Q: Are link pages useful?
A: No.

The slightly longer answer:

It depends what you mean by links page.

What I mean by link page is a page on your site that is dedicated to listing various websites that you have linked to in exchange for them to publish your link on a similar page on their website.

If that is what you have a links page, I would say that is definitely not useful. Search engines will at best see it as redundant, at worst spam. Anyone visiting your site will likely do the same. It’s especially true for users if the web page is completely divorced from the main functional purposes of your website. Because people will likely never bother to look at it.
I think the mythical value of links pages was born from two things:

1. Links are good for SEO

True, but even in the original conception of Google’s PageRank algorithm, it was never just about links per se, but links from quality sites. As the granularity of the various search engine algorithms has increased over the years the idea of what constitutes a valuable link in terms of SEO has also become ever more sophisticated. But the idea of the more links you have, the better, has never really been true.

2. Our visitors will follow the links

I don’t deny this must happen a bit, but as I stated above, unless these links are in a place where a lot of visitors are going to look at them, they aren’t going to have any effect. On top of that, if they do come to the page and it’s just a dirty great list of links with no real explanation of what each thing is, they are even less likely to be used.

But I like linking to other people, I think it’s nice

Sure, linking is a fundamental part of the web. You could argue that it was the first really social act of the web, when someone explicitly decided to link to someone else’s content. It’s a way of saying ‘hey – there’s a relationship here’. But ultimately, if you’re going to do this, then you should be doing it in a way that highlights what that relationship is and why you think people should visit the site you are listing.

So how should I link to other sites?

If you have a blog – blog about them. If it makes sense for your site to be linking to them, then there’s a good chance it makes sense for you to publish a short blog post. Blog posts are much more seo friendly and your visitors will appreciate having a bit of context to help decide if they want to see what’s on the other end.
If you don’t have a blog, or still want to have a links page, then it should probably be more directory like – that is to say a short profile of whatever person or organisation or thing it is you are linking to. Again, better for users, better for SEO.

Some useful articles on the subject

There’s a lot of articles on this subject out there, but these two discussions I found particularly helpful in evaluating the subject.

• Would you advise removing a links page
• What a links page should look like

Pass it On are a new company based in Southwold that I’ve been working with to put together various elements of branding. My lastest piece of work for them is their website.

You can view the site at: www.wearitpassiton.co.uk.

If you haven’t set up an .rvmrc

(Which, to be fair you probably should have done)

If you really can’t remember which gemset, start with:

$ rvm gemset list

Then:

$ rvm gemset use [gemset]

Then

$ gem list 

Is all you need to show all the currently loaded gems.

If you have setup .rvmrc

The all you need is run the last ‘gem list’ command. The essential point to remember is that once you’ve switched to your chosen gemset and ruby version, you just execute your gem commands without the ‘rvm’ prefix. (see the bottom of that page).

Whilst we’re on the subject of things I should have done already, I should probably have already setup an rvm prompt too. If I ever get round to sorting these things out properly, I might even write some sort of post about how to set up your rvm environment.

Or you could just look at this blog post, which is easily the most helpful and lucid description of setting up RVM I’ve read so far. Getting started with RVM. It’s a bit old, so there might be aspects that are a little out of date, but most of it still seems to be applicable.

One thing that jars a little is the comparison between this and Firebug, which concerned me at first, however a bit of investigation showed that this too is a temporary state of affairs, with closer integration of the native dev tools and firebug planned for the near future also.

Overall it’s great to see more of these kinds of updates by Firefox, which really represent genuinely useful improvements and will hopefully help to bolster their flagging reputation in the eyes of many users and developers. And hey, you’ve got to love crazy shit like this

I’m not a particularly good programmer, but I do know enough to know that there are aspects of my WordPress development that could benefit from being automated.

In this instance, the usual by-the-numbers setup stuff I do every time I start a new project. In an effort to do that, I’ve ventured into the world of bash scripting to pull together the basic things I do to get a new local copy of my blog going. Here it is, in all it’s glory. Please feel free to comment(constructively) if you feel it could be improved*. My eventual aim is to end up with something that generates dummy content and users etc, but that depends on me finding the time of course.

Points to bear in mind:

It takes a single argument – the name for your dev site and uses that to create a name for the db, password etc. i.e.:

$ sudo wp-setup.sh yoursitename

I do that because it’s simple to do and for dev purposes I’m not too fussy. However, there might be more subtle ideas that would make moving to live easier. Something to think about for the future perhaps.

Note that it also uses sudo, to run the script as root. I do this as I’m editing the apache config files and I have to be root to do that, I think. Maybe there’s a simpler way of doing that, feel free to let me know.

This uses a git clone of the latest stable release from the WordPress svn repo. I do this because I’m familiar with git, but clearly adapting this to svn wouldn’t be too complicated.

*The answer to this is clearly yes.

#!/bin/bash

# Script needs to run as root, is that bad of me? Mainly as it's modifying my apache config. 

EXPECTED_ARGS=1
E_BADARGS=65
MYSQL=`which mysql`

#obviously these are just dev settings, I'm not suggesting these would be great for a live blog :)

Q1="CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS $1_db;"
Q2="GRANT ALL ON *.* TO '$1_u'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '$1_p';"
Q3="FLUSH PRIVILEGES;"
SQL="${Q1}${Q2}${Q3}"
 
if [ $# -ne $EXPECTED_ARGS ]
then
  echo "Usage: $0 sitename"
  exit $E_BADARGS
fi

# Install base wp files - this pulls a copy of the latest stable release of wp, which I maintain on my machine.

mkdir $1
git clone ~/src/wp-stable ./$1
chown -R username:staff ./$1 

echo "wp installed"

# Setup wp database

$MYSQL -u root -e "$SQL"
sed -e "s/database_name_here/$1_db/g" -e "s/username_here/$1_u/g" -e "s/password_here/$1_p/g" <./$1/wp-config-sample.php >./$1/wp-config.php

echo "db ready"

# Add in Vhost statement

printf %s "\
  <VirtualHost *:80>
      DocumentRoot \"/Users/samsutton/Sites/$1/\"
      ServerName $1.local
      ErrorLog \"/private/var/log/apache2/$1-error_log\"
      CustomLog \"/private/var/log/apache2/$1-access_log\" common
  </VirtualHost>
  <Directory /Users/samsutton/Sites/$1/>
  	AllowOverride All
  	Options All
  </Directory>
  " >> /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

# using Ghost gem to add hosts reference, 'cause it's easy.

ghost add $1.local 127.0.0.1
  
# Restart apache to use new settings - site won't be visible otherwise!

sudo apachectl -k restart
echo "all done! Now browse to $1.local to finish setup"

Is where I now live.

The short story is, my wife and I got the opportunity to come down to Suffolk and start our own business, Calendula which has now officially started trading. Yay! Clearly I’m no longer based in Manchester, which some people aren’t aware of yet, hence I felt the need to mention it here.

We both felt like we’d done the city thing for long enough, and living by the sea is something we’ve both wanted to do for a while now. That and the prospect of building our own business was too exciting to pass up. So here we are.

So what of my freelance business? Well, Calendula is still very early days. I can envision a time when perhaps my duties there are such that I will be too busy to take on freelance work, but I can assure you that is not the case right now.

If you’d like to hire me for web design, graphics or ux work, please give me a bell I’d be more than happy to speak to you. Obviously, unless you’re in Suffolk too, it will probably mean my working remotely, at least most of the time, so do bear that in mind.

If you happen to be there, please feel free to say hi; one of the main things I’m going for is not just to hear what the speakers have to say, but for the conversations that will no doubt be generated around them. You will find I look remarkably similar to the cartoon.

There seems to be quite a bit of momentum behind web fonts at the moment, which is as it should be in my opinion. After dealing with the hassle of font-replacement it seems like web typography has taken a massive step forward in the last year or so.

Why the hell should I care about what font I use?

There are a few reasons – firstly I do think a good choice of font is a simple and quick way to improve the visual dimension of your user experience. Applying the font well with a regard to the subtleties of typography would be even better, but just putting a bit of thought into the typeface you use would make some difference. It’s more than most people manage.

Secondly, you might have stringent brand guidelines to follow (or maybe you’re creating some). Although bear in mind that most web font delivery services (is there a better name for these things?) will not have every font you might be looking for. One of my current projects uses a Clarendon for its offline branding, but my current font server of choice is Typekit, who only offer one and it’s not a close enough match to my client’s. Luckily FontDeck offer one that is a better match, but the idea of having multiple accounts with multiple font providers starts to sound a bit fiddly.

Lastly, consistency is a vital part of visual design and web fonts make it easier to be able to maintain that consistency for your organisation as your users move from online to offline and back again.

A note about this site:

As you might suspect, I am using web fonts on this site, in fact I’m using Typekit to serve Museo and Google web fonts for Cantarell both distinguished by their being well designed and free. Whilst I like both fonts, I do also think that using two different font services should probably be regarded as overkill and wouldn’t recommend this kind of behaviour for your own site. Given that this site doesn’t receive a great deal of traffic right now, I figured I could probably get away with it. So there.

Thinking With Type

A great book, which also has a great companion website. Distinguished by the clarity and simplicity with which it deals with it’s subject. Typography is a big subject and Lupton does a great job describing the essentials without drowning you in detail.

Thinking with Type is by Ellen Lupton.

Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works

Another beautifully simple book that is a great introduction to typography for someone who knows little or nothing about the subject.

Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works is by Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger.

The Elements of Typographic Style.

A bit more in depth that the first two, but great for developing a more thorough grounding in the various areas of typography, still written in a very accessible style.

The Elements of Typographic Style is by Robert Bringhurst.

The New Typography

A seminal work, by one of the twentieth centuries masters – Jan Tschichold – which helped establish the use of Sans-Serif typefaces in modern design. Although things have clearly moved on a great deal since then, his work still influences many people now, so it’s worth reading it just for that.

The New Typography is by Jan Tshichold.

The Stroke: A Theory of Writing

A bit more off the beaten track this one, but Noordzij’s thoughtful analysis of writing and typography is great for developing a deeper understanding of the design of letters and how to compose beautiful sentences with them. Incidentally, the publisher, Hyphen press has a series of great, beautifully designed books on various aspects of design and are well worth a look if you want something a bit different.

The Stroke: A Theory of Writing is by Gerrit Noordzij

Let me know if you find these books useful, and if there’s any others you think should be in this list.]]> http://superdeluxesam.com/2010/10/22/getting-into-typography/feed/ 0 http://superdeluxesam.com/2010/09/30/aichers-systemic-approach-to-design/ http://superdeluxesam.com/2010/09/30/aichers-systemic-approach-to-design/#comments Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:20:11 +0000 Superdeluxesam http://superdeluxesam.com/?p=296

Finally got round to reading this excellent book about the life and work of Otl Aicher, and spotted this interesting passage. Aicher is an inspirational figure for any designer, for the breadth and quality of his work as well as the deep, philosophical roots to his work. One thing that consistently appears in his thinking is the idea of designing systems, the most famous of which was the design work for 1972 Olympics in Munich, which remains the de facto model for a branding system.