A Willingness to Learn

I am reminded of a quote from Henry Ford "Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty". This is especially true in a technology based business. If you don’t learn about new technologies or ideas you will surely be outdated soon.

The problem is that there is so much to learn about it is impossible to know it all. IMHO the best one can do is to understand one thing well and have a broad knowledge about other related and not so related topics. Here are some tools I’ve seen used to help people keep up to date.

1. Google News - If you have an account with Google (not email), then Google News let’s you enter your own search terms for news and remembers them for you. I’ve made it my browsers Home Page and created custom search sections with my relevant search terms.
2. RSS Feeds - There are so many out there it is sometimes hard to keep up. To help organize RSS feeds I like Yahoo Pipes. It lets you aggregate several RSS feeds or news sources. You can even filter them for key words. It is easy to use, and non-technical people can set up a basic pipe in about 5 minutes.
3. Other people and groups - Join networking or technical groups where other people in your field gather. Listen to them speak, you can learn a lot from listening. Join groups where people are in different fields than yours. Their perspective on what you do or your industry can be eye opening.
4. Your Clients - Sometimes they have ideas about what they would like to do. If you are not sure if it is possible (or if you know it is not). Don't say so right away, go and research it. You might be surprised to learn that someone else had the same idea/problems and figured out a way to solve it.

Best of luck to everyone and keep on learning.

Front Page and SEO basics

I was helping a friend (we'll call him Mike) figure out why his site was not showing up in search engines - specifically Google. It didn't take long to figure out what was happening or not happening. He had good titles, and meta tags on his pages, but there were two issues that leaped out at me. One obvious and the other not so much.

Obvious issue: The headlines were built using paragraph
and font tags not with H1 or H2 tags. This was easily corrected.

Not so obvious issue: When Mike built his web site, Frontpage placed the HTML for his "Main content" near the bottom of the code. His footer code, and other miscellaneous code was above his content. Therefore when Google spidered his site it thought the footer info was more important that all his content.

Fixing this problem was harder to accomplish. We wound up rebuilding the pages. Mike and I also needed to look at the "code view" in Frontpage to make sure his content remained near the top of the pages HTML.
Lessons Learned:
While there are many tools and programs available to help anyone build web sites. You should have a basic understanding of HTML and SEO, or have a friend who can help you out.