Room

works

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog

Update

As you probably have noticed both R-D and the blog haven't been updated much lately, I am not closing either site and the reason I launched R-D and the blogs as tutorial/advice type sites is because this isn't a news type site so the first tutorial wont be out dated if someone finds the site a year from now, I do plan to add more over time but lately other projects have been the main focus, including the creation of 'Stick Dude' on stick guy comics.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog

Ad Pacement

Something I have asked myself several times since re-launching RD where the best place to have advertising is, the one thing I have always done is place the ads in there own area so they aren't hidden with regular content to trick people into clicking. I have found that the best place to put them is on the right column and footer, this is because if the ad server is slow it will cause your site to stall while it waits for the ads, if they are in your footer or in the right column your website navigation has already loaded with the main body of the content, so it causes less disruption.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog

Search Engine Friendly URL's

This isn't about creating Search Engine Friendly URL's, if you are looking for one RD has one.

Until recently I was not a big fan of these url's as I liked the old fashioned file.php?id= type link, but search engines aren't the best at indexing that type of url so I decided to switch.

Some advice when implementing these URL's:

Includes are done at server side so they are fine to be left as they are

If you have a style sheet, instead of 'includes/style.css' use 'http://domain.com/includes/style.css' as if your url is domain.com/news/05/index.html it will think the style sheet is at domain.com/news/05/incudes/style.css.

Same goes for links, use the full url.

Also check the image urls are the full ones.

Be careful with the url's, I add index.html to my urls as if I ended it news/05/ then its easy to make a mistake, for example if I link to news/05 it will give a page not found error, take myspace for example if you link to your profile say myspace.com/somerandomexample and you post a link too myspace.com/somerandomexample/ it will give the user a page not found error

The reason for this is because your computer renders the html side as far as that knows the url you are viewing is the directory/file in the address bar so renders it as it would any html file.

Search Engine Friendly URLs are mostly about trial and error, when you implement them try all the links and check everything appears as you want them to appear.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog

The power of branching out

As you have probably seen from what started as a website with a forum (BSP) the network has expanded with the addition of Rampant Designs, Stick Guy Comics, blogs and the recent addition Herpes Radio, the entire network has a huge diversity which helps all the websites as they are all connected together (through advertisements and the forum) so if one gains popularity it should help the others. I look at the network as 3 sections the Rampant Designs section which is the technical side, the BSP section which is the entertainment for all ages and the Stick Guy Comics section which is entertainment aimed at a more mature audience (such as the new radio show).

The main advantage of branching out your network into new areas is you let each have its own voice, we could have had bsp.rampant-designs.com, stickguy.rampant-designs.com and radio.rampant-designs.com but all the sites would be compared to Rampant Designs as they contain the same url, but at the same time as the other sites are referenced in some way through the other sites is still allows users to move around the network. If you do branch out I suggest having a lot of diversity don't have your website then a sub site with pretty much the same content because it becomes confusing for users who are on your website looking for information related to it who have to search around several sub sites for it.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog

The easiest method of designing a website

Been a few days since I last 'blogged' here mainly because I have been busy with some other things including a new website which is soon debuting, anyways I thought I would post a quick blog on how I usually do layouts. I will say now I do code, I hate using a program like photoshop to just slice up the image and generate code.

Dimensions

First I work out the dimensions I want to use, such as the overall width, the left nav width, the center and the right. I usually draw it in an image editing program, just a plain background with squares to see how it will look when its layed out.

Design

Next using an image editing program I draw the layout how I want it to look as a whole to see what I expect overall.

Cutting

Next I cut the layout up into smaller chunks, discarding what I would see as irrelevant content (such as the background if I am using a single color for the background and spacer images).

Create a tabled layout

When I have the images I open a html editor (sometimes notepad) and design a template page, I use tables and keep all of the content in the table tags (such as width), I know I have stated before css is a better option but that comes later. Once the layouts done I open it in internet explorer to see it looks as I expect, I then open it in firefox and fix the coding so it uses code firefox will acknowledge.

CSS

Now I take the template and integrate a style sheet to the design. I then test it again in all browsers.

Develop the pages

When everythings working I create all the pages for it, if I use a database (which I always do) I add the code to take the information from the database and add test entries just to test the layout.


Anyways thats all for today have fun and happy coding.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog

Anti -affiliates a little addition

As I stated in a previous blog I am not a fan of these 'get a free iphone' type sites and I recently read an article in PC Advisors 2007 security bible (its a small leaflet and thats the name, I don't worship security or anything), I would post the article but as its in print that means re-typing it which well isn't going to happen. Anyways I came across an interesting article about a website where you get a free laptop for registering (iwantmyfreelaptop.com) well as you would expect when they say register they mean register with them then 10 other sites to buy/subscribe or get a nice new credit card to pile onto that nice little debt, well the writer (Kalpana Ettenson) stated they found it suspicious you would just get a free laptop so they proceeded to check the website against the Better Business Bureau website and the website had a few complaints well by a few I mean 457 where pretty much the user got 9 credits was going fine then dang it the website started to act up not loading and confirming orders so no one was getting there laptop, some people just have bad luck.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog