Sanni’s blog

Problem I noticed during a recent project was to get Flash object over another. So I set the topmost Flash object as transparent, but still the undermost Flash object was showing over it. After some searching from internet I found out that both of them have to be set as transparent to get that working. You can do it in two ways. For beginners it can be easier to select transparent background setting in Flash program and publish both Flash and html file. After that you can copy the code from html file and put it on to the html file where your layout is. Or if you are more advanced user just add wmode=”transparent” to your embed tag.

Did you know that you can add custom 404 error page to your site? Well, you do and it’s also quite easy to do. So why to do that? Sometimes there might be broken links in your site or user will enter your address wrong. So you should do your site as easy to use as you can. So what there should be? Layout can be same than in your actual site, because if there is some kind of navigation and / or search, those should definitely be shown also in your error page, so that users can find what they were looking for. Also a link to your main page and / or possible sitemap can be useful. After creating your custom 404 error page, you also need to create .htaccess file. Notice the dot in front! Easy way to create the file is with simple text editor, for example Notepad in Windows. Write “ErrorDocument 404 /error.html” in the file. Name of the error page can be what ever you want it to be, error.html is just an example. Copy both of these files in the root of your website hierarchy. I hope that this post helps you to create more user-friendly websites :)

Today I spent half of the day learning new features from Adobe’s latest products, so that I can work even more effectively. First I took part one of the Adobe’s eSeminars, which covered new features in Acrobat. After that I watched one of the OnDemand Seminars about Dreamweaver. Last, I watched great presentation about little-known Photoshop features from Adobe TV. I can definitely recommend to use these free resources Adobe offers!

One of my other favorite resource is W3Schools. So far I have found it to be very helpful with html, css, php, sql, javascript and xml, but they have even more material in there…

There are many things that affect to your site’s ranking in search engines. Some simple things are listed here: title, description, header elements, links and xml sitemap.

Probably most important thing nowadays is the title. If possible, every page in your site should have unique title and description, which tells something about the page content. Title should contain 1-3 keywords and title of your site. Description should contain few phrases about your site or page. Description not actually help with ranking, but search engines might show it below the link to your site or page. Search engines might as well choose to use a section of your page’s content if it’s relevant considering user’s query.

Using header elements <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc. correctly tells search engines and users which parts of the content is most important and which least important. Links to your site and from your site are also important. Links to your site make sure that users and search engines will find your site. Links from your site should be relevant considering the content of your site. Links to highly appreciated site’s are best, because it raise your site’s ranking as well. Setting the value of the “rel” attribute of a link to “nofollow” will tell search engines not to follow those links. If you have to include pages like “Terms and Conditions” or “Privacy Policy”, you should use nofollow, because those pages are not relevant considering content of your site. Nofollow is also useful if user’s can add their own texts and links to your site, because otherwise it’s really hard to keep up with the quality of links in your site and it might drop page rank of your site.

It’s also highly recommended that you create xml sitemap for Google. You can use Free Online Sitemap Generator for that. Put your xml sitemap into the root folder of your site. After that add your site and xml sitemap  to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. For watching how much traffic is coming to your site, you can use Google Analytics. It will tell you a lot about your visitors and how they find your site.

See also Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide from Google!

Joomla! 1.5 has improvements for all user categories. For clients that use only frontend to update articles and add news and links. For customers that use mostly backend to administrate whole site. For designers that use backend to edit layout. For developers that creates their own extensions. From my point of view best improvements are clearer administrator interface, easier picture management and overwriting files. Earlier adding pictures to media manager and beside text was pretty confusing. Overwriting files is a good improvement because it makes updating Joomla! much easier and faster.

Read more about Joomla! 1.5 from here!

This Tuesday I was in another Adobe seminar. It took place in Lauttasaari, Helsinki. It lasted two and a half hours. Like the title says, it was all about the new version of Acrobat. The main point in the seminar was get to know the product family of Acrobat and the potential of PDF.

Subjects were Flash tool, PDF Portfolio, saving web pages to PDF, reduction, comparing documents, Form wizard, commenting, Presenter and 3D Reviewer. PDF Portfolio seemed like a great new feature. Also we review PDF standards, OCR and Preflight very shortly. I was already familiar with Preflight from school. New service called Acrobat.com was also presented. I think that could be useful tool for me and my clients.

Check Acrobat.com from here! It’s free and all you have to do is register yourself.

Today I participated my first Adobe seminar. It was organized in Tennispalatsi (movie theater) in Helsinki. It lasted about three hours.  The main speaker was Jason Levine from United States. Jason Levine was very humorous, so the presentation wasn’t bored like these kinds of things usually are. The main point in the seminar was new features in video editing.

Subjects were new features of Premiere and After Effect, new plug-in called Mocha, new program called Soundbooth. Soundbooth is made for quick and easy audio editing, not exactly for the professionals of audio editing. Also we shortly review few new features of Photoshop. Now I am hoping to get the latest version of Photoshop so that I could test those by myself…

See Jason Levine’s blog from here!