So, I’ve determined that I’ll keep Ardamis.com as a place for experimentation and create a new site to handle the web development business – Aleph Studios. It’s so new that I have to think sometimes about how Aleph is spelled as I type it.

I’ll be migrating some of the pages away from Ardamis over the next week or two.

Anna Maria College is a private, not-for-profit, Catholic liberal arts institution accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. In addition to the various undergraduate and graduate programs and courses offered at its campus in Paxton, Massachusetts, AMC offers undergraduate and graduate programs online to reach the most diverse group of students possible.

Anna Maria College Online currently offers three degree programs online: a M.S. in Emergency Management, a M.A. in Fire Science and a B.S. in Fire Science.

The master’s in Emergency Management is one of the oldest and most well-established of its kind in the country. The master’s in Fire Science is intended for experienced firefighters, officers, fire chiefs, and other fire-service professionals who may need a master’s degree to be considered for a promotion or entry into management and high-level positions. The bachelor’s in Fire Science is for students who are preparing for an entry-level career in fire service and safety.

This was the first site that I developed since installing the Page Speed Firebug plugin, and I have tried to really improve on page load times. The site uses optimized images, a single minified JavaScript, and a single CSS file with 0 very inefficient rules, 3 inefficient rules, and 0 potentially inefficient uses of :hover out of 165 total rules. I’ve also paid greater attention to the order of my includes so as to not restrict parallelization, described in more detail in this video about Properly including stylesheets and scripts. So, I’m pretty pleased with its performance.

I was looking for just this kind of a project because I wanted a reason to play with TinyMCE, an Open Source, platform independent, web-based JavaScript HTML WYSIWYG editor control, and SWFUpload, a small JavaScript/Flash library that does very neat things with file uploads.

The most difficult part was actually getting the templates to look good in a variety of browsers. Because the template HTML appears inside of a larger page, I couldn’t rely on Doctype switching to place IE into standards mode. This meant the templates would have to be developed so that they would look approximately the same in standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, as well as horrible browsers like IE6 in quirks-mode. I tried very hard to minimize the use of tables, but they eventually crept in. I was able to use CSS, for the most part, though if any more issues come up, I’m going to throw in the towel and just do inline styles.

The web app is open to the public, but realize that it’s very early in its development and I intend to continue making changes.

Online Project Management Certificate Program

Become the professional that can lead within any size company or organization by completing the Saint Joseph’s University Professional Project Management Certificate online. Obtaining this certificate through our online program is convenient and helps you balance pursuing your education with your current work and family responsibilities. Achieving a Project Management Certification will improve your opportunities for career advancement and position you to receive significant pay increases.

In only 24 weeks, you will learn how to become a more effective project manager through readings, lecture notes, supplemental videos/readings, discussion questions, case study analysis and course projects. The courses in this certificate are instructor-facilitated, broken into modules for easy digestion, and self-paced. Learn from Project Management Professionals while receiving concrete feedback designed to help you improve your Project Management skills.

Learn more about how the online Project Management Certificate program prepares professionals to apply project management principles and lead project teams towards successful project completion.

Online Crisis Management Certificate Program

The Saint Joseph’s University Professional online certificate in Crisis Management will help you become a highly skilled and proactive leader that people know they can rely on during a crisis situation. Saint Joseph’s University Professional’s online Crisis Management Certificate is designed to provide you with the skills you need to identify, create, and execute the best possible responses to a wide range of emergencies and disasters.

Learn more about how the online Crisis Management Certificate program will improve your performance and increase your chances for advancement in business, the public sector, or government by demonstrating you have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to provide a quick and effective response in crisis situations.

Online Purchasing & Supply Chain Management Certificate Program

Supply management professionals are responsible for trillions of dollars associated with the purchasing of products and services every year. Knowing how and when to buy goods and services at the right time and at the right price can make or break your business. As a Purchasing Professional, you probably endure tremendous pressure because you are the one responsible for making these decisions on a daily basis. One bad purchase or ill-advised decision could lead to disaster for your company, as well as your career. The Saint Joseph’s University Professional Purchasing certificate curriculum will improve your Purchase Management skills by providing you with a solid foundation of the fundamentals and administration of purchasing, while also preparing you to take the Certified Purchasing and Supply Management (CPSM) certification exam.

Our online certificate program introduces you to the fundamentals of purchasing and supply chain management, improving your success as a purchasing agent, purchasing manager, merchandise manager, procurement manager, buyer or supply chain manager for a company of any size.

Learn more about how the online Purchasing & Supply Chain Management Certificate program will develop your current management skills or help you achieve your goal of becoming a manager.

Lewis University is a regionally accredited, non-profit university that offers 80 undergraduate majors and programs of study, 22 graduate programs, and accelerated programs for working adults. Lewis University also provides highly respected online master’s degrees in addition to its traditional, campus-based programs. This project involved developing a new site detailing three of these online programs: Master of Science in Public Safety Administration, Master of Science in Information Security, and Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership.

In terms of on-page SEO, I was able to insert a good number of meaningful heading tags. In this case, though, the copy I was provided contained headings that naturally followed an outline structure, so there aren’t many headings on the site that exist solely for presentational purposes and all of the headings are followed by either a direct subheading or at least one paragraph of body text.

The most interesting part of this project, developmentally, was a Flash-like slide show thing that actually uses script.aculo.us’ Effect.Move. It’s so smooth and graceful that the designer and I just kept referring to it as ‘the Flash thing’ to keep it simple.

I’ve been asked to take another look at the structure of the site, which includes a handful of pages that reside outside of WordPress, and make some recommendations for improving the PR in 2009. This should be an interesting project, and it’ll give me a chance to apply some SEO techniques that have gained attention since I last touched the theme.

Big Black Pencil provides marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses in Chicago, including advertising and competitive marketing intelligence. The principal focus of the company has been on web site development, Internet marketing, e-commerce, and usability consulting. As such, the owner has some expectations for the site and I’ve been tasked to meet them. The site has a page for each of 10 distinct marketing services: Advertising, Naming, Intelligence, Strategy, Design, Websites, Integrated Marketing, Website Usability, Social Media, and Findability. These pages reside outside of WordPress, so they rarely change, and they don’t contain much copy – maybe 100 words total, including link text. But it’s these pages that are supposed to drive the leads, that contain the call to action and the link to the contact page. The blog is supposed to assist these pages, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. The blog pages actually do really well in the SERPs, are quickly indexed, and appear to help external pages to which they link, they just don’t have a satisfying PR.

The project goals are to identify why so many of the pages on the site are registering a toolbar PR of 0, fix any on-page factors that may be contributing to that, make recommendations on the direction of future posts and revisit old posts, shape the passing of PR to the pages where the conversions take place, and finally, push up the PR of the site’s index page to a 3 or 4.

Saint Joseph’s University Professional offers online professional certificates in Project Management (PMP Exam Prep), Crisis Management, and Purchasing & Supply Chain Management.

I’m very happy with the code behind this site; in particular, the navigation, which works well in two different orientations. It also marks my first opportunity to work with scripting in ASP, beyond simple includes and random number generating. The forms are sent using CDOSYS, as they needed to work both on my domain during the testing phase and then on the client’s domain immediately after I handed over the files.

Creighton University

I was contracted to do some search engine optimization of the Creighton University web site. Creighton has been consistently ranked as the #1 Master’s degree granting university in the Midwest by U.S. News & World Report, and offers a number of online Master’s degrees, including Master’s degrees in Negotiation and Dispute Resolution and Security Analysis and Portfolio Management. The site was pretty typically constructed, with the same title tag on each page, a mix of HTML and XHTML, URLs that didn’t correlate with the page heading, etc. So, this was a straight-forward project, but it was another opportunity to work with ASP and my first introduction to Dreamweaver templates, both of which were client-specified requirements. The pages are now valid XHMTL 1.0 Strict, with unique title and description tags, with relevant h1 tags and supporting text. I also added an xml sitemap and a robots.txt file containing an auto discovery line.

Saint Xavier University

A second project was to do the coding for a small ‘domain aging’ site for Saint Xavier University, a nationally recognized Catholic, coeducational, comprehensive university offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs to students from across the country. The goal of this project is to further enhance the marketing exposure of Saint Xavier University’s Regionally Accredited online academic programs, warm up the domain for the full site yet to be developed, and set a benchmark for the sort of traffic we can expect to get.

Saint Xavier University’s Master’s degree-granting online programs include:

• Master of Science in Nursing Clinical Nurse Leader Track
• Master of Science in Service Management
• Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction