Stephen Martin Design Blog

Last night I had the opportunity (thanks John Sherrod and Mike) to talk with the Atlanta Web Entrepreneur group about some techniques and practices for SEO-friendly HTML. To all those that were able to attend, thanks for coming out. Unfortunately, ten minutes is not a long period of time when discussing HTML/CSS, but I tried to hit some basics and get some wheels turning.

Here’s a list of topics and links relating to questions I received after the presentations.

Image Replacement (Logos and H1 Tags)

Article About Image Replacement Techniques at mezzoblue.com
This is a great article that covers all techniques going as far back as 2003!

Mod Rewrite and PHP Query Strings

A List Apart article about URLs
Great place to start if you’re concerned with your dynamic URLs

Black Hat Techniques to Avoid, Free Search Engine Tools

Building Findable Websites Chapter Downloads
These are some bonus chapters for download from Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. But don’t stop there… go buy the book!

I’ll also be sending over some more links to Mike to be included in the bookmark directory.

On a recent video tutorial project, I found myself scrambling through Google results looking for the “Get ‘whatever’ Player” badges that you often see on web sites that offer video. Sure, it’s common place now to just embed a video, but what if you’re working with a larger sized tutorial video, that you would like to appear in a pop-up window? You want to include a few things: a link to WMV and QuickTime versions of the video, a note that will let the user know the video will open in a new window, and some instructions for downloading a video player (if for some crazy reason, they don’t have one.)

This is where the badges come into play:

QuickTime Badges

Windows Media Player Badges

Hopefully, this post will help someone out there get these pages quickly!

After looking for some form element templates on the web and coming across flat-file versions, I decided to build my own. These are built within Photoshop and can be resized, easily changed and allow for a little bit of flexibility. Radio, checkbox, dropdown, button and text input all in IE/Win XP style.

Form Elements PSD File

It’s sad to say, but most consumers don’t expect good customer service. It seems like we (myself included in this group of consumers) are satisfied when we get “ok” service. The other day I made a call to Adobe Customer Service. I was having some issues registering an upgrade for InDesign based on an older version and serial number. The service rep on the phone was great, to the point and solved my problem in less than 15 minutes. He was completely empowered to give me the codes I needed to activate my software.

Wow - it was really easy to get my Adobe issue taken care of this morning.

That was the message I sent out to some people through instant message. Why was I so impressed? Shouldn’t a consumer ALWAYS get that kind of service? I mean, I paid money for an application that I needed to do my job. The longer I thought about it the more I started to realize that I, as a consumer, don’t expect great service. I am extremely happy when I receive “ok” service. What a shame.

Just checked my email today to find an interesting piece of mail from Ning.com, a social networking development site. Check out this new video from them talking about their new features.

Then jump over to a golf site I did for Digital 21 about 2 years ago…

Of course, in no way am I pegging them for stealing my stuff. It’s a great photo and could have been used by any designer, in any way, shape or form. Just thought is was a crazy coincidence that I happened to get the email and check out the video.