Voodoochilli Design

Ever wondered why some sites have “more links from this site” underneath?

Heres a pretty good guess as to what is causing it.

And here is a list of some of the tricks that have been played on unsuspecting surfers:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wiihelm.shtml

http://onemansblog.com/2007/04/01/one-man-gives-away-all-possessions-moves-to-alaska/

http://www.contextweb.com/aboutus/news-releases/slooflirpa.html

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html

This is a follow up to this post.

Recently the Alexa page rank of this site has climbed significantly. It’s still not in the top 100,000 but it’s a marked improvement. I put it down to the simple fact that people are searching for keywords relating to Alexa Page Rank and these people are more likely to have to tool installed as a method of increasing their own rank. In fact, by writing this it is likely that the page rank will increase further, which reiterates my point that Alexa Page Rank can be cheated.

This is a tricky one and something I have been thinking about for quite some time. Having a high Alexa or Google rank can be a way of trying to quantify a web sites value, which is especially important if you are going to sell it or intend to sell advertising. The problem I have with it is that Alexa and Google rankings can be cheated.

I will give you an example how people do this. Supposing you and ten of your mates all have websites that you visit every day. You could do a deal that you promise to visit each others sites daily with the Alexa toolbar installed. The tool bar will report back to Alexa that there have been more visitors lately and your rank will go up. Because only a small percentage of people actually have to toolbar installed, Alexa have to base the figures that they present based on projections. For example, if only 1% of people use the Alexa toolbar, their final projections must be multiplied by 100. Its quite easy to see how just a few people can make a massive difference to a small websites results. There are even websites popping up now that automate this system for you. You install a bit of software which makes your site visit everyone else’s. In return, you and everyone gets a higher rank, and the software owners siphon off some of the visitors which they then sell for advertising.

Another thing to consider is that site demographics will also affect results. Visitors to websites about Alexa and Google rankings are more likely to be interested in such things and are therefore much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed on their system.

The same is true with Google, but I think things are a little more complex. The Google Page Rank system is based on inbound links which count as a vote in favour of a particular website. If you are lucky enough to already own a few high ranking websites it’s pretty easy to artificially boost a ranking on new site. You could in fact set up a website that has no value at all, and link a dozen or so very highly ranked sites to it which would result in another highly ranked site.

I believe most of these problems get ironed out when a site is truly massive. The top 100 websites in the Alexa rankings are all deservedly placed.

I think the truth of the matter is that it’s almost impossible to quantify a website’s “worth” using mathematics alone. Algorithms employed by the best search engines are extremely advanced but they are no where near perfect.

For those of you that don’t know WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. A WYSIWYG is used as tool to construct HTML, giving the user a close approximation of what the resulting HTML will look like while editing content. A popular example is the design view in Dreamweaver.

As well as application based WYSIWYGs there is also a large choice of online versions that you can use in your websites and web applications to enable visitors to create their own HTML content. One of our sites (among many) that that includes a WYSIWYG is www.voodoochilli.net. The WYSIWYG is used to allow site members to update their own CV’s, giving them the ability to easily change font, sizes colours etc.

This ability to change so many things is part of the problem with WYSIWYGs. Giving users that have little or no understanding of HTML the flexibility to design web pages might be quite empowering for them but it can easily cause problems for your site. If you have used WordPress lately you may be aware that the open source developers have made the wise decision to cut down the HTML WYSIWYG functions in favour of a plain text editor that allows for the insertion of some limited tags. The downside to this is that any advanced stuff still needs to be done the old fashioned way by hand coding, which is fine for web developers but sort of misses the point for the majority of WordPress owners.

The pros and cons of WYSWYGS vs. plain text editors could be discussed forever, however I wish to simply list the best free online WYSIWYG’s that I have used over the years.

1. OpenWYSIWYG
This is bar far the best free open source WYSIWYG in my opinion. Its easy to install, supported by all browsers and can easily be customised. This is the one I would recommend. It’s just perfect, I cant think of anything I would add except maybe a built in spell checker and an online file manager. All of these things can of course be cutom built for your web application if needed. OpenWYSIWYG, as the name suggests is completly open source which is something I am in favour of.

One on our websites, www.voodoochilli.net I have noticed that sometimes the Google Adsense adverts change to a new format I haven’t seen before. This seem quite random and there doesn’t appear to be any pattern or relation to content of the site affecting the ad format.

Compare the following two images. The first one is the average sort of ad we get, and the second one is the new type. It’s bigger and bolder and I think it could be quite effective.

I have had to shrink the images of the ads down a bit so they fit on this blog properly, but you get the idea. I should also point out these are the 480×60 ads.

Last year a client of mine showed me a clever little tip that helps track down spammers. When signing up for things on websites, you often have to give your email address. Sadly many website owners then sell this information on for a tidy profit. One way to find out which sites are doing this is to use part of their name as your email address. For example, suppose your real email address is joe@example.com and you wanted to sign up to YouTube. You could use the email address youtube@example.com then if in a few weeks you start getting loads of spam to that address you know exactly who is responsible.

For this to work you would need to ensure your email is a “catch all” address. A catch all address redirects any emails to that domain, so you could have anything@example.com and it would get forwarded to joe@example.com

Catch all address have their own problem: spammers only need to know you domain name to start sending you spam. It’s a losing battle I am afraid! You could of course create a real email address for each and every website you sign up to, but that’s going to take ages! One solution is to have all the catch all email sent to a special inbox to keep it separate from your main email account.

A Content Management System or CMS is basically an interface that allows textual and visual content of a website to be managed with little or no need to understand HTML. At Voodoochilli we custom build our own Content Management Systems. We find that this gives us the most flexibility; however it has the major drawback of taking considerably more time to develop. Pre-made CMS’s are developed before hand and enable the easy editing of website content.

Over they years we have used a few of these when clients have already had systems in place. Below I have listed three open source CMS’s which I think you may find useful.

MODx
www.modxcms.com


Modx is an advanced CMS. You can pretty much do everything with it that you would want to. As with most CMS’s it has plenty of plugins and templates to help customise the look and functionality of the site it is powering. Modx is also quite suitable for large scale websites.

I personally found it difficult to find my way around, but you have to bear in mind I was working on an existing website post site launch.

I found a very positive, and more detailed review where by the author says “blows me away that I still even hear about Joomla and Mambo while something like this is on the open source market.”

Every now and then you find a blog that stands out from the rest, and this one is a prime example

Just today I added a tags feature on Voodoochilli.net. Tags are a way of social networking allowing people to find out what’s popular. I found this project particularly interesting as it really does show what real people are posting on the site. Following a simple set of rules, the end result is really quite revealing.

Click here to have a look