Remix existing websites. Rawr!
“Hackasaurus offers ‘X-Ray Goggles’ for the Web through a simple browser add-on. With those x-ray goggles, users can — as the name suggests — peer beneath the surface to see what the Web is made of. The goggles can be activated on any Web page, enabling a view of its building blocks. By mousing over the various elements of a Web page, users are able to see the code, and by clicking they can actually manipulate it — replacing images, for example, or adjusting fonts or alignment.”
What a fun idea!
Class engagement ++
Pooja Sankar was one of three women in her computer science class in college in India. Recently, the former Facebook, Kosmix, and Oracle engineer launched Piazza, a free online app that allows students and instructors to discuss class material in real time, something she would have found valuable as a student.
Piazza is catching on at a number of top universities, including Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. The online app had 70K new enrollments this Fall term alone; the average student user stays on Piazza for about 4 hours per night. Instructors can chime in to answer questions, or mark students’ responses as “good answers.”
Strength in numbers
Dan Harmer, a computer science teacher in Brampton, Ontario was tired of seeing the few girls in his classes sit quietly at the back of the male-dominated classrooms, so he decided to change the distribution. The school complied with his request to put all the girls into one class and the result was remarkable: “It worked, the intimidation factor was gone and the girls loved it.”
And the positive outcomes didn’t stop there.
When female engineers at the Toronto offices of Cisco Systems Inc., a U.S.-based computer networking company, heard about the all-girls program, they invited the students for a visit. The pros wanted to show the girls the diversity of women working in IT and help them see the field as a viable career option.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the single-sex environment and visible role models are helping; rather than sitting quietly in the back of the classroom, the students in Mr. Harmer’s class brag that they know more about technology than their dads and report that they are considering careers in IT.
Wanted: A few nerdy women
As we get the ball rolling in Boston and continue to grow in Philadelphia, we’re looking for instructors who love geeking out on web development as much as we do.
If you have the knowledge and the confidence to lead a group of smart, determined women on any of the following topics, we should talk!
- HTML / CSS
- JavaScript / jQuery
- PHP / MySQL
- Ajax
- Photoshop
- Git
- WordPress
- Drupal
- Graphic Design
- Business (as it pertains to the web, ‘course :-)
Many of the courses already have curriculum created, so your job is just to come in and teach it. For an example of our material, check out the notes from our first class in the HTML/CSS series. Other topics have not been run yet, and you’ll have the opportunity to help us develop that material (compensation will be higher).
Class commitments are usually a couple hours, one night a week or occasionally a half an afternoon on a weekend.
If this sounds like fun to you, send us some information about yourself and your background to instructors@webstartwomen.com.
And, if you don’t fit the description above, but you know a woman who does, please let her know! The more talented, awesome instructors we can find, the more classes we can run, and the quicker more women can start coding their ideas into reality. :-)
Success!
As the first run of our SEO class approaches on September 6th, I thought I’d share the inspiration behind the class.
The Chi Movement Arts Center, home of Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, has been the gracious host of our past few classes. The dance company was recently invited to perform at an international arts festival and had launched an intensive fund-raising effort, but they had a major problem. Their website was virtually “unfindable” via Google when searching for “kun-yang lin,” “kun-yang lin dancers,” or any similar variation.
Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers have a couple things going against them in terms of having a “type in the domain and go” web address. First, they use the .org extension and peoples’ first instinct tends to be .com. Secondly, their name has a hyphen, but the domain name itself does not.
Because of these challenges, it was especially important that people be able to find them via Google. So, the following is a list of actions we took to get them “findable:”
Find out who is coming up at the top
The first thing we did was assess the situation - basically, we wanted to know who was coming up ahead of them. The good news we saw here was they were basically their biggest competition. Every listing was in fact a reference to them, just not to their site. There were mentions on Temple.edu, PhiladelphiaDance.org, BroadStreetReview.com, etc. There were also hits for their own YouTube and Twitter pages.
Seeing this, I recommended they work on making sure all these other places (past and future) link back to their website. For example, their YouTube page mentioned their website, but it wasn’t actually a hyperlink. This is important because search engine rankings depend on backlinks - the more links you have going to your site the better.
Stop using www
Another thing I noticed in our assessment is that sometimes their site was linked to with the www and sometimes without. This ambiguity can have a negative SEO impact because search engines interpret the two URLs as separate; in short, you’re spreading your Google power across two sites instead of one. I suggested they stick with just linking to their site without the www and I set up some lines in their .htaccess file which would strip out the www even if someone entered it:
# STRIP OUT WWW
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.*) [NC]
rewriterule ^/?(.*) http://%1/$1 [L,R=permanent]
Important HTML tags related to SEO
Next step was the foundation of any SEO audit - we made sure the <title>, <h1> and <meta> tags were all used on every page, and used in an appropriate way. I’ll be covering this material in more detail in Tuesday’s class.
Error pages
This wasn’t directly related to SEO, but having proper error pages set up is important. If a user tries to go to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, it’s a missed opportunity if you don’t have a proper error page sending them in the direction of a working page.
As you can see, the above changes did the trick for starting to get their site on track with search engine results. But there are other things that Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers can do so they start to grab up other search engine keywords they’re interested in (“CHI Arts,” “CHI Movement Arts Center,” “Dance Philadelphia” etc.) What we did was just the start, and really, there’s lots more to do. Here are some suggestions I gave them for improving the site even further:
- Kill the image maps! A substantial portion of their content is an image which won’t be read by search engines
- Make URLs more search engine friendly. Example: http://kunyanglin.org/Company-p4.htm could be http://kunyanglin.org/dancers/
- Make sure all images have alt and title tags
- Build a sitemap and submit it to Google
- Kill use of any frames
- Install Google analytics to get a better understanding of their traffic.
- Purchase the .com and .net domains and make sure they’re all pointing to the same place.
I gave them quite a laundry list. :-) None of this is a silver-bullet for SEO success, which is kind of the point of our SEO class. There are foundational and organizational things you need to take care of, which we’ll cover, but the thing we emphasize the most? Content, content, content.
