Web Site Design and Development

This week I finally published the video Windows Live Writer Tutorial that I’ve been meaning to do for some time. This tutorial goes through getting up and running, but I didn’t yet get into some of the really neat Live Writer features that would make you want to get up and running. As a supplement to my tutorial in the meantime you might check out some of the other reviews and articles out there. Phil Waineright’s Writer is Microsoft’s first Live Killer App has an older (but still good) overview of the features — and Live Writer now supports tags, which was missing when he wrote that post. Paul Stamatiou also wrote an excellent Live Writer Review with several screen shots based on the beta. Paul also mentions a few of the drawbacks of the software that I hadn’t noticed. Finally, Michael Pick has produced an excellent Windows Live Writer Video Review — which shows among other things that I need to work on my Camtasia to Youtube skills (no, I don’t think I will link to my Youtube video — that’s the point).

Aside from Live Writer goodies, the other news is that it is almost Christmas, which means it’s also almost New Years, so it’s time to start thinking about things like business planning and goal setting. There are only about two shopping days left to participate in DailyBlogTips’s Group Writing Project, 2008 Blogging Goals.

Finally, I installed a new theme for this site earlier this week, ParticleWave_01, a custom theme I designed recently. One of the items on what’s getting to be a rather long ParticleWave “to do list” is to make a version of that theme available.

The Good Learning Stuff:

Last week I started running my blogging platforms material by a few folks at ActiveRain, and several people who are building their ActiveRain points using content from their other blog asked me about duplicate content. In the course of writing my reply to that I came across the closest thing I’ve found to the official Google Position on duplicate content.

This week I was beginning preliminary work on some posts about A/B Testing, which is one of the ways you can test how different changes to a web page improve or detract from your conversion rate. In the course of looking into how you might use Google Analytics to do A/B testing, I found that Google now has yet another free webmaster tool, the Website Optimizer, which helps you do conversion testing on your site. You can check out the video here.

This week I also taught Purva how to use LiveWriter. Well, John, how come you’re not putting together a nice Camtasia Studio tutorial about LiveWriter and posting it here? How come indeed. Stay tuned. Meantime I saw this post to whet your Live Writer appetite.

The Politics and Opinion Stuff:

SEO, it seems to me, is getting a bad rap from a lot of people, including my good friend, Dave Smith, in his article SEO De-programmers Needed for RE Bloggers. I don’t know if I really want to rebut this or just move on to more “teaching” posts.

One thing that can be said about SEO is that it is a fickle beast in many respects. My own favorite search position is in the toilet this week, so I’m resisting the urge to tailspin into a depression and sit around eating Snickers bars, and instead writing this post.

Your welcome.

In a result that may be completely unrelated, the big news on everyone’s lips is the Great Google Slap of 2007. After documenting the problem fairly well, I thought, Andy Beard went on to point out this amusing Surrender Letter from a Webmaster.