EagleEnvision.NeT Blog

Ok  well first off I would like to introduce myslef: Matthew Kelly. I am the Lead Technician and a Web Developer for EagleEnvision.NeT. I really admire and appreciate Zack's time into our blog so I will be adding more of my own in hopes to share our company experiences, as well as my own.

A main challenge for any high school student- whether they are on the 'straight A' honor roll or just wanting out of school and want to get into other things in life- is that we are all labeled "TEENAGER" right across the forhead. (We) don't see it but its there to anyone and everyone you meet. There is a level of difficulty trying to establish ourselves an professional, on-time, bright, smart, and handsome young businessmen.....
QUESTION : WHY?
ANSWER : BECAUSE WE ARE STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL

It's not a question of our talent. It is everyone who degrates their view of us- or to any young entreprenuers due to our age. Something that not everyone sees is that- age has nothing to do with quality, customer satisfaction, and an outstanding reputation. I'm sure that - I know that EagleEnvision.NeT is better than other companies out there....maybe not in all aspects but in most. We care about what we do, how we present ourselves, and how we can make ourselves better. When was the last itme you talked to a 17-year-old and walked away: A- Complimenting and showing respect them or B- Standing in awe as you were told what the have already managed to do in the 17 years they have been alive. Well we like to think the answer to that is A and B.

Let's face it: 9 times out of 10 the original price estimate sets questionable with a person due to age.

Conclusion..... what do you think? -really I mean thats the answer.... [ valid points vs. stereotyping]

As I continue to blog I will share more experiences in the business world aspect.

For EagleEnvision.NeT, 2007 was quite a big year. Most of our company's history was spent in this year, but we also got most of our business through the course of 2007. Also 2007 was a time of great change. In 2007, we fully adopted ASP.NET and JavaScript in various ways. Our company made some big leaps to achieve a very high quality we can offer to our clients.

Most recently, we have started to code our our new website. We have, however, swayed off track a little bit by recoding the entire code-base over again, but in a better way. We are using better techniques like RESTful architecture still with a continued focus on performance, XHTML compliance, and browser compatibility. We should be on track to release our new site onto the web sometime in the first quarter of 2008.

With our new website, we are taking a look at new approaches to web design. For the first time, our CSS and JavaScript almost work in conjunction. We have thought out new approaches to performance enhancing, through the help of Yahoo!'s patterns and practices, and adopted our own methods of enhancing our code so that the user is not sitting and waiting for a page to load. Hopefully in 2008 we can make the same leaps into making the applications we build more performant from the user's perspective. Hopefully in 2008 we will start to take a look at architecture a little bit closer, as well, as we have in the last few months, to really deliver a product that is secure and provides rich functionality to our clients.

I hope that we will be doing a lot more with emerging technologies such as WPF and Silverlight to really deliver rich web and desktop interfaces in the next year. These technologies provide an experience that is innovative and just down-right sweet. These technologies can be seen in very cutting edge products like the new Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft Surface. We hope to integrate these tools and practices into our daily work to raise the bar on quality.

Finally, 2008 will bring a time of interoperability. For the first time, our company will use other big web player's APIs to be integrated into our products. Our clients will have rich administration functionality at their disposal on our custom-built admin interfaces with functionality from company's like Google and StrikeIron. I will detail that a little later.

So 2008 looks like another promising year for EagleEnvision.NeT. Hopefully we can provide some really cool stuff that our clients and viewers will certainly enjoy. From Matthew, and I, we hope you have a very Happy New Year!

For the past few weeks, I have been taking a look at different blogging platforms such as SubText and BlogEngine.NET. We currently run on SubText (which is what you are probably seeing at the moment) and we really enjoy it. There's just one down side: we can't have multiple authors on the same blog! We really have needed that functionality since we started blogging over a year ago. As of now, we are going to use BlogEngine.NET as a little experiment. We might go back to SubText, I'm not quite sure. BlogEngine.NET has it's up sides, and it's down sides. But so does SubText. I guess we'll see how this all plays out :)

The other aspect of my last few week's work is performance. I don't think I've every been very much of a performance freak, but I defiantly see a difference a few things can make! One of our goals with this website is to be XHTML 1.0 Traditional valid on EVERY PAGE. I think that should help us out on our quest for performance. The three other big things we had to do is:

• Add Expired headers to every page, script, and StyleSheet (to reduce the number of HTTP requests to the server)
• GZIP EVERYTHING
• Add a JavaScript and CSS minifier engine

The result is a 96% on the YSLOW! I don't think I have ever seen an ASP.NET application get above a 70%... so this sort of excites me!

You can see the performance things they measure from this URL: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

If you will notice, we get a C in the CDN category. Honestly, this really isn't fair of Yahoo! to ask of people. Most websites don't have the cash to buy a Content Delivery Network. In some cases, it can even slow down your website. So, 96 is good enough for me!

Hopefully our viewers and web traffic will notice the difference from our previous site, which had a performance rating of 60 and wasn't XTHML Valid, compared to our new site that should load faster and look much cleaner.

In the next few days, I'll start to talk about JavaScript and give a glimpse as to what we are going to do with it.

As I'm watching the Colts game on television and digesting from the American holiday of Thanksgiving, I am actually going to do a blog post on our new website's progress (oh boy, working on a holiday, how dedicated).

One of the things we are excited about putting into our new site is JavaScript. Every since the Harbinger project and our last website, we have tried to add user experience to our site through client-side functionality with JavaScript. If you look onto ANY modern website, they are going to have JavaScript, and a lot of it! Sometimes it's a little overkill as to how much they actually push out to their users, but it's worth it since they get their message across.

The biggest problem with JavaScript is that some people turn off JavaScript in their browsers. This leads to no functionality on the client-side without a full page reload (A.K.A. Postback).  Even worse, the user can be missing out on some of the goodness from JavaScript. The reason many people turn JavaScript off in their browsers is because of security. Many security experts recommend turning off JavaScript on the browser so that a website can't sneak weird things into your computer or behavior that just isn't cool.

Even if I don't fully agree with the practice of turning off JavaScript, I do agree with supporting the people who chose to turn it off. So in our new website, you can go ahead and turn off JavaScript and get the same information, just not in a really cool and exciting way. The way we do that is test to see if you have JavaScript enabled the first time you load up our site, and then adjust what we push out to you in terms of content based on whether you have JavaScript enabled or not. Critics to this might say that this is a small feat and is really simple to accomplish. Trust me, it's not. We had to be really smart as to how we were going to go about this without causing some serious server load and persistence issues. (I will do a post on my technical blog describing how we actually did it).

Focus on User Experience. If your user decides to not use JavaScript, still allow them to see your site, just in a different way. That's what we are aiming for: the best user experience with the most value to our potential and current customers.

Yesterday, we upgraded our hosting plan and converted all our sites over to our new server. Our blog was down for quite some time (since Friday, I do believe). And our main site was also down for a span of time. But no matter... we are up and running again!

If you're in search of a web designer, you might see them talk about PageRank. PageRank is "Google-speak" for your website's ranking. The way PageRank works is a 1-10 number that shows you how you are doing with a set of criteria.

Some people say PageRank has recently changed

This rumor is actually true. A few years ago, Google set out to make their PageRank algorithm stronger. What PageRank does now is test your site for visit trends, keyword efficiency, inbound links, and outbound links. Think about a big website. When people say "big site", I typically think of Microsoft.com. It's in the top 5 most visited sites on the net. I don't even think some people at Microsoft know the vastness of their website sometimes. But usually big sites have the highest PageRank since they are searched most often, have specific keywords, millions of inbound links, and a fair number of outbound links. A medium size company, on the other hand, would be very lucky to receive a 10.  The new algorithm is starting to hurt small to medium size business' rankings. In some cases, some bloggers have noted a 2 point decline. What does this show?

Does PageRank even matter?

Right now, I personally think that PageRank is irrelevant. I really don't care what my PageRank is. I can't control what Google does. Neither can you. You can't buy a higher PageRank or a higher position on a search result. It just doesn't happen. Plus PageRank only measures a website on a few dimensions. What if PageRank also rated your XHTML markup? Or what if it tested your site for an efficient title that isn't loaded down with junk? Well, it doesn't.

The moral of the story is that you shouldn't care about PageRank. It's that simple. A number is not going to determine things like your customer base or your local exposure. So don't worry about it. What you should focus on is your User Experience. Care about what your viewers see. Too many SEOs focus on what search engines see. If they would focus, instead, on what a user also sees, their customers would be more successful. That's why many SEOs use "Black Hat" practices such as hiding text from users so that only search engines can see the text. I'm sorry... but that sort of thing will not get your site far up on a search result and with most defiantly cause a low PageRank. At EagleEnvision.NeT, we're focused on User Experience.

We are going to start blogging about our process a little more to start showing our potential clients what our process looks like and how we work internally. Here's what we are thinking. We are going to blog bi-weekly about our progress on our brand new website, which I have been working on for about 2 weeks. The process of designing our new site should take us to about January, which is our target for deployment.

The Basics

The basic idea of the new site is to incorporate a new and improved design, cool functionality, an integrated blog, and clean coding techniques. Although you won't be able to see under-the-covers at our code, our site will be entirely dependent on a custom-built CMS (Content Management System) we are building just for this site, which will address some of our specific needs and tastes.

SEO???

Yes, it's true. We will incorporate some "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization for those following along at home) techniques. The techniques we are going to use are clean URLs (ex: http://eagleenvision.net/about), keyword targeting, and clean XHTML markup. These technically aren't "SEO-only" techniques... but it's our form of SEO :) So maybe we shouldn't call it SEO...

How will this affect me?

Well, hopefully it doesn't affect you. We do hope, however, that you will find our new site easier to use, nicer to look at, and something you might sit down and read in your spare time. A great web designer has to have an amazing website, right?

What do you have so far?

Since we just started, we don't have much. What I can tell you what we have currently is this:

• Our CMS text editing
• Sitemap (For search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, etc.)
• jQuery (THIS is going to give the site an amazing feel with Ajax and JavaScript effects. I WILL be detailing jQuery in this blog series)
• Clean URLs (No more .aspx on our pages. AKA "Extensionless URLs")
• Caching - We are going to decrease load times on our site by at least 200%. I'm sure you will notice the difference.
• A few Ajax methods ("Contact us" is currently the only one so far)

So we haven't done a thing with design so far. Right now our focus is functionality. We need to get our functionality down and THEN design our site. The coding work is what takes the time and the testing. But I think both will make a difference as we continually push the envelope for web design excellence.

What's wrong with the one you've got?

The look and feel of our website is nice, and it flows. I think we are VERY proud of our site at the moment. What we want to do is make it better, cleaner, and cooler. We also think that a web designer should consider redoing their site or doing something to their site every year. Who wants to look at an old design when they can have something cool and fresh? Our year is up :)

We also want cleaner markup. Right now, our XHTML markup is by no means clean. We have inline styles everywhere and it just isn't our style anymore. (I blame that on the HTML Editor we were using [cough... FreeTextBox... cough]. Glad we don't use them anymore! Thank you FCKEditor!!!)

We also want to be the coolest web designer "on the block". Our new website design and functionality with showcase our company as an innovator and not as a stagnant company.

Check back around Thanksgiving. We will make another post during that week!

Right about now, you are reading our blog. To us, this blog is essential in spreading information about our company and web design in general. We would like to think this provides our future clients with information on choosing EagleEnvision.NeT for their next web design need.

But who needs a blog? Should it only be tech-savvy people and only those who own a computer-oriented business? How does blogging fit into my business schema?  These are probably questions you have thought of when thinking about blogs.

Blog Defined

Blog really stands for "web log". A blog is essentially a series of journal posts about you or your company. Think about a diary. When you were younger, you probably filled a diary with information about your daily life, your feelings, etc. almost on a daily basis. Blogs tend to work off the same principle. For businesses that embrace the Web 2.0 wave of computing, blogs are based off of their business experience.

Blogs are really picking up speed. There are MILLIONS of blogs on the Internet. Blogs basically fall under the Web 2.0 principle of "it's all about the user experience"!

Do I need a blog?

I haven't seen one of our customers directly say this, but I am sure some of them think it. A few of our customers say "yes... I would like a blog". Recently a client of ours said "I don't want a blog... I don't want to deal with it... no thanks." This is COMPLETELY fine! The fact of the matter is: not every business will benefit from a blog. It might be that you don't have time for a blog or maybe you just don't want your site to have a blog-like feel.

What a potentially blogger needs to realize is this: blogging is a choice. With choices come consequences, both good and bad. Blogs, believe it or not, can negatively impact your company's image. There have been many people fired from their jobs for blogging. Sometimes the person didn't do anything wrong and the company just didn't like the person blogging; but in some cases, the person fired is lucky they weren't sued!

On the flip side, blogging can actually speak volumes about you and your company. In cases, blogging will boost sales. Sometimes blogs tell what a normal website can't. When you read a blog, you get a better picture of the writer, since they are speaking from the first person perspective. Most times this is good for business!

Blogging Technology

There are a lot of great blog hosters out there. Blogger.com and Word Press are the most popular. They host most of the high-power blogs such as The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (what a great read) and Scobleizer (Robert Scoble).

But being an ASP.NET powerhouse, we like to use SubText... an open source blogging platform for ASP.NET. When you want a blog and you choose EagleEnvision.NeT, we will most likely set you up a SubText blog. It's great... they do a very nice job with it!

The big question, "do I need a blog", depends on you. Does it work for you? That's something you'll need to evaluate. Weigh the pros and cons for your situation... you are the only one that can decide if blogging is right for you!

Last week, we published The Harbinger Online (http://theharbonline.com) to the good ol' World Wide Web. The project took about 6 weeks from start to finish, and includes many of the things that our recent blog posts have detailed.

The Harbinger is a publication put out by Zionsville Community High School journalism students.

We approached the Journalism teacher, Ms. Jill Chickedantz, at the end of the 2006-2007 school year and inquired to know if they would be willing to have a website that would host articles, staff bios, and other interactive things as to increase interest in The Harbinger. They were all too happy to participate! So... we went to work!

There are some really great things in The Harbinger's website, such as the photo galleries, articles, bios, polls, tags, and the list goes on!

The Harbinger Online is the latest and greatest that EagleEnvision.NeT can deliver... and both Matt and I are PROUD of what we have done. We hope to add more features to this site in the near future!

We all know what a freeloader is (someone that depends on another person because they lack money or they are just lazy), but keyloading (a word I am creating today) is similar yet different. According to the Zack Owens Dictionary (2007 ed.), keyloading is the "process of putting your website keywords into the title of your web pages".

Titles of web pages are displayed at the top of your browser. (See the picture to the right). 

So keyloading is putting your keywords up in the title of the browser.

Daddy... what's a keyword?

A keyword is a descriptive word you would put in your pages so that search engines can effectively index your site. You would typically see SEOs (search engine optimizers) talk about keywords since they increase the probability of your site being at the top of a search. SEOs typically are responsible to researching your keywords as part of their service.

Usually, the keywords are put in the markup and not in the page title. Therefor, the title normal humans see are descriptive but not long.

GASP! Who would do such a thing?!

One word: SEOs. Search engine optimizers often jam keywords in the title so that search engines see these words faster than they would digging through your page content. Does this work? NO! Keyloading your titles might increase your rankings on the search engines, but they will ALWAYS decrease your traffic flow to your site. Would you want to click on a search result with garbage in the title? I don't!

The reason some SEOs do this is because they care more about the search engine than the user experience. It's the only conclusion that one could draw from this.

It isn't to say that only SEOs do this sort of thing. Web designers in general don't take the time to make their titles descriptive and thoughtful. I won't name names, but if your title says "Untitled Document"... well, you can draw your own conclusions there :)

So, Mr. Smart Guy, what should this title be?

OK, your title should ALWAYS contain your company or organization name. For us, our site contains EagleEnvision.NeT on every page title (the exception being this blog). So our about page has the title "EagleEnvision.NeT : About". Part of our main site's theme is the semicolon instead of the typical dash most people use.

The title shouldn't be very long. Because the page is an about page, it only has 3 attributes to the title: the company name, the semicolon, and the word "About". YOU DON'T NEED ANYTHING ELSE! We could have jammed "Web Design, Custom Graphics, Zionsville, blah, blah, blah..." in the title, but who would want to read that? The point of a search engine is to increase your traffic NOT increase your popularity with the search engine. There is a difference. People increase your traffic, search engines don't

Keywords, in and of themselves, are a good thing! They should be thought out and planned. But what you shouldn't do is push them into page titles. It defeats the purpose of website nirvana. It messes up the "chi", so to speak. The moral of the story is: don't be a keyloader!