"I'm in the process of designing a complete front end sales order to shipment solution for our business that will take the form of a web app."

I've been thinking about Test Driven Design and I'm wondering if there is any real point to writing tests for myself? Why should I follow TDD? Or why should I skip it?

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.
Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.
Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!
1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture
Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.
Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

Social media optimization (SMO) is an important ingredient within your SEO and SEM campaigns. In the past, social networking sites were not much more than an oddity. Today, many have received enormous ranking authority from top search engines. If you are not leveraging these sites to increase your exposure and communicate with your niche consumer, your search engine positions are vulnerable to your competitors. In this article, we will describe the influence that SMO currently has on search engine marketing. We will also give you the rules of engagement for executing an effective social media optimization campaign. We’ll explain what SEO social media is, and the advantages of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts.
The Influence Of Social Media Optimization On Search Marketing
Search marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffic. For years, gaining that exposure was based solely upon the development of your site and generating links pointing to your site. Both are still important today. However, social media optimization has shifted the landscape of search engine marketing.

Oracle’s plans for acquiring Sun have been on hold since April 2009. Although the US Department of Justice approved the deal, the European Commission formally objected. This week, MySQL creator Michael Widenius also put out an urgent call to save MySQL from Oracle’s clutches. His reasons:

• Rather than working with the EU, Oracle contacted hundreds of customers and asked them to write a letter of ‘unconditional acceptance’ to the EC.
• A strong MySQL has few benefits, whereas a weaker MySQL could be worth more than one billion dollars to Oracle.
• Oracle had not made any promises to keep all of MySQL under an open source license, retain current support pricing structures, regularly release new editions, work with the community, or add features that could make it more competitive with enterprise databases.
• Oracle’s begrudgingly updated the InnoDB engine and Sun eventually forked the project.

In response, the company has finally issued a press release outlining their intentions for MySQL. Oracle’s 5-year public commitments include:

Hello all,

I hope you can advice me on my situation.

Since graduating with a degree in biology, it has become crystal clear that the current recession isn't kind to people like myself with little to no experience. I also became dissilioned, since the job description of entry level biology jobs are often mundane and bureaucratic. Because of this, I thought hard about my passions and skillset, and realised that I would be better suited and more motivated towards a building career in web development. I have always been technically minded, and naturally, I have acquainted myself with web developing languages, creating websites along the way. Unfortunately however, due to the current recession, its nearly impossible to get my foot in the door of the web industry. So, I have decided to undergo a masters degree in web development (2010 entry), or at least a msc with a substantial web element.
To fund this, I am deciding to work full time for a role which is neither biology nor I.T. It is a very simple, yet stimulating job, namely; patient concierge/assistant. This requires very little theory, and more of basic communication.

I have several pertinent questions:

1) Is a masters in the right step towards gaining career credentials with regard to web development?

The web has been awash with rumors about Google Gears for the past week or two. It appears Google has quietly dropped development of the system.
Google Gears was released as a browser plug-in in May 2007. It provides a number of useful facilities primarily for offline functionality:

• a local server for caching and serving applications when offline
• a SQLite database module for local storage
• a WorkPool module that allows JavaScript thread-like asynchronous processing
• a desktop module for OS integration, e.g. shortcut creation
• a geolocation module for creating location-aware applications.

Great stuff … but a number of issues have surfaced:

• The last version to appear was 0.5 in November 2008. It’s rare for a Google project to have such a slow release schedule.
• Gears is not supported in Mac versions of Google’s Chrome browser.
• Relatively few products have adopted Gears.

However, the biggest reason for sedate progress is HTML5 — the new standard offers many of the facilities introduced by Google Gears. According to Linus Upson, Google’s engineering director, Gears’ time has come and gone. They will continue to support the technology for compatibility reasons, but the system will not be updated or improved:

We’re very focused on moving HTML 5 forward, and that’s where we’re putting all of our energy. Gears has accomplished its mission very well, in getting these capabilities into HTML 5.

Here it is 3:44 am and I am sitting up just polishing up a few web pages. No I don't have a client I am working for, they are just pages for my own personal site, and yet I keep doing it. If I have an addiction it is to web development. Well, that and caffeine.

Content is one of the most valuable things you can focus on during development of your website. Consider each page of your website an opportunity to capture or lose your audience. If a web page has paragraph after paragraph of text, many visitors won’t bother to begin reading. There are various other things to be leery of when writing for the web. This article covers eight tips to help you succeed when writing content for your website.
Entice with Communicative Headings
Visitors decide whether to invest their precious time reading your content, typically after scanning a heading or two. Consider which headline will receive more attention:

• PHP solutions (http://www.webassist.com/php-scripts-and-solutions/?WAAID=898) for the Web
• Three eCommerce PHP Solutions for the Web

While both could be headings for the same content, the second heading will attract more attention because it clearly denotes what will follow. Additionally, it adds a level of expertise. It is also important to keep your headings concise. When headings wrap to multiple lines, they start becoming paragraph-like and readers cannot scan them. Sub-headings are another way to make your content easier for visitors to scan. Once readers have decided your heading is worth investing more time in, they often scan the sub-headings to jump to the section that is most applicable to them.
Conclude Before You Expand

Creating an HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap for your website could be the easiest thing you do to improve your exposure on the web. For those of you who pay close attention to the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site, this could be the one thing that gets you onto the first page of Google’s results. For those who don’t devote too much time on the SEO of their site – this is a good place to start. By submitting a sitemap to various search engines, you are telling them that you exist and what pages your site has to offer the World Wide Web.
There are two types of sitemaps, HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap provides a useful directory of all the pages that are in your site. While XML sitemaps play an important role in helping the search engine “crawl” the various pages of your site. This Roadmap discusses the benefit of creating both an HTML sitemap and XML sitemap, and how you can go about creating them using a sitemap generator.
HTML Sitemaps
An HTML sitemap is a single HTML page that contains links to all the pages of your website. Normally, this is accessible via a link in your site footer, where it will be displayed on every page. With large sites, it is easy to get lost and struggle to find the page you are looking for. With a well organized HTML sitemap, your site visitors will be able to use this to easily find the page they are looking for.