Wordpress and Magento Development

Oct16

Magento: Beginner’s Guide (Book Review)

I have been humbled by the good people at Packt Publishing. For some reason they think I’m an authority, so they decided to let me review one of their new books, Magento: Beginner’s Guide, written by William Rice.

If you’re not familiar, Magento is a fresh and promising ecommerce solution. A leading feature of the software is the core is 100% open source. Of course there are many plugins, themes and other customization features which range in price from the altruistic ‘free’ to the enterprising ‘thousands of dollars’. But in the end, if you’re looking for a robust ecommerce solution and aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty, look no further than Magento Commerce.

This is a hefty book, weighing in at 300 pages. I’ve read the official Magento User Guide, and although it is informative, I feel that it is somewhat dry. I’m eager to flip through the ebook they sent me to see if there are any ‘between the lines’ tips and tricks to liven up a Magento project I’m working on.

Oct01

Anchor Tags, IDs, Google and You!

So Google added yet another facet to their SERPs this week. The new feature allows you to jump to the information you want right from the search snippets. At first glance it seems they’re acknowledging the proper use of the named anchor tag. Further investigation turns up clues of nimble ID attribute seeding.

Page Division Benefits for Visitors to Your Web Site

This is great news for both sides of the SEO table. The search engine user can click directly to the desired information instead of wandering around the page once they’re directed to a site by the SERP. The old way was sort of like getting directions to a house party that left you at the entrance of a neighborhood. This new way leads you to the right driveway.

Aug12

Google’s New Sandbox Search – Caffeine

It seems the search engine market is becoming competitive again. In response to the recent release of Microsoft’s ‘decision engine’ Bing, Google is stepping up their game.

Competition breeds innovation, proof that capitalism works.

This week, Google released their new sandbox search engine, nicknamed ‘Caffeine’. In my initial tests, it seems Caffeine results are focused more on articles and web pages, not video or news results. Youtube and news items are typically still on the first page, but they are further down instead of always sticking to the top.

It seems you can’t saturate your Youtube video description with keywords anymore. Content is king.