Mac SEO Blog

So we have gotten a lot of emails asking whether or not RAGE MapDesign can easily be used with Rapidweaver. It definitely can be, and it is actually quite easy. We have created a short movie to show exactly how it is done.

The point where most users were have trouble was due to specifying the correct paths to your image files. The following tutorial will show how to add your interactive image maps to Rapidweaver. Although this shows how to add Effects based (CSS) image maps, adding purely HTML image maps can also be done easily. If you are having trouble with that, please feel free to contact support and we will be more than happy to walk you through it, and if necessary create an accompanying video.

Update: As of version 1.2 you no longer need to edit the files to rename the images directory to assets. Just go to the Preferences in RAGE MapDesign and select ‘Create Rapidweaver compatible image maps’. This will automatically use an assets folder instead of an images folder.

Recently Google updated their Webmaster Tools account with more data and a revamped Interface. Personally I find the new interface to be much easier to use.

The biggest addition is a web site feed subscriber stats section. You can see the subscriber stats from the Statistics tab.

The all new subscriber stats give you details about how many people subscribe to your web site feeds, such as RSS and atom feeds, through Google services. Although this won’t give you the total number of subscribers since not everyone is using Google tools to subscribe to your feeds, it does provide a nice overview and a gauge at how popular your feed actually is.

If you are unsure what a feed actually is, or you are interested in learning how to get more subscribers to your feeds through Google, there is a Google help page describing how to set up and track site feeds

If you don’t yet have a Google Webmaster Tools account, or have your XML sitemap up, do so now with RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. XML Sitemaps help you get your web site indexed faster and more thoroughly, giving you much more control on how search engines find and index your web site.

Recently Yahoo performed a number of tests to determine what are the major factors to slow loading web pages and provides 13 useful tips to help improve your web page load time. Having fast loading web pages is important for a variety of reasons including;

1. It has been estimated that visitors will spend less than 8 seconds waiting for a page to load before going somewhere else

2. Search engine bots will be able to scan and index your web site faster

How does this relate to RAGE MapDesign? Well Yahoo found that the number one factor to speeding up page load time is too reduce the number of HTTP requests sent to your web server. A web browser sends a request to a web server for each image it must load according to your HTML code. Yahoo actually recommends creating one large image map instead of splitting up your images manually. And of course RAGE MapDesign is the faster and easiest way to create web site image maps.

This reduces the number of requests sent to your server and in return helps speed up your web page load time. You can read the 13 Tips To Faster Loading Web Pages at Yahoo’s developer web site.

Some tips get very creative so go through them to see what else you can do to help reduce the amount of time it takes web browsers to display your web site.

So we’ve been working really hard all summer on some great new updates AND some awesome new products. First and foremost, we have an update on the way for RAGE WebDesign, which I mentioned earlier and RAGE Google Sitemap Automator.

To give you some clues on what’s new, we are going to have to redo all the screen shots on for both products! 🙂

Aside from that, we have been working on two amazing new apps. These applications are one of a kind on the Mac. There are no other tools that can do what they do!

So keep checking back and make sure you get our newsletter so you’ll know what’s coming up. If you run a web site, you’ll love these products!

We recently released an update to RAGE MapDesign which adds support for transparent PNGs in image maps. This means that you can easily overlay any mouse over or mouse down effect in your image map by using png images. This make it really easy to make beautiful transitions using only CSS and XHTML.

I created an example to show off what you can do with the new transparency features. Check out this sample CSS Based Image Map with transparency. The image will overlay the background image with a transparent PNG as the mouse moves over the specified hot spots. This example took about 10 minutes to make including creating the PNGs and putting it up online.

In contrast, when I used version 1.0 to create this image map, it took a while to fake the transparency by using the same section of the main image as the background image for the mouse over effects.

We have some great new features already planned for the next free update of RAGE MapDesign, so keep checking back!