August Interactive Blog

August Interactive partner Tomas Gajar’s design work was featured this week on Smashing Magazine. Tomas designed a 91-piece vector web icon set for our end of year holiday ‘freebie’ for friends and colleagues. The set featured many of our favorite icons – all scalable, editable and free for personal or commercial use.

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You see it all the time—that little orange square on websites that says “RSS.” So what is it? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and represents a group of web feed formats that are used to publish online work that is frequently updated. Most commonly you may see this in reference to blogs or websites, but it can also be used with news articles or even audio and video links.

By subscribing to an RSS feed from a blogger or website that you like, you will automatically receive information from that blog (or website) whenever the information is updated. An RSS reader in your browser or on your mobile device can be used to get all your daily updates without having to visit individual favorite sites on a daily basis.

When we first sit down with a client to discuss search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising, and social media strategy, the first thing we try to explain is the difference between SEO and website optimization.  For us, website optimization is the first and most important step in creating a strong foundation for our keyword specific SEO strategies.

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In order for a website to use includes, you must use php calls.  Basically, the site is still an html website, with the exception that the html is created dynamically by parsing the php includes. If you view the source code for each page sent to your browser, you will not find the php script, only the html.  In order for the php in each page to be parsed, the file extension needs to be .php. You could write a mod to hide the .php extension, but I’m not sure if that is ever really necessary.

Websites are interactive media whose purpose is to allow a user to quickly access and interact with information on the web – and here’s the key point – from anywhere an Internet connection can be made.

Most website users are unaware that that the friendly graphics-based interface with which they interact is really a complex and harmonious compilation of thousands of lines of HTML and programming code.
Because of the complexity inherent in even the simplest website, there are innumerable opportunities for glitches and imperfections. When you consider that fact along with the reality that a site’s code is deployed in a quasi-controlled environment and accessed across a multitude of platform/ browser configurations, then it’s illogical to think that a site is “done” just because it’s been launched.

Any website – whether basic or complex — needs at least some level of maintenance. This could include:
- redundancy and back-up/restorations planning
- server and software monitoring and upgrades
- cross-browser compatibility monitoring and upgrades
- performance monitoring
- content monitoring and updates
The size, complexity, relative importance, and business value of the website will determine for each website owner what maintenance and support plan is necessary and with what level of cost/benefit relationship he or she is comfortable.

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