Category : Resources

Office Geo Location

Adding Geo Location Tags in RapidWeaver

Geo Location Tags (or Geo Tags) are topographical markers (longitude and latitude) that identify your website’s geographical location. In other words, they show search engines where your business is physically located. In my opinion they’re not extremely important when you compare them to directories like Google Places that actually require you to verify your existence at the location by mailing you a postcard with a code – obviously the search engines will trust those addresses more. However, they are still recommended by search engines and do play a role in the growing amount of online tools, such as mobile apps. In conclusion, they are simple to add and likely will only help, not hurt, your business if you rely on local customers.

If you were using a text editor the code for adding geo location tags is very simple. Finding the coordinates for the location used to be the tricky part, but with the abundance of geo tag generators even that process is easy now.

My favorite geo tag generator is MyGeoPosition.com due to its abundance of data, though there are plenty of others that are often far simpler to use. If you don’t like the one I use in this tutorial or are just curious google “Geo Tag Generators” and I’m sure you’ll find a large selection to choose from.

For this example I’ll use an office space in the town I live in. 3830 Watt Ave, Sacramento, CA 95821.

Office Geo Location

After hitting the “Calculate geodata” button you should see a familiar map, well… familiar when it’s your address of course. However, the data we’re looking for is in the Geo-Tag/-Metatags tab.

Geo-Tags Tab

Pretty much every thing in the first box is what we’ll use – so all those staring with <meta…>. Unfortunately we cannot just copy and paste the data, though it is very simple to enter into your RapidWeaver page at this point (you must enter it into every page you wish it to be displayed on, though I would argue you only need to for your home page).

Navigate to the Page Info > Header section in edit mode of RapidWeaver.

Page Info Header Section

For adding each meta tag hit the plus (+) button in the bottom right corner. The tag will already be assigned the meta tag portion so simply add the name and content separately (don’t worry about any of the tags or quotation marks).

Example Geo Tags

That’s it. If your’s looks pretty much like that then you’re finished. Pretty easy.

RapidWeaver Manual

RapidWeaver Manual – 2nd Edition

2nd Edition is out for PDF

Soon to be released on Kindle, EPUB, and iBooks – so if you’d rather have one of those versions then hold on (not much longer).

If you are a previous customer of the 1st Edition you’ll get a big discount in your e-mail soon too.

If you are a previous customer of any of our other products you’ll be getting a discount too – 30% Off (this will launch soon).

As always, I love feedback. The 2nd version was dramatically influenced by user feedback and requests and I plan on making more minor updates to it in time as we receive more requests.

RapidWeaver Manual – CHECK IT OUT!

Font Squirrel - Commercial Free Fonts

Typography: Font Tools & Recommendations

There’s no questioning it, typography is a huge issue in web design. Actually, this is really of little surprise considering its importance in all published materials throughout history, though more significantly in the last century. A choice of font can be used to emphasize things, to convey volume and mood, to look professional or friendly. These days typography is becoming more of an art than ever before as well – many artists turn to it to display their expressions.

Friendly

HEADLINE

Consider these two very familiar fonts, Verdana & Times New Roman, which can convey very different feelings basic on the simple serif or lack of serif on the font. The use of all uppercase or combination of uppercase and lowercase can make a huge different as well.

In the end, when you design you want options. Some of this is an art, though a lot of it can be done well by most people off of gut instinct (in my opinion).

There are currently only 2 predominant commercial free font suppliers in the market: Font Squirrel and Google Web Fonts. My personal favorite, based on better web browser compatibility and selection is Font Squirrel, though Google Web Fonts are not a good idea to ignore. Both are very easy to use and implement into your site, though don’t get carried away as fonts have a significant impact on website load time currently (something I imagine will change in the near future, but hasn’t yet).

Commercial Free Web Fonts

If you have several projects then paying for fonts is not a bad way to go either and can supply you with a lot of very impressive fonts. For this I highly recommend, above all other paid font services and vendors, Adobe Type.

Majestic SEO - Backlink Sitemap Research

Search Engine Optimization Tools

In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) not only does Google write the rules, but they also give away a ton of powerful and free tools. I’m not going to go into great detail about each one, but they are all worth your time if you are aiming to do some stellar SEO link building and will help you out in extreme ways when conducting any SEO campaign.

  • Google’s Keywords Tool – designed for AdWords this tool can also be used to find how much keywords are searched for each month.
  • Google Analytics – powerful analytic tracking and data to show how users interact with your website.
  • Google Webmaster Tools – Offering additional SEO data as well as your site’s functional performance and search engine status.
  • Majestic SEO – Great Referring Links & Backlink insight.
  • Search Engine Reports – Provides ranking information for your website in relation to keywords in Search Engine searches.
  • Google’s URL Builder – A simple URL builder for setting up Google Analytic Campaign tracking.
  • SEO for Chrome – An easy all-in-one Google Chrome extension for seeing how a website ranks and all basic info on websites.

Another service that is not free, though worth the cost for many businesses is SEM Rush. SEM Rush is far more intuitive than any of the Free Tools when it comes to helping suggest keywords and giving a competitive insight.

Commercial Free Images, Photos & Textures

Photography

We do often purchase stock photos from professionals at a variety of sites, such as Big Stock though often you can find some great free goodies out there. For Photos the best Commercial Free place to look is Flickr, though you can’t just go there and start looking or it will be impossible to sort through everything that is commercial free and not commercial free. The trick is to utilize the Flickr: Advanced Search option. When on that page navigate to the bottom and locate the “Creative Commons” section and check all the boxes that apply (I usually select them all).

Flickr Advanced Search Creative Commons Section

Note that you should still always check the conditions of the photo used as they can have requirements, such as photographer recognition, and they can vary from photo to photo throughout the photographers flickr page.

Textures / Patterns

There are actually quite a lot of websites out there that offer free textures or patterns and also a good amount of sites that sell them. However, I am going to highlight one that is perhaps the most popular out of them and provides a great inventory that can be used for nearly any website – Subtle Patterns.

Lynda.com Online Tutorials

Improving Your Coding Skills

To find resources to help improve your coding is not difficult on the internet these days – fact it’s hard not to find your answers in many cases. You can find blogs and forums from just about any web design topic such as HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript or even more advanced topics like MySQL and PHP. Over time I’ve found a hand full that are my personal favorites and that I’d like to recommend if you are a RapidWeaver user who wants to sharpen their coding skills. RapidWeaver is great software for users who want to avoid having to know much if any code, though knowing code is only going to enhance your experience and unlock more possibilities for you. The choice is yours.

1. Code Academy

For free help it really is hard to beat Code Academy. They don’t cover every topic, though they do touch on some great foundation topics and give you a chance to see your code live.

2. lynda.com

I’ve been a member at Lynda.com for years now and have used it to learn most of what I know today. They do not cover all topics or even every piece of software, but they do have a very extensive library and its growing all the time. In addition, they cover not only topics of web design, but also graphic design, SEO, business, and much much more.

On the downside Lynda.com does require a $25/mo membership fee, though I think it’s well worth every penny. You can also upgrade your membership and pay $37.50/mo which will give you access to all their exercise files.

3. CSS-Tricks

If you subscribe to a blog and want to improve your coding then definitely add CSS-Tricks to your list… if you haven’t already. Chris Coyier continues to delve deeper into some fun and amazing coding that doesn’t stop at CSS. In addition, he provides great example and snippets for achieving CSS and jQuery techniques.

What’s Yours?

There are lots more tools out there in the internet for increasing your skills and I’ve only touched on 3 ones that I love here. If you have one you love please comment and share what you love about it so much. If you want to explore other great ones that are not my personal favorites, but still very useful, check out these: