Usable Layout

Do you have large stylesheets (CSS) and Javascript files that are referenced on pages in your site?

By compressing those files you could cut down on your websites bandwidth and user response times.

A great place to start is by turning on mod_gzip or mod_deflate to automatically compress your files before returning them to the user. This is a module that will compress some / all output just before it is returned to the user. This method is probably the best approach for most users, provided that their webhost provides these modules.

When trying to add a style for a element based on its id and class, i.e.
HTML:
<div id="myID" class="class1 class2">Text</div>

CSS:
#myID.class1 {border:1px solid red;}

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and below don't support this multiple selector capability.

Workaround:

• Define the style inline
• Add the class to a parent element and then select based on class and then id
• Define a parent element and place the class on the parent

Workaround example:
HTML:

What is the optimal time (both time of day and time of year) to get you job listing out there?

The results of of such a study are likely to vary greatly by industry. The following results are based on our experience hiring website developers and designers. **Stats may be scewed due to the fact that India is 9 - 13 hours ahead of North America**

Optimal time to post your job online:

• 5pm

We have found that developers in general look for jobs in the evening - late evening.

Best time of the month / year to post your job(s):

An update on our original importance of Website Geo-Location article.

Google recently released the ability for webmasters and site owners to let Google know what geographic location their site targets.

How do you stop a users' browser from caching pages from your site. There is no 100% method of doing this. As a website developer or webmaster, you have to assume for the worst (i.e. that a user is viewing a cached version of your pages) and make sure that you handle it on the next page request.

There are two methods to minimize the chance that a user is viewing a cached version of a page on your site.

1. Javascript
2. Response headers (could also be meta tags)

These two approaches can also be used together.

Javascript

How does the location of your server affect your search engine rankings?

If you have a .com domain name but your server is not located in the geographic location of your target or primary market, you search engine rankings will suffer.

If you have a country specific domain name but your server is not hosted in that country, in general your search engine ranking will not suffer (in that geographic region).

What can you do to remedy this?

• First you need to get a web host in the particular geographic region you are targetting
• Then you need to:

Iframe stands for inline frame. An Iframe is a floating frame that can be inserted anywhere within a web page.

A concern for webmasters about iframes is that an iframe can be used to include pages on your website into external sites.

How do you prevent pages on your website from being included through an iframe by another website?

Placing the following javascript code at the top of all pages on your site will ensure that if any other site iframes a page on your website, that your page will break out of the iframe and just display your page in the users browser.

As everyone is optimizing their websites and web pages on their sites for search engines (organic traffic), you also need to optimize your paid search campaigns (PPC).

What do I mean by this? We all have generated good content for our pages (in page, meta's and page titles), gotten good backlinks to our pages to optimize our websites for organic search. To read more about optimizing your site for search engines (organic), please read our search engine optimization basics article.

What is it?

Many big multi-national websites use this technique. If they have different country specific websites, when a user lands on any one of the sites, they are redirected to the specific site for their country.

Why do this?

If you have build a site that specifically targets a geographic region (usually by country), then you probably want your users to access this site instead of any of your other websites.