Do you have the “website blues”?

Website Blues stillWell, a few of our star blogosopher graduates got together and helped us with our new tv spot- the “Website blues”- it should be running on WRGT and WKEF starting this week. Click on the image at right to see the spot.

The guitar player is David Cousino – www.davidcousino.com and www.lakeishasabol.com and www.awilum.com also participated!

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Dayton Area Board of Realtors site access for Macintosh

RapattoniMLS-Access-Instructions.pdf (application/pdf Object)

One of the things we stress in the Blogosopher course is adherence to W3C standards- and especially, accessibility for the blind. The main reason is that search engines act just like blind people on the web- they can’ t go where they don’t know where they are going.

Part of web standards is using code that everyone understands- not any proprietary systems- like the one Rappattoni uses to build their Multiple Listing Service (MLS) sites.

Apparently they require Microsoft Internet Explorer to work with their site- and Microsoft abandoned the program for the Apple Macintosh in January of 2006- mostly because they were having a hard enough time updating Explorer for the PC (which is still not RSS aware).

I found the link above – with instructions for installing some software for a Mac so you can view their site. But, this is a reminder to companies that decide to build sites based on proprietary standards or software technology- you may be shutting out some of your best customers without knowing it.

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Using Image and File Attachments

Using Image and File Attachments « WordPress Codex

This isn’t the easiest to read set of instructions – but it’s the best that’s out there for now.

If you want to attach a Microsoft Word doc (not recommended) or a PDF (recommended) to your WordPress blog- these are the steps.

  • The reasons you don’t want to attach a Word Doc:
  • not everyone has Word
  • Word can contain viruses
  • Word formatting will break depending on fonts and computer platform.

But- if you load a PDF:

  • Everyone can read it with the free Acrobat reader
  • Search engines will parse it
  • Many people can read the PDF within their browser
  • It will look exactly the same on every machine
  • It can have fields in it to fill out on the computer

I hope to put a simple step-by-step how to upload PDF’s to your WordPress blog soon. For now- the codex link at top is the best I could find.

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