January 14th, 2008
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. ⋅ Tags: domain names
January 4th, 2008
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 only need to buy a single SSL certificate.
Posted in Website Design. ⋅ Tags: .htaccess, redirects, SEO, SSL
November 19th, 2007
If you plan to link directly to an .EPS or .AI file for downloading (e.g. logos, vector art, etc.) on a website, you should note that Internet Explorer doesn’t correctly handle these postscript files. If you attempt to download an .eps file with IE it will save it as a .ps file and it will save an .ai file as a .pdf. This is not a problem in Firefox or Opera.
The simple solution is to zip these types of files so IE doesn’t change the file extension, and your visitors can download them without problems.
Posted in Website Design. ⋅ Tags: eps, IE, Internet-Explorer
November 10th, 2007
Lately I’ve been creating a lot of PayPal “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons for a few of my customer’s websites. The problem with creating these buttons is that they require an email address to be added to the HTML code, which in turn gets easily harvested by spam-bots.
A simple alternative to using an email address is to use a “referral code” instead. To get the referral code login to PayPal and click on “Referrals” located near the footer of the page. On that page you will find a link like: https://www.paypal.com/us/mrb/pal=VXDE78NC4F3K2. Copy the “VXDE78NC4F3K2″ part of the code and replace the hidden input value of “business” with it in your button code.
Original Code:
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="name@example.com" />
Revised Code:
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="VXDE78NC4F3K2" />
You may ask why I wouldn’t just use PayPal’s encrypted payment buttons. Well, By creating non-encrypted buttons you can easily edit them (e.g. change Price, Item Name, etc.), create new ones fast and dynamically input values via PHP.
Posted in Website Design. ⋅ Tags: ecommerce, email, HTML, PayPal, spam
