This isn’t the first nail in the SEO coffin, nor will it be the last. But it’s a blow that’s hard to ignore: Google just announced an upgrade to its search algorithm that they say will impact 35% of all searches. That’s not a bad thing, either. According to the blog post, the update will produce results that are more up-to-date. For example, if you search for Olympics without specifying which year, the results will automatically assume you mean the 2012 games, rather than older ones. Of course if you really want to read up on the “miracle on ice”, you can still search for 1980 Olympics and read about ice hockey at Lake Placid.

While this is generally good for us as consumers of search results, it doesn’t bode well for certain sites, like the sports desk at the Reuters news service, which doesn’t show up until page 8 of the results. My point is that if you’re creating a new site or updating an existing one, don’t waste your time or money on SEO services. Most of them seem to be hucksters anyway, but even if they can get your site up in the rankings, there’s little chance you’ll stay there. What should you do, instead? Spend time on your social network connections and — gasp! — interact with your customers.

Maybe you’re already familiar with web sites that let you create your own, basic site for free and without having to know any programming, using pre-made templates. Places like Google Sites, WordPress.com, Tumblr and Blogger are all popular. If you want to check out another one, look at Onepager. It lets you use a custom domain name (like www.mycompany.com) and includes analytics, so you know if you’re reaching your target audience. And did I mention they just raised $350 thousand in financing from angel investors? It means that something must be in the works, there.

If you’re on YouTube or Vimeo and click an Embed button to get the code to embed a video on your site or on your blog, you might notice something new: the code they give you is a simple 1-line iframe, rather than the long, complicated object and embed tags.

Years ago, people predicted that iframes would go the way of the dodo, but developers still find them useful. The reason YouTube and Vimeo are now using them is that the iPad and iPhone don’t support Flash, and that’s the format these videos are coded in. But when you insert an iframe, the video sharing service can insert something more compatible. The iframe code also has the advantage of being a lot more simple, and it’s easier to re-size the video to fit your web page.

If you still need the old method for backwards compatibility, both sites let you click a button to get the legacy code.

There’s a cool Firefox add-in that puts rulers and guides in the browser window, so you can measure things just like in Photoshop, Flash, Quark and most other graphics applications. The add-in is called foxGuide and you can download and install it from Mozilla here. Just be aware that it’s currently a beta release. Like most other add-ins, it’s free, and the developers don’t even seem to be asking for donations. I’m running foxGuide in Firefox 4 beta 9 without a problem.

Once foxGuide is installed, activate it from the pop-up menu when right-clicking the screen:

You can then drag as many horizontal and vertical guidelines on the screen as you want. Remove one at a time by dragging it off the screen, or remove them all by right-clicking and choosing Reset Guides. Or just refresh the browser.

The only minor glitch is that because the rulers lie on top of the screen, they take up a small amount of space (rather than pushing the screen away), so if you want to measure something right at the edge it can take some fiddling. But that isn’t terrible; just make the rulers transparent to see what’s behind them. You probably also want to fix the rulers in place, otherwise they’ll scroll out of view when you scroll the page. You control the preferences with a small control panel in the lower, right corner of the screen.

According to StatCounter.com, IE6 — the bug-ridden, security-plagued, non-standard bane of web development — has fallen to an all-time low rate of fewer than 3% of all browsers in use. Thank goodness! It overstayed its welcome for about 5 years, long after IE 7 and 8 were introduced. For much of the last decade, developing web sites that would display properly in IE 6 as well as in browsers that actually worked properly often meant doing the work twice.

IE 7 was better, but still did weird things, and the further good news is that version 7 only accounts for about 13% of all browsers in use. IE 8 and IE 9 (now in beta) are W3C standards-compliant and display pages the same way as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and others.

Click for bigger image

You can help drive in the final nail by pasting a bit of code in all your pages that uses IE conditional comments to tell people using the old version that they should upgrade. Get the code at www.ie6nomore.com.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to use PNGs on your web site.”

OK, maybe he didn’t say that. But the time has come, anyway. Although PNG (Portable Network Graphic) images are a better technology than either GIF or JPG, Internet Explorer was slow to adopt its transparency feature. But starting with IE 7, which came out several years ago, IE supports it. (IE 8 is the current version, and IE 9 is already in public beta). The reason I was reluctant to use PNGs when building web sites is that there were still a lot of people using IE 6. But we have to cut IE 6 loose, and this is as good a time as any. (If you want to help put IE 6 out of its misery, go to www.ie6nomore.com and add their code to sites that you build.)

What transparency feature am I talking about? Well, GIF images allow transparency for only 1 color and can have a maximum of 256 colors, JPG images don’t allow any transparency at all and can have 16.7 million collors, but PNG allows 16.7 million colors and multiple-color transparency, for a mind bending 4.3 billion colors.

Look at the drop shadow in the examples below (yellow background added to make the transparency obvious). Since the GIF applies transparency to only 1 shade of white, it produces an odd-looking halo around the drop shadow. The JPG version allows a full color drop shadow, but it doesn’t allow transparency, so you can’t see the yellow background. But the PNG version has the best of both: lots of color levels and full transparency. (If you’re viewing this page with IE 6, the PNG will look the same to you as the GIF. Time to upgrade!)

This comes at a price. The GIF image is 15 kb, the JPG is a paltry 7 kb, but the PNG weighs in at 25 kb. If you’re only displaying one image, this isn’t a big deal. But if you have a lot of images and you think that some visitors to your web site might not have broadband connections, you might want to use PNGs only where necessary.