Web Design Training Blog

I have just deleted 284 spams which some sad spammer sent to this blog hoping they might get some benefit from it. No way. But I have had to disable comments because I do not have time to waste deleting spam.

Spam is the scourge of the Internet. It is criminal activity undertaken by people who dont care about anyhing but their own useless activities.

Spamming makes very little money for the people who engage in it. It costs legitimate businesses huge amounts of money.

It is time to clean up the Internet and start kicking spammers off the Internet

Many of these spams originate in countries that are not taking the Internet seriously and are making no efforts to police what is happening in their own back yard. These countries ought to have their Internet connections turn off until they start doing something about the problems their users are causing to the rest of the world.

Sadly no one will be able to comment on my outburst but hey you can blame the spammers for that.

Looking at the home page for webworkerskitchen.co.uk, I see there is a need to re-structure the content to make it easier for people to use.

The navigation bar on the left of the window has a number of page names but these are not intuitive. I never get any feedback from users (possibly because I haven’t asked them for any !) so I dont know what people want to look for.

If I guess about use, I would say there are two kinds of use of the web site:  (a) people who want a structured approach to learning about web design and (b) people who want to find out about specific things.

The site currently has both kinds of content. There are pages with a lot of links to other web sites.  This is useful and convenient as a way of knowing where to go for what.

Other pages are geared more to explaining how to do things.

One of the problems with a site like this is that bits get added all the time. So, there is a lot of stuff in the right hand column about pages that have been added recently.

What I am thinking about now is changing the first menu item in the main folders bar from “Design links” to “Web Design - basics”.  On that page I can go through the basics of planning, designing and working on a new web site. This structures the material according to the process of working on a web site.
The link lower down currently called “Web design” would handle material relating to specific aspects of web work.

I think also that some of the content might be transferred away from the web site into this blog.

I have relied a lot on links because I dont see the point of putting up writing about something if someone else has made a good job of the same thing on another site.  Well that is what the www is all about - links.

If you are a user of webworkerskitchen.co.uk, feel free to comment and feedback on how best to organise the site and what you would wantto use it for.

Having installed the blog software on the web server and made a few posts to see if its working, I then started to get into using the various functions offered by the application - or at least beginning to find out how to use them.

The software - WordPress - has a help web site. I noticed a thing called a “blogroll” so I went on to the help site to see if I could find how what it was and how it would be configured and used.

After a bit of searching I found the section about Creating and Managing a Blogroll.

I found out that ” The blogroll is where you link to the blogs you read frequently - a friendly way of acknowledging the good blogs out there “.

The Blogroll lists links to other blogs. There is a page on the admin area where these links can be inserted. So I did a search for uk blogs on web design, found a new and added them in.

OH NO NOT SPAMMING!

I now find that blogs get spammed.  Complete idiots try to post their pathetic rubbish to my blog.  It will never get through.  Dont they understand this? Comments that are clearly spam just get marked as spam and deleted before they ever get published.  All that spammers do is to create more work for me to delete their miserable detritus.

If this sounds harsh, just count up the minutes of my time that are wasted every day deleting spam.

Bear in mind that it has been estimated that 80% of all e-mail traffic on teh Internet now is unwanted, unsolicited junk mail.

Who is paying for that?  People like me who are serious Internet users and whose time is being wasted by spammers.

Fortunately,  blogging packages have anti-spamming devices built in and block rubbish from being posted to serious blogs.  Comments are welcomed from serious users but have to be moderated before they are published.