By Rad | June 24, 2007 - 2:30 pm - Posted in SEO, Web site Design, website

SEO and CSS

one of the #1 things a new webmaster or designer can do for his/her site is to know who your target customer is.  If you don’t know who your target is you can not even begin to put together a good layout or navigation, or really anything at all for your website. How can you do any of these things without knowing who you are trying to attract?

With this in mind, we will assume that you have your target firmly centered in your cross-hairs, and we will go over the top 10 things you need to look at for SEO.

1) Title tag - this has got to be at the top of the list, because it’s at the top of your page! :) usefull keyword rich titles are important.  If you just have the default “home” for a title you will have a hard time with the search engines.

2)Meta-tags - this, according to some is not as important anymore, but I belive the keyword tag, and the discription, geo, and content tags are still VERY important.

3)Layout - how is your site layed out?  What is the first thing a search engine going to read on your page? Your navigation, or your content?  A lot of SEO experts are going to right side navigation beacuse of this question….I think it is a better way of doing things for just this reason.

4)Flash- Great stuff —- in moderation.  If the whole site is in flash, the search engines won’t see anything except the code for the plugin, get board and leave. your content NEEDS to be readable by the bots.

5)Navigation -  K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) if your visitors can get confused on where to go, it’s a sure thing the bots will too.

6)Content - YEAH! more more more, and keep it updated.

7)Links -if your are talking about the newest CSS designing techniques, link to articles about CSS designs. (shows you want to be relivent to this term)

8)Directories - Are you listed in places like DMOZ?  There are some good diretoies out theer that don’t cost an arm and a leg, link love is needed to help raise you in the all mighty search engines eyes.  This is one way of starting this step of your proccess.

9)Articles - Do you write articles? Either in blogs, or places like News Vine?  Great way to get out there in the public eye.

10)LINKS! - like the directory idea in #8, links are the moast important thing in the search engines eyes.  The more sites that link to yours the better, but you want them to be quality links not quantity.  If you have 1000 sites linking to you, but they have nothing at all to do with your subject matter, they will help a little (maybe even hurt if they just appear over night).  But 50 GREAT links about related matter and you will get more out of it.  This is the hardest thing to get done, but doing it right will give greater results than giving your web addy to a FFA ( Free For All) link exchange.

Hope this helps someone out there at least :)

Shannon

Tampa website Design

SEO Web site Design website
By Rad | March 22, 2007 - 7:40 pm - Posted in PhotoShop, Web site Design, website

Photoshop shinny text tutorial

All right.  We all have seen the shinny text out there. We all want it. we will have it!  In the last tutorial on reflective text I went over how to make text reflect on a flat plane. 
Read that tutorial first to understand how I did that. ( we will be doing it here as well)   The great Shannon will now attempt a more coherent tutorial on making the shinny text.  

Read The Full Story…

PhotoShop Web site Design website
By Rad | March 18, 2007 - 7:01 pm - Posted in Web site Design

A detailed overview of the complete web design process, from client consultation through design implementation into a fully functional coded site. Full images also shown for each step also shown.

read more | digg story

Web site Design
By Rad | - 7:01 pm - Posted in Web site Design

We understand what 404 means: page not found. But pity the poor, typical user, who has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. It’s just another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak. Stop relying on the default behavior of any webserver or web browser and create your own user friendly 404.

read more | digg story

Web site Design
By Rad | - 7:00 pm - Posted in Web site Design

Printed magazines are all well and good but they cant deliver up to the minute information and articles like an online magazine can. Here we round up the best online resources for web designers…

read more | digg story

Web site Design
By Rad | - 7:00 pm - Posted in Web site Design

CSS Formatter and Optimiser (based on csstidy 1.1)

read more | digg story

Web site Design
By Rad | - 6:50 pm - Posted in Web site Design

Photoshop shinny text tutorial

All right. We all have seen the shinny text out there. We all want it. we will have it! In the last tutorial on reflective text I went over how to make text reflect on a flat plane.
Read that tutorial first to understand how I did that. ( we will be doing it here as well) The great Shannon will now attempt a more coherent tutorial on making the shinny text.

Read The Full Story…

Web site Design
By Rad | March 17, 2007 - 8:13 pm - Posted in CSS, Web site Design, website

The one thing that has bothered me the most about CSS design is the lack of standards. (W3C doesn’t count, or maybe they do!)  I know what your saying “W3C has the standards set!”  This is true, but nobody seems to follow it.  Sure FireFox is just about the best at it, unfortunately too large a percentage of users are in I.E. still.  This presents a problem.  To fix the CSS on your site to work on all browsers, you need to hack this, and hack that, in order for it to work.  The following are a couple of ways to get all browsers to center your content without hacks. Read The Full Story…

CSS Web site Design website