Статьи на разные темы

July 6, 2008

SEO: Search Engines versus Visitors

Filed under: firefox, kansai, kids, law, mobile — manyarticles @ 9:29 pm

SEO: Search Engines versus Visitors

In the bid to drive traffic to their sites, webmasters often forget why they are in business, and who keeps them in business. Most search engine optimization experts and forums focus on the search engines. The reasons are SAMSUNG G-2739NR-S not far fetched; search engines are the biggest source of qualified traffic to most sites. Without traffic, you are out of business.

But that is not the end of the story. What search engines think about you is very important, but what visitors think about you makes or breaks you. It is visitors that deliver your Most Wanted Response (MWP). If you are selling goods or services online, and your visitors are LG KG370 pissed off with you, search engines cannot come to your rescue. Search engines cannot Candy CMC 2895 DS click through any pages on your site, visit your order page, and place an order. Visitors do.

It makes one wonder why search engines are the main focus in site design and layout, and not visitors, the main reason why the sites were set up in the first place.

One needs to strike a balance between pleasing the search engines and visitors. Visitors should come first. Search engine optimization should be carried out within the corridor whereby visitor experience will not be compromised.

One clear area where the visitor’s interest is thrown to the winds is links/resource pages. This page is meant to be an additional resource for visitors to garner more information on the subject matter. Hard copy books on a subject matter often have at the end, books recommended for further reading. In the list are books that readers can buy, if лампы энергосберегающие здоровье зрение they want to read further on the subject matter, if Olympus FE-170 they are so
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The Favicon, an Untapped Image Promotion Trick - Animated Favicons?

Filed under: activity, goal — manyarticles @ 6:11 pm

The Favicon, an Untapped Image Promotion Trick - Animated Favicons?

A favicon is that little image that most browsers display on the address line and in the favorites (bookmarks) menu. Tabbed browsers like Firefox and Opera extend the functionality of favicons, adding them to their tabs. The name was coined based on Internet Explorer (the first browser to support it) and derives from “Favorites Icon”. Each web browser has a unique user interface, and as a result uses the favicon in different ways. The favicon allows a company to further promote its identity and image by displaying a logo, a graphical message, etc. Often, the favicon reflects the look and feel of the web site or the organization’s logo.

A traditional favicon is actually a Microsoft Windows ICO file. An ICO file is actually a repository of bitmap like images. They are used because in some locations a 16×16 pixel image is desired, and sometimes a 32×32 image may be needed. Sometimes a 16 color image is desired, and sometimes a 256 color icon is desired.

You probably already knew all of the above.

But did you know that Firefox can display animated favicons? If you don’t believe me, газпром статьи open Firefox Ardo COO 2210 SHS and go to my site, bsleek.com (there should be a link at the bottom of the article). if you don’t have Firefox, download it, it’s a “must have” and you will quickly fall in love with the simplicity and convenience of tabbed browsing. Even if you are not a designer but just a site owner, in today’s environment you absolutely must know how your site looks in all browsers. You would think that all websites should look the same, but as browsers become more diverse and more sophisticated, standards are not respected and things can get messy. For example, I just discovered that a few pages on my site don’t look as expected in the latest version of Opera and need to be adjusted.

Ok, I hope by now you saw my animated favicon in Холодильники Neff Firefox and came back to the article to learn more about it…

The main reason why you can see animated favicons in Firefox is because Firefox abolished the proprietary ICO format in favor of the ability to display any supported image format in the favicon location, including BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG and… animated GIFs.

So now you know the big secret, the animated favicon is nothing but a tiny animated GIF.

Here’s a very neat trick, that can actually be used to visualize how any image looks like as a 16×16 pixel icon - once you start designing one of those, you will realize that it is extremely hard to produce a legible image on a 16 square pixels canvas:

Find any page with any graphic that you are interested in. Right click the image and chose “View Image” from the dialog. A blank page should display with your chosen image and surprise: you can see a miniature 16×16 copy of the image as a favicon! Uhh… do I have to mention again that we are doing all this in Firefox?

A hacker’s mind will immediately think of how great it would be to use this feature as a conversion tool. Unfortunately, unlike Internet Explorer and Opera, Firefox doesn’t store FavIcons in .ico files, the icons are stored in an encoded format directly in the bookmark file.

You can apply the same principle to animated GIFs and you will notice that a miniature version of the animation also plays in the address bar and on the tabs.

Perhaps one of the main reasons why you don’t see that many sites using animations is browser compatibility. Animated
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