Aarron Walter

free findability strategy cheat sheet [PDF 200k]

When I was researching my book, I asked a group of my students at The Art Institute of Atlanta what sorts of content they’d hope to find in a book exploring findability and SEO through web standards. Thinking like students with limited time to work on their projects, they all agreed that “the book should include coverage of what needs to be prioritized, and what can be done later if you run out of time”. Brilliant idea! I never would have thought of that. Well it’s covered in chapter 9 thanks to them.

As I was running through my table of contents with them, they pointed out that it’s all useful info, but it would be nice if there were a quick reference that you could just print out and keep nearby as you start new projects. That way you don’t miss any of the important stuff you should be doing to make your site findable.

I’ve created what I think is a pretty comprehensive findability strategy cheat sheet that will guide you through all of the stuff you should be doing when creating new websites or even redesign existing ones. All of the advice follows industry best practices and web standards, and have references to the places in my book or in the 5 free online chapters where you’ll find detailed explanation and examples of how to do this stuff.

I hope you find it useful!

download free findability strategy cheatsheet [PDF 200k]

There’s a fair bit of tedium and redundancy that goes into the set up of a new site. Most web designers start with the same tasks like reseting all default margins, padding, and other values to a common baseline for cross-browser support, you define your layout, wrestle with type, maybe even set up a print style sheet. We often find ourselves repeating what we’ve already done many times over on other projects. Blueprint, a recently released CSS framework created by Norwegian student Olav Frihagen Bjorkoy, seeks to eliminate this common tedium by providing a concise set of style sheets that make setup and design quick and easy.
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Whether you are looking for high quality free fonts, indespensible CSS techniques, tutorials on development topics ranging from Ajax to XHTML, you will find the ultimate resource to nearly every facet of web design at Smashing Magazine. The breadth and depth of resources this site offers is staggering. They choose a topic, then find everything on the web that is worth reading about it. It’s not the indiscriminate list of everything, its the list of everything useful.

Another site that is equally as useful to any web designer is Web Design From Scratch. This site touches on each major topic of the planning, design, and development process of a professional web site, offering clear explanations and real world examples that make each point clear.

I ran across a very useful collection of compressed versions of popular JavaScript libraries today, including Scriptaculous, and Prototype. The Prototype library compresses down from 70k to 30k, which is pretty impressive. I’m becoming more persuaded daily that MooTools is a better option, though, as it offers you the ability to pick and choose which pieces of the library you wish to download, and offers compression on your custom built package resulting in vastly smaller file sizes than the Scriptaculous/Prototype combo.

If you want to compress your own JavaScript or CSS, there are a host of utilities out there for just this task. See comments on this blog post for a laundry list of options.

Most people run their web sites on one of the many inexpensive shared hosting servers running a LAMP environment. If you are like me, you probably have a number of domain names registered, perhaps all parked on the same server pointing to the same site. It would be great to split things up, though, to point one domain to a particular site on your server, and other domains to their own site. Apache lets you do this using a special .htaccess file, which configures the server software on the fly. You can set up unique sites in their own directory on your server, and then
direct Apache to point requests for a particular domain to that folder. Let’s assume the domain you want to redirect is called “somedomain.com”, and the folder on your server where the site files reside is called “somedomain”. Create a plain text file with a text editor and add the following to it:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} somedomain.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !somedomain/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ somedomain/$1 [L]

If you are on a Mac or Linux machine, you will need to save the file as something like htaccess.txt so the operating system does not hide the file (.htaccess is a special name the operating system recognizes, and will try to interpret the commands within). Upload the file to the root directory on your server (sometimes called, htdocs, public_html, or www among other names). Rename it .htaccess, then try accessing somedomain.com in a browser. It should direct your request to the files within the somedomain folder transparently, giving the effect of multiple domains with their own site running on the same shared hosting environment.