You can see some screen shots on SEO Roundtables post on the findings.

I think it is a good idea that Google have removed PageRank data from the Webmaster Tools. For a long time both search engines and SEOs have told webmasters not to get obsessed with that factor anyway. It just did not make sense to keep it.

But then why do Google keep the PageRank data in the Toolbar when PageRank is clearly not a very good quality benchmark?

I believe it is due to the fact that Google have invested heavily over the years in the brand PageRank. PageRank is a brand more than a technology today.

For over 10 years Google have been telling the public that PageRank is equal to Googles secret formula for how to rate all information. From a branding point of view they have put much more into the PageRank basket than what is technically correct.

From a technical point of view it doesn’t make sense to report the PageRank data to webmasters – but from a branding point of view Google can’t live without it.

If Google dropped PageRank in the toolbar now and stopped using the brand in public communication they would need some other simple way of explaining what it is that they do so much better than everybody else (if their mind off course).

And why give up a really good and strong brand? Well, off course there is that little thing about the fact that PageRank is actually not really what the public think it is, but hey that’s just a minor detail, right?

PageRank does it job in the public toolbar. Its not very accurate, to say the least. But who cares?

Well, our clients do – because their clients – the general public – look at that toolbar and to some degree trust the green bar. As long as people do that PageRank will be important! As long as our SEO clients feel that their clients judge them partly on PageRank they do want to use that as a benchmark.

Should Google totally discount PageRank and also remove it in the toolbar?

Long term that would probably be the best and least confusing for all but I do understand the problems Google would have to deal with if they do. It’s not an easy decision but one that I feel Google will have to make at some point. The current solution – with toolbar PageRank visible but no Webmaster Tools PageRank is not good. It’s confusing; it sends mixed signals; and it makes Google look less trustworthy.

You are usually so busy with current projects that answering calls from past customers can seem like an unnecessary and non-profitable chore.

Here is how you can plug back in to your client base and turn customer service into the profit center that you never thought it would be.

1. Ditch the “Pump and Dump” Model

Many of us tell ourselves that web design isn’t like other businesses. Therefore, we don’t have to behave as other business people do. We can design websites, get our final payment from the customer once the job is done and move on to the next client. This is completely wrong thinking. Web design is a service just like landscaping, legal representation or car repair. You are providing a service for money. While you may be in demand now, in a downturn you will only keep your business profitable if you provide outstanding service. While you do need to devote a certain percentage of your time to finding new leads, you should devote the same amount of time each week to helping out your past clients.

2. Make Your Terms Clear

Most web design firms offer maintenance packages or charge for updates. While it is important to provide good customer service, you should spell out clearly what constitutes free customer service and what constitutes a paid request.

This is best handled in your initial contract with the customer. Many web designers don’t like to produce contracts as they are worried about scaring off the customer. On the contrary, the customer will often view such a move as a legitimate business transaction and a sign that you are a professional. Be very wary of any company that is not willing to sign a contract for whatever reason.

The contract should include a copy of your quote to your customer with a statement that anything over and above what is included in the quotation will be charged out separately. One-time charges for updates and maintenance packages should be on offer in the contract and on your website so that clients can refer back to these charges.

3. Deal With Emergencies

We’ve all gotten that strange call from a client declaring that something is an emergency and needs to be fixed RIGHT NOW, regardless of what that emergency is. While it may not be an emergency to you, your client perceives it as such and how quickly you deal with that emergency will reflect on your business. It may be helpful to explain to your client that something isn’t as bad as it seems after the fact, but don’t even go there unless you have fixed the issue at hand.

4. Treat Every Contact as an Opportunity

From simple questions about search engines to irate clients, each call is an opportunity for you to reach out and either educate or placate your client. One of the most common complaints about web design companies is their lack of responsiveness after the project is complete. All you need to do to combat this is answer your clients when they phone or e-mail you.

You can build on this by weaving sales techniques into your after-sales service. The key to doing this properly is to address the actual needs of your customer. When a customer calls you, ask them at the end of the call how everything is going and if there is anything more that you can do for them. This is when they’ll start telling you about a form they have been thinking of adding or a new technology that they want to try out. Leave it open-ended and let the customer talk. If they simply say “No.”, then thank them for their call and move on to your projects. At least one in ten of them will probably say “Yes” and give you more business.

E-mails are a tricky subject. One of the problems with e-mail is that we get so many of them in our business day that it is easy to let a customer request fall to the bottom of the pile. Flag customer requests or put them in their own folder for immediate answering so that this doesn’t happen to you. If an e-mail isn’t something that requires an e-mail reply, such as a customer asking for a link to something, pick up the phone and call them. You’ll have a much better chance of impressing the customer over the phone then you will over e-mail.

5. Identify and Cultivate “Angel” Customers

Develop an 80/20 list. It is a general rule that 20% of your clients are responsible for 80% of your income. Once you have identified them, treat these clients as “angel” customers. You need to retain their loyalty in order to keep your business viable. This may mean taking each of them out to lunch a couple of times a year or bringing them to a lecture on search engine marketing at a local trade show. Whatever you do, make sure that you don’t just know their names, but can actually come close to calling them friends after a while. While this concept may seem tacky, it is an old school way of doing business that most people still appreciate. Loyalty is earned by doing a good job first and forging a relationship second. If you don’t forge that relationship, your customer does not have the necessary loyalty to return to you for their website needs.

6. Turn The Rest of Your Customers Into “Angels”

Look at the remaining 80% on your list. Ideally, you would like to move them into the 20% column. You can do this by sending out educational e-mail newsletters, sending Christmas cards once a year and occasionally calling them to see if they need anything or have any questions for you. Treat these calls with the same importance as your sales calls – they will lead to just as much business. Consider having pens or other promotional items made with your logo and sending them to your customer, then following up with a phone call to make sure that they got them.

If you can find a way to incorporate at least a few of these customer service ideas into your everyday business, you’ll be making your clients happier and making a little more money in the process.

Doing development is something for those programming grunts, those code jockeys, those geeks.

Why should we enter the trenches of development when it’s so nice up here with the Photoshop brushes, afternoon tea, and MacPros? ??Because you’ll be a better designer for it.

Skeptical? Read on and discover 6 reasons why designers should code…

1. Better XHTML

I’ve worked with and known many designers who knew only the bare minimum needed to get their designs out of Photoshop and into a web format. Oftentimes they would make use of a software program or plugin like SiteGrinder. While these programs keep getting better and better at making compliant code, they still don’t match the human-produced variety.

Knowing how to write your own standards-compliant XHTML will make you a valuable addition to any web team (emphasis on the standards-compliant part). With all the fuss about PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, and many other languages, people tend to forget that everything ends up being HTML in the end, because that’s what your browser has to have in order to render a page. The more you know about the medium you work in, the better you work in that medium.

2. Better SEO

And while we’re talking about standards-compliant code, we should mention SEO. This is a big buzzword, though not quite as much as it has been in the past. However, what this means is that SEO is becoming a much more commonplace idea of what a website should strive for, instead of just an added special feature for big business sites.

If you can learn to write your own code, you’re much closer to being able to list “SEO Compliant Designs” on your sheet of available services. That means you can charge more, and it’s another badge on your hat.

3. Better Accessibility

Better code and better SEO = better accessibility. Part of of the job of any designer is to present information in a clear and coherent manner, and on the web that means not solely in a visual manner. A shoddily-coded website can be a nightmare to navigate if you’re blind, or even if you’re using a mobile device.

Learning the ins and outs of developing code for accessibility not only allows you have that knowledge as part of your production skillset, but it will also help you to better understand the considerations you should take when designing for accessibility.

Accessibility is a mandate for all government websites, nearly all education sites, and businesses are starting to see the value in it as well. The more people you can reach via your site, the more chance you have of accomplishing your goal, whatever it may be. And that has to be reflected in any successful design.

4. Better Left Side

Being a right-brained creative is great, but giving your left side a workout can spur on creativity of a different nature. The motto at the bottom of the WordPress website is “Code Is Poetry”, and this is because translating a written language to something that can be visually seen is truly an art form.

Learning to write your own code opens up whole new avenues of expression. Developing your technical and analytical abilities can improve your information design, developing wireframes, and create a pathway to work with interaction design. And who knows, it may even improve your math skills!

5. Better Communication

It’s easy to get lost in the techno-jargon used by developers, simply because you may not have been exposed to the type of things they are discussing. Digging in and working with code yourself will allow you to become familiar with the terminology that is used when conversing about the construction of a site.

Being able to speak the lingo will help when you need to communicate with a developer or project manager about how a design should be implemented.

6. Better Design

You can only do so much knowing the fundamentals of design. Typography, color theory, composition, etc. are all fantastic and extremely important skills to know (and know well)…but eventually if you want to excel in your creativity, you must learn the tools of the trade. Painters learn about canvas types, paint compositions, and bristle qualities. Web design is no exception. Learn to code: you’ll be better for it.

These online website creators allow you to create a full website, free of charge, directly in your browser without any prior knowledge of website development.

Many of these services also offer premium packages with additional features, for a small cost per month, if you desire additional tools. The biggest advantage in using these services is the unbeatable development speed, as it all happens in your browser with click-and-drag functionality.

If you’re not a web designer or a creative person but need an easy and affordable solution to creating a website, try one of these free programs.

Wix offers a simple, yet powerful online platform to make Flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. Using a browser-based interface, you can choose from a wide selection of design templates or start with a blank canvas. Wix provides more than enough tools to get the job done, with everything from animation effects and photo albums to Google maps and RSS feeds. You can also import photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube with only a few clicks.

The design interface is sleek and quick (on a high-speed connection). Tools are easy to access when needed and can be hidden when not necessary. Creating new pages and editing old ones is straightforward. Your website is hosted on Wix’s server for quick and easy publishing, however unless you upgrade to a premium package (starting at $4.95/month), you don’t have much control over your domain name. All in all, Wix is by far the best choice for free Flash websites.

Weebly is another top choice and sports a simple click and drag interface that allows you to create a professional website very quickly. Content elements, such as videos, pictures, maps, and text are added to your website by simply dragging them from the Weebly bar to your webpage.

You must choose from one of their templates, yet each template is pretty flexible and customizable so there is some room for creativity. Adding and organizing your website’s pages is surprisingly painless. When you add a new page to your website, it’s automatically added to the navigation bar so there’s no need to update your navigation, even if you add a new page at the last minute. Your website domain is in the format of ‘pagename.weebly.com,’ though if you wish, you can create and purchase your own domain name through the interface (the domain purchase process is handled by bestdomainever.net).

With over 20 million websites created with Webs, this one is among the most popular free website creators available and features many of the same features of the other online website builders.

It’s worth noting the ability to integrate your site with Paypal or Google Checkout. It only takes a few clicks and your account information in order to add e-commerce functionality to your website. Also, you can create your own social network by requiring visitors to “join” your site, all with a just a couple of clicks. How cool is that?

Webs is probably not the easiest free website builder to use, however with the extra features available, Webs is a viable option for creating a powerful, free website.

As I mentioned, Google Chrome OS will run on Linux Kernel within a new windowing system. The operating system will run on both x86 and ARM processors. The key aspects of Google Chrome OS is Speed, simplicity and security so there will be no doubt of its performance. Like Chrome Browser, Google Chrome OS is start very fast and within seconds you will start surfing on web.

The web based applications will be the applications in Google OS, i.e. whatever technology you use to create a web based application, your application can run directly under Google OS. This gives benefit to millions of web developers to write desktop applications for Google Chrome.

Tech media has already started talking about the competition Google OS will bring in Desktop based operating system market.

Because third parties can develop add-ons for Firefox, by downloading the best add-ons that are available, you can transform Firefox into a tool that dramatically increases your productivity and saves you a countless amount of time.?? Since there are so many different add-ons available to download, it can be a little overwhelming to pick out which ones you should be using.

Therefore, I decided to do all of the legwork for you and compile a list of the six best Firefox add-ons for web designers.

1. Web Developer
2. Firebug
3. Colorzilla
4. Fireshot
5. CSS Validator/HTML Validator
6. Browser Window Resizer

Analyze The Top Sites in Your Niche

Once you find out what the top ranking sites in your niche are, what should you do? Well, here are several things you can do.

You can find out some very interesting facts. For example, you might discover that a lot of the inbound links come from websites that the competitor owns. This isn’t always easy to find out, but it’s very informative if you can. The “whois” information may not give you much to go on, but if you do discover that this is the case, you may realize that owning some legitimate websites on the side can help attract more traffic to your site.

You might discover when browsing through your competitor’s site that even though the information on your site is similar, their site has a very different structure – a better optimized structure. It could make a big difference in their search engine ranking. You might discover that your competitor is using a bunch of keywords and key phrases that you never even thought of.

Start off simply enough. Get a pad of paper and a pen and make notes as you thoroughly do your own “crawl” of your competitor’s site. Look over the pages as they appear first, then go back and look at the source html. On most browsers you get this by pressing ctrl+U. If not, this command can often be found in the “Tools” menu of your browser. Don’t worry. You don’t have to be an html genius to learn from it.

Look at their title tag. Is it well written? Does it reflect a common syntax used throughout the site? On the home page, look for the H1, H2, and H3 tags. If you find them, your competitor uses heading tags within the page. Try to identify the actual text used in the headings. You will more than likely find some key phrases within these tags.

Look for nofollow tags. These are used to spread PageRank throughout the site. Doing this is what’s known as having a themed structure, and it can be very beneficial to your ranking. If you find this pattern, they either know their SEO or they’ve hired someone who does.

How do they do their navigation? Is it in a drop-down menu? Is it search engine friendly? In the footer is there a text menu?

Look at the anchor text: is there a pattern of keywords there? If certain words appear there often, they are almost certainly target phrases.

Check the Google PageRank of the pages you visit. If a page has a notably high PR, pay closer attention to that page. These are often pages that have the information that visitors choose to link to. It could give you some clues for adding similar content to your website.

Because the server returns a new page each time the user submits input, traditional web applications can run slowly and tend to be less user-friendly. With AJAX, your JavaScript communicates directly with the server, through the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object.

With an HTTP request, a web page can make a request to, and get a response from a web server, without reloading the page. The user will stay on the same page, and he or she will not notice that scripts request pages, or send data to a server in the background.

In the next steps we will see how to create an XMLHttpRequest and receive response from the server.

1. Create XMLhttpRequest

Different browsers use different methods to create the XMLHttpRequest object. Internet Explorer uses an ActiveXObject, while other browsers use the built-in JavaScript object called XMLHttpRequest.

To create this object, and deal with different browsers, we are going to use a “try and catch” statement.

function ajaxFunction()
{
var xmlHttp;
try
{
// Firefox, Opera 8.0+, Safari
xmlHttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
}
catch (e)
{
// Internet Explorer
try
{
xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject(”Msxml2.XMLHTTP”);
}
catch (e)
{
try
{
xmlHttp=new ActiveXObject(”Microsoft.XMLHTTP”);
}
catch (e)
{
alert(”Your browser does not support AJAX!”);
return false;
}
}
}

2. Sending request to the server

To send off a request to the server, we use the open() method and the send() method.

The open() method takes three arguments. The first argument defines which method to use when sending the request (GET or POST). The second argument specifies the URL of the server-side script. The third argument specifies that the request should be handled asynchronously. The send() method sends the request off to the server.

xmlHttp.open(”GET”,”time.asp”,true);
xmlHttp.send(null);

3. Writing server side script

The responseText will store the data returned from the server. Here we want to send back the current time. The code in “time.asp” looks like this:

<%
response.expires=-1
response.write(time)
%>

4. Consuming the response

Now we need to consume the response received and display it to the user.

xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=function()
{
if(xmlHttp.readyState==4)
{
document.myForm.time.value=xmlHttp.responseText;
}
}
xmlHttp.open(”GET”,”time.asp”,true);
xmlHttp.send(null);
}

5. Complete the code

Now we must decide when the AJAX function should be executed. We will let the function run “behind the scenes” when the user types something in the username text field. The complete code looks like this.

You may want to hurry up for this as it will be on first come first serve basis.

Following are some of the Rules and Regulations.

* Facebook username must be at least 5 characters long
* Alphabets (Aa-Zz), numbers (0-9) and period (.) are allowed in the username
* Only one vanity url will be allowed per account. So think twice before your register a username
* Facebook reserves the rights to “remove and/or reclaim any username at any time for any reason,” and will work with intellectual property rights holders to prevent users from claiming trademarked terms as their usernames.

So if you are planning to get yourself a name which is quite common, then you may want to set yourself a reminder.