7 Essential Title Tag Strategies

The latest Market Position newsletter has a nice summery about good use of the Title tag. Main points covered:

1. The length of your title


2. Word proximity


3. Keyword location


4. Word order


5. Repitition of words


6. Titles for human consumption


7. What words to use

The author contradicts himself a little - in point 3 he suggests better results from placing your keywords at the beginning of the title and then in point 6 reminds us that the Title tag is important for human consumption too. Ever looked though your browser's History and tried to find a site you were at yesterday and they have used keywords (or something else just as unpredictable) at the start of the title tag?

Like everything else, a balance is required.

Simple Problem Solving

Found this little gem in a post at Signal V Noise - a simple, step-by-step guide to problem solving:

1. write down the problem


2. write down why it’s hard to solve


3. write down what would make it easier


4. write down possible ways to implement things that would make it easier


5. write down why those ways suck


6. then make it not suck

Beautiful!

Crazy Egg - Another Web 2.0 Stats Pack

These things seem to be coming out of the woodwork - Crazy Egg is another invitation-only Web 2.0 stats pack.

Although it does look like it's got an extra nice feature missing from others - a heat map showing where visitors are clicking. Nice touch.

Well, I've signed up for an invite. Will take it for a test drive when I can get an account set up!

(Via TechCrunch)

Tags: crazy egg | web 2.0 | statistics | Stats

The Yellow Fade Technique (YFT)

Some time ago 37 Signals pioneered what they call the Yellow Fade Technique, or YFT. You might have seen it on Basecamp or Backpack.

Jamie asked me the other day if I knew how it was done. I had seen a tutorial for it before, but hadn't bookmarked or blogged it! So after a few minutes of Googling a found a couple of possible how-tos:

• The Yellow Fade Technique, Revisisted. I don't know how or why this is better than the original. But it's revisited, so it must be, I guess!


• The Fade Anything Technique


• And the find of the afternoon - script.aculo.us - this site has lots of goodies. Shall have to poke around here some more!

However, none of these were the original tutorial that I was looking for... :/

Tags: yellow fade technique | 37 signals | web 2.0 | javascript

Formatting for task descriptions

Thanks to Sawan for this suggestion - don't know why nobody thought of this earlier

Anyway, have just finished integrating TinyMCE with task descriptions in NetOffice. So now you can add lists, include hyperlinks, stikeout previous instructions etc etc!

A couple of things have been changed:

1. Obviously, TinyMCE files need to be copied into your NetOffice installation.


2. We have added a file called tinymce.php to the /includes/ directory. It only contains Javascript, but we've used a PHP include so we can pass variables to it later if we like. That will mean we can enable or disable certain buttons dynamically depending on other page variables.


3. This file is called in the head of the page, so /themes/deepblue/header.php has been adjusted accordingly. If you're using another theme, change your header.php to include /includes/tinymce.php.


4. Then obviously /tasks/edittask.php has been adjusted - basically just giving the textareas id attributes so TinyMCE can find them. There is also a little bit of code at the top of that file that calls a function to convert < and > to their HTML entities, which we don't want any more! So that's just been commented out for now.

That all might sound scary, but if you're using the standard Deep Blue theme that comes with NetOffice 2.6, all you need to do is unzip the following file into your NetOffice directory. I've even included TinyMCE so it should be pretty straight forward.

• Download ZIP file - 1.53 Mb

This is only tested with NetOffice 2.6 - I have no idea what will happen on earlier versions.

Also... just in case, make sure you back up your NetOffice installation so you can roll back if needed...

Quickies for a Friday Arvo

Just a few quick links from around the traps today:

• 37 Signals have released Campfire - a group chat IM thingy. I quite like a lot of their stuff, but have no need for this one at all. I expect there are those that do, but I'm not one of them! I'll just stick with MSN Messenger.


• Scripto - it's Flash without Flash! Animations in HTML and CSS driven by Javascript. Will have to check this one out.


• And while we're on the subject of Flash, FlashObject lets you use Javascript to detect for the flash plugin and then embed the object. That should overcome those pesky validation issues with embedding Flash too.

Tags: campfire | 37 signals | scriptio | flash

Dropdowns for Google Search?

Heard a rumour tonight that Google are testing dropdown boxes for their search page. So instead of seeing different tabs for web, images etc, we might soon see just one search page with a dropdown box containing these options!

Can't find anything on Matt Cutts' blog or the Googleblog... so we'll see what happens there...

Technorati: google | dropdown | predictions