Simply Put the agency blog

The folks over at Automattic (the same brilliant minds that brought us WordPress, Gravatar, and a number of other web apps) have unveiled their latest creation: Prologue. It’s not exactly a new project, but a highly customized WordPress theme that takes the concept of Twitter and mashes it into an innovative new way to stay connected with members of a group/company. And all within the friendly realms of WordPress.

Its use is not limited to being a company communication tool, but that idea had by far gotten me the most excited. Here at Vdot Media, it’s hard to stay on top of what everyone is working on, and while we’ve tried internal blogs and other tools, Prologue may serve to be the simplest and least demanding/involving solution (a characteristic that makes Twitter the lazy blogger’s best alternative). I just might be curious enough to try to see if this one will work out.

Aside from the productivity benefits, Prologue gets my two thumbs up for taking something with simple functions (WordPress) and hacking it up to do something completely different and something completely awesome (for lack of a better word). This kind of innovation really drives our team, and it’s what made Can’t Wait for Christmas such a fun project.

I’d love to hear from others who have tried out Prologue as a company communication tool. If the team will let me, I just might have a few first-hand thoughts to report as well.

In the mean time, read up on and see a screenshot of Prologue here. Download the theme and take it for a spin here.

It is with great sadness but greater joy that I share the news that IE6 will finally be put to rest come this February. According to InfoWorld, Microsoft has finally given the thumbs up to an autoupdate of IE6 to IE7 which is set to occur on February 12.

As web designers, we’re constantly kept awake at night fighting crime in the war of browser compatibility issues, hoping only to build websites that deliver consistent experiences to all users regardless of their browser of choice. Microsoft did us all a favour with the release of IE7 not too long ago, marginalizing the differences in how it displays websites between it and its next leading competitor Firefox. But despite this and all the new features and innovations that IE7 brings to users, there still remains a significant portion of internet users who haven’t been incented enough to make the leap from IE6 to IE7. This essentially has meant that the designers who choose to make accomodations for outdated users must design websites for 3 very different browsers. Until now, that is.

On February 12, the update will roll-out and a good 30% of the internet population will see many websites in a whole new light and in the way they were truly designed to be seen (despite our greatest efforts, many websites are still not fully cross-browser compatible). For us, it means the old ‘tester’ computer that still runs IE6 may finally be unplugged. Coincidentally, its power supply died last week.

You can read the full article on InfoWorld here. For the truly stubborn, the article also mentions ways to avoid the autoupdate.

This is great news for the community, and it comes shortly after the announcement of another exciting IE milestone. It’s definitely a good time to be a web designer.

The other day, I came across a black hat SEO technique that lets webmasters increase their page rank almost instantaneously. A good chunk of the webmasters know about this, but there’s a big group of those who don’t know anything. Let me explain.

One driving factor of SEO is link building, and we all know that getting links from high PR websites is key. The way fake PR works is simple: If you visit page X with PR 2, typically, a PR checker will show PR2 (for e.g. PageRank bar on a Google tool bar). If you visit page Y with PR 8, then the PR checker will show PR8. Simple, but now imagine if, when visiting page X you are immediately redirected to page Y. Or in other words the page that is actually being checked is page Y, then the PR checker will read PR8 and not PR2. Simply speaking, this is how the fake PR technique works. The technique redirects Google bots from page X to page Y while keeping the user on page X. When the Google bots are redirected to page Y, the bar for e.g. will read PR 8 (that of page Y), because that’s the page Google thinks you are viewing.

Before you get too excited and start redirecting Google bots crawling your site to sites with higher PR, it may interest you to know that this technique does nothing in terms of SEO. It doesn’t improve your rankings, and worse yet, by redirecting the big G’s spiders to another page, you hurt your chances of being picked up by Google properly. However, with the increasing demand for in-bound links from high PR websites, webmasters are using this technique to trick clients into thinking they are purchasing quality links to their websites. It’s easy for someone to fall for this, because when you visit the prospective website you simply trust the Google PR bar on the top. And when you’re offered a PR8 in-bound link for just $15, you’re just taken by it. You have no reason to doubt the PR bar, the price is great, and you don’t want to pass up the chance - so you pay for the link without giving it a second thought.

For the skeptical and the worried, I’ve luckily stumbled upon this Fake PageRank Detection SEO tool that should save you guys and girls some grief. Give it a try the next time you’re making an investment based on the PR of a website to make sure you’re not falling prey to fake PR tactics.

I woke up this morning with a pleasant surprise - our site (www.vdotmedia.com) was chosen to be Site of the Day over at The Daily Slurp! In addition, our new has also been featured over at CSS Mania, Most Inspired, and CSS Creme - all popular website galleries that celebrate and showcase modern websites designed and developed in valid CSS/XHTML.

Aside from the great exposure from being featured on the front page of these high-traffic sites, these galleries are a great tool for designers to find inspiring work from all around the world. I encourage everyone to give them a browse (and vote for our site while you’re at it!).

In early December, we launched a holiday microsite entitled Can’t Wait for Christmas that encouraged visitors to post their wishes and share exactly what they couldn’t wait for come Christmas day. The site was a hit and we happily received almost 300 unique wishes from people all around the world. More interestingly, the site was conceived, designed, developed, and launched in less than 19 hours.

The site was simply a great in-house project that let us flex our WordPress muscles a bit. In fact, a detailed tutorial on some of the WP techniques used in the making of Can’t Wait for Christmas has been posted here. And if you’re a real keener, you can learn more about the project by reading mine and Satish’s interview about the site over at HatchThat.com.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by and shared their wishes and counted down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds til Christmas with us. Hope you all had a merry one!