of DIVs I was using on my www.TerrysComputerTips.com site.

Although my pages are fixed now (by removing the <center> and </center> tags), IE7 initially took this same beautifully centered page — and right-aligned the DIV at a page width of about 1400 pixels.

Where it got that number, I don’t know. Idenfifying the problem was easy.

Identifying the solution wasn’t — who would have thought that removing the <center> and </center> tags would make the page center properly?

I’m not sure how I found it, other than shooting at the problem with a “what affects the whole page…that I can change” approach. But, that was it.

It’s time to lose the <center> tag.


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Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, Opera, Usability, Visitor Experience 

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