Dream Row is a participating sponsor of the 2009 Agape Animal Rescue Glitter and Glam. Please purchase a ticket today for this exciting event coming to Nashville @ the Hotel Preston, July 9th, 2009.

We cordially invite you to join us in our efforts to save animals’ lives by attending Agape Animal Rescue’s first annual red carpet Glitter and Glam event from 6PM to 9 PM on Thursday July 9, 2009! For a small ticket price of $50 per person, you will have a night to remember, and will be helping rescue animals at the same time! Enjoy an extraordinary wine tasting with heavy hors d’oeuvres, and over $1,000 in door prizes. After a few drinks you will be whisked away into the world of fashion as the John Casablanca models and a few furry friends hit the runway. This night of good wine, food, fashion, and fun is a “must do” for anyone looking for night of affordable entertainment.

Glitter and Glam marks Agape Animal Rescue’s 5-year anniversary. Over the past 5 years, Agape has rescued, rehabilitated, and found homes for over 400 animals in Middle Tennessee. The money raised from at this event will directly impact the animals is need in the Agape program. We appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you on July 9th! Glitter and Glam: A Wine Tasting and Fashion Show for the Animals.

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On February 21, 2009, we invited Agape Animal Rescue to set up a silent auction as a benefit toward their activity, and we were able to raise $180 to go toward caring for their animals. Thanks to Agape for their ongoing care and for doing such fine work!

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Wicked lyrics. Supreme instrumental skills. Hilarious personal touches. A cover featuring a woman barely hiding her unmentionables with an American flag. Can you really ask for more?

Read the rest of this entry »

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As you may have seen in our portfolio, we recently launched ellerevue.com, the brand new site for a high energy song and dance show that combines the Las Vegas style with the best of what makes Nashville unique. Everybody is quite happy with the way this site turned out, from the flowing swirl animation to the nice page transitions to the absolutely beautiful photography. If you ever get a chance, go see their show!

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While reading an article about writing from A List Apart, I found a nice analogy to use in development projects. Sometimes, using the same old examples grows a little thin, but for some reason this one struck a chord:

“Sorry; can’t do it. The content is the heart of the website. I can’t build you a body until you give me a heart.”

It’s simple, but the analogy holds at a deep enough level that you can actually extract quite a bit of meaning, the more you think about it. I guess you could call it profound.

Don’t be surprised if you hear us using this from now on.

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A fairly long article on quality by Andy Rutledge makes the case that when we talk about web standards, what we’re really talking about is quality. We completely agree.

We like car analogies. Here’s one we’ve used before:

If you bought a car that could only drive on smooth asphalt but couldn’t drive on concrete unless you drove in reverse—and couldn’t drive on gravel unless the sun was shining, would you think that was a very high-quality car? Of course not!

Would you buy that car just because it was cheaper than a Ford or Chevy? Of course not! Why? Because you understand there’s more to a car than the price. There’s a quality consideration.

You could put money into fixing it to work on all roads in all conditions, but over time that would amount to more than just paying for a real car, plus you have to deal with the headache of fixing a job that should’ve just been done correctly to begin with. Nobody needs that headache.

Web site work is surprisingly similar. There are plenty of places to go to get really cheap work done, but it all ends up as a car that only works in perfect conditions rather than something to be proud of.

Benefits of Quality

As the W3C, the governing body of web standards specifications, themselves discusses, when you buy standards compliant web sites you put your resources to work where they’re really needed. You generally pay more at the beginning, but the total cost of ownership of a high-quality web site is actually lower than a low-quality site.

The W3C article linked above goes into detail, but they discuss these benefits:

• Web standards give you a more powerful web site
• Web standards give you reduced maintenance costs
• Web standards give you accessibility (for screen readers for the vision impaired, etc.)

We’ve been in the web industry for a while. We’ve taken over plenty of projects that were created too cheaply up front and ended up costing their owners more in maintenance, headaches, and lost reputation than if they had been built with quality as a priority from the start. We realize we cost more than most firms; we’re the first to admit it. At least now you know why: it’s because we take a long-term view.

Remember, a web presence, like a building, can only be as strong as its foundation. It’s worth making sure the foundation is solid.

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As developers, we’re a technical bunch. We like to talk about the nuts and bolts of code and what makes the web work. While we try not to get too technical on people, sometimes we slip a little, especially when it comes to the idea of web standards and our approach to web site development and SEO.

Why?

Many reasons, really. Here are our top three.

1. Search Engine Optimization

As we discussed in the article on semantic tags, you want the HTML tags (the “markup”) in your site to be as minimal as possible, to convey meaning rather than visual formatting, and to be easy for search engine programs to catalog and rank. Devoting plenty of effort to creating a solid foundation based on web standards is well worth it, because it makes the search engines’ jobs much easier. The result? A better shot at good ranking.

By the way, when we start an SEO campaign on a typical web site, it generally takes $1-2k in work to get it standards-compliant and ready. When we do the development from the beginning, that work is already done, minimizing SEO startup costs. The benefit is a site that hits the ground running. That’s kind of a side point, though. On to our second reason:

2. Compatibility

Most web sites work perfectly fine in the browser the developer used, on the platform the developer ran. That much is a given; anybody with a simple web editor can do that. The difference between that and professional web development is vast. A standards-based web site works:

• in any web browser
• on any operating system
• on any device
• by any program

…that wants to consume the content on the site. Odds are that the majority of your site’s visitors will be people using something like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Opera on a Windows PC or a Mac. However, you likely don’t want your web presence to exclude people on Blackberries or other PDAs, do you? What about screen readers for the vision impaired? It takes a professional group with expertise in web standards to build sites that have this level of cross-platform/device compatibility.

Oh, and you may have noticed how this ties in with the first point (and extra points to you if you saw it): what are search engine spiders but special vision-impaired programs that don’t have a web browser but still want to read your site? They’re the most common non-browser device there is!

3. The Future

This is a fairly simple extension of the second point. A year ago did anybody outside of Apple Inc have any idea that they’d be releasing a hybrid iPod/phone device? Nope. So what happens when the iPhone hits the market? Do we need to rebuild all of our web sites with a special iPhone version? Not if we built to web standards.

You see, living by web standards makes your web site future-proof. Web standards are methods and conventions that we all agree to follow for the sake of compatibility. New devices might work differently from old ones internally, but you can bet they work best in a standards-compliant environment. Building to standards now saves re-development costs tomorrow.

It’s an Issue of Quality

The whole thing revolves around the idea of quality. Next time we’ll discuss the implications of that idea, and why you should insist on high-quality work on your web presence.

Until then, realize that it boils down to this: we push web standards and quality because we care about our clients.

We love to dote on our clients. You deserve to be treated like royalty. Come on, contact us to get started. You know you want to.

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When we do SEO analysis for people, we often suggest a move to more “semantic markup” or “semantic tags.” If you’re wondering what this means, we’ve got you covered.

The semantics of semantics

First, some definitions:

Semantic

Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language (thank you, dictionary.com!).

Tags, markup, HTML

These are all the same thing. Have you ever used your browser’s View Source feature (e.g., in Firefox, View ⇒ Page Source) to look at what a web page really is under the hood? You’ll see lots of stuff that looks like this: <b>Bold stuff</b>, <i>italicized stuff</i>, <span class="complex"><span class="initialcap">C</span>omplex <em>markup</em> schemes</span>. Everything inside the < ... > markers is a tag. We also call it markup because the purpose of the tags is to “mark up” plain old text to help us give it meaning. This comes from the definition of HTML: hypertext markup language. Make sense? Enough to move on, at least?

Search engines are looking for meaning

It’s not that search engines are existential; it’s just that when a search engine visits your site to catalog the content on it, it’s not simply creating a list of words that appear on your site. That’s part of it, of course, but the real reason is to try and figure out what the words on your site mean; the more meaning they can extract, the better they’ll do at associating your site with somebody’s search, without the user having to search for the exact words you use on your site..

Extracting meaning is very complicated, so the more help you can give Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, Looksmart, etc… the better off your site will be.

SEO & semantics

Ok, so what does all of this mean, at least for search engine optimization purposes? Good SEO is only possible when the HTML tags are semantic in nature. The HTML that builds your pages has to impart meaning, not just be a method of creating visual formatting. You see, there are lots of different tags, some more useful than others:

• The title of a page is set by the <title> tag.
• Headings are created by <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6> (depending on their importance).
• Words are emphasized with the <em> tag.

And the list goes on. Hit Google for a tag list if want the details.

The key point is that semantic tags must give your text meaning. Take, for example, the <em> tag I just referred to. Most browsers render this by putting the words inside this tag in italics. There’s also a tag specifically for “italics”: <i>. It’s shorter! Why not use that? Because of semantics. The <i> tag instructs the browser to italicize the text, but the <em> means something: “emphasize this” (as opposed to straight italics, which could be a book title, a motto, or something else entirely).

The fact that both tags look the same in a default browser configuration is a red herring—since <em> has actual meaning, search engines can more easily figure out what to do with the text; this generally leads to better ranking for the page’s topic. The difference in one tag isn’t much, but multiply that over thousands of tags across a handful of pages, and you can see why it’s beneficial.

Good semantics mean more accessible sites

The web isn’t just people using web browsers on PCs and Macs. Cell phones, PDAs, screen readers for the blind, and yes, even search engines are non-browser devices that are interested in the content on your site. New devices enter the market every day. In order to be “future-proof” and not require redesign when some new gadget comes out, your web site has to be semantic in nature, or else people with these gadgets will have a hard time getting around on your site, or worse, be completely locked out of it (incidentally, this is one of the reasons why there’s such a huge difference between high quality web sites built by professionals and the stuff you can hire the neighbor kid to do; unfortunately, it’s also one of the things people tend to overlook until it’s too late, inevitably to their detriment).

Things to do

• Keep content separate from presentation when you’re writing for your site. Think Notepad rather than Word; the formatting comes later.
• Remember that HTML is supposed to describe what your content means rather than what it looks like.
• Try and keep your tag usage as minimal as possible. A good CSS artist can create beautiful designs with very few tags, and such pages almost always get better search visibility.

Things to avoid

• Archaic tags like <font>. These are presentational in nature, and only obscure the meaning you’re trying to convey.
• Embedding style into your markup, like <p style="color:blue">blue text</p>. This too provides noise that just gets in the way of the actual content itself. Keep stylesheets externally linked.
• WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors in products like Word, which generate absolutely horrid HTML. It might look okay on your screen, but you’re almost guaranteeing that it’ll be ugly on half of your visitors’ screens.

If all of this seems simple, then great! You’re ahead of the game. Get crackin’ retrofitting your site! Most of our clients are the kind of people that want to focus on being the best they can in their business, and not have to worry about the details of creating a truly top notch professional web presence. That’s why we’re here. All of our projects are built with 100% standards-compliant semantic HTML. We can be the web experts so you don’t have to be.

Contact us for more information about how we can put these principles to work for you!

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