Built from the ground up to enable designers and content editors to rapidly build and manage search engine optimised websites, Boost Optimiser fills a gap in many CMSs available today.

Tight integration with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Tool allows quick development of whole sites, mini-sites and landing pages tailored to rank well with the major search engines.

Online demos of the CMS are available at the Boost Optimiser website, and applications from resellers are welcome. Check it out at www.boostoptimiser.com.au.

The first problem I found with making this choice is that the Gmail Notifier tool does not play nicely with HTTPS, and so could not login and retrieve data from my Gmail account. Bah!!

Luckily, there is a workaround available while Google get an update sorted. Details below are sourced from the Gmail Help Discussion list on Google Groups.

1. Download http://www.google.com/mail/help/downloads/notifier_https.zip
2. Open up the folder.
3. Double-click on the file called notifier_https.reg to install it.
4. Click 'yes' when you're asked to confirm if you want to add the information to the registry.
5. Restart the Notifier.

And you're done! The Notifier will now work with Gmail set to always use HTTPS. If you decide you don't want to use that setting anymore, you'll need to install the other file in the zip folder – notifier_https_undo.reg – to reset Notifier.

The launch of the Apple iPhone in Australia is due on July 11th, and Pope Benedict XVI is due to arrive in Sydney on July 13th for World Youth Day 2008. Both events are causing quite a stir, and not all for the good.

iPhone

The iPhone launch has once again seen the Australian telcos whipped into a gouging frenzy, with Optus releasing pricing details of their 3G iPhone plans, and Vodafone and Telstra sure to follow suit shortly.

If the Optus pricing is anything to go by, and the other two follow suit, I will be withdrawing my expression of interest for an iPhone and reverting to my trusty Samsung on a pay-as-you-go account. Optus is advertising 1GB per month for $100 on their Turbo Cap pre-paid plan. Granted, the plan comes with a huge amount (by my monthly call count) of included calls, but that isn't why most people will be buying the iPhone. 1GB of internet access will be used up very quickly. A simple example is visiting the Sydney Morning Herald homepage. Today's measurement of that page weighed in at 920Kb, and the page auto-refreshes every 5 minutes. If you were to visit the page twice a day, which is not unreasonable, and sit on the home page for an average of 7 minutes each visit, you would use up 3.6MB of your allowance. One months worth would see 100MB / 10% of your allowance gone. And that's just looking at the news! Never mind your mapping, Twittering, Facebooking, and emailing needs. Come on Aussie telcos'! If you want to be a leader in the growing online mobile space you're going to have to be a lot more generous with your data plans. Making a quick buck now is not in yours, or the national interest.

The Pope

I am not a religous man. I am, by definition, an Athiest. I have no belief in God, or any other of the much lauded deities. I do not though have any strong feelings about others having belief in those things. Whatever floats our boat.

I do find the whole religion thing very hypocritcial though, and none more so than the Catholic faith. Throughout history the Catholics, and indeed many other religions, have used their 'faith' as an all encompassing reason for attrocities that would, under normal circumstances, be denounced by average men.

But I digress! The Pope visiting Sydney for World Youth Day has caused no end of problems for the citizens of this fair city. From the taking over of the Randwick Racecourse, to untold strain put on the public transport systems, to the special powers being granted to police to arrest anyone causing, or looking like they are going to cause, annoyance to attendees of the functions.

And to top it all off, there is a huge scandal hanging over Cardinal George Pell, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, and his handling of accusations of sexual assualt by a Catholic Priest.

I have nothing against people celebrating their beliefs, but when the act of performing those celebrations affects the way I, and many hundreds of thousands of other Sydneysiders, go about our daily activites, I have to question the legitimacy of the celebrations.

Am I being harsh? I don't think so. In both cases, the iPhone and the World Youth Day events, somebody is standing to make a lot of money, and your average citizen is having their liberites restricted so that that money can be made. For shame!

There are still sections of the guides that are light on content, but I am working this week on completing each guide. And not a moment too soon – lead developer James Beattie is busily unit testing the latest improvements and enhancements to the CMS in preparation for the version 1.0.2 release. Watch this space for news on that release.

Making a website that ranks well with the search engines is a process that has to start from the foundations of the site. Stuffing a badly designed and built site full of keywords isn’t going to help, and is a waste of money.

There are numerous ways to make a website more accessible to search engines, and each has additional, tangible benefits to the website owners and visitors.

Presented below are my top 5 tips for developing a website to help make it an SEO success.

Design for search engines, enhance for humans

Search engines are very much like blind humans in the way they ’see’ a website. They read the page in the way the source is ordered, they do not see images, they have to make a ‘mental’ representation of the page by using semantic clues built into the page by the developer, and use that representation to make sense of the relationship between possibly disjointed blocks of information.

First step then is to design your page with no style, formatting, or other behavioural enhancement. A clean, semantic, well ordered page of data should be the goal. Once the textual content of the page has been laid out, you can start adding styles, images, and behaviours that will give the page visual appeal.

Lighten the code

Search engines have limits to the amount of data on a page they will index, depending on the size of the page. Using excessive amounts of code to display your content is therefore going to have an effect on what the search engines will do with your page. The goal then is to develop your page using the least amount of markup possible to achieve the required visual appearance. Using semantic markup certainly goes a long way to helping with this goal, and the natural added benefit is that your pages are lighter, meaning faster download times for your visitors, and less bandwidth/storage charges for you.

Images are for pictures, not text

OK, so your marketing department have put together a beautifully crafted piece of collateral, and they want you to replicate it online. No problem – convert the piece to a web optimised image and paste the darned thing, easy.

But remember in item 1 where we identified the search engine as a ‘blind’ visitor. He can’t see the image, and therefore cannot read the beautifully crafted message your marketing department has spilt blood to create. What a waste!

Any textual message should be displayed using text – simple. Everybody then gets the same message, whether fully sighted, sight impaired, or search engine. Once the textual message is available it can be enhanced using a variety of techniques, depending on the final visual requirements.

Images can be text too

What? Didn’t you just say images are pictures. Have you been at the hooch again?

No, there are times when an image is used in your page to support the text. Without the image, the text wouldn’t be complete. In these cases the image element should have an

attribute applied to it. The

attribute is used to provide alternative, textual content to the image, and it should describe the image. This alternative text will replace the visual image in cases where the image cannot be displayed or seen.

Don’t be shy, let your content shine

An all too common mistake is to develop your site using methods and technologies that essentially hide the content from search engines.

Simple mistakes like using forms for navigation, Javascript for links, Flash for navigation, or whole sites (unless the Flash has been developed using accessibilty settings). All of these will stop a search engine, and many visitors, from accessing your site. Not what you want after spending possibly thousands of dollars on your shiny new site.

So we loop back to item 1. Make the site for the search engine first, then progressively enhance it for visual users, and indeed visitors with greater processing capability.

Is there anything else?

The above tips are quite generic, but form a really solid base to work from. Any developer worth a fraction of the money you are thinking of spending with them should be developing to these standards. And that word brings me nicely to my conclusion.

Develop to Standards

The beauty of the Internet is that anybody can build a website and get it online. The horror of the Internet is that anybody can build a website and get it online.

Although we are working in a very young industry, there are global Standards that have been developed and put in place to ‘regulate’ the way that web technologies should be used. The big daddy of the web standards world is The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C work on developing specifications, guidelines, software and tools for every aspect of online activity, and their published standards are what every developer should be working with. Sure, cousin Joey can knock out a website in a weekend with his laptop in his bedroom, but if you’re serious about making any kind of impact with your site, cousin Joey isn’t the best man for the job.

Hopefully this quick introduction has given you an insight into the foundations of developing for SEO. Please feel free to leave your comments regarding this post below.

If you have any request for future articles you can leave those in the comments as well.

I scored 52, and was pleased to find that (most of) the ones I missed are in the lesser/never used category.

See how you fare, just remember to be honest to yourself and do it all without any aids. Good luck!

Two days of total immersion in everything good about web development, presentation after presentation full of inspiration, meeting with peers in the real world – the original social network – and relaxing with a few beers, good food and conversation at the end of the day.

Thanks to all the organisers, presenters, sponsors and attendees for making my first Web Directions such a memorable experience.

Since it's initial posting the solution provided there has been tweaked and fine tuned based on use and reader feedback. A lot of the feedback and comments were about the inability for readers to use that particular solution because they did not have access to modify the PHP source code. One such example is that of Bloggers, who have access to the Blogger templating system, but not the code.

In response to this feedback I have put together a free random background image script generator tool, which will generate a self contained block of Javascript which can be pasted into any template or web page, to provide random background image selection and application to a single element on that page.

Comments and feedback are encouraged, as are links from any sites that may find a use for the script!

ALP leader Kevin Rudd has launched a new site for his 2007 electoral campaign with the slogan Kevin07. It's a highly stylized site that looks like it has come straight out of any of the many political satire movies, lots of prime colours, big and flashy, marketing driven – and with very little substance.

As the politicos jump on the opportunity to use the internet to reach the widest possible audience, they miss the point and use their sites as direct extensions of their standard media campaigns. The opportunity for public interaction is missed, and in todays social web, that's a big no-no.

But the online political arena is not the sole domain of the political parties and their members. There is no requirement to have (hundreds of) thousands of dollars of marketing capital to run an online campaign. Many minor groups and individuals are using the internet, and particularly blogs, to voice their opinions about issues they feel strongly about. There are large groups, such as GetUp that take on the government directly, and much smaller groups/individuals, such as Alex Hawke, that campaign more about issues that affect them directly.

The Alex Hawke site is a great example of the power of the internet being harnessed by a motivated individual to campaign against a politician they have issues with. The site does not use cheap tricks, skulduggery or misinformation to attack it's subject. Rather it employs the ethical and unwavering use of truth and publicly available information to inform the reader. The use of a blog as the publishing platform allows direct interaction from visitors to the site with it's author, and other visitors, to discuss the subject matter.

Through the honest and open use of the medium, one man can raise the awareness of an issue, create a ripple that grows into a swell of opinion. It is this change that politicians and political parties must face as they battle to win the votes of the electorate.