Morrow Studios – personal site of Chris Morrow, Interactive Developer

While working on my current contract I ran across a great jQuery plugin for adding a YouTube playlist to your site, while maintaining SEO and compliant code using a simple unordered list. You can get the plugin from GeckoNewMedia.

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I’ve been looking for an Interactive Developer position for a few weeks now. I have master level knowledge in front-end development including CSS, Javascript, jQuery, XHTML, AJAX, and solid knowledge of Flash OOP and AS3 development; but times are tough… Some companies are wanting a designer/developer/OMNIGOD… I hope to have a full-time job soon developing Flash (AS3) or a front-end / Flash job.

Here’s to trying to know it all… lol

I’m finally getting some of my notes from the “Voices That Matter” conference I attended in Nashville, TN in June. I was flooded with great information from Shari Thurow in her session “Redefining Search Engine Friendly Design”

If you’re looking for a great starter book on SEO check out Shari’s book Search Engine Visibility.

Below are my notes.

Types of Search Queries

• Navigational: 10-26%
• Informational: 62%-80%
• Transactional: 10-23%

Navigational Search

URL most important – reason being number one in search results is near impossible unless domain name matches query

Many people use Google or Yahoo rather than using address bar

Informational Search

• wants information on a topic
• quick answers

Example: what is the phone number of my dentist (use office name and location

Transactional Search

• users want to interact with website (not necessarily buying anything; game, download pdf, etc.)
• have separate splash page for transaction (ex. search for “Adobe CS3″; does not include pricing info yet amazon does

Yahoo siteexplorer is a good way to see refers and how people are aearching

Building blocks of search engine friendly sites

• index text
• follow links – give search engine on-the-page criteria
• measure popularity – 3rd party links pointing to URL

Text (sorted by most important):

1. title tag – #1 tag for search results
2. Breadcrumb links – sense of place; where am I?
3. heading ( h1, h2, etc.) – use CSS formatted text; not images
4. intro paragraph
5. calls to action

Link component

• -site navigation scheme
• cross-linking
• URL structure: too long (users tend to skip to sites with shorter URLs)
  • Good: www.yoursite.com/products.html
  • Bad: www.yoursite.com/pageviewer.aspx?id=128623478236&category=goodproducts&whateverelse=something
• Relevance: information architecture
• Major influence: Number and quality of links to a site

Conclusions:

• presonas and profiles should be based on querying behavior
• Build landing pages based on known querying behaviors
• Semantic markup is critical

• seobrowser.com – shows what the search engine sees
• linkfinder.com ????
• mattcutts.com/blog – SEO information
• adwords.google.com/ - tool to generate keywords
• wordtracker - free tool for keyword suggestions
• scholar.google.com – best resource for SEO

Book suggestion: Chris Sherman: Google Power

I haven’t been working with the Tween class, and thought I would revisit it and add a looping function to pre-populate an unlimited number of tweens using one tween function. Code is below and you can download the source code here.

import mx.transitions.Tween;
import mx.transitions.easing.*;

// Constants

_global.xPos = 20;
_global.tweenNum = 1;
_global.timeVar = 1;
_global.timeReduction = .15;

function tweenBall():Void {
var nextDepth:Number = this.getNextHighestDepth();
_root.attachMovie(“ballClip”,”ballClip”+tweenNum,nextDepth,{_x:Stage.width, _y:200});
_global.xSpacing = _root["ballClip"+tweenNum]._width+20;

// Set tweens for different properties of object animated

var tweenXpos:Object = new Tween(_root["ballClip"+tweenNum], “_x”, Regular.easeOut, Stage.width, xPos, timeVar, true);

var tweenAlpha:Object = new Tween(_root["ballClip"+tweenNum], “_alpha”, Regular.easeOut, 0, 100, timeVar, true);

tweenXpos.onMotionFinished = function() {

if (tweenNum<5) {

// set new variables for next tween
_global.tweenNum++;
_global.xPos = xPos+xSpacing;
_global.timeVar = timeVar-timeReduction;

if (timeVar<=0) {
_global.timeVar = .1;
}
tweenBall();
}

};
}

tweenBall();

I attended the Voices that Matter Conference last month and one word sums it up; “inspiration.” I met many intelligent, very talented people and noticed a common character trait; humility. Why is this? I have a B.A. in Psychology which is another story, but I always like to people watch and study those that are successful. I learned a number of things at the conference, but I believe the number one thing I learned was to “humble myself.” Think about it. If you think you’re the best or that you “know it all” on a subject, you are frozen in your knowledge and are not looking to learn and adapt to different ways of thinking. On the other hand, if you are honest with yourself and stay open to new ideas and methodologies, the possibilities for growing in your knowledge are limitless.

Enough of my rant for now, but in short anyone looking to step up in skill level needs to step down in pride level. This blog will help me to stay honest with myself, and I hope to share with others in the web development profession or just wanting to learn about website design/development.

More to come on my lessons learned at the Voices that Matter Conference…

Later,
Chris