In today’s edition, we’re on grammar patrol. When it comes to potential mates, there’s no bigger turnoff than poor grammar — one email littered with dangling modifiers or non-parallel constructions and we’re done. Ick.

While that may seem way too picky, perhaps in an OCD kind of way, it’s not a bad method for keeping Darwin on top — we see a chance for natural selection to work in every run-on sentence. Remember: Together, we can weed out those woeful writers.

You may not be keen on turning over your love life to Strunk and White, but we suggest you embrace a real sense of grammar diligence when it comes to blogging and developing content for your website.

We’re constantly amazed — and sickened, frankly — by how many people can’t spell to save their lives. Or by how many times we’ve stumbled upon “right” instead of “write” or “you’re” instead of “your.” OK, homophones and possessives can be tricky, but remember to just take a few minutes to re-read your blog post, link bait piece or website copy block before pushing the “publish” button.

We understand not everyone went to journalism school or snuggled at night with a copy of The Associated Press style guide. If grammar isn’t your strong suit, find someone with a better eye and ask them to give your copy a once-over. As professional writers, we can’t tell you how wholly unprofessional those awkward constructions and misspellings look — and how much damage they can inflict. You will lose readers, respect and, ultimately, business because of those errors.

So, do yourself a favor and use one of the 6,392 dictionaries and thesauri available online when sitting down to write. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or question your word choice and sentence construction. Pick up a couple of grammar and style books if it’s not a strong suit, and make sure to scour the Internet for sources. We’re big fans of Copyblogger, for example.

But, in the end, you can’t go wrong with the O.G. of copywriting manuals: Strunk and White, baby. Pick up another old newspaper editor’s favorite, William Zinser’s “On Writing Well,” while you’re adding to your copywriting library.

The bottom line is this: Dedicate time to honing your writing and editing skills. Your ever-increasing roster of visitors and clients (as well as your ever-expanding bank account) will thank you.

Sempo just released their survey for 2006 on Search Engine Marketing. In the survey, Sempo shows that Search Engine Marketing as a whole is up 62% percent from last year with spending in North America around 9.4 million. In 2005, estimation on spending was around 5.75 billion, which was an increase on 2004 by 44% and an estimated doubling of 2006 by the year 2011.

“These spending figures show that 2006 was a watershed year for the SEM industry. We have moved from the first wave of adoption of search-based marketing to the myriad of small and medium sized businesses, many of them startups, using SEM as a fundamental part of their business. In fact, many of these SMB companies have been founded on an e-business model and that is a huge implication for our general economy, going forward,” says Kevin Lee, member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO and chair of its Research Committee.

The yearly increase of spending is happening because online marketing is becoming extremely successful for many companies. As more companies begin to put there faith in SEO/SEM they are realizing that these online marketers are able to give them more bang for their buck then they thought was possible. Online advertisers are able to target searchers to a T with the precision that they have always wanted and the tracking capabilities to show what works and what does not work.

Due to the recent surveys and the success companies are having with online marketing, it is safe to say that Search Engine Marketing is here to stay. Having your company online is far from a luxury now, it is a must. With 16% of the world’s population, or 1.1 billion people able to find your business via the web, it is extremely important that all businesses are able to be found on the internet. It is just a lot easier to “be found” if you are on the top of a search engine.

As a application development specialist for lifeBLUE Media. I see a lot of different coding styles. Some are organized and very readable; others look like raw fettucine with extra alfredo sauce. But one habit that I’ve seen numerous times, often among relatively inexperienced programmers, is the dependence on PHP’s register_globals directive.

register_globals was introduced as a way of making it more convenient to access User input. For example, instead of having to type: echo ‘Hello, ‘, $_GET[’username’], ‘!’; With register_globals turned on, $username would automatically be assigned the value of $_GET[’username’], so all you would have to do is: echo ‘Hello, ‘, $username, ‘!’; Wow, what a timesaver!

So why are they getting rid of register_globals in PHP 6 if it’s so helpful? I believe not even Sherlock Holmes could figure this one out. The problem, interestingly, is not that register_globals is bad; rather, the problem is that register_globals encourages very bad security habits. Let’s break out the magnifying glass and our trusty pipe to take a look at a fictitous banking site. One of the pages on this site, transfer.php, provides an interface for the User to transfer funds between two accounts. Without register_globals, the code might look something like this: $_sql = ” UPDATE `accounts` SET `balance` = `balance` - {$_POST[’amount’]} WHERE `accountid` = {$_POST[’transFrom’]} LIMIT 1″; $db->execute($_sql); $_sql = ” UPDATE `accounts` SET `balance` = `balance` + {$_POST[’amount’]} WHERE `accountid` = {$_POST[’transTo’]} LIMIT 1″: $db->execute($_sql); Simple enough. Now here’s what it would look like using register_globals: $_sql = ” UPDATE `accounts` SET `balance` = `balance` - {$amount} WHERE `accountid` = {$transFrom} LIMIT 1″; $db->execute($_sql); $_sql = ” UPDATE `accounts` SET `balance` = `balance` + {$amount} WHERE `accountid` = {$transTo} LIMIT 1″: $db->execute($_sql); This begs the question, “How does PHP know where these variables are coming from?” The answer is: It doesn’t.register_globals looks in $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE and $_SESSION, so if there’s a matching index in *any* of these superglobals, your code would have no way of knowing which value is the ‘correct’ one. For example, suppose you created a cookie whose name is ‘amount’. An incorrectly-configured php.ini might cause the cookie to overrule the amount that the User specified in the form! And by (inadvetently) allowing the User to specify these variables in the URL, you open your site up to XSS attacks.

It was for this reason that the default value for register_globals went from ON to OFF in PHP 4.2.0. But many programmers merely shrugged their shoulders and went on with their normal lives: $amount = $_POST[’amount’]; $transFrom = $_POST[’transFrom’]; $transTo = $_POST[’transTo’]; $_sql = ” UPDATE `accounts` SET `balance` = `balance` - {$amount} WHERE `accountid` = {$transFrom} LIMIT 1″; $db->execute($_sql); $_sql = ” UPDATE `accounts` SET `balance` = `balance` + {$amount} WHERE `accountid` = {$transTo} LIMIT 1″: $db->execute($_sql); But this is really not much of an improvement. True, the code does now examine where the variables are coming from, but it’s not validating the values. To use a rather dramatic example, suppose a (somewhat less-than-reputable) request comes in, and the value of $_POST[’transFrom’] is “0 OR TRUE”. Now the first SQL query looks like this: $_sql = ” UPDATE `accounts` SET `balance` = `balance` - 500000 WHERE `accountid` = 0 OR TRUE LIMIT 1″; $db->execute($_sql); Here’s a hint: you’ll be getting a LOT of angry phone calls VERY soon! How would you protect yourself from such an irresponsible act (also known as an SQL Injection Attack)? Rather easily, as it turns out: $amount = (float) $_POST[’amount’]; $transFrom = (int) $_POST[’transFrom’]; $transTo = (int) $_POST[’transTo’]; Not even 20 characters later, your code is completely SQL-Injection-proof!

There are many, many opinions out there on the best way to validate User input. Certainly *some* kind of validation that makes sense is always better than none, and that is the purpose of this article…or is it?

In the Nerd Matrix,  you will find numerous posts regarding coding, programs and application development, and other insightful information for all of us nerds out there. Read topics about common prgramming errors, new standards of coding, or just good, clean technical information that you or someone else you know could benefit from. Please contribute by posting quality and clean comments, or just give a shout out comment to the rest of us fellers in the nerd community.

As nerds we should be proud that we can boldly go where the average person cannot. And those are the easy ones, lets not blow any brain cells with our in-depth knowledge of .NET frameworks, hypertext markup language, or the latest w3c output. Just like Budweiser’s Real Men (and women) of Genius, we salute you Mr. Programmer Rocket Scientist Nerd Guy. This blog is for you!

Alright, here it is ladies and gents. Impress your friends, family, all of your secret admirees, and maybe even yourself with this tiny piece of information. I am not even joking. This will make you feel like a genius while connecting whoever to whatever web site you want…whenever. Are you ready for it…Here it comes!

<a href=”http://www.lifeblue.com”>Web Design Company</a>

Of course I would like you to use this specific reference and plaster it all over your site, but then this article might not be so beneficial to you when it comes to impressing those listed above. This is a standard HTML coding tag that websites use to link other URLs. Have you ever right clicked on a site and viewed the source code? Odds are you will find this similar code in abundance throughout those millions of other characters and what nots displayed on the page.

It is simple as it looks:

(a href) is the HTML tag that says “Hey web browser, I am about to display a link here”

http://www.lifeblue.com is the actual URL that the link goes to. So you can put any up and running website address in this spot.

Web Design Company is the text displayed to click on the link.

</a> as any good HTML person would know, you always have to close out your tags.

Now you are saying “Okay nerd face, what good does knowing this mind boggling information do me.” Well I will tell you. Try typing out this code on a notepad document>Save it> and open it with your favorite web browser. There it is. You can also include it any website, profile, e-mail, etc that allows HTML. Well I believe I have done my good deed of the day. So long.

Britney Spears…who, what?  What did she do again?  Nothing is the honest truth.  So then what is this article about?   Don’t worry about that quite yet.  Let’s get back to the Britney topic.  Did you see that performance?  I believe I have now gone through all the phases of the grief cycle for Britney.  I have certainly been in shock, denial to say the least, anger and depression to the hilt, and now, thankfully, I am on the road to acceptance and recovery.  It is now truly at the point of empathy.  The poor girl just does not know which way to turn.  Don’t worry Britney, I am behind you 100 ½ %. 

Well it would not be a good web industry related blog if I did not tie all of this to some higher meaning subject.  So in honor of Britney’s downfall, today’s topic is truly Oops! I Did it Again.  What is the Oops?   The oops is the fact that you chose the wrong company to do your web design development and marketing….Again!    So in order to better help you get through this mistake, let’s go through the grief cycle for choosing the wrong web design company. 

Shock – That’s right.  You both saw your results and went into a vegetative state, or it has been months down the road and you are shocked your site isn’t the next hottest thing on the market.  Breathe deep, its okay.  Either someone did not tell you what you needed, you didn’t know, or your odds of success stood where most new un-marketed, un-targeted websites are…not good. 

Denial – Go ahead and deny for a while.  It lets us clear our head and come back to the problem once the initial emotion is gone. 

Anger- Anger is okay too; let us keep it simple though.  Crush a can or even hit your head a few times on a well padded wall…but not too hard, we don’t want forget what has happened and then have to start the process all over again. 

Depression – It would probably be a good idea to skip this one if at all possible.  Nobody benefits from depression.  Think happy thoughts, like what could happen if you choose the right web design company. 

Testing – Let’s start searching for the right professional web company.  Test the waters and see who is not going to let you do the same mistake?

Acceptance – Ahhh…here we are…recovery at last.  Use your past mistakes and input to help pave the way for new found glory.  Don’t worry, that sorry excuse for a site you are currently using can be undone with a snap of the fingers.

Do you feel better…are you still reading?  If you need to go over these steps with an expert website consultation provider then call us.  We are here to help.  Now if only a quality, well marketed website could help my girl Britney…if only.

As one begins their quest for finding the perfect web design company, it is often a daunting mix of price vs. quality, targeted results vs. redundant solutions, and the biggest of all…custom vs. template.  All of these really go hand in hand.  Now while there are so many things to consider, let’s discuss what a professional web design company really is.

Learning - A professional web design company starts with getting to know your business and how you want your online presence portrayed to potential customers.  Industry specific questions, calls with key business decision makers, and industry research all play a pivotal role in how your website will be created.  This upfront learning allows the developers to provide effective results without a multitude of features you don’t need, can’t use, and even worse, your users can’t either.  Bottom line, a good web consulting agency conducts thorough research before beginning a project to provide an effective solution. 

Innovation – A professional web design company provides innovative ideas, concepts, and tangible features to help set your online presence apart from competitors.  Whether it comes from graphically appealing design elements or a user-friendly application, it is these features that make people say “that is a great site”…or  you get the industry average of a less than 10 second view and that person never goes to your site again.  I am not a nay sayer but I don’t think even Walmart could stay open if everyone that went there walked inside for 5 or so seconds and left….well maybe Walmart could find a way but that is a different conspiracy theory all together. 

Long Term Relationship -   A professional web design company provides results that are long term.  However a website, just like a brick and mortar operation, needs to be updated, expanded, interchanged on a regular basis to keep existing customers coming back and bring new ones in.  It’s the same as a clothing store updating seasonal trends, or a doctor using the latest technology and ideas…you get the picture.  A good company continually provides new ways to expand your online presence and is there for you when you need it. 

In the end it seems budget drives a large percentage of determining which company to help you create your online dream.  While the bottom dollar is almighty there are always ways to provide custom, targeted results without breaking the bank.  Simply put, a quality website cannot be built in a day with a handful of pesos by seamstresses.  It takes a little time, the right budget for the right solution, and a skilled team of development and marketing experts.   Wait that’s us! Find out why we should be your professional web design company.