Create and post your very own Web site on the Internet using HTML in this extensive, hands-on, six week workshop. First, you’ll learn about the capabilities of the World Wide Web and the fundamentals of web design. Then, with your instructor’s patient guidance, you’ll plan the content, structure and layout of your Web site, create pages full of neatly formatted text, build links between the pages and to the outside world, and add color, backgrounds, graphics, and tables. You’ll also learn critical and timely information on securing the best possible location in search engine listings, and powerful no-cost or low-cost web marketing strategies.

ENROLL NOW

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Week One

 Today, you’ll create your first Web page. You’ll learn how to add tags and content to your page, view your page in a browser, reopen it in an editor to make additions and changes, save those changes, and then view the updated page in a Web browser. These skills will apply to every Web page you ever create, and they’ll get you started on creating any page you can imagine.

 In today’s lesson, you’ll learn to beef up your pages with the design elements that you see in most websites. We’ll discuss how to add headings, paragraphs, numbered lists, and bulleted lists to your pages, and we’ll also talk about the secrets to adding special characters like © and &trade. Finally, you’ll discover how to add links to other peoples’ pages and to other pages within your own site.
Friday – Lesson 04

Here’s your chance to add some visual excitement to your website! Today, we’re going to learn the basics about adding pictures to your Web pages. You’ll discover how to download pictures right off the Web, and you’ll also learn how to prepare and use your own pictures from a digital camera.

 Tables are a terrific way to neatly organize content into rows and columns. You’ve no doubt seen tables used in other websites and countless other forms of publication. In today’s lesson, you’ll learn how to use HTML to create tables in your own Web pages!

 Friday – Lesson 06

If you’ve been involved in Web development at all during the last 20 years, you may have heard about HTML, XHTML, HTML5, and CSS. If you’re new to all of this, it’s a confusing mess of alphabet soup. In this lesson, you’ll learn the who, how, what, when, where, and why of these technologies—and what you should use now so your website is in sync with current specs and future trends.

 Virtually all modern websites use CSS style rules for all their website styling. In today’s lesson, you’ll learn what a style rule is, and you’ll get some hands-on practice creating your own styles rules. You’ll learn how to center and align pictures and text, and you’ll discover the secrets to jazzing up your site with colors (and how to choose from the millions of color options available to you).

Friday – Lesson 08

Today’s lesson will introduce you to more advanced HTML and CSS topics, including how to create a page layout with a navigation bar. You’ll learn how to create a page layout using div tags to put named page divisions in a Web page, and we’ll discuss how to style your page divisions by adding an internal style sheet and some style rules.

 Most websites consist of multiple pages with some common content on each page. Today’s lesson will teach you to use a layout page as template so you can build multipage websites more quickly. We’ll cover liquid versus fixed layouts, how design a layout, and how to easily build additional pages from your layout page. This will help you to develop more professional-looking pages using the same modern coding techniques that seasoned professionals use!
Friday – Lesson 10

Getting a site on the Internet is one thing. Getting people to notice it is quite another. In today’s lesson, you’ll learn about Internet directory services, search engines, Web-crawling infobots (not as creepy as they sound), and things you can do to make your own site stand out in the crowd!

 In today’s lesson, you’ll learn how to publish your website for the whole world to see—well, at least anyone on the Internet. And best of all, you’ll learn how to keep your site on the Internet, for free, forever!
Friday – Lesson 12

In today’s lesson, you’ll learn about authoring systems like Dreamweaver and Expression Web, and how they can make Web development quicker and easier. You’ll also learn a couple of ways to get an online presence without creating your own website!

The search giant said the main change for users would be that it could combine information from one service with its other services, thus providing a more fluid user experience. For example, if you conduct several searches on Google on a particular item, Google could assume that you want a video on that item if you then visit YouTube. What do you think of Google’s new privacy policy? Does it affect you at all? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

According to Danny Sullivan, the Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, the new policy will provide users with more personalized results. He told us that it really wasn’t surprising that Google made the change since most other tech and Internet companies have one privacy policy for all their products and services.

“Google, which kind of has come from privacy policies on a per product basis, is kind of playing catch up, so that they have the ability to be more flexible both in what they may do with the information and how they may use the information to improve products and services,” he said.

This flexibility is what has some people worried, however. Under the new policy, Google could potentially take the information it gathers when users search to target them with ads. Although Google says it will not do this, the new policy gives it the right if it so chooses.

“Potentially, it gives Google a lot of new rights,” said Sullivan.

READ FULL ARTICLE

Carpe diem on any duplicate
content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify
your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar
content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with
more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure
that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred
version.

Let’s take our old example of a site
selling Swedish fish. Imagine that your preferred version of the URL and its
content looks like this:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

However, users (and Googlebot) can access
Swedish fish through multiple (not as simple) URLs. Even if the key information
on these URLs is the same as your preferred version, they may show slight
content variations due to things like sort parameters or category navigation:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

Or they have completely identical content,
but with different URLs due to things such as a tracking parameters or a session
ID:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify
your preferred version:

<link
rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish”
/>

inside the <head> section of the
duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

and
Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish.
Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as
well.

This standard can be adopted by any search engine when crawling and
indexing your site.

Of course you may have more questions. Joachim Kupke, an
engineer from our Indexing Team, is here to provide us with the answers:

Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.

Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.

What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.

What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.

Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.

What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.

from Yahoo!:

• The URL paths in the <link> tag can be absolute or relative, though we recommend using absolute paths to avoid any chance of errors.

• A <link> tag can only point to a canonical URL form within the same domain and not across domains. For example, a tag on http://test.example.com can point to a URL on http://www.example.com but not on http://yahoo.com or any other domain.

• The <link> tag will be treated similarly to a 301 redirect, in terms of transferring link references and other effects to the canonical form of the page.

• We will use the tag information as provided, but we’ll also use algorithmic mechanisms to avoid situations where we think the tag was not used as intended. For example, if the canonical form is non-existent, returns an error or a 404, or if the content on the source and target was substantially distinct and unique, the canonical link may be considered erroneous and deferred.

• The tag is transitive. That is, if URL A marks B as canonical, and B marks C as canonical, we’ll treat C as canonical for both A and B, though we will break infinite chains and other issues.

and from Live/MSN:

• This tag will be interpreted as a hint by Live Search, not as a command. We’ll evaluate this in the context of all the other information we know about the website and try and make the best determination of the canonical URL. This will help us handle any potential implementation errors or abuse of this tag.
• You can use relative or absolute URLs in the “href” attribute of the link tag.
• The page and the URL in the “href” attribute must be on the same domain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx”, and the ”href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://mysite2.com”, the tag will be invalid and ignored.
  • However, the “href” attribute can point to a different subdomain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx” and the “href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://www.mysite.com”, the tag will be considered valid.
• Live Search expects to implement support for this feature sometime in the near future.

Again! -

Since Google’s announcement yesterday that they would now be encrypting search result URLs by default for all users, the community has been out for blood. The change is going to fix known privacy issues, so why is this a bad thing?

“How will this change impact Google Analytics users?
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google “cpc”.’

As of this morning, here’s what we see in Outspoken Media’s Organic Search Traffic report for the last 24 hours:

According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the change is only supposed to affect referral data in the single digit percents — only users who are signed into Google and searching.

That’s a pretty big assumption on Google’s part about my client’s users and referral sources. Remember, they’re AVERAGING based on the entirety of the Internet. In the case of Outspoken Media, yes, this “(not provided)” data does account for a small percent of traffic for that 24-hour period of time. To be exact, it accounts for 1.2% of our visits for that timeframe. But what about clients who have a stronger user base with Google accounts? We spoke with one such client yesterday and approximately 30% of their current users are signed up with Gmail accounts. That’s more than a single digit percentage and they already have a small amount of traffic!

The recommendations from both studies were immediate action on the part of Google to correct these issues:

“We argue that solutions should be quickly deployed to protect users against these two types of attacks. The session hijacking attack is harmful not only because it allows an attacker to collect a lot of private information, including sometimes the search history, but also because it can be exploited to add potentially compromising entries [25]. It can also be used to modify the search results displayed to the victim. In fact, Google allows to delete or promote—i.e., show as first—results using a button associated to them. An adversary hijacking a session cookie can perform searches on the victim’s behalf and influence the results corresponding to these searches as she wishes. For instance, this attack can be a powerful tool for censorship, as it can be used to remove or promote some pages displayed after a Google search.”

In each document were recommendations to both users and Google on how to counteract the threat of hijacking:

USER ACTIONS

• Log out from any Google service when performing a search
• Delete and disable the Web History service
• Disable personalization from anonymous cookies or always delete Google cookies
• Sign out from Google accounts when connecting from a shared network or to use a vpn to encrypt the traffic and prevent cookie interception.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE By Rhea Drysdale is the Chief Executive Officer of Outspoken Media.

This is what Google is saying:

Making
search more secure: Accessing search query data in Google Analytics

Tuesday, October 18, 2011 | 11:17 AM

Labels: Announcements, googlenew

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Before creating your feed, choose the file format that is right for you.

The document is divided into several sections.
Each section describes the relevant attributes, and requirements for each
attribute:

1. Basic Product Information: Attributes to describe the basic
   information about your products, such as title, description and type of
   product.
2. Availability & Price: Attributes to specify the
   availability and prices of your listings.
3. Unique Product Identifiers: Attributes to ensure your
   products appear on the right product page, such as brands, UPCs, and EANs.
4. Apparel Products: Attributes to describe apparel products,
   such as color or gender.
5. Product Variants: Attributes to correctly describe
   variations of a product that only differ by color, material, pattern, or
   size.
6. Tax & Shipping: How to include information to supply
   tax and cost of shipping information for your products.
7. Nearby Stores (US & UK only): How to include
   information to show your physical stores in addition to your online store
8. Loyalty Points (Japan only): Attributes to specify the
   loyalty points Google Shopping users gain when buying the item.
9. Multiple Installments (Brazil only): Attributes to specify
   multiple payment programs to buy items.
10. Additional Attributes: Other attributes to describe your
    products.

We use the term item to describe a single
product listing. If you are using Text or Tab delimited format, an item is
equivalent to one line in your data feed. Items are similar to products, but we
assume that products can occur in multiple variations. These variations -
product variants – differ by color, material, pattern, or size. We use
item to refer to a single variation of a
product.

Important Note:

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

A friend of the family said that Mr. Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer, with which he waged a long and public struggle, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.

“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.

Tributes to Mr. Jobs flowed quickly on Wednesday evening, in formal statements and in the flow of social networks, with President Obama, technology industry leaders and legions of Apple fans weighing in.

A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”

Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.

Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.

Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.

It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

While Google did not say a specific day, one webmaster reported that her site was hit on Wednesday, September 28th. That was Dani Horowtiz, who runs Daniweb, a Panda victim we’ve discussed several times before, as the site had managed a 110% Panda recovery before getting hit this week.

Search Engine Land is reporting that while Google “declined to share any specifics” about what kinds of pages were being targeted, unnamed sources said the update rolled out on Tuesday. The blog is calling this version 2.3.

Some webmasters thought maybe a Panda update had rolled out earlier this month. Search Engine Land editor Barry Schwartz asked if Panda 2.5 had hit (personally, I’m not bothering much trying to keep track of the numbers). The answer turned out to be no, as Google told him there was no update taking place. According to Search Engine Land now, this latest update is actually the first true Panda update in about 10 weeks.

Since then, Google announced that it is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites (blog scrapers in particular). The company also released a video giving an inside look at how Google handles search algorithm tweaks:

When to use
URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs. This functionality provides a simple way to prevent crawling duplicate content on your site. Now, your site can be crawled more effectively, reducing your bandwidth usage and likely allowing more unique content from your site to be indexed. If you suspect that Googlebot’s crawl coverage of the content on your site could be improved, using this feature can be a good idea. But with great power comes great responsibility! You should only use this feature if you’re sure about the behavior of URL parameters on your site. Otherwise you might mistakenly prevent some URLs from being crawled, making their content no longer accessible to Googlebot.

A lot more to do
Okay, let’s talk about what’s new and improved. To begin with, in addition to assigning a crawl action to an individual parameter, you can now also describe the behavior of the parameter. You start by telling us whether or not the parameter changes the content of the page. If the parameter doesn’t affect the page’s content then your work is done; Googlebot will choose URLs with a representative value of this parameter and will crawl the URLs with this value. Since the parameter doesn’t change the content, any value chosen is equally good. However, if the parameter does change the content of a page, you can now assign one of four possible ways for Google to crawl URLs with this parameter:
•Let Googlebot decide
•Every URL
•Only crawl URLs with value=x
•No URLs
We also added the ability to provide your own specific value to be used, with the “Only URLs with value=x” option; you’re no longer restricted to the list of values that we provide. Optionally, you can also tell us exactly what the parameter does–whether it sorts, paginates, determines content, etc. One last improvement is that for every parameter, we’ll try to show you a sample of example URLs from your site that Googlebot crawled which contain that particular parameter.

Of the four crawl options listed above, “No URLs” is new and deserves special attention. This option is the most restrictive and, for any given URL, takes precedence over settings of other parameters in that URL. This means that if the URL contains a parameter that is set to the “No URLs” option, this URL will never be crawled, even if other parameters in the URL are set to “Every URL.” You should be careful when using this option. The second most restrictive setting is “Only URLs with value=x.”

Feature in use
Now let’s do something fun and exercise our brains on an example.

- – -
Once upon a time there was an online store, fairyclothes.example.com. The store’s website used parameters in its URLs, and the same content could be reached through multiple URLs. One day the store owner noticed, that too many redundant URLs could be preventing Googlebot from crawling the site thoroughly. So he sent his assistant CuriousQuestionAsker to The GreatWebWizard to get advice on using the URL parameters feature to reduce the duplicate content crawled by Googlebot. The Great WebWizard was famous for his wisdom. He looked at the URL parameters and proposed the following configuration:

Parameter name Effect on content? What should Googlebot crawl?
trackingId None One representative URL
sortOrder Sorts Only URLs with value = ‘lowToHigh’
sortBy Sorts Only URLs with value = ‘price’
filterByColor Narrows No URLs
itemId Specifies Every URL
page Paginates Every URL

The CuriousQuestionAsker couldn’t avoid his nature and started asking questions:

CuriousQuestionAsker: You’ve instructed Googlebot to choose a representative URL for trackingId (value to be chosen by Googlebot). Why not select the Only URLs with value=x option and choose the value myself?
Great WebWizard: While crawling the web Googlebot encountered the following URLs that link to your site:
1.fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?trackingId=aaa123
2.fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?trackingId=aaa124
3.fairyclothes.example.com/trousers/?trackingId=aaa125
Imagine that you were to tell Googebot to only crawl URLs where “trackingId=aaa125”. In that case Googlebot would not crawl URLs 1 and 2 as neither of them has the value aaa125 for trackingId. Their content would neither be crawled nor indexed and none of your inventory of fine skirts would show up in Google’s search results. No, for this case choosing a representative URL is the way to go. Why? Because that tells Googlebot that when it encounters two URLs on the web that differ only in this parameter (as URLs 1 and 2 above do) then it only needs to crawl one of them (either will do) and it will still get all the content. In the example above two URLs will be crawled; either 1 & 3, or 2 & 3. Not a single skirt or trouser will be lost.

CuriousQuestionAsker: What about the sortOrder parameter? I don’t care if the items are listed in ascending or descending order. Why not let Google select a representative value?
Great WebWizard: As Googlebot continues to crawl it may find the following URLs:

1.fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’lowToHigh’
2.fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’highToLow’
3.fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’lowToHigh’
4.fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’ highToLow’
Notice how the first pair of URLs (1 & 2) differs only in the value of the sortOrder parameter as do URLs in the second pair (3 & 4). However, URLs 1 and 2 will produce different content: the first showing the least expensive of your skirts while the second showing the priciest. That should be your first hint that using a single representative value is not a good choice for this situation. Moreover, if you let Googlebot choose a single representative from among a set of URLs that differ only in their sortOrder parameter it might choose a different value each time. In the example above, from the first pair of URLs, URL 1 might be chosen (sortOrder=’lowToHigh’). Whereas from the second pair URL 4 might be picked (sortOrder=’ highToLow’). If that were to happen Googlebot would crawl only the least expensive skirts (twice):
•fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’lowToHigh’
•fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’ highToLow’
Your most expensive skirts would not be crawled at all! When dealing with sorting parameters consistency is key. Always sort the same way.

CuriousQuestionAsker: How about the sortBy value?
Great WebWizard: This is very similar to the sortOrder attribute. You want the crawled URLs of your listing to be sorted consistently throughout all the pages, otherwise some of the items may not be visible to Googlebot. However, you should be careful which value you choose. If you sell books as well as shoes in your store, it would be better not to select the value ‘title’ since URLs pointing to shoes never contain ‘sortBy=title’, so they will not be crawled. Likewise setting ‘sortBy=size’ works well for crawling shoes, but not for crawling books. Keep in mind that parameters configuration has influence throughout the whole site.

CuriousQuestionAsker: Why not crawl URLs with parameter filterByColor?
Great WebWizard: Imagine that you have a three-page list of skirts. Some of the skirts are blue, some of them are red and others are green.

•fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1
•fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2
•fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=3
This list is filterable. When a user selects a color, she gets two pages of blue skirts:
•fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&flterByColor=blue
•fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&flterByColor=blue
They seem like new pages (the set of items are different from all other pages), but there is actually no new content on them, since all the blue skirts were already included in the original three pages. There’s no need to crawl URLs that narrow the content by color, since the content served on those URLs was already crawled. There is one important thing to notice here: before you disallow some URLs from being crawled by selecting the “No URLs” option, make sure that Googlebot can access the content in another way. Considering our example, Googlebot needs to be able to find the first three links on your site, and there should be no settings that prevent crawling them.

- – -

If your site has URL parameters that are potentially creating duplicate content issues then you should check out the new URL Parameters feature in Webmaster Tools. Let us know what you think or if you have any questions post them to the Webmaster Help Forum.

If you join now, you’ll be able to test the first set of updates we’ve released to Platform Preview: hover and confirmation bubbles.