APM Solutions: Information about APM Solutions and other Web related news
I haven’t seen an update from any of the people I follow on Twitter in over 3 hours now. Judging by other social networks, it doesn’t sound like it’s just me.
The current Twitter Status from 1 hour ago is:
We are currently investigating a problem causing many users’ timelines to be delayed. We will update with status here shortly.
I guess we will all have to take a deep breath and wait for the problem to be resolved.
My 2 and a half year old daughter recently became interested in using the laptop in our main living room. Of course, right now she wants to play games, but it’s a little nerve-wracking to think in a few years she will want to explore the Internet in many more ways. The New York Times published an article today on how to provide guidance on web video for children. A pretty valuable read for anyone with young kids that are venturing into the web world. Just another parenting skill we all need to master.
Google made an announcement today that it released their Google Street View service to several cities across Canada including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Halifax.
If you are not familiar with it, Google Street View is a feature of Google Maps that shows high resolution street level images. This feature has been a concern among privacy experts due to its high quality imagery. Google has taken some steps to increase privacy measures which include blurred faces and license plates on vehicles.
Street View was already available in several countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Australia, and Google cameras are showing up in an increasing number of areas as Google expands the service. In fact, a colleague of mine remembers seeing the cameras a few months ago, and when we looked up that specific location you can actually see his car idle at an intersection and a blurred face looking up towards the camera.
I decided to test it out and see what was happening down at the Parliament Building. Sure enough….crystal clear.
Street View is pretty amazing and once more streets are captured it’s going to get ever better. Or scarier. 
APM Solutions recently went live with a newly designed website for Courtland Antique Warehouse. The website was a spin off from Antique Stoves which was re-designed over the summer. The owners of both websites wanted to keep the look and feel the same with both websites, so they are very similar with regards to header, navigation and style.
Courtland Antique Warehouse also features many of the CMS features as Antique Stoves.
The complete website can be viewed by visiting the Courtland Antique Warehouse home page.
So you have researched SEO strategies, made necessary adjustments, and implemented all the latest SEO techniques to assure your website is fully SEO optimized. Now what? How do you go about measuring success of all your hard work?
Years ago you could say, well I have a number one rank. Unfortunately this is not sufficient enough these days. The problem is that search results aren’t the same around the world due to localization. If you do a search in Ottawa Canada for a phrase you may rank #1 or #2, however if you did the same search in London England, you may not even be on the first 5 pages. Furthermore, search engines are becoming very smart and rank according to previously searched phrases. Obviously this is only done if you are logged in. If you are, then they can track your search history and rank according to those behaviors. Because of this, it is much harder to figure out what OTHER people are seeing when they search on specific terms or phrases. Because you see certain results, doesn’t mean others are seeing the same results, which makes it very difficult to put on a value on how well your SEO strategies are working. Read More »
One of the most common questions I get from new small business clients is, “How do I get my website ranked high on Google?”. It’s a great question and one that has many answers. Depending on the website content, the time it takes to rank well on Google varies, however there are steps that you can take to increase your chances. Read More »
I recently started using the IIS7 URL Rewrite module to redirect old Coldfusion URLs. The current version of apmsolutions.ca is developed in ASP.NET, and since I did not want to lose my page rank with all of the old ColdFusion URLs, I needed a way to do a 301 redirect. Since the website is running on IIS7, I made use of the URL Rewrite module that you can install on the server. The last rule that I left was probably the easiest, and that was to redirect a non www URL to a www URL. It can be done as such:
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name=”Redirect to WWW” stopProcessing=”true”>
<match url=”.*”/>
<conditions>
<add input=”{HTTP_HOST}” pattern=”^domainname.com$”/>
</conditions>
<action type=”Redirect” url=”http://www.domainname.com/{R:0}” redirectType=”Permanent”/>
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
Give it a try and let me know how it works out for you. To test, go to apmsolutions.ca and you will notice it will redirect to www.apmsolutions.ca. If you know of another way of doing this with IIS, please let me know.
Website: http://www.prgx.com
Existed Since: 1995
PRG–Schultz is a professional services firm known for quickly delivering “bottom-line” results to the world’s largest and most successful enterprises. They help clients recover over payments, improve margins, reduce costs and accelerate cash. PRG-Shultz will not win any awards based on graphic design, however I doubt very much that was the intention. Although they do make good use of whitespace throughout the website, the lack of consistency with navigation could leave end users very confused and frustrated.
I haven’t been using WordPress for a long time now and although I find it full of rich features and options, one feature I did not see what the ability to add custom titles, keywords or descriptions. The content management software that I developed in ASP.NET and ColdFusion, both have this feature and I was a little disappointed that WordPress doesn’t come with it installed. After some initial searching for a plugin, I came across the All in One SEO Pack. Read More »
This is the second part of a four part series on Rules of Good Web Design. There are several aspects to Navigation that needs to be addressed when designing a website. Tom Kenny points out 3 of these aspects in his article titled The Principles of Good Web Design Part 2: Navigation.
Without a good navigation system setup, users will find your website very frustrating and most likely will leave very early.
Read this part 2 of a 4 part series and see how you can apply these rules to your own designs. Stay tuned for Part 2 – Color later this week.
Adam McLean is the owner of APM Solutions, web design & development firm in Ottawa, Ontario. To keep up to date with the fresh content from APM Solutions Blog, subscribe to the