I have had my hands full working on a Moodle an open source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) site this is not the first time I have worked with Moodle but I never had to attempt to optimise a moodle site before merely administrate it.
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Spare a thought for the outcasts
October 20, 2007 — Tim NashAre you really an SEO?
August 23, 2007 — Tim NashSorry for the long delay I’ve not been away and have been blogging elsewhere but have gone through a period where I feel I have had nothing to say about SEO or Drupal. Part of the problem with being one in a crowd is that you need to scream to be heard unfortunately everyone else knows this as well.
Recently I decided to take a break from blogging on Venture Skills blog, not a long one just some time to refocus, while I was away I read large quantity of blog posts and discussions on SEO and I slowly dawned on me that most SEO’s are fakes. Read the rest of this entry »
Re-captcha your comments
July 30, 2007 — Tim NashComment spam sucks, its as simple as here at Venture Skills blog we get hundreds of spam a day most are caught by Akismet but not all are. If your hosting your own blog or site then no doubt you have tried many combinations. One simple method of reducing spam is a CAPTCHA “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” These provide puzzles which are easy for a human to solve but are much more difficult for a machine. Read the rest of this entry »
Page not found again! 404 in depth
July 24, 2007 — Tim NashI was chatting to a friend the other day about his newly created site (it looked really sweet) and I was looking at the CSS (very neat) but misstyped the URL my whole world came down no literally not only was he using IIS to host the site 
he had no custom error pages.
A few days later I noticed he was starting to pay attention to this problem, interesting articles started to appear in his del.icio.us account, and I started to think about the humble 404 and other error messages.
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Cloaking is ok says Google
July 6, 2007 — Tim NashA recent Google Webmaster blog post finally put the last nail into the coffin with regards to content substitution or to give it the demonic blackhat term Cloaking…
A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
Source:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html
So its ok for us to write text and then substitute that text with a flash or image file, now to be fair most SEO I think have been doing this with CSS image substitution for some time, but this is the first time that I have seen Google come out and say that its ok to use these techniques.
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5 CSS Fonts & Typography Tips
May 18, 2007 — Tim Nash
So following in the vein of our accessibility drive and then our layouts we now turn our attention to some of the best ideas and tips when it comes to using Fonts and typography in your CSS based sites.
In case you were wondering…
Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.Wikipedia
These as always are in no particular order, but hopefully will help at least one or two people out.
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Top 5 CSS layout tips
May 9, 2007 — Tim NashSo we brought you some great CSS tips to help with accessibility over the weekend, and we discussed how layout helps users get into your page with our look at stumblers and Diggers habits, now its time to introduce the layouts…
These are our favourite CSS layout sites and scripts, enjoy
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5 Accessible and pretty CSS tips
May 5, 2007 — Tim NashWe are in the last few bits of the new site and while designing it a major focus has been on accessibility and not just for search engines.
For us accessibility is built into the design its about reaching as many people as possible and giving as many people as we can the chance to read about our work and to enjoy our highly entertaining blog posts (no really they are). In European countries the various EU and country specific laws are pretty rigid and all web designers should by now be familiar with WAI Level 1 & 2 and be reaching and exceeding these standards as the norm. One of the major criticisms is that by following the standards you are left with dry boring sites, this just is not true! you can still have amazing sites and we are going to show you 5 neat tips to make your standards compliant site look just as good as it always did.
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Are Flash only sites the SEO Devil?
April 19, 2007 — Tim NashI have run an update to this post on my blog timnash.co.uk: Does Flash SEO still suck?
Nothing gets up the semantic web developer lobby noses more then the bane of their lives Flash. After spending months developing perfectly semantic well formed XML compliant HTML some upstart art herbet comes along and ruins their day by showing the boss his latest web site. No amounts of appeals about it won’t be searchable or accessible will help. The lure of flash is to great for many companies and while you may be saying its not accessible the boss is pointing to large corporate sites like Marks and Spencers and Starbucks are using it and ultimately you will loose the battle, but wait this story is not over the Arty farty herbert is a web designer and hasn’t got a clue what your talking about when you mention htaccess and so you end up having to actually launch this monstrous baby, sounding familiar?
Adobe Flash (formally Macromedia) is a great tool for developing highly artistic multimedia applications, it has the accessibility and searchability of a brick. If you are serious about getting organic rankings the only advice is stay away from Flash, I mean it stop reading this post it will not help!
Still here? You either failed to read my last sentence or are being forced into this satanic world so lets get on with trying to make flash searchable. Read the rest of this entry »
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