This site was submitted by a friend of Gerry, who has created this Web site himself for his business in Sydney, Australia. Gerry handles sales, installation, maintenance, and repairs of AC systems. This site has a lot going for it from an search engine optimization point of view – lots of text that using the right terms, but is visually a little difficult to get through.

I think the text really needs some work. There is a lot of variation between color and size, so some text is hard to read because it is small, and some it hard to read because of the color (and some both!). In addition, it’s difficult to tell what is a link, since the link color is also used a text color. And there really isn’t any necessity for so much bold text. Extra point: Don’t underline text that isn’t a link. The visual appearance of this site would really be improved by cleaning up the text, reducing the number of text colors, and solving the issues with font size.
Now, pictures – there are some, which is great, but in general they are being resized using HTML rather than using a graphics program, so they don’t look great in the page, especially since some of them aren’t resized proportionally. In addition, when you resize a large image using HTML, it still has to be downloaded in order to be displayed, so you can end up with some pages that are very big downloads, even though they don’t look like it. I suggest creating real thumbnail-sized images and then linking to the larger files. Investing in a logo, even one that is a simple type treatment, would also give this site a little more professional finish.

As easy as it is to create a blog, it’s just as easy for it to start getting bogged down. A few simple tips can get your blog up and running to speed again.
It’s easy to make your blog, and easier to make it start to slow down
How many images and how big are they?—embed from Flickr or Photrade
Too many widgets and scripts-pare them down!
Reduce the number of posts on a page
Check that template!
Online testing tools
For WP users: WP-cache
All else fails talk to your host if self hosted

1.) Start out with a basic out of the box Ruby on Rails application.
2.) Very quickly add mysql database capability.
3.) Populate the database with recent Leo tweets.
4.) Visualize the data using Gruff charts and a touch of Ajax for up to the minute reporting without refreshing the browser.

Thats it! The lifecycle of a simple Ruby on Rails application using a database, ajax and gruff charts. Web 2 goodness abound!

ruby-lang.org

rubyonrails.com

rubyforge.org