1. If life is a class, you’d be my constructor… because I’m nothing without you baby.
    
2. You orient my objects girl.
    
3. Life is so exciting when I’m with you, I feel like scraping W3C standards.
    
4. Girl, you and me are so compatible, I bet our md5 checksums are a perfect match.
    
5. You and me don’t need an API to communicate, we just understand each other.
    
6. You must be good at SEO because when I search for perfection, you’re my top match.
    
7. I don’t need to modify your stylesheet baby, you’re already perfect.
    
8. I wish I had the RSS feed of your heart.
    
9. If you were a part of my domain, we could share cookies.
    
10. My love for you is like a session that never times out.
     
11. Our love is like open source software… it makes the world a better place.
     
12. I’d love to add you to my blogroll.
     
13. I don’t need analytics to know how many times you’ve visited my thoughts.
     
14. Can I get your IP address just in case I can’t find your domain?
     
15. When we communicate it’s like there’s no latency in the connection.
     
16. Everything you say is important to me baby, there’s no packet loss.
     
17. I’d give you a PageRank of 10 any day.
     
18. If you’re interested, I’d love you give you an inbound link.
     
19. You’re like a framework worth building my life around.
     
20. From here it looks like you’ve got an impressive Google rank.
     

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I know that there’s going to be a firestorm of disagreement or agreement if this post get’s any exposure but I am going to post it anyway. Many would shun me for naming a “best framework” for anything. From a career viewpoint, I have my reasons.

PHP frameworks are everywhere. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and symfony are just some samples of frameworks that have already sprouted and taken root. I’m not going to delve into the specifics of what each can do and what advantages one has over the other. There are numerous other sources that can provide better side-by-side comparisons and even benchmarks of all of the existing frameworks for PHP. I am going to make a recommendation from a career standpoint.

There are a huge number of PHP developers who are entirely independent and have no intentions or desire to get a desk job in a large corporation programming PHP and for that group of developers, feel free to totally ignore this post as it won’t make any sense from your perspective. For the rest of you who are, like me, developing PHP as a career, I will share my findings when it comes to frameworks. Regardless of which framework contains the most bells and whistles and shaves a few lines off your application, if you’re going to spend the time to learn a framework and become an expert, it had better benefit your career as well. It is with that reasoning that I make a framework recommendation.

In the present snapshot of the IT industry, PHP is steadily climbing as a legitimate candidate for larger IT shops. The quantity of PHP jobs increased substantially in just the past year. With certainty, developers who want to get the best of these jobs will need to keep pace with the industry and learn new skillets before they are requested within job postings. I cautiously approached issue of frameworks because I was not sure how the situation would unfold. With the completion of the Zend Framework, I feel it’s likely that this is a skill that will grant it’s early adopters an edge in the market.

Until recently, corporate PHP use has been generally limited to smaller projects, smaller companies, and smaller applications. As PHP use grows in larger projects and larger teams, the need for a framework because greater. So the simple question is: which framework will the industry adopt? While I can’t predict the future, I feel that the Zend Framework is by far the most likely choice from a corporate perspective. Companies will likely choose ZF because it is made by Zend, it has a large support community, it is likely better tested, and because Zend isn’t likely to go anywhere soon. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be groups using other frameworks on occasion, but I am predicting the choice of larger, establish companies as a general trend.

Another huge plus for Zend Framework is the specialties it contains with web services. Web services will undoubtedly be a firm part of the corporate future and ZF’s support for web services will only add to the case. This combined with the other basic reasons will surely make ZF the candidate of choice.

All that aside, ZF is pretty cool. It’s got a tremendous feature set, has a great syntax, and should improve the performance of any PHP dev team. Just as frameworks such as struts and tiles are prevalent in the J2EE world, the same trend will take hold as PHP becomes more acceptable to the larger groups. I recommend getting started with Zend Framework as I already have. If you start gaining experience with it now, you’ll be a step ahead of your competition when it really counts in the future.

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While the story above was hypothetical, something most of us don’t think about until we have a site with a decent amount of traffic is that there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t want to you be highly ranked on search engines. One thing you might not realize is that there’s a relatively easy way to hack your site’s search engine rank. This is especially the case with Google. One of the main Google ‘rules’ listed on their webmaster help center is: Don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. This means Google doesn’t want to see pages and pages of the same “stuff” on your domain.

“Then this doesn’t apply to me!” you might say. However, lets think about what Google defines as a “page”. For Google, a “page” can be any document it crawls that has it’s own unique URL. So, yourdomain.com/file.php, yourdomain.com/file.php?hello=world, and yourdomain.com/file.php?hello=mom can all be seperate pages to Google. “Still doesn’t apply to me… my links are all uniform and I use Apache rewrites.” OK, so your pages are all correctly linked on your site. But what’s to stop me or someone else from linking to a creative spin on one of your pages? What if a devious person cleverly dispersed hundreds of these links across a variety of pages. When Google crawls these pages, it will crawl these links to your site, and find a potentially endless list of “duplicate” pages. As far as Apache rewrites go, you might think you are protected but if you use rewrites such as this: yourdomain.com/avoid-seo-hack-32.html, and 32 is some unique id that you are using to serve your content, then what’s to stop me from linking to: yourdomain.com/duplicate-content-32.html. Chances are, this is going to work and its going to look even worse to Google.

<?

// —————————
// SEO HACK FIX// the way the url should look
$correct_url = “/avoid-seo-hack-32.html”;

// compare url to correct url
if ($correct_url != $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’])
{
// the page url didn’t match, so we 301
// direct to the correct url
header(“Location: {$correct_url}”);
exit();
}
// —————————
?>

“Ahhh! So how can I protect my site from this?”

The solution is simple… I wrote a few lines of php that should help you out. Basically, all you need to do is determine the correct URL for your page, then check the URL that has been requested. If it doesn’t match, then redirect the user to the correct URL. Once you have done that, you will be protected against this hurting your SEO score… either accidentally or maliciously.

I am sure someone looking for ways to hack a sites search rankings will read this blog and go to work with their devious plan. However, now that you know how to avoid it, your site will be safe.

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Not only does this add unnecessary size to the project and makes changes ten times harder, it also hurts SEO scores as well. No, I’m not saying that your friendly neighborhood GoogleBot is easily confused, but it does effectively dilute the weight of your text. In most cases, the “stuff” that you want bots to use to rank your site is the raw text. Yes, I understand that formatting this text is important by using h1 tags, font sizes, etc but there is also a visible-to-hidden content ratio that most bots consider. If you have 4 lines of text to display, 400 lines of formatting will cause that text to have less weight and relavancy than using 40 lines of formatting.

Proper use of CSS can greatly reduce the amount of markup on each page. However, everything can be used to much so I try to practice a less is more approach. If you can achieve the same result without an image, whats the point in using and image? I am not at all against the proper use of tables but if you can achieve the same result without them, then take the simpler approach. The point is to achieve the result that you want in the most efficient and to-the-point way possible. Not only is this good, clean coding, its also a solid approach to web 2.0.

Another point I can’t stress enough is adherence to W3 standards. I’ve dealt with people who have no regard for any type of web standards and not only was editing their work a headache, it was also a huge roadblock to SEO. There might be other opinions on this out there but I can tell you that working side by side with very similar projects, one with terrible W3 standards and the other with perfect conformity. The latter appeared at the top of many of our targeted searches, gained PageRank twice as fast, and was indexed faster than the other. The project with poor conformity also stalled at a specific PageRank even though it now has twice the traffic and ten times the inbound links than the other project. I imagine its still there with the same PageRank.

“But what coding standard should I choose? HTML 4.01, xHTML?”

My experience has been that even though its painful to convert larger projects, xHTML 1.0 Strict has worked extremely well for me. If you are dealing with a great deal of legacy code, xHTML 1.0 Transitional might make your life a little easier. While Adhering to any standard is better than nothing, xHTML is basically well-formed HTML and its going to become necessary at some point to make the switch so why not start now.

Everyone loves WordPress and its tendency to get eaten up by search engines. Most of the advice I have in this post is put into practice by WordPress. Its not definitive proof that I know what I’m talking about but I think most of you would agree it all makes sense. I know this isn’t news to a lot of you that have been doing this for a while now but I am amazed to see the amount of disregard for coding standards out there. A syntax error wouldn’t slide in a conventional application so why does it happen so much with ML?

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“Oh no, not another web design blog!”

I know that there are a million web design blogs out there so I propose a new genre. Welcome to my web style blog.

Although, I am a career applications developer, graphic design and internet marketing have always been a deep passion of mine. This can be a great benefit to my work at times and a sharp clash at other times. The duties of a typical developer are to execute work orders passed down from upper management, marketing, or general clients.

Developers aren’t typically expected to do much more than type away into code editors and terminal windows with project specs and mock-ups at hand. Maybe its not quite that bad for all of you, but you get my point. Developers don’t typically have opportunity to meddle with the design side of their work. At this point in my life, I am fortunate to have a job with a decent balance of design and development. If I prefer to churn away at the keyboard, I can do that. However, if I have an idea for a design change, I can mention it and management really does listen.

All that aside, I still find myself coming up with great ideas and having no time or place to make them come to life. I look forward to sharing some of these thoughts and ideas with you… and who knows, maybe someone out there might find something useful.

With respect to my SEO background, I have had the pleasure of working with some extremely talented sources on SEO over my career. Taking a strong interest in the skill, I have also learned a fair amount on the topic as well. I have also worked on some incredibly successful SEO initiatives both past and present.

Open source platforms are definitely my area of expertis. Without getting too technical, I have a couple open source of projects that I am hoping to complete in the near future. I am known to openly endorse outstanding products and services that I use myself.

Considering my development experience, passion for design, and exposure to SEO, I hope offer something interesting to a someone out there.

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