Spammers are a tricky bunch. And, I hate spam. I REALLY HATE SPAM. I found this article at PC World that provides 8 excellent tips for recognizing and curtailing comment spam.

Here is an excerpt:

Is a spammer just trying to use your site to boost their own web presence? Here’s how to recognize a comment on your blog or website as spam, and how to stem the flow.

By Angela West Feb 8, 2012 7:00 AM | Original article appeared in PC World.

Comment spam, also known as blogspam, has existed since the dawn of blogs. It’s created for one purpose: to insert a link on your site back to the commenter’s website. Comment spammers are getting craftier at the game. Comment spam was a much larger problem for bloggers in the nascent days of blogging before improved spam blockers, when you could easily spend 10 minutes a day moderating a blog. Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, actually created a spam blocker for WordPress called Akismet in 2005, partially so his mom wouldn’t be assaulted by Viagra ads while writing her blog.

Today, spam blockers do a good job of nabbing most spam, but link builders still employ underhanded tricks to get their comments onto your blog, usually hiring people to do the deed since bots are usually stopped by the spam blockers. Many business owners and employees are unfamiliar with comment spam; they happily approve spam all the time, and who can blame them? They just don’t know. Here are a few ways to tell if that comment is spam or from a real person, and eight tips for reducing it on your website.

Read the whole article at PC World…

London-based designer Anneke Short has come up a series of minimalist posters that are out to challenge the preconceptions that people have of designers.

‘Confessions of a Designer’, is a collection of quotes that Short has “either found [herself] thinking or that [she has] heard [her] designer friends say, often on more than one occasion”.

Blatantly honest and comical, they portray the frustration and realities that designers often face.

Read the entire article and see the posters at Design Taxi.

“Well, it’s a start, but basically it stinks,” said Steve Jobs, telling early Apple engineer Chris Espinosa exactly how he felt about the company’s first calculator application.

Iteration after iteration, Jobs continued to be dissatisfied with the calculator. Espinosa continued to code, slowly inching his way to perfection. But nothing was quite right. In a flash of both brilliance and perhaps frustration, Espinosa put together a visual builder that let Jobs design the calculator himself by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the buttons, the shading, and the background, without doing too much technical tinkering. He dubbed it “The Steve Jobs Roll-Your-Own Calculator Construction Set.”

After about 10 minutes, Jobs had dialed in to his perfection. This version of the calculator application was shipped with Mac OS for 15 years.

This was a story about two people. But imagine how powerful it would be if it were about one. What if the design vision of Steve Jobs could be in the same brain as the engineering excellence of Chris Espinosa?

It’s no mistake that this is very much the sort of thing that is most valued within the most effective software teams in Silicon Valley. Let’s call it “the designer who codes.” This is the sort of person can build exactly what he knows people need, with an aesthetic that compliments its use, with no back-and-forth.

Silicon Valley start-up Quora does it this way to great effect. They take the process simplicity to the next level. Every person on lead designer Rebekah Cox’s team is also an engineer. The design doesn’t happen in Photoshop. It happens in the text editor, in code.

“Knowing the technology better means more productive arguments when there are disagreements because everyone speaks the same language,” says Cox.

They’re not the only ones. Unsurprisingly, Facebook (where Cox started her career as a product design lead) has been running its design team in the same way for years. Unlike most software companies where day-to-day and detailed product decisions are made by product managers with business backgrounds, Mark Zuckerberg’s design team is his imperial guard. They work closer to him than any other discipline in the company.

The powerful fusion of great design, great engineering, and real authority in the hands of those people, results in magical user experiences. As we have seen over and over again, this simple dynamic creates truly great products.

Copyright © 2012 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Inc.com, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195.

This fabulous article from Inc. includes 19 Dos and Don’ts for creating a website that will work for your business. Here’s an excerpt.

I’m continually surprised by how many people call my design company with very firm ideas about what they want on their business website and yet, they haven’t thought through some of the most basic questions first. For this reason, our first question is always “Why do you need a site?,” not “What do you want on it?”

At bottom your website is a marketing tool. For many businesses, it’s the only source of business. If done right, it can be a major part of yours.

Here’s my quick-hit list of the top dos and don’ts before you get started:

Do:

1. Set smart goals. And make sure they’re measurable. Here are a few great ones a Web designer wants to hear: increase conversion rates, increase sales, generate more leads, reduce overhead, and improve brand awareness.
2. Plan on becoming an SEO wizard…

Read the entire article @ Inc.

You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction. Why do you think you check your email so much?

Want to be more productive and get your focus back? There are no secret tricks here… do one thing at a time. Stop multitasking—it’s just another form of distraction.

Easier said than done, I know.

Recently I sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task, so I thought he’d be a good person to ask.

Here are his tips for staying productive:

1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women). 
3. Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
4. Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead. 
6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day. 
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.

Read the entire article…

Read the entire article…

Some website frameworks have built in meta description functionality, which I think can be useful to synopsize the content of the page and helpful for people who find your page via a search. But will that improve your ranking? Probably not. Will abuse of meta keywords/descriptions hurt your ranking? Probably.

Here’s what Google says:

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”

SEO begins with a well designed website, which unless you are a designer is out of your control. So, what is within your control?

Content Content Content

I try to emphasize to my clients FRESH, RELEVANT CONTENT first and foremost. Pure user experience. No behind-the-scenes tricks.

If your site sells pancakes, talk about pancakes in fresh and creative ways, provide delicious pancake recipes, and link to sites that provide expert pancake advice beyond the scope of your pancake site. Do all this and people who love pancakes will find your site and keep coming back.

If you really want to succeed with a website, you might look into a writing course. Seriously. Clear, strong and concise copy is key to a fundamentally sound webpage. And, beyond that?

Consider these SEO areas

1. Title tags – which usually include the post or page title, so make sure your post titles contain relevant keywords.
2. Image/Link tags – clearly express in words each image or link with title and alt tags. Built into WP. Use it.
3. Incoming links from “expert” sites. Big rank booster.
4. Outgoing links to relevant sites.
5. H1, H2, H3 tags with relevant information.

It’s all about the user’s experience!

The algorithms used by Google and other search engines are complex and ever-changing. Google reports they have over 200 relevancy signals in their scoring to determine page rank. The one thing that seems super important across the board is content relevancy in the body of the page – again, user experience.

So the hidden meta tags, which do little or nothing for a user’s experience, are given little or no weight. Not strangely, Google has decided this year to include page load speed as a ranking factor. If two sites have the same relevancy score but one loads faster, it will get the higher rank… again, user experience.

Did I mention user experience? Hope this helps.

1. Don’t use the automated WordPress installation your hosting service may offer.
2. Keep your WordPress installation up to date.
3. Keep your plugins up to date.
4. Delete any unused or outdated plugins.
5. Choose an administrative password with letters, numbers and symbols. No common words!

Install It Yourself

The automated WordPress installation provided by some hosting services creates auto-generated passwords, database names, nonce, login, security and authentication keys. Create your own secure names and passwords using numbers, letters (cap and lowercase), and symbols. Install WordPress yourself or have your friendly-neighborhood web developer do it for you.

While most automated setups notify you when a WordPress update becomes available, usually the notification only appears in your hosting service control panel, and, if you’re like me and don’t spend a lot of time inside the cpanel, you can easily miss it. If you manage your website yourself, take responsibility for your own updates.

Perhaps your site content changes infrequently. In that case, you may even miss an update notification that WordPress provides inside your administrative area. I strongly urge everyone to familiarize themselves with the WordPress backend and schedule regular times to login and look for update notifications — I offer WordPress Training Sessions for the beginner, intermediate or expert user.

Update, Update and Update!

Which brings us to updates. Website applications, like operating systems, evolve to work more efficiently, provide new features, and patch potential security holes. The more robust the software, the greater the potential for some nefarious code finding its way into the maze of legitimate code.

Luckily, WordPress has a large and fervent open-source community, and its developers rapidly address any security issues. The only problem is (and this is going to sound dumb) for the security updates to work you must update to the latest version of WordPress. Seriously, do it!

And, if backing up your database and installing the updates seem confusing or scary, then get someone to do it who is comfortable with it. Believe me, disciplined updating is far less time-consuming and costly and headache-inducing than fishing for and cleaning up some malicious code injected into your site. And, don’t get me started on the revenue lost when Google slaps a giant warning on your website that reads “VISITING THIS SITE MAY HARM YOUR COMPUTER.” It’s like trying to get a date while wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I have herpes!”

The same thing goes for plugins. Plugin developers frequently update buggy or outdated code, but it’s your responsibility to update the plugin. Do it! Now!

And, if you no longer have any use for a plugin, deactivate it and delete it. Some plugins, upon deactivation, leave residual data in your database, so you may want to clean that up as well.

Create Secure Passwords

And, lastly, this is a no-brainer. If you want a secure WordPress site, create a secure admin username and password. And, don’t give it out to other people. If your website is a collaborative effort and you need to give someone access to your admin area, create a new user profile for them and grant them the security access commensurate with their contributions.

Conclusion

Just like a car, a website requires responsible management and regular maintenance to run efficiently. Don’t take the set-it-up-and-forget-it approach, or you’ll inevitably run into problems down the line.

If you need help keeping your WordPress site secure, updated and purring along, contact me to sign up for my Extended Maintenance Services.

ANSWER: Don’t display your email in plain text on your website.

What!?

That’s right. Spambots scour the web just looking for text that reads mailto:xxxxxx@xxxx.com. Use a contact form instead. Whether you use PHP, Coldfusion, Python or another scripting language to power your form, they all can process the email on the server’s side, so you don’t have to post your email in plain view. Also, contact forms allow users who may not have email clients on their computer to contact you.

An alternative to a contact form is to ENCRYPT YOUR EMAIL, so spambots can’t read it. There are many ways to do this (some ways work better than others). A Google search for “email obfuscation” should turn up several techniques… or consult your local web nerd. Hello!

Avoid using common words like “info” or “information” or “contact” or your name in your email address. One way spambots “discover” your email is what I call the “pull a number from the hat” method. Basically, if they don’t first find your email sitting pretty on one of your web pages, they have a laundry list of commonly used words that they tack together with your domain name (e.g. contact@yourdomain.com or info@yourdomain.com). Or if they find your name on the web page, they’ll give your-name@yourdomain.com a try. It’s not difficult for an automated spambot to generate dozens of variations on your email address, and, if luck is on their side, one will be correct.

Also, don’t use your website email address for your personal email. BEWARE when a website requires you to give your email address to register or get information. Read their privacy policy first.