Optimizing Magento for Search

The first steps to optimizing Magento for search engines (making Magento SEO friendly) is to plan out your template use and your overall site design. The entire site must be search friendly, not just a list of specific aspects of Magento’s configuration. Sometimes the template has more to do with SEO success than any other factor.

If search engines do a perfect job, they read, understand, and index your entire site. When they do that, what they find is what is presented by your template. Why not prepare for the days when search engines are close to perfect? That is why Magento SEO starts with the template selection.

Magento Search Friendly URLs

Magento URLs are search friendly but there is more you can do to make them search optimal. Perhaps “search optimal URLs for Magento” is a good article that needs to be written. Since Magento runs on a form of the Zend Framework, there are numerous options for implementing SEO friendly URLs.

Once you’ve chosen your business and purchased a domain name the next step is to find useful and relevant keywords. Without this step your Web site will get lost among the many Web sites that compete for your business.

To begin keyword research you need to utilize some useful tools. The first Web site you should look at is Google Keywords which is a free tool that displays the amount of searches and competition for specific keywords. It also allows you to find more specific keywords that can better describe your site.

A better tool would be to purchase some type of software or service such as WordTracker which offers detailed information about keywords. Unfortunately it’s not free, but there are other services that are.

2. Find a Niche Market
This cannot be stressed enough as it’s much harder to receive top search engine rankings for a new site than an established site. A new site will have to compete with Web sites that have established high search engine rankings.

To compete with these Web sites is unwise. You first need to find a niche market, and then build up your Web site to a position as to where it can compete with these generic terms. For example let’s say you have a Web site geared towards weight loss. You would not use the keyword “weight loss” because there’s too much competition. You can use one of the keyword tools to find suggestions of related keywords that you will be able to compete against. You may find the keyword “weight loss surgery” or “weight loss techniques.” These phrases are much better keywords than generic terms like “weight loss.”

Use the list of a few keywords, check out the competition that word/ phrase has on Google. Look at the number of competitors. If this exceeds a few million, then you need look for a more specific keyword. The next step is to observe the top listed pages and see how well they are optimized. You can download the Google Toolbar and add Page Rank to your browser for free.

A low Page Rank between 0 – 3 means that you can easily compete with these Web pages. A Web site with a Page Rank of 4 – 6 is a bit tougher to compete with, but is manageable using my guided steps and expertise. You don’t want to compete with Web sites that have a Page Rank above 7. Check the domains homepage, not a sub-page to get an accurate Page Rank!
3. View Competitors Source Code

It’s important to view potential competitor’s source code to see if they have efficiently performed on page search engine optimization. To do this on your Brower click “view” and then click on the “source” option as displayed.”

This will bring up a page with all the html code on it. You don’t need to be an expert with html to understand what we’re looking for. We need to see if our competitor’s Web site is properly optimized. We look to see if they are using their keywords in the header tags, the title tags, and the image alt tags. These should all be located near the top of the source code.

If you cannot find these then go to the toolbar and chose “edit” and select “find” and type in h1 or title, etc. to see if there are being used for the keywords. If these don’t exist or aren’t being used to hold keywords, you have found an easily beaten page. This means that with some proper optimization you will be able to outrank this page. The last thing you want to look at is the body content and to see if the keyword is used a few times in the body content. A site lacking in keywords in the body context is a poorly optimized page. You should always make sure your Web page is keyword rich with relevant content.
4. Keyword Placement

After you’ve selected a few keywords to use we want to combine the ones that have like terms. For example, if you’ve selected three keywords such as: weight loss story; weight loss picture; safe weight loss, you see that all three keywords contain the words “weight loss.” We can combine the words to better optimize your page.

For the title tag the fewer the keywords used, the better the search engines will rank your page.

When we create the page it should NEVER have “Welcome to our Web site!” in the Title Tags.

It should NEVER have “weight loss story, weight loss picture, safe weight loss” in the Title Tags either.

The way the title tags should look is: “Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture” (Note: You can add this character | by holding the shift key on your keyboard and pressing the backslash key above the enter key.)

You should always remove prepositions such as “and” as this will only hurt your search engine optimization. The fewer, more relevant the words, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

Header 1 tags should be placed above your body content. This should contain your most relevant keyword in this tag. i.e. “Weight Loss Story” This main keyword placed in the H1 tag will substantially increase your page ranking! The Header 2 tag should contain your second most important keyword. The header 3 tag will have your least important keyword placed in it. These header tags are often overlooked, but make a significant difference in your on page search engine optimization.

The body content of your Web page should be rich with keywords and relevant content. You should have each keyword appear at least once for every 1-2 paragraphs. Do not stuff your body with keywords. You want to give your body a clean natural look, meaning do not over or under use keywords!

Image tags alt tags should also be keyword rich. Search engines often look at the alt tags of images on your Web site. If the alt tags don’t make use of your keywords then you will be ranked lower than if you had keywords in your alt tags.

5. Homepage Organization

We want the search engines to notice your keywords and index you accordingly. In order to do this you should start and end your body tags with your keywords. This gives the search engine spider information that your page is highly relevant to your keywords.

When the spider looks through your Web site it reads through your content from top left to bottom right. Below is an example of how the search engine reads your page starting with 1 then 2 then 3.

Rather than creating a table that looks like this:
navigational links
Your body text…

You should create a table that looks like this:
Your body text…
navigational links

Now, search engines will view your body content before it views your navigational menu. The search engine will see the top of your page then see a blank area and skip to your body content then move onto your navigational menu

6. Search Engine Submission

The best way to achieve high search engine rankings for new Web sites may not be what you expected. You should not submit your site directly to the search engines as this process can take weeks or even months to get your site listed. Instead you need to get listed on top ranking pages that are relevant to your Web site’s content. These high ranking pages are often optimized on a weekly or even daily basis. Every time the site is indexed your link will appear and the search engines will automatically list your site in its index.

To do this you need to search for Web sites indexed by search engines and get them to link to you. The incentive you need to give them is to write some sort of article relevant to your line of business. At the bottom of the article you include your web page URL to get picked up by the search engines. You submit the article to popular article directories on the Web and you will be indexed by the search engines in a matter of days.

Here’s a list of the most popular article directories:

1. GoArticles.com
2. Ezinearticles.com
3. ArticleCity.com
4. Certificate.net/wwio
5. Amazines.com
6. Articledashboard.com
7. Article-directory.com
8. Submityourarticle.com/articles
9. Magportal.com
10. Isnare.com
11. Pubs.acs.org/hotartcl
12. Article-hangout.com
13. Webarticles.com
14. Articlecube.com
15. Article-buzz.com

The other option is to perform a search of the most generic term that is related to your business. Click through these Web sites looking at the Page Ranks. Contact the Web site and ask them to link to your site and in return for linking back to their site. Always contact sites that are relevant to your line of work and always offer them something their visitors can benefit from once they add your link.

You can purchase a link in top Page Rank sites through link builders. A few of the good Web sites that can do this for you are: textbrokers.com or text-link-ads.com or linkadage.com.

Remember that you only need to purchase a link for one month, since it will take less than one month to get you indexed by the major search engines. Continuing to pay for the link after a month is a waste of your money.

7. Off page Optimization

Here, you need to study the linking strategies of the top 10 Web sites for your keyword. We want to copy their model, but do things slightly better to achieve the top rankings. First open up a spreadsheet in Excel and list the following columns: Linking Web site, Anchor Text, Page Rank, Link Popularity Page Title, and Number of Outbound Links. Then we search your keyword on Google and fill in the information for the top 10 Web sites.

To discover the linking Web sites go to Google and type in the websites URL “link:www.thewebsite.com.” Then count the number of sites that are listed to get the link popularity.

Anchor text is whatever follows the .com or .org of a website URL.

Page Rank is the rank Google gives to Web sites. You can download it for free at Google’s Web site.

Page Title is the title of the page that appears on the top left of the screen. If the title does not contain the keywords then the site is not well optimized and easy to surpass in rankings.

Number of Outbound Links is the number of links located on the webpage linking to the site you’re checking.

Once all this information has been collected you can see what needs to be done to your site to beat the top ranking sites.

8. Search Engines and Capitalization

Capitalizing different letters in keywords brings up different results in search engines. Search engines are case-sensitive so it is important how you use capitalization. The problem with listing every variation of a word results in the search engines thinking that you are spam and deleting your URL. This gets worse with singular and plural words!

The solution is to stick with lowercase listings rather than trying different variations. Studies have shown that most people search in all lowercase and this has the most relevant listings. Not using every other variation means you lose out on 18% of traffic. This is not worth the risk of being banned from the search engines.

9. Search Engine Spamming

Search engine spamming is attempting to achieve top ranks for extremely popular keywords. Search engines have discovered ways to fight keyword stuffing and other search engine tricks. Search engines can detect your spam and will act accordingly by penalizing or banning you from their listings. The risks aren’t worth the temporary rewards. Search engine spam should be considered the same as email spam.

10. Hire a Professional SEO

Hiring a professional search engine optimizer is a great idea if your business relies on Internet sales. Search engine optimization is something that is time consuming and requires lots of research. Most businesses don’t have time to optimize their Web sites. At SEO Optimizers we make sure everything is inline at your site and fix any problems that may be holding you back from reaching the top ranks. If you really want to be at the top of any searches you need professionals to help you solve the problem.

Must Haves

These Google products can make the most basic of computing tasks easy and are a must for any Google devotee.

1. Reader: Reader is a Web-based news aggregator that reads Atom and RSS feeds to allows users to easily subscribe, organize and share news items. It even has a mobile version allowing you to get your news on the go.
2. iGoogle: Create a custom designed home page with iGoogle. Users can choose to have their Gmail accounts, calendars, weather, news and more all integrated on one main page they can see when they open their browser. The site also offers a wide number of themes for further customization.
3. Picasa: This Google program makes it easy to manage your photos online and off. Users can download a photo editing and management program to their desktops which makes it easy to mail, upload or post photos to a blog or they can use the online albums provided by the program.
4. Docs: You no longer need desktop publishing applications installed on your computer to type out documents or create spreadsheets, you can do it entirely online with Google. The services allow users to create, publish, share and collaborate on their documents and presentations, and best of all, they’re available on any computer with an Internet connection.
5. Notebook: Research can be easier with this Web clipping application from Google. It makes it simple to clip text, images, and links from pages while researching and then save, retrieve or share the clips later.
6. Desktop: Make it easy to find everything on your desktop with this application from Google. It allows users to search through their email, computer files, music, photos, chats, and web history to find what they need and also allows them to install useful gadgets to their desktops.

Maps and Travel

Make getting from place to place a snap or explore the surface of another planet with these tools.

1. Ride Finder: Hook up with taxi, limousine and shuttle services through this search tool which uses GPS data from vehicles in 14 US cities. Users will access the program through Google Maps and any service that wants to participate in the program is accessible on the site.
2. Transit: Those taking public transportation will appreciate this mapping tool which helps users to plan a trip via the local public transportation options by using Google Maps.
3. Mars: Doing a little space exploration through these maps of Mars, created through a composite of images and data from two NASA missions to the planet. Users can see the elevation, infrared data and photos of Mars through the site.
4. Sky: Those hampered by bright city lights or clouds can still enjoy looking at the night sky with this program from Google. It provides easy access to images from the Hubble telescope through the Space Telescope Science Institute, allowing users to look through planets, stars, galaxies, satellites and more.
5. Earth: Travel around the world without leaving your desk with Google Earth. The program uses satellite imagery and mapping technology to allow you to find and see any location in the world through an attractive and easy to use interface. Some people have claimed the satellite pics comprimise personal security, but either way, it’s a useful tool.

Web Browsing and Development

1. SketchUp: SketchUp is a simple but effective 3D drawing tool designed for both Macs and PCs that can be a handy tool for architects, civil engineers, designers and even game developers. The program comes loaded with some innovative tools and also allows users to upload their drawings directly into GoogleEarth.
2. Checkout: Designed to simplifying the process of paying for things online, Google Checkout stores customer credit card and shipping information making it easy to purchase things with the click of a button. For added security, the site also offers fraud protection and package tracking.
3. Web Accelerator: Make webpages load a little faster by making use of this tool. It uses data compression, prefetching of content, and shared cached data to make even slow Internet connections less painful to use.
4. FeedBurner: FeedBurner can be an easy way to manage a variety of RSS feeds but it also provides a number of tools that are incredibly useful to bloggers, podcasters and other Web developers like traffic analysis and targeted advertising.
5. Web History: This feature from Google makes it easy to find search results that are most relevant to you, find sites you visited and follow trends in your Web browsing history.
6. Base: This tool from Google is an online database in which any user can add content– text, images, documents and webpages. It can be a great way to get your content out there, as if Google finds your information relevant to a search it may appear in search results, in Google Maps or on its shopping site.
7. Co-Op: Co-Op allows web developers to feature specialized information in Google searches, refine and categorize search queries and create customized search engines based on Google Web Search, making it easier to find information about their pages and on them.
8. App Engine: Developers can build and host websites on Google servers using this tool. At present, the site only offers limited free accounts, but in the future more fully-featured pay accounts will be opened up.
9. Website Optimizer: Make sure your site is ship-shape by putting it through the paces with this Google tool. It checks your webpage, testing the content, to help you create the most effective and profitable advertising campaigns, create user-friendly interfaces, and increase overall conversions.
10. Browser Sync: This tool, created by Google, allows users to sync their Firefox browser settings including passwords, bookmarks, history, tabs and open windows, to different computers via the Internet.
11. Click-to-Call: This advertising systems allows customers to call companies for free, or at least at Google’s expense, from search result pages. Users enter their phone number and Google calls them back, connecting them with the advertiser.
12. Page Creator: This program from Google allows users to design and build webpages and then publish them to sites hosted by Google. Users are offered 100 MB of storage and the program comes with a variety of preloaded templates and layouts.

Social Networking and Communication

1. Orkut: This social networking service used to be invitation only, but since 2006 has been open for anyone to join. It allows users to create an account, list information and interests and talk with and add friends to a profile. While less popular in the United States, the site is one of the biggest in both India and Brazil and can be a great way to meet people from around the world.
2. Android: Android is an open source mobile phone platform that is based in the Linux OS and is in the later stages of development by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. When it is released in late 2008, it will allow users to have more control over their mobile devices and, Google hopes, encourage them to use Google products from just about everywhere.
3. Send to Phone: Send yourself a message from the Web with this tool. It allows users to send text messages to their mobile phones about anything they want to remember or share from a simple Google website or through a Firefox extension.
4. Shared Stuff: Google offers this free Web page sharing system that allows users to save and share pages they find interesting on the Web with others. The program can also be integrated into Facebook or del.icio.us.
5. Talk: You may have heard of Google Talk but did you know that it’s not only a chat tool but can be used for VoIP conversations as well? Users can make the most of the service, and enjoy its integration into their Gmail accounts.
6. Dodgeball: This social networking site was created for use on mobile phones and allows users to text in their current location and get information about friends and interesting events that are nearby, as well as the ability to invite friends to come to their current location. It’s currently available in 22 cities in the US.
7. Friend Connect: This new feature offered by Google allows users to easily add social networking functionality to their sites. You can integrate the program with sites like Facebook and Orkut and best of all it requires no in-depth programming know-how.
8. GrandCentral: GrandCentral is a VoIP service that allows customers to link several phone numbers. Users can set up the service to ring certain numbers at certain times of the day or to go through a series of numbers in order to contact them. As an added bonus, it also features a unified voice mail service. The service is currently in the beta stages and users will have to request an invite to get a number.
9. Sites: Create and collaborate on shared websites with this tool from Google. Users can create a simple webpage, collect relevant information and choose who can edit and work on the project with them.

Custom Search Tools

Narrow down your search with these effective online tools.

1. Scholar: Google Scholar provides a great way to through the full text of scholarly literature from all fields and formats. The index of materials gives easy search capabilities to nearly all peer-reviewed journals that appear online and has a “cited by” feature that can make is easier to find related materials and gather sources.
2. Patent Search: This specialized search tool from Google allows users to search through millions of patents from 1979 to the present to see if a particular design or idea has already been claimed. Each patent results page will come complete with citations, drawings and claims from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
3. Sets: More of a fun tool than a search engine, Google Sets allows you to enter a few items of a set into a search query and the site will try to predict other items in the set. While it’s right on a majority of the time, some results will undoubtedly produce a chuckle.
4. Catalogs: Tired of those old catalogs piling up or filling your mailbox? Unsubscribe to them and browse through catalogs with Google instead, which has collected over 6,600 print catalogs.
5. Search by Number: Did you know you can enter an area code, parcel tracking number or flight information into Google and get the information you need quickly and easily? Simply type in what you’re searching for and Google will do the rest.
6. Accessible Search: This search engine is designed especially to aid those who are visually impaired or blind by giving priority to sites that have been designed for usability by everyone.
7. Trends: Get easy to read graphs of Web trends over time with this tool. It allows users to track searches over city, region or country to see when certain topics were of more interest to browsers. Users can also take a look at Hot Trends which displays the most popular searches over the past hour.
8. Book Search: Formerly known as Google Print, this tool allows users to search through the full text of books that are scanned and stored in the Google database. Results range from entire books to short excerpts depending on arrangements with publishers and copyright issues with the materials.
9. News Archive Search: Browse articles that go back over 200 years with this integrated feature of Google News. Users can find articles from sources like the New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and more.
10. Special Searches: Google offers a wide variety of special search tools that can help narrow down what you’re looking for. Choose from searches that specialize in universities, the government, public service, Linux, Microsoft, Apple and more.

Miscellaneous Google Tools

These various Google tools can keep you busy for hours or make doing a wide variety of things even easier.

1. Google Pack: Windows users can take advantage of this collection of software from Google and partner companies. It includes popular Google programs like Desktop, Picasa, Toolbar, Earth and Talk as well as third party applications like Firefox, Adobe Reader, Skype and StarOffice.
2. Gadgets: These mini-applications can by placed on a webpage or on your iGoogle site or if you have Google Desktop to your desktop as well. They make it easy to keep track of events, to-do lists, check the weather, or even just play games.
3. Pinyin IME: With an increasingly global economy, it can be useful to have tools that make it easy to communicate with those speaking other languages. This tool from Google China allows users to convert Pinyin characters that can be entered on a western style keyboard to Chinese characters.
4. Image Labeler: Users can help label images for better search results with this tool that uses a game-like interface. Users compete against another player to label images, creating an enjoyable time for them and helping Google create a more accurate search database.
5. Code Search: Programmers looking for help with code or open source code to use will get directed results with this specialized search tool.
6. Alerts: This email notification service sends out alerts based on categories like news, web and groups. Users are alerted when new articles make in into the top ten news articles or top twenty search results for that item.
7. Apps: Businesses can use Google products within their own domain names with this tool. The standard edition is free, and users can upgrade if they need more storage to use Gmail, Talk, Docs and more.
8. GOOG-411: Google offers users a free 411 service when calls are made from anywhere in the United States and Canada. The service uses speech recognition to help users find a local business or service in their area.
9. Google Moblizer: Make any webpage mobile friendly with this great tool. If you can’t seem to get a page to display right on your PDA or iPhone, pop the URL into this tool and Google will display a stripped down, simpler version of the page that’s easier to see on your mobile device.
10. Gears: Gears is an open source project that gives Web applications more versatility and power by adding new features to your web browser that can include storing data locally, interacting with desktop products and running JavaScript in the background.

Over the last few parts you have learnt how to use most of the standard drawing tools in Flash. In this part of the tutorial I will show you how to create your first Flash movie with animation.

Symbols

In order to animate something in Flash it must first be changed into a Symbol. There are three types of symbol: Graphic, Button and Movie. In this part of the tutorial I will just deal with Graphics.

To start, draw a filled circle in the middle of the screen, a few centimetres high. Choose the arrow tool and double click on the circle to select it and the line around it. Then press F8 on the keyboard. You will get a window called Symbol Properties. In this window you can give a name to your symbol so that you can refer to it later. Type ‘Circle’ (without the quotes) in the box and then select Graphic and click OK.

You will now notice that the circle apears with a blue line around it. The next thing you will want to do is to animate this circle.

The Timeline

To create animation in flash you must use the timeline:

The timeline window shows all the frames that make up your animation and all the layers (which will be covered later). Each small box in the timeline is a frame. The animation runs at 12 frames per second (shown at the bottom) as standard but this can be changed. As you can see above, there is a black dot in the first frame. This signifies that it is a keyframe.

Keyframes

Keyframes are very important in flash as they are used whenever something is changed. For instance if you wanted the circle to appear in another position later in the movie you would create a keyframe in the frame where you want it to change and then you could move the circle without affecting the rest of the movie. That is exactly what you are going to do now.

Right click in frame 50 on the timeline and choose Insert Keyframe. This will insert a new keyframe into the animation at frame 50 and it will contain the same information as the previous keyframe. You could have also chosen Blank Keyframe which will make a new blank keyframe but you want the circle to be in both keyframes in your movie.

Now, click in frame one and press Enter to play the movie. As you can see you now have a 4.1 second long movie of a circle in the middle of the screen – not very interesting.

To make something happen you will need to change the second keyframe. Click on it (frame 50) and the symbol of the circle will be selected. Now, with the arrow tool, click and drag the circle to the upper left hand corner of the stage. Then click in frame one again and press Enter to play the movie.

Animation

The movie you have created now has a circle which moves on the screen but, as you will have noticed, it stays in the same place and then suddenly moves in the last frame. Animations, like television and film, are made up many frames, each of which has a slight change from the last one. As they are played very fast (12 frames per second in flash) the object looks like it is moving. Luckily, flash has been built so that you don’t have to do all of this manually.

Acutally, animating the circle on the screen is amazingly easy because of the Flash feature called Motion Tweening. This feature will automatically create all the frames to go between two keyframes to animate an object which you have moved (in this case the circle). All you have to do is right click in any frame between your two keyframes and choose Create Motion Tween.

Once you have done this the frames will change from being grey to being blue with an arrow across them. This signifies a motion tween. Click in frame one and press Enter to view your movie. As you can see, now flash has made your circle move smoothly accross the screen and, if you click i
n the frames between your keyframes you will see that it has created all the frames in between.

Scaling

Motion Tweens can be used for other things as well as moving objects. You can also change their size. For this you will use the scale tool. Right click inn frame 80 and create a new keyframe.Your circle will be selected. Now choose the Scale tool:

from the Options section on the tools pallette (if it is not available make sure you have the black pointer tool selected). This tool allows you to change the size of objects. 6 white boxes will appear at the edges of the circle, just like in any other image application. Use the bottom right hand one to drag the circle size until it is considerably larger. You will also notice that the circle grows equally around its centre point. Now, as before, right click in between frames 50 and 80 and choose Create Motion Tween.

In the last part of the tutorial I showed you some of the basic drawing tools in Flash. Before I show you how to create animations in Flash, I will first explain some more of the tools available to you. These tools are not as important as the ones I showed you last week but, to create good animations, it is useful to know how to use all the tools.

Ink Bottle

The ink bottle tool is quite useful. If you have a block of colour (for example one created with the paintbrush – which will be covered later in this tutorial) you can click on it to add a line round the edge. The colour of the line placed round the edge will be the same as the colour selected as line colour on the tools bar.

Dropper Tool

The dropper tool, like the ones in graphics software, is used to pick a colour off one part of the screen and use it as the fill or line colour. If you click on a fill, the fill colour will be set and the pointer will change to the fill tool. If you click on a line, the line colour will be set and the pointer will change to the ink bottle tool.

Eraser Tool

The eraser tool is used to rub things out on the stage. It is used by just clicking and holding down the mouse. It does have a few options though:

The large section at the bottom is used to select the size and shape of the eraser brush. On the right at the top is the faucet tool. This makes the eraser work like the fill tool – you just have to click once to remove the fill from an area. The part on the left is the special option. This allows you to choose the type of eraser you use. The default is Erase Normal, which works like a normal eraser tool. Some of the other options are:

• Erase Fills which will leave all lines intact as you use the eraser but will rub out fills
• Erase Lines which leaves fills but rubs out lines
• Erase Inside which allows you to erase inside a shape without harming the edges

Paintbrush Tool

The paintbrush tool will paint lines all the time you have the mouse button held down. It has some options, though, which are like the eraser tool options:

• Paint fills, will only paint inside a shape
• Paint Behind, which will paint behind all shapes and fills

Pencil Tool

The pencil tool allows you to draw lines on the screen. It is different to a normal freehand tool, though, as it has three options which can be set:

This option will allow you to choose what flash does to your line once you have drawn it. The default option is Straighten. Flash will straighten out your line so that any part of it that is almost straight will be made into a straight line. The two other options are smooth and ink. Smooth will change your line so that it is smoothed out to make curves. The ink option will not make so many changes to your line but will still smooth it a bit and straighten some lines.

The Text Tool

The text tool is used for adding text to your flash movies. Just click on the stage where you want the text to appear and a cursor will appear, where you can type in your text. To make chan
ges you need to use the character palette:

The options here are quite self explanitary. The font section lets you choose the font for the text. With flash all fonts are embeded in the file so the user does not need to have the font on their computer. Below that is the size box which lets you choose the text size. Next to that are the normal bold, italic and colour options. Below that is the Tracking option. This allows you to choose how spaced out the characters are. At 0 the spacing is normal. If you increase this, spaces will be left between your characters. If you decrese it, your characters will start to overlap. The option below this is the superscript/subscript option and below this you can specify a URL for a link.

In the last part I showed you the Flash interface and explained exactly what Flash is. In this part I will show you how to use Flash’s drawing and painting tools to put something into your animation. At this point there will be no interactivity and nothing will move but once you know the basics you can develop this futher.

Basic Drawing

The first thing you need to learn how to do is to draw basic shapes in Flash. We will start with the most basic shape, the circle/oval. Before you start you might want to move some of the floating pallettes so that you can see enough of the stage to work on.

Firstly, choose the Oval tool from the Tools bar on the left:

Then, draw the oval or circle you want on the stage (just as you would in a normal graphics program). Holding down shift will force the object drawn to be a circle. Once you have drawn your circle you will now notice a few things about it. Firstly, there is a line around the circle and a fill inside it. These are changed using the colors section of the Tools bar:

The first option (set at black in this example) is the line colour and the bottom option (blue in this example) is the fill colour. To change them click on the box filled with colour. You will get a menu with a selection of colours. If you want to match the colour to a colour on your screen click on anything on the screen and its colour will be used.

Now, try drawing another circle or oval, but this time change the fill and line colours.

The next tool you will use is the rectangle tool:

As with the circle tool, this works in exactly the same way as in any standard grapics program, you can drag out a rectangle you want to draw and hold down shift to force a square. Like the circle, the rectangle’s line and fill colours are set using the colors section of the Tools bar.

The rectange tool, unlike the oval, has some options which can be set. These appear in the Options section of the Tools bar:

There is only one option for the rectange, the Round Rectangle Radius. This creates rectangles with rounded corners like this:

Click on the option. A box appears asking for the radius in pixels. The example above used a radius of 20 pixels but it is best to experiment to find the best setting for what you want. After you have set this draw another rectangle. This one should have rounded corners. Remember: Flash will remember this setting so before you draw another standard rectange you should set it back to 0.

Like any other drawing program, Flash also has a straight line too:

This works in exactly the same way as the line tool in graphics software.

The objects you have drawn can also be moved. You must be careful, though, as Flash treats the fill and the line separately, so to move both together you must double-click in the object before dragging it if you want to move them both.

Drawing Or Painting?

Flash is a very strange program for editing grapics. It is really a cross between a drawing and a painting program with some special features of its own. It is like a drawing program because you can move and change objects once you have drawn them but it acts like a painting program with fills etc. For example if you drew two circles, a large one with a black line and a blue fill and a small one with a black line and no fill, then moved
the small one on top of the bigger one. You could then use the fill tool to fill in the middle of the small circle, changing only part of the big one.

Flash also allows you to break up graphics using other ones. If you now moved the small circle away from the larger circle it would leave a white space behind where it used to be. This feature can be extremely useful.

Special Fills

AS well as filling a shape with a single colour you can also use Flash’s premade fills. They are found at the bottom of the fill box. There are three gradient fills but the best are the radial fills. These allow you to fill in any shape with a radial gradient (going from light to dark). The special thing about them is that the lightest part will be where you click your mouse when using the fill option:

so you can very effectively make 3D looking circles, which are excellent for buttons.

Flash is one of the most popular technologies on the internet, with thousands of websites using it for introductions, animations and advertisements. Although many people feel that these animations are sometimes unnecessary, Flash has created a way of including multimedia on web pages, which will run over a standard internet connections. The recent release, Flash 5, has brought many changes to the creation of Flash animations. Many of the techniques covered in this tutorial will also apply to past versions of Flash, as well as Flash MX, the very latest version, though. If you are not sure what a Flash animation is like click here for an example. If this does not work you will need to download the Flash Plugin.

Why Use Flash?

Flash is one of the best multimedia formats on the internet today for several reasons. Firstly, the Flash plugin (required to view the animations) is installed on nearly every computer connected to the internet. All the major browsers come with it installed by default and, for those who don’t have it, the download is very small. Secondly, Flash is a ‘vector based’ program, which means the animations and graphics created by it have much smaller file sizes than a video or streaming media version of the same animation would be. You can also include sound, graphics and dynamically created information in your animation.

Flash provides a versatile and easy way for webmasters to create animations for their users.

What Do I Need?

As mentioned above, all you need to view a Flash animation is a modern web browser with the Flash plugin. To create Flash animations, though, you will need some software. Although there are other Flash creations on the market, Macromedia’s Flash 5, is by far the best and, as Macromedia created the Flash format, it always has the latest features in it. Unfortunately, the software costs $400, but you can download a free 30 day trial from Macromedia.

Once you have downloaded and installed the trial (or bought the software) you will be ready to start creating Flash animations.

The Flash Interface

When you first open Flash you will find an interface that looks something like this:

I will quickly cover the different aspects of this screen.

In the centre is the large white ‘Stage’. This is the actual movie where you will place all the objects you want to include in it.

Across the top of the screen is the timeline. This is where you insert all the actions that happen in your movie so that they happen at the correct times. It is split up into frames.

Down the left hand side of the screen is the ‘Tools’ pallette. This is where you will find all the tools for inserting objects and text into your animation.

There are also four floating pallettes on the screen. The ‘Mixer’ pallette allows you to choose the colours you will be using in your animation. It will change the colours of the currently selected object. The’ Info’ pallette will allow you to find out a bit of information about the object you have selected and will allow you to make changes to the properties of a tool you are using. The ‘Character’ pallette contains all the text formatting tools. Finally the ‘Instance’ pallette contains all the tools for changing objects when you are animating them, including sound and several other tools for making changes to your animation.

Each of the parts of the Flash window does many different things. Instead of going through each tool explaining what it does, I will show you examples and explain how to create them, showing you how to use each tool while doing so.

Although there are many uses of the .htaccess file, by far the most popular, and probably most useful, is being able to relaibly password protect directories on websites. Although JavaScript etc. can also be used to do this, only .htaccess has total security (as someone must know the password to get into the directory, there are no ‘back doors’)

The .htaccess File

Adding password protection to a directory using .htaccess takes two stages. The first part is to add the appropriate lines to your .htaccess file in the directory you would like to protect. Everything below this directory will be password protected:

AuthName “Section Name”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /full/path/to/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

There are a few parts of this which you will need to change for your site. You should replace “Section Name” with the name of the part of the site you are protecting e.g. “Members Area”.

The /full/parth/to/.htpasswd should be changed to reflect the full server path to the .htpasswd file (more on this later). If you do not know what the full path to your webspace is, contact your system administrator for details.

The .htpasswd File

Password protecting a directory takes a little more work than any of the other .htaccess functions because you must also create a file to contain the usernames and passwords which are allowed to access the site. These should be placed in a file which (by default) should be called .htpasswd. Like the .htaccess file, this is a file with no name and an 8 letter extension. This can be placed anywhere within you website (as the passwords are encrypted) but it is advisable to store it outside the web root so that it is impossible to access it from the web.

Entering Usernames And Passwords

Once you have created your .htpasswd file (you can do this in a standard text editor) you must enter the usernames and passwords to access the site. They should be entered as follows:

username:password

where the password is the encrypted format of the password. To encrypt the password you will either need to use one of the premade scripts available on the web or write your own. There is a good username/password service at the KxS site which will allow you to enter the user name and password and will output it in the correct format.

For multiple users, just add extra lines to your .htpasswd file in the same format as the first. There are even scripts available for free which will manage the .htpasswd file and will allow automatic adding/removing of users etc.

Accessing The Site

When you try to access a site which has been protected by .htaccess your browser will pop up a standard username/password dialog box. If you don’t like this, there are certain scripts available which allow you to embed a username/password box in a website to do the authentication. You can also send the username and password (unencrypted) in the URL as follows:

http://username:password@www.website.com/directory/

Summary

.htaccess is one of the most useful files a webmaster can use. There are a wide variety of different uses for it which can save time and increase security on your website.

In the last part I introduced you to .htaccess and some of its useful features. In this part I will show you how to use the .htaccess file to implement some of these.

Stop A Directory Index From Being Shown

Sometimes, for one reason or another, you will have no index file in your directory. This will, of course, mean that if someone types the directory name into their browser, a full listing of all the files in that directory will be shown. This could be a security risk for your site.

To prevent against this (without creating lots of new ‘index’ files, you can enter a command into your .htaccess file to stop the directory list from being shown:

Options -Indexes

Deny/Allow Certian IP Addresses

In some situations, you may want to only allow people with specific IP addresses to access your site (for example, only allowing people using a particular ISP to get into a certian directory) or you may want to ban certian IP addresses (for example, keeping disruptive memembers out of your message boards). Of course, this will only work if you know the IP addresses you want to ban and, as most people on the internet now have a dynamic IP address, so this is not always the best way to limit usage.

You can block an IP address by using:

deny from 000.000.000.000

where 000.000.000.000 is the IP address. If you only specify 1 or 2 of the groups of numbers, you will block a whole range.

You can allow an IP address by using:

allow from 000.000.000.000

where 000.000.000.000 is the IP address. If you only specify 1 or 2 of the groups of numbers, you will allow a whole range.

If you want to deny everyone from accessing a directory, you can use:

deny from all

but this will still allow scripts to use the files in the directory.

Alternative Index Files

You may not always want to use index.htm or index.html as your index file for a directory, for example if you are using PHP files in your site, you may want index.php to be the index file for a directory. You are not limited to ‘index’ files though. Using .htaccess you can set foofoo.blah to be your index file if you want to!

Alternate index files are entered in a list. The server will work from left to right, checking to see if each file exists, if none of them exisit it will display a directory listing (unless, of course, you have turned this off).

DirectoryIndex index.php index.php3 messagebrd.pl index.html index.htm

Redirection

One of the most useful functions of the .htaccess file is to redirect requests to different files, either on the same server, or on a completely different web site. It can be extremely useful if you change the name of one of your files but allow users to still find it. Another use (which I find very useful) is to redirect to a longer URL, for example in my newsletters I can use a very short URL for my affiliate links. The following can be done to redirect a specific file:

Redirect /location/from/root/file.ext http://www.othersite.com/new/file/location.xyz

In this above example, a file in the root directory called oldfile.html would be entered as:

/oldfile.html

and a file in the old subdirectory would be entered as:

/old/oldfile.html

You can also redirect whole directoires of your site using the .htaccess file, for example if you had a directory called olddirectory on your site and you had set up the same files on a new site at: http://www.newsite.com/newdirectory/ you could redirect all the files in that directory without having to specify each one:

Redirect /olddirectory http://www.newsite.com/newdirectory

Then, any request to your site below /olddirectory will bee redirected to the new site, with the
extra information in the URL added on, for example if someone typed in:

http://www.youroldsite.com/olddirecotry/oldfiles/images/image.gif

They would be redirected to:

http://www.newsite.com/newdirectory/oldfiles/images/image.gif

This can prove to be extremely powerful if used correctly.

In this tutorial you will find out about the .htaccess file and the power it has to improve your website. Although .htaccess is only a file, it can change settings on the servers and allow you to do many different things, the most popular being able to have your own custom 404 error pages. .htaccess isn’t difficult to use and is really just made up of a few simple instructions in a text file.

Will My Host Support It?

This is probably the hardest question to give a simple answer to. Many hosts support .htaccess but don’t actually publicise it and many other hosts have the capability but do not allow their users to have a .htaccess file. As a general rule, if your server runs Unix or Linux, or any version of the Apache web server it will support .htaccess, although your host may not allow you to use it.

A good sign of whether your host allows .htaccess files is if they support password protection of folders. To do this they will need to offer .htaccess (although in a few cases they will offer password protection but not let you use .htaccess). The best thing to do if you are unsure is to either upload your own .htaccess file and see if it works or e-mail your web host and ask them.

What Can I Do?

You may be wondering what .htaccess can do, or you may have read about some of its uses but don’t realise how many things you can actually do with it.

There is a huge range of things .htaccess can do including: password protecting folders, redirecting users automatically, custom error pages, changing your file extensions, banning users with certian IP addresses, only allowing users with certain IP addresses, stopping directory listings and using a different file as the index file.

Creating A .htaccess File

Creating a .htaccess file may cause you a few problems. Writing the file is easy, you just need enter the appropriate code into a text editor (like notepad). You may run into problems with saving the file. Because .htaccess is a strange file name (the file actually has no name but a 8 letter file extension) it may not be accepted on certain systems (e.g. Windows 3.1). With most operating systems, though, all you need to do is to save the file by entering the name as:

“.htaccess”

(including the quotes). If this doesn’t work, you will need to name it something else (e.g. htaccess.txt) and then upload it to the server. Once you have uploaded the file you can then rename it using an FTP program.

Warning

Before beginning using .htaccess, I should give you one warning. Although using .htaccess on your server is extremely unlikely to cause you any problems (if something is wrong it simply won’t work), you should be wary if you are using the Microsoft FrontPage Extensions. The FrontPage extensions use the .htaccess file so you should not really edit it to add your own information. If you do want to (this is not recommended, but possible) you should download the .htaccess file from your server first (if it exists) and then add your code to the beginning.

Custom Error Pages

The first use of the .htaccess file which I will cover is custom error pages. These will allow you to have your own, personal error pages (for example when a file is not found) instead of using your host’s error pages or having no page. This will make your site seem much more professional in the unlikely event of an error. It will also allow you to create scripts to notify you if there is an error (for example I use a PHP script on Free Webmaster Help to automatically e-mail me when a page is not found).

You can use custom error pages for any error as long as you know its number (like 404 for page not found) by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument errornumber /file.html

For example if I had the file notfound.html in the root direct
ory of my site and I wanted to use it for a 404 error I would use:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

If the file is not in the root directory of your site, you just need to put the path to it:

ErrorDocument 500 /errorpages/500.html

These are some of the most common errors:

401 – Authorization Required
400 – Bad request
403 – Forbidden
500 – Internal Server Error
404 – Wrong page

Then, all you need to do is to create a file to display when the error happens and upload it and the .htaccess file.