Problem: Using a background image in a word document, converting to Adobe Acrobat PDF will loose the background image.

I had been looking to empower one of my clients to create better looking literature without having to get us to build all of them in Illustrator. Word templates seemed the way to go, better looking day-to-day business communication and anything more complicated would come to us t design & lay-up.

• Having first tried using the header and footer feature in Word found it too hard to recreate the style, copy & position the logos + only to find logos/colours opaque.
• Then tried using the background image [Page colour >  Fill Effects > Picture (in Office 2007 this is all under the Page Layout tab)] which looked perfect except when converting a document to PDF it lost the background image. No settings I changed seemed to change this, nor using the “print” to PDF on the PC.

Finally the solution:

Add your image as a Watermark, simples.

Word 2007 > Page Layout tab > Watermark >  Custom Watermark > select the picture > untick Washout (This will mean the background image isn’t faded).

If you wish to design a background image to fill an entire word document at 100% scale I would suggest 800 x 1300.

I have a regular need for new passwords for all the tools and services I sign up to during the course of the year. Below randomly generates a 7 character mixed case password.

*refresh page to generate a new password*

For years the two major SEO don’t dos were building your site purely in Flash or using AJAX. Since major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google have received a sanctioned Flash reader from Adobe, they have both improved their results on reading SWF files. The next major battle is crawling AJAX websites.

Many website owners will have had the experience of Google indexing URLs that have only ever appeared in JavaScript so we know that there has always been some support, even though the message in the SEO community has always been that JavaScript is not crawlable.

For the less technical of us, the goals outlined in Google’s proposal for making AJAX crawlable are:

• Minimal changes are required as the website grows
• Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
• Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
• Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content

Let’s hope that there is more guidance on crawlability of AJAX than there is for Flash, otherwise many of you will be finding parts of your site that you genuinely do not wish to be crawled and indexed appear in search results.