Web Standards, Accessibility & More

So I recently created a dental blog site for my brother’s business, General & Cosmetic Dentistry (I used WordPress, which is awesome). It’s part of a marketing effort to gain more patients, and in response to the poor economy and people just flat out leaving Michigan, where his dental practice is located. Using Web 2.0 in today’s economy is surely a sign of the times!

Anyway, my brother was very smart by initiating a web-based marketing plan. He asked me for help, so this was a perfect opportunity to exercise some of my Search Engine optimization (SEO) skills! Besides setting up a professional blog, I also suggested these things in order to help traffic to his dental office web site:

• Tweak keywords in Meta data, page titles, etc.
• Create a dental blog entry (consistently) once a week, and on the same day.
• Publish press releases once in a while.
• Submit his site to search engines once every 6 months.
• Change his Twitter account name from personal to professional, and balance tweets about both sides of life.
• Create LinkedIn and Yelp profiles (actually his great idea!).
• Put Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Blog links on his office web site.
• And of course, ensure accessible, semantic HTML markup with web standards!

So far in only a couple weeks, his position on Google search has risen considerably!

Digg this article!

Many people have seen Twouble with Twitter, as it was somewhat “viral” for a while. But have you seen “Twitter Whore“? It’s kinda cheesy and silly, but for some reason I find it hilarious. Over the top.

[youtube ALbH63Ali9U]

PS:
Here’s Part 2. Not as good as the first one, though.

Addendum:
You can now purchase a Twitter Whore t-shirt!

I recently updated my personal home page at dennislembree.com (I like to call it a “vanity” site). It’s my usual minimalistic, user-friendly, standards-based, accessible design, and I’m liking it.

Changes include removing the bio, organizing in three categories, and a fresh appearance. Check it out and leave me some feedback if you’d like.

The new web page renders wonderfully in the good standards-compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome), but IE has a couple issues of course (peek-a-boo and left margins on unordered lists). I fixed the IE7 issue and one of two IE6 issues. I’m feeling thankful for conditional comments!

Last week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The sponsors included O’Reilly Media, Adobe, Microsoft, and eBay. Overall, it was a pretty good conference, with lots of discussion about mobile and geo-location, “Cloud Computing”, and of course, Twitter and Facebook. Here are some tidbits I picked up:

• Mobile web usage doubled in 2008.
• Nokia is the world’s largest digital camera producer (as they are the biggest mobile phone manufacturer).
• App written by Google in HTML5 for iPhone and Android is sweet.
• Mobilize Don’t Miniaturize
• Need to read up on the W3C Geolocation API
• Since 2003, web page file size has tripled!
• Only 1% of iPhone Apps are used long-term.
• For usability testing, research only what is necessary.
• Don’t put branding ahead of users.

The day before the conference, I took and vacation day and brought my wife and kids up from Cupertino to “the city” for a mini-vacation. We stayed at a very nice hotel for which we got a great rate through HotWire.com. Here’s a Flickr album of the family portion of the trip.

Computer nerd area

Exhibit Hall

Dennis at Golden Gate bridge