Best Practices

Jul 28th, 2006

Leaving an Audit Trail In Your Database

Part of your role as a database architect is to save users from themselves. It’s inevitable that critical records will get modified or deleted from time to time. If the system has more than one user, the frequency increases exponentially. It’s tempting to take the approach that if users are going to be liberal about [...]

Jul 26th, 2006

Don’t Put All Your Revenue In One Basket

In one of my previous posts, Growing Little Customers Into Big Customers, I talk about the advantages of establishing an ongoing relationship with a customer that generates a lot of recurring work for you. If you take the thoughts in that article to an extreme, you might conclude that you should find one good customer [...]

Jul 24th, 2006

Carnival of the Web #2

Jesse over at The Future of the Web has started up a blog carnival for topics of interest to web professionals. I’m impressed with the original thought behind the posts that appear in the latest edition of Carnival of the Web. I’m flattered that one of my posts, Pricing Your Web Design Service, [...]

Jul 21st, 2006

How to Get Your Visitors to Create Content for Your Website

Years ago, long before I ever heard of a blog, I wrote this article about allowing your visitors to leave comments on your web pages. Blogging software today makes this as easy as selecting a checkbox, but not too long ago it required an investment of time to set this sort of thing up. This [...]

Jul 19th, 2006

Growing Little Customers Into Big Customers

When it comes to keeping the bills paid, it can be very useful to have a few cash cow customers. These guys and gals always seem to have more work to send your way. In the best possible scenario, they’re even willing to delay projects a month or two if you don’t have the available [...]

Jul 17th, 2006

On Scalability: Expect to Grow

During the development of a project, you’ll repeatedly be faced with situations where there are multiple solutions to a problem. One choice is to create a robust answer that is reliable and will adapt well to the changing needs of the customer for the foreseeable future. Another option is a design that addresses the current [...]

Jul 12th, 2006

Why You Should Use Fusebox

Fusebox isn’t a programming language. It’s a methodology that can be used whether your preferred language is ColdFusion, PHP, or ASP. You’re likely visiting a site designed with Fusebox when every page of the site is located at index.php. (Depending on the language you use, this may be index.cfm or index.asp. For the rest of [...]

Jul 11th, 2006

Testing Your Design in Multiple Browsers

The Internet is truly miraculous. By defining a standard collection of tags and specifying how each should behave, the community ensured that all third-party browsers would render a web site exactly the same. Um… yeah.
I’ll go along with the part about the Internet being miraculous, but browsers rendering web sites the same? There isn’t even [...]

Jul 6th, 2006

The Number One Key To Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I’ll cut right to the chase. The key to search engine optimization is content. You can try to “trick” search engines with keyword stuffing, doorway pages, and cloaking; but the best you can hope for with those approaches is a short-term increase in search engine rankings. Google (and all of the other major engines) are [...]

Jul 5th, 2006

Stripping HTML Tags From User Inputs

You want to believe the best about our users, and for most of them it is appropriate to do so. Unfortunately, there’s always the danger of people coming to the sites you create with the intent to stir up trouble. While it’s less of a problem, you also have to be concerned about innocent users [...]

July, 2006