An internet class may be any one of the following:

• A text course delivered via email.
• A text course delivered via website.
• A video or audio course delivered via email or website.
• A full modular class delivered through a system that also delivers quizzes and issues a grade and certificate of completion.
• A class delivered via chat, or video conferencing.
• A class hosted by an organization, broadcast through intranet to another location, utilizing specialized equipment.

And the options are growing daily!

The thing is though, that when you read that someone offers an “internet class” you’d better find out just what it is, because there are many definitions, and value is different from one to another.

It is really just a pretentious techie way of saying that a site is good enough to be publicized and tested by lots of people, but not yet ready to be taken seriously as a fully marketable business. Big sites do this to get people to the site before they’ve worked out all the bugs, and to put it through natural stress testing to find the rest of the bugs.

It works too – on both counts. If you have a fairly complex site that you know you need to have a lot of people visiting before anyone is going to take it seriously, a Public Beta phase can help to get it out there and noticed enough to be a contender. This is especially important for membership sites – you need members to get members, so you can offer free memberships during Public Beta, then charge when you go to full launch.

You can go to Public Beta as soon as you have enough of value to be worth something, but not quite full value. That value may be, in part, determined by traffic volume. Public Beta can last an indetermined amount of time. It gives you time to get the feel of things, and to see how the site performs under fairly natural settings.

Front Porch Folks is a Networking Community. It has some twists on the normal one though, so it catches people’s fancy even in its infancy. But we are still doing a Public Beta, until we get 500 members, because value depends partly on the number of members. Membership is free until then, later it will have a low yearly fee – because we want to keep it affordable for our target market.

Opening the doors to a Public Beta is a good option for a complex site, and provides a sometimes much needed transition between ready for something, and not quite ready for everything!

Worse, many of these people are selling the service of creating a blog for someone else, and just putting together a shoddy scraped blog. Search engines don’t like them, because they aren’t original. People don’t like them either.

Many site owners have no idea that blogging has to be done in a certain way in order to be profitable. When someone promises them a cheap and fast solution, they jump on it, because they think that blogging is easy. And it is, but getting traffic to a business from it ISN’T easy. It isn’t cheap if you pay someone else to do it either!

No blog owner of intelligence and morals is going to approve comments that have nothing but a quote of their own scraped content. Why should they? The backlink doesn’t help them one bit, since search engines will disregard it. The link to the other site from theirs though, is potentially harmful.

So now we have this network out there of scraped blogs – they exist solely for the purpose of automatically seeking out and reposting bits from legit blogs. Eventually, the only links they’ll have back are links from other scraped blogs. Everybody frantically auto-scraping and auto-posting and nobody listening.

Pretty much a waste of time… But then, shortcuts usually are.

I think with each new thing that people can do, they go through a phase of doing it just because they can, and everybody thinking it is neat that they can – look at the pre-WWII cartoons. Most aren’t even funny, they have these characters doing stuff on screen just because they can. They didn’t put much thought into how to really make it entertaining, they could make those characters move, and that was all they tried to do.

So now we have things like Flash, PDFs, Movies, Audio, etc. And all these people out there saying, “you just GOTTA do this!!!” without thinking about the purpose of the site, the target of the business, or the needs of the visitor.
After the shiny wears off, people will start thinking more logically about it – at least, the pros do.

No matter what the new toy, we always should consider whether it will add to the site and to the purpose and function.

There are very few sites that can benefit from Flash headers at this point. And even fewer that can benefit from any other Flash elements which are unfriendly to search engines and the disabled alike.

But there are tons of dynamic features which can benefit a site when they have a need to automate certain features, or break the hourly rate barrier, communicate more efficiently, etc. No feature is right for everybody, and each one has to be weighed carefully, the cost against the benefit. The major problem we see with many so called professionals is that they are recommending the features without mentioning the long term cost, so the site owner gets stung with a site that isn’t really what they needed.

Select carefully. Each choice has a long term impact.

ADA Accessibility for the web means basically two types of compensation – making sure visual elements can be understood by those with visual challenges, and ensuring that auditory elements can be understood by those with hearing limitations.

This is done through text. Text is the universal equalizer. It can be read and understood by people, and machines, so those who rely on machines to interpret web pages for them can still access plain text versions of elements.

This is most commonly seen in an image alt-tag. A bit of text that is displayed if the image is not shown. This is absolutely critical if you use image links on your pages, because otherwise, if the images cannot be viewed, your site cannot even be navigated!

There are other basic ways to compensate also – if you have audio on your site that is critical to the function of the site, simply provide a written transcript for access by the hearing impaired. If you have video, provide either an alt-text or a written transcript, whichever is most important.

In addition to ensuring that major elements are understandable, it is also important to pay attention to simple courtesies in your design – good contrast between text and backgrounds, easy to read font sizes, and other friendly tactics.

These simple tactics beat getting into a wrangle with a lawyer who has an agenda, any day!

This is true of writing, coding, marketing, designing, page layout, and the other skills involved in creating a successful website.

I’ve noticed this mostly in writing. With practice, you can become so familiar with the writing process that you can sit down to the blank page, and channel your thoughts directly from your brain, through your fingers and onto the screen. Practice improves typing skills also, so both your writing skills, and the ability to record the thoughts, improve at the same time.

With practice, you begin to conceptualize very complex sites in your mind, in ways that help you build it more efficiently to start. Long term, you can pull many parts into a quick assessment and conceive of an entire project in a way that makes the process far faster.

These are things that I cannot share though – I mean, I can TELL you this, but some of it you don’t get until you DO it – until you see the results of your own practice.

Practice can help with any aspect of building a site – just doing it, more than once, helps you remember and grow in skill.

We remember what we do. We understand what we do repeatedly.

When you choose a source of info to learn SEO, make sure they are up-to-date. Because some of the recent changes have changed not just a few strategies, like has happened in the past, but they have created some fundamental shifts in philosophy.

Content is still king – but site promotion, so that people can FIND that content, is getting trickier.

This summer’s blogging class will touch on some of these issues, as they relate to blogs. The fall Web Development series will cover it in more depth.

Our daughter was in the third grade. She still could not read at a functional level. We knew this, and we kept complaining to her teacher. Her teacher’s response was, “Of course she can read. She does great on phonics!”

The teacher never had her read in class. The time spend on “reading” in class was spent dissecting reading, and learning ABOUT reading, not DOING it. The teacher had no idea that our daughter could not connect reading and phonics – they had no relation to one another in her mind. We sat her down and began reading with her every night. She became a competent reader within a few months.

Many people are like this. They learn best by doing. So taking a class on how to write HTML won’t help you build a website. Talking about building a website won’t help you build a website either. Only doing it helps you see the concepts in action, and to understand some of the abstract issues.

If you want to learn to build a website, or create a blog, or take a few lbs off your photo, you need to DO it. If you come to class with an idea of something you want to DO, then you’ll be more motivated to learn. If you get to actually build something in class, your learning is better retained. And you discover where the hard parts are, when there is still an instructor in the room to help you over the bumps!

You must move up to installing something to stop it before it gets to the forms, or to filter input at the form. There are a number of options for this, depending on what the site is that you need to protect.

One of our favorites is Bad Behavior http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ It works by stopping spambots from accessing your site content if they are identified as malicious bots. So far it has worked well on the sites I used it on. There have been minor problems with it, but nothing that I could not solve fairly quickly.

Another popular option is the Captcha option, and the other variants for identifying a person instead of a bot. Those forms that ask you to answer a simple question, or type in some squiggly numbers? That’s Captcha. And spambots are the reason for it. It isn’t foolproof, but it works a good percentage of the time.

If you have to move into this realm of protection, look at your options carefully. Remember that IP blocking solutions are almost useless anymore. You want something that works beyond that. Make sure it is well supported also, and updated regularly – or IT can become the source of a problem!

See, here is what happens when you have a form on your site that allows someone to register, send information, post a listing, contact you, etc:

1.Malicious bots are programmed to trawl the web, looking for sites with vulnerabilities. They look for any way to take advantage of your site – one may be programmed to spam, another to abuse a form, another to look for more serious security holes. Some do more than one thing.
2.When they find a site with the type of form they are looking for, they try to take advantage of it. If they fail, they move on. If they succeed, it sets up a chain of events.
3.The bot will proceed to exploit whatever opportunity it found. It may be a weak form, a site that does not have moderation turned on, etc.
4.If it succeeds once, then it marks your site as a target. It is important that you understand that these bots only check ONCE for a hole. If they find it, they will exploit it, and they will keep hammering your site even if you DO install some kind of protection later. Once you are found, the damage is done. This means that if you leave your comments unmoderated, and a bot finds it, and starts plaguing you with spam, it will NEVER STOP. Even if you set the comments to moderated. It will still keep sending you stuff that you have to clean out. Some bots can even break through moderated comments to auto-post. And they never go back to check again to see if it is still working, they just hammer away in the background. They can be unbelievably aggressive, and it just wears on you to try to fight them.
5.In order to get them to stop, you have to do one of two things: You can install something to stop them (which doesn’t really stop them, it just makes it so you can see them anymore), or you can move your site. If you move it where any links still lead to it that lead them there before, or if you move it on the same domain, they’ll find you again within a few hours, because while bots are not programmed to check to see if posts are going live after that first check, they ARE programmed to look if your page disappears.

The first rule then, is to prevent from the start. That means turn ON comment moderation, or post moderation, or registration approvals. Don’t EVER allow a site to operate where someone can register without confirming an email address, or where they can post a comment without someone having to approve it before it goes live. If you do, you are asking for someone to come in and take over your site. If you want it to be valuable to you, you have to keep control of what goes on it.