I recently learned that British Columbia has the lowest minimum wage in Canada at $9.75 per hour. In May, of 2012 this increases to $10.25. This got me thinking about Web Developers and what they could expect to be paid. Like many countries Canada runs an annual census to determine average wages in each province. According to the 2011 survey a web developer in BC can expect to earn an average of $23.56 per hour. [...]

After working for two years with WordPress content management I’m starting to realize it is not always going to be the best open source system. WordPress does update regularly with security features and some usability. What it doesn’t do is look past the code to see what people actually need WordPress for and how they use it. Some of the most popular plugins include variations of: Search Engine Optimization Caching User Profiles Custom Post Types [...]

WordPress follows a pretty straight forward HTML structure that can be easily broken down into a usable diagram. With this diagram any web developer or graphic designer that is involved with slicing a photoshop wordpress theme, Illustrator wordpress theme or cascading stylesheet theme can build a universal structure. Any block element such as header or main can have the inner DIV containers swapped quite easily while retaining a solid structure. WordPress DIV Structure Advantage This [...]

Without great usability of your website it won’t matter how good your product or service is. Getting high search engine ranking will help exponentially increase traffic to your website. What it doesn’t do is increase your sales. For sales you need to convert those website visitors into customers. To increase that conversion a clean, easy to navigate user interface is required. Interact with your Visitors with Website Usability Website usability can be defined as your [...]

Search Engine Optimization is a unique industry. The primary focus of companies that offer these services is to help get your website ranked higher on Google and Yahoo. Unfortunately many such companies utilize an old SEO trick called Link Farming. The Encyclopaedia Wiki describes link farming as follows: On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although some link [...]

Cleaning Up WordPress Functions.php In WordPress themes my biggest pet peeve is overloaded functions.php files. Most themes come with hundreds of options in the administration panel and are generally all coded in the functions.php file. I’ve witnessed a WordPress theme functions.php file size in excess of 100Kb. That’s larger then most images you would put on your site! This isn’t even including any functions specific to the front end of the website theme. I’ve seen [...]

What Can You Do? A website report is a way to see how well your website is doing. Through solid website analysis you can fine tune your reports to detail many important observations including, but not limited to: Website traffic Keywords used to find your website Where, in the world, your web traffic comes from Rate of investment for marketing strategies Percent of visitors using a specific web browser Errors on your website What pages [...]

What Is Web Development Marketing? The dictionary defines marketing as “the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.” Web development marketing is about advertising your products or services. It is marketing to people that may not, otherwise, know you exist. For the purposes of this article I will be focusing on methods of networking and advertising that [...]

Social interaction in web development is also known as social media, or social networking. It involves using technology mediums such as blogs, facebook and twitter to help drive traffic to your website. Utilizing social media networks allows you to be a ‘Pied Piper’ for your web service or web product. Playing the right notes on your flute attracts targeted visitors to your website, but it is still up to you to guide them in the [...]

Everything on your website is content. Web copy is the written part of that content. This is a difficult part of marketing because web copy is written for two audiences: Website Target Audience Search Engine Spiders For brevity lets simply state that keywords placed throughout the website copy, highlighted as is logical, gives search engines a more relaxing, yet very effective read. Before I summarize my own approach to web copy, I highly suggest you [...]