Hello blog!

Posted on by brennon

Hi there. I’m glad you made it to my blog. Just a quick overview of what my goal is with this blog. My über plan is to make this blog just as useful to myself as I’m hoping to make it for you!

The Vertexwerks Methodology

Posted on by brennon

This is the methodology quoted directly from Web Development Methodology for Results

I.D.E.A.S.™

The Vertexwerks Methodology

Investigate

This is the crucial first step for successful projects. We dig in to learn everything we can about a situation, the stakeholders and target viewers. The resulting research provides us the information we need to create the appropriate solution. From this research, we deliver a set of documents summarizing our recommended action plan, such as creative briefs, needs analysis overviews, technical infrastructure recommendations, scope documents, time and cost estimates and others as appropriate.

Design

Once we have an approved plan, and everyone has agreed to terms, the fun really begins. Our technical and creative teams coalesce to create both the eye-candy and functional specifications that form the foundation of your final project.

Execute

Taking the designs and functional specs, Vertexwerks creates the final artwork, page templates and supporting back end database application. Supporting photography and illustrations are also delivered here, with staged signoffs by both the client and Vertexwerks’ production and QA teams.

Activate

This is where the project goes from being an internal development project to accessible by the world at large, or subset thereof as you so deem. At this stage, documentation as appropriate is delivered to clients and web sites are uploaded for launch.

Support

We can provide training for internal teams to take over maintenance, backups and updating of content and you application, or we can provide very cost effective outsourced maintenance contracts. Either way, we’re here to help and make sure your project is an outstanding success.

Thunderware Call To Action

Posted on by brennon

I was asked this morning to join the Granite School District Information Technology Business Advisory Board by Kim Blanchard who is the Business Advisory Coordinator. Kim found me by typing “programmer in salt lake city” into google. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it! And I was more than glad to accept the offer.

Kim told me after we got off the phone that she would send me an email in 30 minutes or so. It seemed like the longest 30 minutes of my life. I had to call all my friends and let them know. (Oh and if you couldn’t tell I’m incredibly excited to learn and share with the board)

The email contained an invitation that I wanted to post so here it is! Brennon Loveless – Thunderware Call To Action.pdf

SEO Tools

Posted on by brennon

During my long adventure trying to conquer the world of search engine optimization I found some very useful tools that provide some awesome stats about the site in question. Here is a list of the seo tools that I like and the reason why I like these seo tools:

  • Website Grader – I put this link first for a reason. When you type in your url this gives you information about your site in every way shape and form, but that isn’t the best part yet. It tells you how to get everything ranking higher oh and it’s FREE!
  • Trend Report – The next best thing to the website grader is trend report. Once again you get to see a huge report about the status of your site. The part I really like is the backlinks section and the outgoing links section
  • Yahoo Site Explorer – To use this you can either use the link to the left, or just go to yahoo.com. In either case just type link: in front of your site to get all the links that search engine has to your site (i.e. link:http://www.thunderware.net will give you all the links to this site). Then there is a second way, try using ( linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com ) without the parenthesis. — also visit Effective use of yahoos linkdomain
  • Google Backlinks – From google you can check your backlinks by appending link: to your domain (i.e. link: “thunderware.net”) I drop the http://www and surround the domain in double quotes (“”). There is another way that some claim help you get better results than just using link:, try using (“yourdomain.com” -site:yourdomain.com) replace yourdomain.com with your domain and remove the parenthesis.
  • Bing Backlinks – Bing discontinued the link: operator in 2007 so if you want to see what links are available in bing visit “Explore your backlinks” where most of this information came from. Also a side note if you sign up for a Bing Webmasters account, submit a sitemap to them, and authenticate your website then you’ll be able to view your backlinks by going to the link above.
  • Lynx View – This service allows web authors to see what their pages will look like (sort of) when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser.
  • GeoURL – Create GeoURL headers for your website.
  • Search-based keyword tool – The Search-based Keyword Tool provides keyword ideas based on actual Google search queries that are then matched to specific pages of your website with your ads.

Htaccess Redirects

Posted on by brennon

This will be a short entry, but I just wanted to write this down so I don’t forget it.

In order to redirect a specific file or folder using .htaccess add the following to the .htaccess in the root level of your site.

Redirect file.html http://your.url/file2.html
Redirect /specialoffer http://www.thunderware.net/specialOffer

This information was found on Sam Brown’s site.

Seo Page URL’s

Posted on by brennon

Search engines will see certain url’s as different url’s and may count the page as duplicate content view the first few sentences here. The best way to avoid this conflict is to do a 301 redirect meaning that the page has moved permanently.

I’ll use thunderware as an example. The url’s thunderware.net and www.thunderware.net (notice the www) are considered different url’s to google because of the www subdomain. There are two very simple ways to eliminate the possibility of duplicate content due to the www subdomain. One is via the .htaccess file and the other is via php.

1.) add the following lines to the .htaccess file of your webserver and also make sure that htaccess files are enabled (instruction for apache are here; google “enable htaccess for <insert your webserver here>” for other directions).

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thunderware.net
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.thunderware.net/$1 [R=301,L]

2.) add the following lines to the beginning of your index.php file, or the file that is used as the entry point to your site. Also you can add this to the beginning of every file if you feel so inclined. One warning is that a check needs to occur before this script is called before the redirect is called so that an infinite redirect doesn’t occur.

<? Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.thunderware.net” ); ?>

I believe that the htaccess way of redirect is more effective since the php script above will always redirect, and until I have a moment to rewrite this entry this will have to suffice. Use the htaccess if possible.

Information found at webconfs.com and Google Webmasters