Technically Easy

Category: Websites and Blogging

This category will contain any blogging-related posts, that includes platforms such as WordPress and Blogger.

  • Review: Weight Loss Weapons Blog

    I mentioned in my last post that I will post reviews of Web sites and blogs for free. This is my first review and I am very familiar with the parent Web site of the blog that I have reviewed. The blog is managed by someone I have conversed with on Website Babble and have witnessed the development of the Web site.

    The focus of the Weight Loss Weapons blog is simply the author sharing his experience about losing weight, but without the pills and the programs. Does the blog provide enough information to help you with losing weight that is easy to read and follow? Read the review to find out.

    Weight Loss Weapons Blog

    Design 4 stars

    The design of the Weight Loss Weapons blog is very similar to the parent Web site, although the blue colours seem to be a little darker on the blog. This may have been done to set the two apart. In general, the blues that the author chose are nice and are easy on the eyes. This allows you to read the content without being distracted.

    The navigational bar is to the right, but the list items are really close together. More spacing between the individual items would make it easier to read each item. As many blogs have, the author has chose to include a MyBlogLog recent readers list. Unfortunately, the placement of the widget is above the Blogroll and Archives lists. The blogroll and archives should be above this widget, with the Archives list appearing just below the Recent Posts.

    The blog does include a handy search option, which works nicely. The search, however, is in the upper-right hand corner and can be missed easily. It would be better if it were more prominent, such as beside the top menubar. I was happy with the speed and accuracy of the search and feel that it is a nice feature.

    Once aspect of the blog that I like was the nice, large and easy to read font. I have visited many Web sites and blogs where the font is small. I can read small text without any trouble, but others may find it difficult. They don’t have to worry about this blog as the author has chosen a nice size.

    In terms of the design of the blog, I found it neat and easy to read and navigate. The author has definitely spent a great deal of time in the design of the blog.

    Focus 4.5 stars

    I mentioned in the introduction that the focus of the blog is on weight loss. He has gone into detail on such things as exercising and meal planning. There are many comments on each post where people have also provided good advice, which just adds to the focus of the blog.

    Much of the advice that is given on the blog can be followed by anyone who just wants to get healthier, even if they don’t plan on losing weight.

    There are a few posts that are a little off topic in the blog. They usually provide updates about the blog itself. While they may be off topic, the author has nicely included them in a separate topic in the navigation on the right. This excludes them from other topics someone may use for weight-loss.

    Overall the main focus of the blog is clear and easy to determine by simply reading several posts. The author obviously has had experience with losing weight and it shows within his posts.

    Content 4.5 stars

    I like to use long posts in my blog, mostly because I have a lot to say. For most bloggers, short and concise posts are what they favour. The author of the Weight Loss Weapons blog has chosen to write smaller posts, but they are not short on information.

    The posts within the blog are well written and contain a lot of useful information. The author seems to publish several posts a week which is great for those looking for information. It also shows that the author spends the time and effort maintaining the blog, which adds to its quality.

    With the exception of a few posts that provide a blog update, the posts pertain to weight loss, which the focus of the Web site and blog. His posts are well written with very few spelling and grammatical errors, which I discuss in the next section.

    There were a few problems with some of the pages and links on the site. The About page link in the menu bar links to a standard WordPress template page that isn’t complete. A nice about page would add to the blog. The link to the parent site works correctly in the navigation bar on the right, but brings up a “Page Not Found” page from the link in the footer. If you do want to go to the parent Web site, simply remove the “/blog/” from the URL.

    Besides those to issues, the content within the posts are nice and short and easy to read. For those looking to lose weight, you will find a lot of useful advice without the fluff.

    Spelling and Grammar 4.5 stars

    The author has definitely taken the time to check for spelling and grammar on his blog, as it was difficult to find any mistakes. I did, however, find a few minor issues within some of the posts. There are a few times where the author includes a comment in parenthesis after a paragraph but doesn’t include an ending period. There are other times where words within a sentence are capitalized when they don’t need to be.

    Besides those two minor issues, the blog did not have many mistakes, which made it nice to read. The issues described above did not affect the readability of the posts in any way.

    Overall 4.5 stars

    As I mentioned, I know the author of the blog from Website Babble, and so I also know the amount of time and effort he has put into it, and it clearly shows. Overall I found the blog nicely organized, and easy to read and understand. With the exception of a few minor design and link issues, the Weight Loss Weapons blog is a great blog that anyone trying to lose weight should check out.

  • Free Web Site or Blog Review

    I have been thinking about how generating backlinks is a great way of getting exposure for your web site or blog. It takes time and effort to generate backlinks to your web site, and it is a never ending experience.

    I have decided to help out those who have a web site but are having trouble getting others to link to them. I’ll even go one step further than providing a backlink, I’ll write a full review about the web site in a future post.

    The details about getting a review of your web site can be found in this post.

    Requesting a Review

    To get a review done about your web site, you simply need to contact me in the e-mail address provided on Technically Easy. When you do send an e-mail to psalmon12@gmail.com, include the following:

    • Your web site name.
    • Your web site URL.
    • A description of your web site.
    • Your name and e-mail address. (Don’t worry these won’t be published in the review).
    • The subject of the e-mail should read Free Web Site Review.

    I’m interested in relatively new web sites and blogs to help them out, but I do have my limits. I won’t review sites that only have a few pages (less than 10), or blogs that have few posts (less than 10). I will review sites only if they look like the owner has put some time and effort into the site, and not some quickie, spur of the moment site.

    I can’t give a timeline on how quickly your site will get reviewed, but I’ll try to create a review on a regular basis. Depending on how many requests I get, it could take some time to post a review of your web site. I’ll send you an e-mail once the review is available.

    Review Criteria

    I have decided to rate a web site on the following elements:

    • Design – Is the look and feel of the web site pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate? Does the entire site seem to flow or is it a jumbled mess?
    • Focus – What is the focus of the web site? Is it easy to determine or does a visitor have to hunt around for one?
    • Content – I’ll read through some of the content to see if it matches the focus of the entire web site. I’ll check to see if it is easy to read and understand and make note of any content that stands out.
    • Spelling and Grammar – I’ll see if the content is well-written by checking the spelling and grammar. Having bad spelling or grammar can make the content more difficult to understand.

    There may be other criteria in the future, but these are the main elements that I will be targeting. I will rate each element out of 5 stars, and then rate the entire site overall out of 5 stars.

    I will be honest with my reviews but will mention both the positive and negative aspects of the web site. Don’t get angry with me if your site doesn’t receive a high rating. I am just one person, and another may have a different opinion about your web site. Keep in mind that I’m writing a review for free.

    Summary

    Generating backlinks to your web site is one of the best methods you can do to increase the exposure, and eventually traffic, to your web site. It takes time and effort to generate backlinks, but I can help to make it easier for you. I will write a free review for your web site and post it on Technically Easy.

    I will review several elements of your web site and rate them out of 5 stars, and also rate your entire site out of 5 stars. If you would like a review, simply send me an e-mail that includes the information outlined in this post, and I’ll visit your web site and write a review.

  • Forum of Helpful Web Site Advice

    I attempt to provide useful advice on various technologies in use today on Technically Easy. There are many times that I find myself looking for answers to some of my technological questions on other Web sites.

    When I started this blog I was new to blogging and to some degree Web site management. There are many aspects to designing a Web site that I hadn’t thought about before. I have found a very helpful Web site that I’ll share with you in this post.

    Website Babble Forums

    The Web site is called Website Babble, and is a forums frequented by those who have experienced many of the pitfalls of Web site management. The administrator of the Web site is Lisa, who many know online. She has created a successful online business through her Web sites. This is what many of those who start Web sites strive to be like.

    In the past, I have registered to various forums and Web sites only to not login after the first time. I also found that on many of those forums it seems that asking certain questions gets you branded as a newbie or idiot.

    At Website Babble, it is a different experience. I find that you can pretty much ask any question related to Web sites and someone will provide friendly, useful advice that will hopefully answer your question.

    Similar to other forums, there are the regular contributors to the forum, which I try to be. The contributors are by no means the authoritative source on Web sites, but they have had various experiences in the past that could help others prevent a similar fate. Chances are if you are having problems with your Web site, one of the contributors have experienced the same problem and can provided a solution.

    Lisa has also been known to hold contests to those who provide helpful posts on the forum. Her contests award quality over quantity, so you don’t need to post the most to win one.

    The forum is free to join and post. You can include your Web site in your signature but not in your post as that is considered spam, which Lisa is very good at tracking and removing. Google has indexed some of the posts from the forums in its index, so chances are good that it will find the link to your site in you signature.

    I recommend that you join if you are new to anything Web site related. If you do register on Website Babble, keep an eye out for me. My ID is TechieGuy.

  • Introduction to HTML

    I recently wrote two posts regarding designing Web sites: Designing Web Pages: Tables or CSS and Introduction to Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). The information presented in both of those articles may be advanced for those just starting out with creating Web pages.

    I decided to create this post to provide an introduction to HTML and create a Web page. This post will create a very simple Web page that you can then display in a Web browser.

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  • Web Site Design Tips

    Like many of you, I have been surfing the Web for many years and have visited hundreds of Web sites. I have found Web sites through search engines, e-mails, and other Web sites. Many of these Web sites have a great layout and provide very valuable, useful information. Others are more complex to navigate and don’t really help with anything.

    In this post I will provide several points that I think makes a Web site great. Many of these points are common sense, and can easily be implemented.

    Points to Keep in Mind

    1. Easy Navigation – This is a very important point, and one that will determine whether I stay and visit more pages. It is important to ensure that your visitors can easily find their way around your site. This can be a simple menu list on the left or right side of the Web page, with the content right next to it. You can even have a menubar at the top of the Web page for more important categories.
    2. Readable Text – Many sites now try to use a very small font size. The author of the Web site may be able to easily read the text, but many of the visitors may have trouble reading small fonts. I try not to go below a 10pt font equivalent on my Web pages. I also try to find a common font that is easy to read such as an Arial or Verdana font. If you use CSS, then you can set the font family and size in one file that can be easily changed if you choose.
    3. Appealing Colours – I am not to keen on Web sites that have a bright pink or yellow background. I find it hard to view the Web page, let alone read the content. If I want a bright background, then I usually choose white and have black text. This is what most people are probably used to. I then add colours to my Web pages through the use of images and borders.
    4. Small Image Sizes – I hate Web sites that have large images that take some time to download. I have a broadband Internet connection, but there are still sites that make take some time to download because of a large image. You should try to compress your images as much as possible to reduce the size of the images.

    5. Reduce Page Size – This point goes hand-in-hand with the previous point. I like to write long posts in this blog, but if you can try to keep your page sizes to a minimum. Including the previous point you should try to break large articles into several pages, reduce the Javascript, CSS and HTML sizes. Create separate Javascript and CSS files that are included in your HTML pages, and remove excessive spaces, tabs and comments from your HTML.
    6. Flash Introduction – This is a worthless and pointless page. I have seen sites that display some flash animation when you visit the Web site. If the there is a skip intro button, I usually just click that to avoid seeing the introduction.
    7. Too Much Advertising – I don’t mind if people place ads on their Web sites, but sometimes they can go overboard. I have visited Web sites that have ads on what seems like every inch of a Web page. Sometimes there is so many ads, that I have trouble finding the actual page content.
    8. Write Unique Content – This is probably the most important point when creating a Web site, especially for generating traffic. Spend the time to write you own unique content instead of copying someone else’s content. There are sites out there have the same content as many other Web sites. I like to read unique content that provides more and different information than other sites.
    9. Ask for Opinions – Join Web sites that have the same niche as yours and then ask others to visit your Web site and provide an opinion. This can help you determine what you need to change.

    Summary

    This post provided many points that you can apply to your Web site to make your visitors enjoy their visit. As always, your Web site will probably change over a period of time since no Web site keeps the same look over many years.

  • Introduction to Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)

    In a previous post title Designing Web Pages: Tables or CSS, I briefly talked about using CSS to layout the content of a Web page. I didn’t go into detail about how CSS files are used in conjunction with Web pages or even how they are created.

    In this post I will provide a simple introduction to cascading stylesheets and how you can link them to an HTML file.

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  • Designing Web Pages: Tables or CSS

    There is some debate recently about the best method to design and layout a Web page. Traditionally, HMTL tables have been used to handle the layout of a Web page. Today, however, a new layout method is gaining more popularity which uses CSS (Cascading Stylesheets).

    Which method is the best way of designing a Web page? I will explain both methods in this post and provide my own opinion. This post, however, won’t explain how to create the HTML files as I’ll save that for a future post.

    Using HTML Tables

    If you view the source of many Web pages on the Internet, you will probably see the entire layout of the page constructed using tables. Tables have been the main method of providing the layout of a Web page since they were first introduced. They make it easy to provide a header, footer, and content sections to a page.

    Recently, however, many Web designers have been declaring that tables should only be used to display tabular data. This makes sense as many applications, such as Excel and database GUIs have a structured table look. The Web designers also state that the look and feel of a Web page should be separated from the HTML Web page.

    The advantage to using tables is that they are easy to use. You define a table (<tabl>), then a row (<tr>) and finally a cell (<td>). You can span rows across columns and columns across rows to make cells larger. Formatting a table can be accomplished in the HTML code itself, or a CSS file.

    Another advantage to tables is that all browsers in use today support tables. This means that a visitor won’t get a mangled Web page when it is viewed in their browser.

    A disadvantage of using tables is they need to download the entire HTML first before they are rendered. This is because the browser can’t be sure how the table will look until the entire HTML can be rendered. As more people switch to broadband Internet, this will probably be a moot point.

    I have designed many Web pages using tables, and have had no problems. I have, however, started to design Web pages using the new method: straight CSS with no tables.

    Using CSS

    The second method of laying out a Web page is using pure CSS and not tables. This method has been gaining popularity, especially among the processional Web designers.

    So how exactly is CSS used to layout a Web page? The answer: through the use of division tags (<div>). These tags are used to divide your Web page into various sections. One large section will contain all the sub-sections, which is usually called the container. Within the container you may have header, footer, navigation and content sections. The look and positioning of these sections is defined by the CSS.

    The CSS as I mentioned earlier is an acronym for Cascading Stylesheets. These are text files placed on a Web server that are downloaded along with the HTML file. A CSS file contains definitions, known as styles, which provide the look and feel of your Web site. The best part about using CSS files is that you only need to change one file when you want to change the look of your entire site. For those that manage thousands of Web pages, this can be a huge time saver.

    One disadvantage to using CSS to layout your Web pages is that not all Web browsers support all the CSS style tags. Your Web pages may not display nicely to visitors on older Web browser. With each new version of a browser, this becomes more of a moot point.

    I currently use the CSS method for Technically Easy, which is also my first site designed in this manner.

    The Verdict

    I usually call the last section in my posts "Summary" but this time I think I’ll provide my verdict, or opinion. I have used both methods to design Web pages, and have seen the advantages and disadvantages to both.

    I decided to go with CSS for my new sites since that looks like the future of Web pages. I have accepted the risk that for many visitors on older browsers, the Web pages may not display correctly. I have also examined my Web site statistics and realized that for the most part my visitors are using newer browsers. I have tested my CSS site on IE 6.0+, Firefox 2.0+ and Opera 9.0+, and haven’t had any problems.

    If you are a beginner to Web page designing, I suggest you use tables since they are easier to work with. Once you become familiar with HTML and CSS, you can then try using CSS for the layout, if you choose. I do recommend, however, that you learn CSS quickly and apply that to your Web pages as it can make changing the look of your entire site easier.

    In the end, I don’t think it really matters which method you choose, as no one cares what your Web page source looks like. All that matters is that you Web pages display correctly.

  • What are Web Feeds?

    A Web feed is used extensively on the Web especially for those who own a blog. They provide a means to distribute the contents of a Web site to subscribers. There are, however, two main types of feeds that can be used to send the sequentially and updated content from a Web site. This post will describe the two feed types and how someone can use them.

    RSS

    The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) (RSS 2.0) feed started out first as Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91), which then became RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90). All formats are specified using XML.

    The first version of RSS was first used in March 1999 on the My Netscape portal and has since been modified by various people and corporations. This has led to some incompatibilities and issues between the various versions, which I won’t go into detail here.

    Atom

    The second popular type of Web feed is the Atom feed. Similar to RSS feeds, Atom feeds are also specified in XML. This type of feed was developed because of the many incompatible versions of RSS feeds.

    The Atom feed has gone through two versions: 0.3 in December 2003 and 1.0 in December 2005.

    Publication

    Many blogs and other Web sites have the ability to publish both RSS and Atom feeds. When content on a Web site is updated, the publishers send out the feeds with the updated content in sequential order to their subscribers. This provides an automated method for the subscribers to read the new content from many different Web sites without actually visiting each one. This automated process is known as syndication.

    Syndication

    Imagine you enjoy reading the content on 20 different Web sites, and visit all 20 each day to read any updates. After a while you would probably be tired of visiting that many Web sites each day. With syndication you don’t have to because the content comes to you.

    Syndication is the process of automatically receiving a Web feed (RSS or Atom) from a Web site. All you need is a news reader that would automatically check the Web sites that you choose for new content. In the case from above, the news reader will check 20 Web sites for updates. Only the updated content is downloaded, so if only 5 sites have updated their content, you will only receive content from those 5 sites.

    Summary

    With the advent of RSS and Atom Web feeds, the information from Web sites has never been easier to receive. You can automatically receive information from any Web site that provides a Web feed provided you have a reader. In turn, it also is easier for publishers to send updated content to their subscribers simply by converting that content into an RSS or Atom feed.