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Webdevelopment, what not to do!
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Loading ...Gotta make this a quick post, since I’ve just come home from work and I have a meeting planned later this evening. So what am I gonna share with you all today. Some of you may know, after visiting my publishing site, that I’m currently developing some website’s. And I can tell you its taking a lot longer then I’d hoped. Let me walk you through the process I went through when developing the website and share with you what not to do. Its so good when my mistakes may help you be better.
Please all note that some of the things I describe are just plain stupid, so don’t repeat them unless you wanna waist a lot of time. I’m doing this project in my free time so no harm when I make a mistake, but don’t do this if your trying to be a professional. I know I don’t!
Stupid planning
So what was the first mistake I made is one lots of developers make. Ah who needs planning, after all this is something I’m doing for fun. Oh boy! I learned this one the hard way with this project. Lets just say I started a semi professional lay-out of the site over half a year ago and it aint even half done yet.
Which also brings me to my second point: don’t take on more then you can do. Logical aint it. But it is hard when you have a good idea and you want so many features. I know I wanted a lot of them, I just had to have statistics, movies, actors, shows and the episodes, characters, automailing, etc…
Documenting
I know that a few posts back I talked about how to approach developing software, and for once I actually stuck with my own advice. I wrote a nice little requirements document with what the website had to do, what it had to contain and how users should interact with it. Score one for me! Not quite, I found that instead of making multiple increments in development I kept adding things on the fly. So right now half of the stuff build isn’t even written up yet. Oops
Guess that’s another you shouldn’t do. When you get a great idea write it down, put it on a list. Do what ever you have to but don’t implement it straight away. If you do the list of things to do will never get done.
Simplify it
Man this article is becoming an embarrassment for me, just hope it helps you all. So on to my next point for the list of what not to do. Again my simple little idea for a movie and show website and again silly little me. I love developing things and I loved my idea, after all I’d been playing with it for the better part of three years now. I had tons of ideas for it, but forgot that every idea made the website more complicated then it had to be. Don’t get me wrong I’m still working out every idea I initially had for the site, but I’ve become a lot more realistic.
I’ll share a simple example with you. I had a pretty good database design (well I have to say something nice about myself every now and then). Then came my idea to add tracking information, I just had to know what pages got the most visitors. Doesn’t sound to difficult right? That’s what I thought as well, just a simple little idea for my supposedly simple little site. I didn’t stop to think that this would mean linking stats to every table in my database which would mean making more tables, more queries, more code, more complexity… Long story short: A lot more work. I should have realized that and simplified my idea.
Rebuilding back-end
So whilst I was working on my beautiful project I something kept nagging at me. I had used tables pretty much everywhere I shouldn’t have. Used them for styling, position and god knows what else. So I made a discussion rebuild the back end, ok no problem. Just a few hours work.
Lets just say I’m never doing that again. Its a nightmare working on the back-end for div structuring instead of tables and also working on adding more features. Never in my live did I encounter so much problems and didn’t knew where they came from. Not to mention I still haven’t solved one, but that can wait for a later post. So please don’t ever do that, I mean it!
What am i talking about
Have I gotten you interested, educated or well who cares at least you read the entire article. For those that are interested in seeing the release of the movie and show site check it out. Its not yet done, but everything there should at least work. Those of you who are interested in my failures visit the development site. But be warned the development site will not always work and might be down from time to time.
Firefox is testing my patience
So what am I ranting on this time. Well for my current job I’m stuck surfing
the web for long periods of time. Some friends recommended using firefox
because its so stable and so much better then IE.
So me being a fool I listened and oh boy how did I enjoy the new
browser. First problems started creeping up in the first few hours, Firefox
loves my memory. And I don’t mean in a good way. It eats up 300 Megs of
memory on average. Score one point for the good guys.
I hear those firefox fans saying, yean but it is so much more safe. Sure if
you don’t mind reinstalling the damn thing every two weeks or so because a
new ‘patch’ is released. And I do mean reinstalling not just updating, score
another one for the good guys.
Well I’m working a lot on the Internet and copying and pasting text is a big
part of any job on the net. So I press CTRL+C and then go to my little text
editor and hit the CTRL+P. Ho wait a minute! You didn’t paste anything, what
the f*ck. Seems that Firefox is a bit picky when it comes to copying text,
some times it does and sometimes it doesn’t. Score another point for the
good guys.
So what’s my conclusions, well I’m going back to IE. It might not be liked
by the geeks, but its a hell of a lot better then the firefox currently
available. If you counted like I did, then IE scored 3 points against nope
of Firefox. Now true I only listed problems, but hay I’m not waiting for a
browser that’s got this kind of major problems in its code.
Update(06 April): Ok i’ve done some research into it and it appears to be that the copy and paste problem is a very old one, I’ve just never used Firefox that intens before.
GMails strange interface
I made myself promise not to create this post, yet it appears to be here. Ok
better tell you what I mean. Do you have a GMail account, if so then check
the positioning of the buttons in the inbox. You’ll see that they are in the
following order ‘Archive’ – ‘Report Spam’ – ‘Delete’.
Nothing wrong with that, nice clean and logical.
So here is my problem, I always check my spam box to make sure no message
mistakenly gets send there. In the process I love selecting the link
‘select all’ and then press the delete button. But in my hurry I
always end up pressing the ‘not spam’ button. Why?
Easy GMail fucked up, well that’s my opinion anyway. Instead of the same
order of buttons as the inbox they changed the two buttons around. So
instead of having ‘Not Spam’ – ‘Delete’ you get ‘Delete’ – ‘Not Spam’. Why
does google want to hurt me so badly, can’t they design a user interface
that is a bit more obvious. Or more important the same throughout the
website.
I’d better stop as I’m starting to rant, so until next time.
Improving search results
Lets get one thing clear, this is not for the users that use the search engines. I might be willing to do a short article about that at a later stage. So what am I talking about, well its quite easy. You have a site and you want to rank better in the search results, I know you so be bold YOU want to be the first result the users see. Damn that’s difficult isn’t it!
Well that’s what I found out the hard way. A company hired me some time ago, wont mention who just look back a few articles, to optimize their pages for the search engines. Oh sure why not just ask me to pay Google to be first! Simply put I’ve been busy since the beginning of January and it aint all that easy. Granted I’d never done anything like this before, but still. So how do you approach this, well can’t go into much detail but can describe some of how I achieved the results.
Research behaviour
This part oh so many people don’t like, including me considering I’m kinda a technical guy. But you need to find out what attracts visitors to your site.
- What do you offer them
- how do you make their lives easier
- What do they like to see.
Just a few of the questions you should answer for your site, and if you have multiple sections don’t be surprised to have to do this for each section as the visitors might be quite different.
Stay up-to-date with search engines
Oh my god, can it get any more boring! YES, it most definitely can. Especially for those among you that hate math, vector and graph based calculations. Sorry about that, but you are going to have to read tons of research papers on information retrieval. Most of which won’t be used and some of which will help you a lot. I just love those little gold mines. So what do you look for and how. A good place to start is citiseer which contains tons of those papers. Just look for terms like data mining, link structure, page rank and LSA/LSI. Another place to start your educational live is in the patent offices, they contain dozens of patents sent in about the search engines.
Research & Invent techniques
Here I wont lie to you, there are hundreds of techniques that are discussed on the web. Some of which will work and most of which wont. My advice mix it up! Simple ay. You have all the knowledge of the research in search technology so use it. Combine it what is printed on the web. Improve! You will also have to decide what to do. Will you stick with the rules(white hat) set by the search engines or will you push the limits(black hat). Some good resource to start with are probable:
- Seomoz, especially the blog is useful
- Cre8asiteforum, basically an alround forum for webdevelopment
- Search Engine Watch, same as cre8asiteforum but they are a bit more greedy and want you to pay for most access.
- High Rankings, mostly white hat stuff so don’t expect any miracles
Wait for results. I know this step is boring, but it usually takes up to a month before any results are visible.
Day of rest day of fury
So its sunday, not suppost to do much then I suppose. But I had some time
left so I went sqauring the web for those fun april fool jokes that many of
you fell for. No use denying it anyway, I felt for a few to.
For a short list:
- Google Romance
- New game, or not!
- Blizzard presents BurgerCraft
- Dutch game buyers require id to prove they are older then 18 (in Dutch)
- Jack Thompson sues Oblivion because of satanisme (in Dutch)
Probably a lot more like these I haven’t found so I may feel like updating
the list, then again I may not after all it is sunday.
