There are some things that you CAN do but SHOULDN'T do because the intent is questionable.

I found yet another example in the web field the other day. I was creating a website for a local company and the owner asked how he could make the site more visible to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Answers, etc.

I began to explain what meta tags were and how he could come up with a list of words for the search engines so they would return the site in searches for those words.

He seemed to understand and then asked how it could be that every time he searched for his store, the competitor came up in the list before him.

A quick "view source" showed us that the competitor had entered my clients company name (word for word) as one of his meta tags.

My Two Choices
Given this turn of events I had the following options:

1. Tell him 'turnabout is fair play' and simply put the competitors name in our meta tag.
2. Use the opportunity to model ethical business practice for my client.

Luckily it was fairly easy to choose option 2. My client agreed that it was low business practice and he wanted nothing to do with it. I can only pray that I would have been so ethical if he had have pushed me to do the opposite.

In Summary
In this upside down world it makes sense to do anything to get one up on the competition. And while you may lose market share due to ethical decision-making I believe God will bless you. If not here and now, in the near future or at the end of it all.

Either way I'd much rather be on this side of the fence...

By the way, there is a slight chance you could be taken to court for this behavior. But this isn't the judge I'd be worried about. Even if you get away with your meta tag mayhem in this life, you will stand before The Judge someday.

For those of you that need a quick 'up to speed' lesson on what a favicon is, look at the image to the left.

The Blogger logo (White 'B' on orange background) is seen three times. The bottom one is simply an image, but the top two are 'favicons.' A favicon (short for 'favorites icon') is an image saved in a specific format (yourLogo.ico) to be used dynamically in specific ways. Three of the most common are:

1. In the address bar next to your URL
2. On browser tabs (now a big part of Firefox and IE7 functionality)
3. Next to the favorites link in your browser (when you add it as a favorite)

This used to be a more difficult process - requiring software to create the icon and save it in the right format. But thanks to a new online site you can do it in no time. And there is no reason (but laziness) not to add this to your site.

Favikon is a site that allows you to upload a graphic and save it as a favicon. You simply follow the steps, save the finished version to your desktop and upload it to the root folder of your website (the same folder that your home page lives in).

Finally, go into each page of your site and add the code provided in the last step into the 'head' section.

If you have thousands of individual pages (not dynamically generated from a template) this might be difficult. But one option is to just add it to your home page and top level pages that are right off the main navigation.

It's so easy there's no real reason to skip this step in the development process...

I'm not a huge programmer, but I love to learn small tricks that make my workflow easier. One such trick is the Server Side Include (SSI) or PHP Include. These awesome little workhorses make designing a dynamic website a bit more time intensive on the front end, but much easier in the long run.

(Very) Simple Explanation
An "include" is a short function that you place in your HTML/XHTML page. It is just one line that says something like "include "your_document.html" or something like that.

Go here for full explanations: Server Side Includes / PHP includes

When the browser gets to this function it goes looking for the "your_document" file and "includes" it in the page. If "your_document" is a text file that says, "Hi - I'm an include" then "Hi - I'm an include" will show up on your page.

The cool thing is that you can now duplicate this HTML/XHTML page as many times as you want and each page will still pull "your_document" into that page. This allows you to make global changes in a websites look and feel by simply changing the "your_document" file.

In the past I used includes for navigation only. I would create an HTML page called "nav.html" and it would just be a list of links. Each page called this file to populate the navigation panel on that page. If I wanted to add a link to the site, I simply updated the "nav.html" page and every page on the site had the new link!

However recently I have experimented with includes for headers, navigation, footers, and even simple form elements.

Coupling includes with the power of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes website maintenance a breeze and makes routine site enhancements much more doable.