Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most hotly debated concepts in web development today. Much more important than Ajax, user-supplied content, or the “language-on-rails” ideas floating around today, SEO is what will determine whether users can find your site.

It’s commonly accepted that metadata is “data about data,” and the definition is purposefully vague. However, the use of metadata as a fundamental component of a good website strategy is not. Metadata’s purpose is clearly defined for each aspect of a site with which it interacts from keywords to search to taxonomy and other advanced applications, such as microformats.

Many developers working with CMS400.NET are coming from a language other than ASP.NET. Most commonly, these developers are coming from PHP or classic ASP. I myself was in this situation. I started my web development career in PHP and made the transition to ASP.NET. In this post, I’ll explain some of the core differences between scripted languages like PHP and .NET. I’ll also point out some common use cases to help explain how to make the jump. For the most part, I will be referencing PHP, but the concepts can also be applied to classic ASP.

Over the past few years, there has been a large paradigm shift in web design and development. Web standards have moved to the forefront of the web world, and incompliant sites are slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past. Many designers and developers have been resistant to this change, but there are many great benefits to making the move to standards-based design. In this article, I'll cover some of the ways that standards can help and provide a few pointers for getting started.

This article is part 2 in the series about connecting with your users. In the first article, I discussed some techniques that you can use to implement blogs and forums to help build a community. In this article I'll disucss some techniques that you can use to implement a membership system that gives you information about the people using your site and keeps users connected.