Frog's Digital Design Blog » Tools

Rank Check Your Site With Advanced Web Rankings

Gary Hartley — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:14:53 +0000

Advanced Web Rankings (AWR for short) is a pretty well-known tool for rank checking websites against your chosen keywords and search engines. There are four licence levels – from $99 to $599. This looks great at first glance because unlike a lot of licences in the SEO world (SEOMoz for one), this is a one-time fee instead of a monthly or yearly renewal. There is a sort-of hidden cost however that we’ll look at later.

Basic Features

So AWR seems reasonably priced, but what do you get for your money? Well, the Standard Licence (the cheapest one) lets you rank check as many sites as you like and you get access to all the data you’d expect like ranking changes over time. The next level up (Professional) lets you create nice reports to print and email – great if you have clients or people to share the data with.

The Enterprise and Server levels give you access to keyword research tools (Wordtracker, Google Keyword tool and and there’s an API for others like SEMRuch and Google Webmaster Tools) – to be honest I use separate tools anyway so that isn’t why AWR is important for me. What I like is being able to rank check sites from any search engine – the Server licence which is the most expensive, actually gives you a proxy so you get accurate results from other countries.

Setting Up A Project

The AWR Project Manager is a tool that lets you set up and manage your rank-checking project. This could be something like “My Website Rankings” or “New Keyword Set”. You start by choosing which search engines you’d like to use – Google UK and US for example – and then you add your keywords. This is as simple as typing them in, although you can export from a file or URL. You then add as many websites as you like to be checked and choose what crawl depth you’d like AWR to go to.

Realistically, it doesn’t really matter where your site is after the first few pages, but setting a crawl depth of a few hundred results let you see if you’re popping in for any of your target terms.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the bigger the crawl, the longer it takes. AWR actually rests in between querying the search engines so that it reduces the risk of being blocked.

Once you click OK that’s it – the project starts running! You can manually pause or delete it at any time, and re-checking is as simple as forcing a new crawl or scheduling one. You can even set it to email you the results.

Top Sites

One neat little feature is the “Top Sites” tab which is part of your main project dashboard. This shows you up to 200 sites that rank above you for the selected keyword. It’s a great way to keep an eye on the competition and even find sites that are worth partnering with.

One Downside

The only annoying thing about AWR is that you have to purchase a Maintenance Plan after the first 12 months in order to keep getting updates and support. This costs from $29 to $119 and as we mentioned above, it’s not totally clear at first that you have to pay this (AWR talks about a “One-Time Fee”). I’m not entirely sure what would happen if you didn’t bother to buy a maintenance licence after 12 months – presumably it would continue to work!

Overview

AWR is an easy to use, solid rank-checking program. It’s got all the features you could want to check your own site, your client sites or your competitor sites, and the reporting is great for a quick overview. You can customise the reports and dig a lot deeper into various data, but from my point of view it’s the data at a glance that’s the most useful. AWR is the best rank checking tool out there at the moment so it’s well worth using for your clients or just for your own sites.

#####

Reply from AWR on 26th August 2011.

The application license does have a one time fee. Upon purchase, AWR comes with a 1 year maintenance plan, which provides free application version and search engines definitions updates. When the initial maintenance plan expires, you can continue to use the application at the version level we released before the maintenance plan has expired. Purchasing a new maintenance plan, which will bring new version and search engines definitions updates, is optional, as each user may consider is best for himself.

- AD, Advanced Web Ranking Support Team

10 Advanced jQuery Demo’s and Plugin’s

Gary Hartley — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:03:26 +0000

Here’s a quick catchup on some of the hottest jQuery demo’s and plugin’s at the moment. For more information about each one simply click on the image under each heading to link to the demo site. If you have any others you wish to share please do in the comments belooow.

Quicksand

Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

Flip

Flip is a jQuery plugin that will flip easily your elements in four directions.

Slideout Tips

Slideout tips with jQuery and CSS3

Photo Zoom Out Effect

A jQuery image zoom out effect

Sliding Boxes

A slick jQuery plugin with multiple transition options to on hover of an image.

Puzzle Menu

A beautiful jQuery image and menu transition plugin

Avia Slider jQuery Image Slideshow

A unique jQuery image slideshow plugin with multiple transition modes to choose from.

jQuery Background Image slideshow

An elegant jQuery background image plugin.

Cloud Zoom

Image zoom powered by jQuery.

iCarousel

A horizontal image slideshow jQuery plugin.

Check Availability of Social Usernames, Domain Names and Trademarks with one search

Gary Hartley — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:29:24 +0000

Here’s a really useful tool in our ‘really useful tools to share’ series of posts… you like that? Good, I’ll continue… If you’ve just finished collecting the Dr Who 2010 Merlin sticker collection and you’re frantically looking for another random collection to occupy your time then why not start a social usernames collection? Just imagine, owning your chosen username account on every social site on the web! Am I selling it to you yet? No? That’s good, you’ve passed the ‘I’ve got a life’ test. On the other hand if you have a legitimate reason for owning or checking the availability of a username on social sites, domain names and trademarks then this online tool is exactly what you’re after. Do it all in one search, type in a query and see which ones are available and which ones you can secure. They’re quite literally up for grabs.

Bill Murray

So let’s pretend I’m Bill Murray, the legend that is (this guy has a direct line to my funny bone). I want to know which TLD‘s for www.billmurray. are available and which social sites I can register as billmurray.

Crap, no usernames are available for the top 10 social sites but there are both trademarks and domains available. Now, what can I do with the domain name www.billmurray.tv? Is he still on TV? Has he ever been? Films yes but TV? Sorry I’m meandering off the point.

The point is – whether you’re a Joe Blogg‘s or a business you can use ud.com to check and protect your online identity, all with one quick search.

Know of a better tool for the job?

Then let us know in the comments belooooooow.

Pre-launch website checklist

Gary Hartley — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Successful websites require a series of important pre-launch stages to ensure they have the best chance of succeeding. Client liason, technical specs, design briefs, accessibility, standards compliance and SEO are all important factors in the DNA of the top performing sites. Through years of commercial experience we have found the final quality assurance stage to be one of the most important. This vital stage ensures both platform stability and quality is at it’s optimum pre-launch.

A pre-launch website checklist is a key tool and should be used religiously on every new website build. A useful online tool that seems to successfully identify all the key pre-launch points is Launchlist. Winner of ‘CSS Awards Site of the Day’, Launchlist offers a simple, user friendly online checklist for websites. You simply answer Yes or No to their questions and they say whether your site is ready to launch. You can even add your own points, useful if you have a additional QA’s. The service is currently FREE with a Pro service on the horizon.

A few sample check points

All text free from spelling errors?

Content has been placed consistently?

Page & Content formatting has been tested?

Print stylesheet exists and tested?

Meta data has been included and is appropriate?

Page titles are descriptive and SEO friendly?

Images have appropriate alt text?

Title attributes are appropriate and SEO friendly?

Favicon has been created and displays correctly?

Footer includes copyright and link to site creator?

HTML has passed validation? Check using the W3C HTML validation service

CSS has passed validation? Check using the W3C CSS validation service

There are no broken links?

And so on and so forth.

Visit Launchlist

Affordable Secure Backup

John Bates — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:26:58 +0000

Whether you are an IT professional or a computer novice, choosing the right backup system to use at work or home is a difficult, and frankly uninspiring use of time, and one which almost always results in making undesirable compromises. There always seem to be far too many options and the good solutions come with a price tag that almost matches the cost of the system they were designed to support. A good backup system should satisfy, at least, the following requirements:

It should be affordable.
Operation should be reasonably well automated.
It should be easy to restore to one of several points in time.
There should be some redundancy.
It should be simple to store some backups offsite.
Media should be encrypted for security.

The system described here uses an affordable drive enclosure to host two of three disk drives in a scheme that gives both disk mirroring and offsite storage all for a very affordable price of, roughly, £260. Of the three disk drives, two stay in the enclosure and the third is kept offsite and periodically exchanged with one of the two in the enclosure. Each disk drive is mounted in a drive tray (a one-off operation which requires nothing more than the use of a Philips screwdriver) which allows it to be easily inserted and removed from the enclosure. The enclosure is connected to a USB port on a computer and looks, to the computer, like a single large disk. I use 1TB capacity disks which allows me to securely store approximately 1,000 GB of data which is a lot even for a small business.

Operation

The drive enclosure is populated with two of the three SATA disk drives and attached to a computer (Mac, Windows or Unix) through a USB connection. A DIP switch configuration on the rear of the enclosure can be used to choose from a number of different configurations allowing the two drives to appear as either one big drive, two independent drives or a single drive using RAID 1 mirroring for increased protection against disk failure. This backup scheme uses the latter configuration, RAID 1, which employs disk mirroring in which the enclosure maintains an exact copy of its first disk on the second disk so that if either disk fails the remaining disk can continue operation without loss of data. If a failure occurs, the failed drive can be replace with a good drive and the system will automatically mirror the data to the new drive without any downtime. From the computer, the enclosure appears as a single USB (external) drive.

The second disk can be removed at any point and replaced with another which will be automatically mirrored with the contents of the first disk. The process of mirroring a 1TB disk takes about 3 or 4 hours but during this period the drive can be used normally. A green LED above a drive indicates that it is functioning normally, a flashing amber LED indicates that the drive is in the process of being mirrored and a red LED is indicative of a hardware fault with the drive.

Backup software on the computer populates the USB drive as it would any externally attached drive. I use the excellent SyncBackPro for Windows to pull files in from other machines on the network and write it to the drive but any archiving software could be used as appropriate for the platform.

Archival Storage

Some operating systems provide a mechanism for maintaining historical copies of your files within the file system. Windows does this with what it calls Previous Versions, and on Mac OS X similar functionality can be achieved by using Time Machine. Both these mechanisms enable fuller use of the storage space on the drive by keeping old versions of all files, even files that have been deleted since the last backup, for as long as space remains on the backup disk. Once the disk fills up these systems will automatically begin to prune back the oldest versions of files, keeping only as many old files as the disk can hold. Both of these mechanisms, Previous Versions and TimeMachine, will allow you to view the files in any backed up folder on your system as they were at several points in the past, typically at daily or more frequent intervals.

Redundancy and Offsite Storage

The enclosure keeps two drives in sync automatically so that should one of the drives in the enclosure fail the other one will continue providing read and write functionality without any interruption of service. This gives one form of redundancy, but by swapping the mirrored disk with a spare one on a regular, say daily, basis you get to maintain as many backup copies of your complete data as you feel comfortable with. It is easy to manage a small pool of spare disks which can be used in rotation. If we then keep one or more of these disks at a different location to the enclosure we have an offsite backup.

Very cheap USB caddies can be purchased which will hold a single SATA disk drive. These can be used in an emergency to mount any of the disks on a computer if the enclosure fails or if you need to access the data that is on one of the drives from a different computer or location.

Encryption

If securing the content of your backup data is important then the free open source TrueCrypt is an excellent tool. TrueCrypt provides on-the-fly encryption of an entire disk which means that data is encrypted or decrypted just before it is saved or loaded from the disk. The operation works transparently, encrypting the entire disk volume without any user intervention. Data is copied to or read from the encrypted disk exactly as it would be to or from an unencrypted disk. No data can be read from the disk until the correct password has been provided so if one of your disks is lost or stolen you can be confident that its contents will remain safe. The documentation on the TrueCrypt web site provides a step by step guide to installing and using TrueCrypt to protect a USB drive.

The decision to encrypt is an optional one and can be delayed until a later date. TrueCrypt software is such a good tool that I would recommend experimenting with it even if you don’t decide to use it to encrypt your backups. One of the modes of operation of TrueCrypt allows you to create an encrypted file on your normal file system which can then be mounted by TrueCrypt as a drive (or volume) on your computer. To the computer this looks like a normal external disk but has the advantage that all of the files that you write to the disk are securely encrypted and cannot be read without providing the correct password. TrueCrypt is software that I would be prepared to pay quite a lot of money for but it is open source and free.

Cost

The system I describe here costs roughly £260 (including the backup media) and provides 1TB of always available RAID and offsite backed storage – this makes it a very competitively priced solution for a small business or home worker.

I purchased the enclosure and extra drive trays from Dabs.com but the enclosure is also available from Amazon. The hard drives can be purchased from anywhere but should all be of the same capacity – Good 1TB drives can currently be found for about £60. The individual component costs for the whole system were:

Component	Price
1 x USB Dual Removable SATA RAID External Hard Drive Enclosure	£70
1 x Extra Hot Swap Hard Drive Tray	£10
3 x 1TB Internal SATA Disk Drives	£60 each
TrueCrypt Open Source Disk Encryption Software	£free

With a total component cost of about £260, the benefits of this disk-based system over our old tape based solution are enormous not just in price but in flexibility and features. In short, it is a solution that I would recommend.

Instant Blueprint – Create a website framework in seconds!

Gary Hartley — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:27:34 +0000

Instant Blueprint allows you to quickly create a web project framework with valid HTML/XHTML and CSS in only a matter of seconds, allowing you to get your project up and running faster!

If you’re after saving time by setting up the generic website framework of your next project then this could save you time. Personally I’d like to see a few more options like including the options to setup a specific CSS Framework.

Setup Instructions

Simple setup instructions include:

Enter your project name
Select options
Enter markup id tags (1 per line)
Click Submit..

..and Instant Blueprint does the rest!

Let us know if you found this tool useful and if we should feature similar posts in the future.

W3schools.com Historical Browser Statistics: Visualised

Gary Hartley — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:20:00 +0000

Viewing historical browser market share statistics the old fashioned way is a pretty dull task. There’s nothing less inspiring than sitting staring at a table of data that visually tells you nothing. On the flip side we all like a good pie chart right? All those colourful segments that kind of look like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, indicating immediately the impact of the resulting data in a visual form.

Historical browser statistics

Current browser share statistics is something I reference from time to time and I use W3schools.com as a primary source for this data. A tool I recently discovered from Axis shows the historical browser statistics from W3schools.com in a custom visualisation. It tracks back to January 2002 and includes historic deprecated browsers such as IE4.

Conclusion

A cool online tool for viewing historical browser market share statistics. Witness the demice of Internet Explorers dominant control of the market with this intelligent custom visualisation. Let us know what you think of the tool and the market share as a whole.

Grid Overlays to assist your website development

Gary Hartley — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:16:20 +0000

I’m a web designer by day and a web designer by night, I pretty much live and breath the web. I use many tools to assist me in my workflow, tools that both assist me in maintaining quality in my work and also in saving time, time I’d much rather spend catching up on the latest season of The Wire.

One pretty cool tool I use to assist in the development side of web design are grid overlays. Grid overlays are exactly what they sound like, a grid that overlays your website. I use them as a quick visual guide to check to see in all my elements line up as intended and are pixel perfect.

Browser plugins

One option is to use Firefox and an extension called Gridfox. This is useful as I already use Firefox as my main development browser.

Scripts

Andy Budds Layout Grid Bookmarklet

A more die hard approach would be to use Javascript. Andy budd wrote a nice overlay grid bookmarklet, originally inspired by Khoi Vinh’s post about using a background image of a grid for layout. The script is also demonstrated on the SubtleGradient website.

#grid

A personal favourite is this Hashgrid script you can embed on your site. The clever part is you can turn it on and off by typing ALT + G – g33k! The clever scripting gives me the functionality I need, if I have a particular layout to test with a different structure I can simply replace the bg image.

Designing with Grids in mind

Do you or have you considered using a CSS framework when developing sites? Personally I don’t as I feel I can write lightweight CSS which is both flexible and cross browser. Photoshop guides and grids help in the design phase but you lose these when developing, until now of course.

In summary

These tools help bridge the gap between the design phase (Photoshop, guides and grids) and the development phase (using these tools to test and compare). Let us know if there are any other tools out there that do something similar, I’m sure I’ve missed some, oh and let us know what you think of these, if you already use them and what your experiences of working with them are.

Free Secret Santa Random Name Generator

Gary Hartley — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:49:30 +0000

Christmas isn’t far away now, 38 days to be precise, and if you’re even a little bit festive there’s a chance your place of work may do a Secret Santa. It’s a fun way of buying a colleague a Christmas present without them knowing who sent it. It’s also fair because everyone normally has a small set budget in which to purchase the present. We use a simple online Secret Santa organiser that randomly pairs present givers and receivers. Simple enter the names and email addresses of each participant and each person will receive the name of the person they need to buy for, all done surreptitiously.

The Site

The process

4 simple steps

Enter your name, email address, and a group name
Select the number of presents for each participant.
Enter the names of the participants.
Click on the Pick Names button.

Visit the Free Secret Santa Random Name Generator →

Satellite Above – I Watched it for a Little While

John Bates — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:44:23 +0000

A moving light in the sky is guaranteed to catch my attention. If it is slow moving and flashing then I know that it is likely to be an aircraft. If it shoots across the sky in an instant then I know it to be a meteor or shooting star. If it is fixed then I conclude that it is a star or a planet. But what if it is none of these? What if it is bright orange and moves across the sky slowly over a period of thirty seconds or so?

I asked myself that very question recently as I watched in amazement as an object that looked to me like a distant ball of fire passed silently and slowly from north-west to south-east across the clear evening sky. My initial thoughts were that I had just seen my first fireball but I knew that to be very unlikely and, besides, I was sure that fireballs were associated with freak weather conditions and on this night everything was still.

The object, whatever it was, appeared to be some distance off and moved across the sky with a speed that I readily associated with that of orbiting satellites which I had seen many times before. But these had always been white in colour and this one was a distant flaming red.

I wondered if it would be easy to check whether any satellites had passed overhead and so turned to the Internet for a solution. I came across a number of great resources which provided more than enough information to solve the mystery.

The first was a free piece of software by Sebastian Stoff called the Orbitron Satellite Tracking System which gives graphical and tabular information about the position of satellites and their visibility at a given time and place. The Orbitron software suggested that what I may have seen was a satellite which goes by the name of Iridium 43, one of a family of about seventy such satellites that provide communication services and orbit the earth from pole to pole at a height of about 500 miles and at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour.

The Iridium satellites made the news back in February of this year when one of them, Iridium 33, collided with a retired Russian satellite and with a combined impact speed of 26,000 miles per hours both were destroyed leaving thousands of pieces of space debris to fall back to earth over the following days. The Russian satellite had been uncontrolled since, at least, 1995 but the authorities had predicted that the two satellites should have missed each other by about half a kilometre – they were clearly wrong.

Iridium satellites are known to give rise to an interesting phenomenon – the Iridium Flare. The satellites are equipped with three highly reflective door sized antenna made of silver-coated Teflon on polished aluminium and occasionally one of these will pick up light from the sun and reflect it down onto the earth’s surface generating an illuminated spot on the earth about 6 miles across. To an observer on the surface of the earth the satellite appears as if from nowhere as a faint object that slowly increases in brightness to a maximum and then just as quickly dims until it is no longer visible, with the whole show lasting no longer than, perhaps, thirty seconds. A simulation is shown here. The satellite that I saw appeared a rich flaming red in colour but I put that down to atmospheric conditions and its effect on the light as it was reflected from the satellite down to earth.

A really excellent web site that makes it easy to determine when and where to look out for satellites that are likely to be visible to the naked eye is Heavens Above. Start by declaring your location and follow links from the main page to get predictions for when Iridium flares, the International Space Station or other such objects will be visible in your area. The site also displays charts showing you where in the sky these objects will appear.

If you like to see a more earth-based and dynamic view of how any given satellite is orbiting then this real time satellite tracking web site has a mashup showing the live movement of selected satellites superimposed over the familiar Google Maps background. You can combine this view with an Iridium flare prediction from the Heavens Above web site to get a Google Maps view of the expected track of a visible satellite too.

It is all a little geeky, but I find it reassuring to be able to get an explanation for such phenomena.