Programmers use the term 'bots' without thinking twice. We often forget our clients have live outside of cyberspace and generally could care less to learn this stuff. But sometimes its good to know more. Bots are applications that run automated process on the web. Bots is short for robots. Think about what a robot on a car assembly line does. It has a number of welds to make in specific places on that part of the car its creating. We bots on the web do a series of actions that a human would normally have to do. A good example and the reason for this entry is the search engine bots. Google, Yahoo.com and others have bots called spiders. They go out and "spider" the web. Meaning they chart the web, recording new pages and updating old entries. That how your site gets listed. Yes you need to submit your site, but after you do, a spider will visit your site and verify what you submit, plus collect more information. Something I rarely hear clients discuss is the robots.txt file. This is a file that is part of your site and tells these spiders what pages to record or ignore. For example, you want them to follow and index (record) your homepage. But you probably don't want them to record your admin login page or a test page you might made. Details on how to make robot.txt files are all over the web (www.google.com/webmasters/start ).  You can also  use  meta-tags on a  page  by page basis (www.robotstxt.org/meta.html ). Now if you do nothing, generally spiders will index everything they find. But search engine traffic is very competitive. Think about it. If a spider finds a number of pages on your site that are sparse, this can lower your site's ranking. Sometimes it might be helpful to hide very simple or basic pages, to make your site look content rich on the rest of the pages. Every little trick helps.

Unofficially, I've been working Internet Working Hours for almost 10 years now. Influenced by clients being in remote locations, and indulging programmer tendancies, it seemed like the logical thing to do. Monday to Friday 11am to 7pm EST. Sometimes it's liberating, but overall it makes no difference except for the few clients who expect to find you at 9am. For those clients, I say remember I can be found at 7pm sometimes even 9pm. It's hard to go online and not end up working. And a coder who goes on MSN is bound to have a client message him after hours. Don't get me wrong, having clients is a good problem to have.  I predict in 5 years I won't talk to a client via phone unless it's a video phone. And that's the point of this little rambling. For those not into the web but know they need it, be aware those in the industry are not necessarily not into communcating, but may not be into your method of communication. The number of clients who can't believe that I will give them a phone call, is shocking. I do it purposefully know my competition generally does not. But most of the time, the phone is just for introduction. Real communication is all email or im. For multitaskers, having text you can refer to afterwards is a lifesaver.

I spend so much time telling clients that surfers are visual, they can't afford not to be. Then what do I do? Hudreds of words without any visuals. So I vow to use images or video is possible on the blog from now on. Do as I say not as I do never sat well with me. If your site has text you think is important (every site or you wouldn't write it), spend the time to get decent images.

Working in this field we collect acronyms on almost a daily basis. We use them as if they are real words. SEF URLs is one that every website owner should know. Search Engine Friendly Uniform Resource Locators are web pages which have names that search engines will list higher than others. The reason is firstly they do not contain query strings (?a=xyz). Secondly, but not always they contain keywords of the page. We prefer Artio SEF URL component for Joomla. The names of pages are generated automatically by the title of the page. They can be altered and with one click you can have your php pages .html pages. Best of all it's free. If your designer or programmer hasn't told you about this component you should really ask them why.

Last night's riveting races in New Hampshire were not just televised. CNN provided multiple live feeds. NBC, ABC and Fox all  had ample web video. In the past there would be nothing live, atleast not for free. Video has  come of age on  the web, and not just on Youtube. The fact is anyone can create a video site now, even if they don't have a video camera. Extensions like Seyret allow you to create your own Youtube. It gives the option to host files or link to other sites. In the past this would cost thousands, but now at the usual open source price, it's free.

Today's surfers want video for everything. My suggestion is give it to them as long as the quality is high enough that it doesn't hurt your image. And since broadband is still slow in N. America (compared to Europe & Japan), a low end camcorder can provide high quality clips for under $500.

 Think about it, instructional videos, training videos, property showcase or car video. Be your own tv station before your competition starts his.