Are you losing page rank and visitors when you change the names of your pages? - mjcpk web design and development

Without thinking about it you can easily be creating links from search engines and other sites that go to missing content. Make sure that when you rename pages, images and other files on your site that you tell everyone what you’ve done.

A .htaccess file is an essential tool for any website. It has many uses like setting default pages, 404 pages, indexes and URL rewriting but what we need it for here is the 301 redirect.
A 301 redirect is a way of telling the web server that you’ve moved or renamed a file but you still want links to the previous name or location to keep working. For example: if I have a page titled ‘products.html’ that I decide to rename ‘new_products.html’ I can use a 301 redirect to make sure anyone following a link to ‘products.html’ gets to ‘new_products.html’ and not a 404 page.

Where’d my Page Rank go?

There is nothing worse than having lots of people linking to your site and finding that it doesn’t go to the page you want it to. It also means that any Google Page Rank that you would have received is lost.

A 301 redirect tells people that the page has moved permanently. Search engines can use this to update their indexes and ensure that Page Rank is passed on to the new page name.

The syntax for a 301 redirect is really simple:

Redirect 301 /oldpagename http://www.yoursite.com/newpagename

Just create a new line for each page that you have renamed or moved. You can even redirect a page to one on another site if you have moved it that far.

You probably have a .htaccess file in the root of your website. If not you can create one yourself, it’s just a normal text file.

In summary

So when you next change the name of a file or an image on your site don’t forget to add it to your .htaccess file as a 301 redirect. You can check if you have any broken links on your site with Google Webmaster Tools. The 301 redirect also helps if you haven’t managed to update all of the internal links on your site too.

I must confess that I tend to shy away from jQuery and javascript in general. I know that javascript can do amazing things and I know it can really enhance the user interface of a site but I tend to avoid it. In my defense part of the reason comes from the historical problems with javascript prior to the advent of the modern libraries. Javascript could cause problems and was an effort to implement and maintain. As a result I kept things deliberately simple to ensure browser compatibility and for my own sanity.

Nowadays there is no excuse to avoid javascript and, when necessary, I use jQuery plugins to provide what I need in a site. However, I haven’t been moving beyond using plugins and the initialisation code provided by the developers on their websites. Other than changing a couple of variables I’ve not been writing any code. That’s not programming, it’s copy and pasting!

Something has happened to change everything. I recently stumbled across jQuery for Designers which is a site by Remy Sharp (@rem) with a whole load of great tutorials on using jQuery to achieve real world tasks.

It is the real world nature of the tutorials that has made the difference to me. It is not suitable for absolute beginners as it doesn’t introduce you to the basics of jQuery. I know the basics, I’ve watched and read tutorials about them before, but what I needed was some more concrete examples of jQuery in action.

What’s good about jQuery for Designers is seeing how you can use the various selectors and functions built in to jQuery to achieve things quickly and simply. Remy does a great job of making you want to get coding. As a result I threw together a little animated carousel in only a few lines of code. Previously I would have searched the web for a plugin that exactly matched my requirements and would probably ended up with more code when you added together the plugin code and the initialisation code that goes with it.

So, all in all, I’m feeling both inspired and empowered. I’m looking forward to taking my designs to the next level with what I’ve learnt. If you want to do the same head on over to jQuery for Designers and get started!

Using copyrighted images that you don’t have permission for can cause you serious trouble. What seems like and easy way to avoid paying for images can end up costing you a lot more.

Every image is copyrighted by default. The copyright is owned by the person who produced that image. They can sell the rights to that image in many different ways or they could license it for use for free. Just because a website doesn’t have a copyright statement doesn’t mean that you can use their images for free.

I found this image on a website…

Clients often come to us with images that they want to put on their website that they have found on other peoples websites. Sometimes they find them by using Google’s Image Search.

These images all belong to someone else and if we were to use them we would be stealing them and passing them off as our own.

Hotlinking

It is possible to show an image from another website without actually having it on your web server. This is called hotlinking. Your web page displays the image directly from they other website’s server. This isn’t an infringement of copyright but it is still a very bad idea.

Using images like this uses bandwidth from the other person’s website. It may actually be costing them money to show images on your website. This is known as bandwidth theft and is considered a very rude thing to do on the Internet.

The other problem with this is that you are always at the mercy of the website that is hosting the image. If they remove the image or block your site the image will disappear from your website without notice. Sometimes website owners like to get their own back when you hotlink to them. Some do this by changing the image to a notice that says something like ‘Don’t Hotlink!’ but others have been known to be more extreme and swap them for offensive images and pornography. Do you want that on your website?

Penalties for Copyright theft

If you are using someone’s images without permission they can send a takedown letter to your ISP. Internet Service Providers like to avoid the legal complications of copyright and often comply immediately with takedown notices without contacting you. The first time you realise there is a problem is when people start complaining that they can’t get to your site anymore. The ISP has probably pulled your entire site due to breaching the terms and conditions of their hosting agreement.

Beyond this you could be sued for your use of copyrighted images depending on whether doing so made you money or caused the copyright owner to lose money. However the potential loss of your site (even if for a short time) should be enough to make you avoid stealing images.

Alternatives to using copyrighted images

There are a number of sites on the web that will let you use their images for free. Some of them will do so on the understanding that you link back to them but they don’t often have very many or very good images in their collections.

Another option is images that have been licensed as Creative Commons (CC) by their creators. These can be found on both Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. There are different types of Creative Commons license that allow you to do different things with them. Make sure you check the details of the license before you use an image.

Royalty Free Images

Royalty Free Images are not free. You have to pay an initial fee to use the image but you don’t have to pay a royalty every time the image is used. The good thing about royalty free images is that you don’t have to include an attribution to the image creator on the web page.

Lately we have been getting Stock Photos from 123rf.com who have a large catalogue of images that are available in different sizes and very reasonable prices. This is a much quicker option than having to trawl through free images sites and Creative Commons sites for the image you want.

Never, ever, ever

So there you have it. There is never a reason to use copyrighted images. It is illegal, can cause you loads of problems and there are much better alternatives available.

Design is all about psychology. We must understand how people are going to respond to what we show them. We know that a website for a daycare centre that uses only the colours red and black and is covered with pictures of skulls is not going be received well. This is quite obvious but there are more subtle things that we shouldn’t overlook.

A simple mistake that I used to make when I first started designing websites was to not use photographs. I used graphical images to add gradients, curved edges and any number of nice looking touches but I often left out photographs.

So why is this a problem? Any design without photographic images tends to look quite impersonal and as a result some of my designs ended up looking like sites for soulless corporations rather than the small businesses they were actually for. Something as simple as a photograph of the building the business is in or some of the products they provide can counter this.

The next step is to add some photos of real people. Showing the visitor a picture of a person engenders trust. We are a very visual species and we like to look at the person we a dealing with. A smiling face is even better because that keys into our natural psychological responses. A smiling person means they are our friend and mean us no harm. We also respond to smiles with one of our own (or at least a relaxing of our frown). This causes us to release some of our happy brain chemicals and makes us even more likely to trust the site.

You will tend to see that the photos of people displayed on websites tend to match their target audience. A site for teenagers will show pictures of teenagers rather than old people, a Chinese site is most likely going to show those of Chinese ethnic groups and a site for new mothers is going to show women rather than men. When we see an image of someone that we feel is like us then we identify with them and, again, are more likely to trust them.

This can present a problem for sites that have general and/or worldwide appeal. It isn’t possible to show photos that equate to everyone who is likely to visit a site and often those that try to be too PC and multicultural end up looking totally contrived. We all have our own preconceptions, likes and dislikes when it comes to gender, race, ethnicity and age. However much we’d like to be able to treat all groups the same (especially when it comes to generalities and stereotypes) we don’t. Remember this is occurring mostly on a subconscious level and is not something we are always directly aware of.

To get around this problem of bias towards and against certain groups there is a surprising solution. Cartoon images can achieve all of the positive aspects of smiling faced photos without the problems of bias. The reason for this is that a cartoon image is very simple and lacking in detail. We supply the detail in our minds and superimpose our expectations onto the cartoon. This could be a simple stick figure or even an animal or bird.

Twitter is a prime example. A smiling anthropomorphised bird works as well as a human face. It also has the benefit of being cute and non-threatening. The choice of animal can also be used as statement about the company. A bird may be fast, a dog dependable and so on.

Even a stickman can trigger our automatic responses to smiling faces

So photos are essential to key into our natural preference for seeing who and what we are dealing with. Smiling faces set us at our ease and engender trust. A single happy cartoon character can be more use than a slew of varied human images. We are programmed at the deepest levels to look for faces and we see them everywhere.

I’ve been writing a few guest posts lately and the first one has been published over at Netchunks.com.

The link is: http://www.netchunks.com/essential-tips-to-ensure-site-visibility-for-webmasters-and-designers/

I’d like to thank Shiva Chettri for giving me the opportunity.

I’m also looking into getting a few guest writers to add a couple of blog posts here.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks have been in the news a lot lately. Wikileaks was attacked and then their supporters launched attacks of their own in retaliation. It seems to be an increasingly popular way of hitting out at your enemies online. A number of news article have made mention that it is now often used as a way to censor human rights groups. DDoS Attacks Aim to Censor Human Rights Groups – InfoSec Island

ddos - distributed denial of service

Weathering the storm of a DDOS attack can be a costly business and is often beyond the budget of Human Rights Groups and charities. Hosting companies don’t like their servers to be battered due to the knock on effect on their other customers. Groups can be asked to switch from shared service to a dedicated server or find alternative hosting.

The whole problem stems from having a single point of failure. Any server, no matter how well prepared, can only deal with so many requests. Expensive load balancing set ups can alleviate the problem but, ultimately, faced with sufficient numbers they too will be overwhelmed.

The standards for DNS allow for multiple IP addresses to be assigned to a domain name. It has always been considered a poor man’s equivalent of load balancing due to the fact that there is no analysis of server load before giving out the IP address. Addresses are dispensed in a round robin method. Whilst this doesn’t suit conventional load balancing I believe it can be used effectively to reduce the impact of DDOS attacks.

To ensure that their message wasn’t lost in the DDOS barrage Wikileaks duplicated their content on over 500 other web severs world wide. The main site went down but the information still remained available elsewhere. If we combine this approach with round robin IP addresses we have a method spreading the load of a DDOS attack across many servers and, thus, reducing its impact. Hackers from Anonymous had to give up their revenge attacks on Amazon, Mastercard etc. because they didn’t have the numbers to be truly effective. The more servers involved and the harder it becomes for the attacks to mount an effective attack.

What is required to make this suitable for charities and other groups to use is an organisation to provide them with a single ftp upload point and the rest is dealt with for them. The organisation would need to rent server space from as many hosts as they can (using basic reseller plans this would be easy to do), manage the DNS details and duplicate the content across the servers.

There are many people looking at other methods of managing DNS. The Distributed DNS project is an example. Any change to the DNS infrastructure of the web is a major undertaking and requires the agreement of many groups and organisations but, in the meantime, this looks like something that can be done to mitigate the effects of online attacks on free speech.

For the last week I have been working my way through the challenges on www.HackThisSite.org.

HackThisSite has a number of ‘missions’ where you are required to hack into websites to achieve your goals. However, all of the challenges are simulated and hosted on the HackThisSite servers so it’s all legal and above board. To complete the tasks you have to learn a number of different methods of hacking and improve your general knowledge of programming, cryptography and internet protocols.

There are many reasons to want to do this. It’s fun but it is also educational. It is hard to design secure websites and applications without any understanding of how others may try to exploit them. Some of the ‘basics’ challenges on the site seem almost laughable but it is surprising how often you see some of these vulnerabilities in the wild.

For me it has been a real eye opener. Now I can’t even look at one of my own sites without thinking: ‘How can I exploit this?’ I’m looking for ways someone would hack my sites and it makes me all the more careful not to leave gaping holes in my own security.

I’ve often said that a good understanding of photography aught to be compulsory for designers. Well, likewise, working through the missions on HackThisSite aught to be compulsory for developers so that they can understand some of what they are up against.

Forewarned is forearmed!

We have to keep reminding ourselves that the web is still in its infancy. Due to its rapid rate of change we’ve yet to really nail down some real best practices for using the web. This is especially true when it comes to privacy.

There are obviously issues with any number of web services but I’d like to talk about a rather small and niche area: staff photos on company websites.

Companies often put photos of staff on their bio pages but what’s the risk? It’s important to remember that due to historical archiving anything we put on the web is likely to be there for the foreseeable future. A simple search for someone’s name in Google could throw up any amount of personal information which includes that photo from their employer’s website.

I’m not about to suggest that we never put photos on the web but I would rather we didn’t make it easy for someone to produce a police state type dossier  on us via a simple Google search.

Whilst a .htaccess file can be used to prevent hotlinking and, therefore, someone seeing the full image from a search it doesn’t prevent the image being indexed and the thumbnail showing up in an image search.

So, about all we can do for the moment to mitigate this is to add no-archive and no-index to the rel attribute. Links images should also be no-follow. This way legitimate users of the company website can view the images but Google wont keep copies.

Focusing just on this small area has show me how complicated the whole area of privacy is when you expose yourself to a global network that is indexed in one place and backed up in massive archives.

There are a lot of issues to sort out with regards to privacy and, for me, there aren’t any easy answers. There will always have to be a trade off between privacy and ease of communication.

So what do you think? Am I right or just paranoid? What solutions do you have?