Everyone knows about hyperlinks – the highlighted text and images that we can click on to take us from one page to the next on the web. In the case of a text link, there is a simple piece of HTML code behind the link. For example, consider this link to Angie’s site.
If you look [...]

Even as a technical person who has spent most of their career programming or managing programmers, I was pretty confused when I first dipped my toes into web development. I really wished I had a simple primer that put things like the web server, web applications, the role of the database and hosting into perspective. [...]

A lot of the traffic to YLF comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com. This is easily the highest volume source of new readers right now. So it is important how YLF “ranks” for keywords that relate to YLF subject matter. For example, when someone goes to Google and searches for “smart casual [...]

The easy route is to use a service like Widgetbox. Once registered, you can create widgets (like the ones below) in a matter of minutes. I took a bit of extra time to create an image for the widget title, but this pays off by putting the YLF brand stamp on the widget.
Other default characteristics [...]

Most websites get a lot of their traffic from search engines. I lifted the chart below from YLF’s Google webmaster statistics and it shows that 41% of our traffic comes from search engines, 32% comes from direct traffic (people typing in the URL or clicking on a link in an email message) and 27% comes [...]

Every few months I spend some time trying to get YLF a little more exposure through directories, which catalog websites much like Yahoo did in the early days of the web. The process is often manual – the directories have real people that review sites and ensure that they get listed in the appropriate [...]

Wordpress is so simple. Here are the steps I took to get this blog up and running.

Created a database on one of our servers
Downloaded Wordpress 2.6 from Wordpress.org
Set up the “wp-config-sample.php” file and renamed it to “wp-config.php”
Used ftp to put the contents of the unzipped Wordpress folder in the html root folder
Browsed to the installation [...]