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Non-Linear Search Engine Optimization Session at RedDot Summit 2007

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I would blog something about the SEO session by Non-Linear Creations I’m sitting in, but I have a feeling Sowrey.org sitting next to me is going to do a much better job of doing so.

Since I can’t compete at all in terms of comprehension, I’ll compete with my iSight :) Here’s a photo I snapped of the session ;)

UPDATE: Okay, I did pay attention after-all :) Here’s the highlights from the SEO section.

  • focus on the “long tail” PPC search terms (i.e. more specialized keywords, not broad terms with high PPC)
  • drive traffic to specialized pages that match the search terms
  • monitor traffic, searches within your site to see what they are looking at
  • ALT tags = Google takes you seriously and ranks you higher
  • use CSS to reduce “code clutter”
  • use site-maps to help Google index
  • use static URLs and “clean” URLs (i.e. no query strings, no guids)
  • avoid duplicate content (i.e. /, /index.htm, /default.asp), use 301 redirects

Wow, I totally need to do some of these things on my blog…nah, I’ll just keep posting hot women ;)

Presentation: Broadband Video News Powered by RedDot

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I got a few requests for our slides from our presentation this morning, so here they are: PDF. All the videos we showed are on my YouTube channel.

The sites we talked about were mainly:

Yes, I am TheJonathan

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I really appreciate everyone coming up and telling me that I was able to help them out in the RedDot Google Group or that we were able to give them a new way to approach something. I’d also like to thank my colleague (and co-presenter), Andre, for helping implement the process and information architecture framework that makes us successful.

RedDot is a pretty good piece of software for mid-tier content management, and it works pretty good out-of-the-box. But it’s great to see more-and-more people pushing it further to enhance the user-experience inside SmartEdit. It’s really great to identify those areas of your projects where editors are spending most of their time (i.e. adding a story, creating a gallery) and use the RedDot Query Language (RQL) and some DHTML/Ajax to make them more efficient. In the end, you get happier users and less broken SmartTree structures, so it’s pretty-much a win-win situation.

Anyhow, it was great to meet you all and I’m sure to see you all around the group and future Summits. I’m going to the beach ;)

UPDATE: Thanks for the write-up from Sowrey.org :)

Adding Dynamic Anchors with Ajax in RedDot CMS 6.5

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Here I demonstrate the Ajax and custom RQL we use to add URLs to dynamic anchors in RedDot CMS 6.5.

Creating a Gallery Page in RedDot CMS 6.5

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Here’s an example of how we create a new gallery on our Fashion Television website using custom RQL. Here’s an example of the type of pages we are producing with this technique.

Drag-Sorting Lists in Reddot CMS

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

For any new (RedDot) visitors to my blog, welcome :) Here’s the video from a while back of the drag-and-drop sorting using Ajax and custom RQL that I’ve implemented on the Fashion Television website.

I’m busy trying to back-port it into our other projects as well ;)

RedDot Customer Numbers

Monday, February 12th, 2007

From the RedDot opening session this morning:

  • 98% retention of customers measured over 3 years
  • 91% will provide a reference
  • 2,000 customers world-wide

I’m glad we’re not the only ones using this CMS ;)

RedDot really wants to be in the Social Networking space

Monday, February 12th, 2007

In the opening address this morning, the term “social network” and “Web 2.0″ came up a couple dozen times.  The basic plot was that if people are talking about your products on the web, you want them doing it on your site so you can learn from them and refute their claims.  There was a lot of “I know, it’s scary” ;)

I’m getting the feeling that LiveServer is going to be talked-about a lot at this conference…

Hummingbird RedDot Summit 2007

Saturday, February 10th, 2007

Next week I’ll be presenting at the RedDot Content Management System Summit 2007 in Huntington Beach, CA with my colleague, Andre. We’ll be presenting “Broadband Video News Powered by RedDot” Tuesday morning at 8:30am. I’m going to be showing off a bunch of our RQLing (RedDot Query Language), and we’ll lift the covers on our CityNews.ca site. I’ll also be blogging from the event Monday and Tuesday, and contributing to the RedDot User Group (I’m TheJonathan if you haven’t figured that out yet ;) ).

If you happen to be there, come check out our session! I’m trying to leave lots of time for questions at the end, so bring your RQL questions. See you there!

Hummingbird Summit 2007