Best Practices

I went to bed last night with a killer headache centered right behind my eyes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised since I had spent almost every waking hour of the past 4 days staring into my monitor as though it displayed the secret of eternal happiness and life everlasting. (It doesn’t.) The reason I’ve been going overboard is that I’m very excited about the overhaul I’m giving my facetious movie review site. I’ll post more about that in a few weeks, but now I want to talk about the research I did this morning on ways to prevent eyestrain.

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As a web developer you have the necessary set of skills to create HTML email formats. I was never that crazy about them because creating a design that will be effective in all major email clients is even more taxing than creating one for the major web browsers. You really have to keep the styling pretty vanilla.

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Not too long ago I took a training course for business owners. The focus was on intelligently developing relationships with other business owners with whom you can refer business back and forth. The key to making this work is to appropriately feed and water these relationships. If you take the right actions, you can have very profitable relationships.

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Why does anybody offer online payments? After all, there is a mark-up that takes money out of your pocket on every transaction. Unless it’s the only way you accept payments (which is true for some businesses), you’re complicating your accounting and business processes by adding another special case for how a payment is received.

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A few weeks ago I wrote my early impressions of CakePHP. In this post I’ll share my thoughts on the mystical “bake” function, SEO-friendly URLs, and intuitive code.

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Why this sounds like the holy grail of search engine optimization. What mystic secret could I possibly know? It don’t know if Google’s Local Business Search really counts as a secret. If someone does a search for “plumber Indianapolis”, then Google will still return their normal, natural search results. Above those results, though, they return a list of plumbers with Indianapolis addresses. All you have to do is sign up and confirm your address.

If you are looking for a way to keep the lines of communication open with your existing customers, this feature is great. Let’s face facts; SEO has its complexities. Imagine how exciting it is for someone who is not as comfortable with technology as you or I to be told there is a way to get quality traffic from Google that does not require jumping through all kinds of hoops with your web site. With this information, you’re demonstrating to your clients that you are a knowledgeable and trustworthy resource for using the Internet to help their business.

You can also make recommendations to your clients about getting the most out of their local business listing. Google allows businesses to include coupons with their listing. This can be a printable coupon for brick-and-mortar stores, or it can be a promotional code for e-commerce sites. Either example is a great way to stand apart from the pack.

This certainly isn’t a comprehensive review of CakePHP. I have a client that wants to use CakePHP so they can support it internally. I’ve just barely scratched the surface, but the whole point of Cake is to allow you to develop something useful on a very short learning curve. Since it is freely available, I thought I’d share my first outing with this rapid development framework for anyone on the fence about giving it a shot.

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Most visitors to a web page will only see how it is displayed in their browser of choice. They don’t know (or care) how the code that generates that page appears. So why should we as developers care? Because we’ve been told it’s the right thing to do? Well, okay, I guess. If I’m going to spend the extra time required to write clean code, though; I’d like to know a good reason why. (In this post, I refer to clean code and optimized code interchangeably.)

Maybe I should start by asking what constitutes optimized code? I usually think of it as code that is executed quickly. It should use the least number of lines necessary to accomplish the task and be relatively easy to read and maintain. In practical terms optimizing your code usually involves removing any unnecessary fluff and organizing what’s left into an easily understandable format.

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