Yesterday if you happened to visit this site you would have noticed all the styles were turned off. This was done to celebrate the third annual CSS Naked Day.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words…

It only happens once a year in April, so if you didn’t participate this year, mark your calendars for next year and show your support for web standards.

Posted in General ~ No Comments

There is a nice little write-up in the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers regarding the recent website redesign I did for the Building Industry Association of Southeastern Michigan. Here is a couple of excerpts from the article:

Building Industry Association of Southeastern Michigan also announced the launch of its new Web site at www.builders.org. The site offers a wealth of information for potential and current home owners including access to a list of professional master builders who have homes available in communities throughout southeastern Michigan.

The Web site also features a separate section for members of BIA and AAM that can be accessed using the member’s personal identification code.

HomeTownLife.com has the entire article on their website.

Posted in Company Information ~ No Comments

I had a hard time finding a solution to redirect only certain files from HTTP to the secure HTTPS. I found all kinds of ways to redirect the entire site to HTTPS but none for specific pages only. After a few hours tinkering I found a solution using the following code in a .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
 
rewritecond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
rewriterule ^filename\.php(.*)$ https://www.example.com/filename.php$1 [r=301]

The first part of the code redirects example.com to www.example.com as noted in an earlier post, “301″ Redirects for SEO. The second part then redirects a specific file (filename.php) from http to https. Thus the individual file “filename.php” can only be accesses using a SSL connection.

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This is a warning to those using Network Solutions to check if certain domain names are available.

Seems they now reserve each domain that is searched on their site for five days. Thus, forcing you to buy it from them in that time period. Plus, they charge approximately three times as much as more competitive registration companies (e.g. GoDaddy, NameCheap) for a (1) year registration. You have been warned.

Posted in General ~ 3 Comments

Search engines will often regard www.example.com and example.com as two different websites. Because of this, websites usually experience the effects of link fragmentation (inbound links point to both www.example.com and others to example.com). For example, if www.example.com has 5,000 inbound links and example.com has 2,500 inbound links you could potentially combine them so you have all 7,500 links pointing to www.example.com.

To do this you can setup a permanent “301″ redirect by creating a .htaccess file with the below code. This will ensure that all requests coming in to example.com will get redirected to www.example.com.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Notes:

• The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)
• REPLACE example.com and www.example.com with your actual domain name in the code above
• This .htaccess redirection method only works on servers using the Apache Mod-Rewrite module

This “301″ redirect method is also a great way to save money on SSL certificates. When the site always points to www.example.com you can by just one SSL certificate.

Posted in Website Design ~ 5 Comments