by Stuart Mortimer

You may not be aware of this and im sure you’ll find it very interesting! Despite the time and effort that your web designer has put into creating a beautiful website for your company, Google - the biggest search engine in the world doesn’t even care what it looks like! This may seem like a bold statement, but this article will explain to you exactly why it is true; Google and all the other big search engines including Yahoo and MSN cannot even see what your website looks like!

So, in order to explain, let’s start at the beginning. It’s important to know exactly what Google is and why it is there in the first place. Google is a huge network of linked computers dotted around the planet in locations called data centres. The purpose of these computers is simply to visit as many web pages as possible and store the text content that they find there so that it can be used to power their search results.

The sole aim of search engines (aside from making money) is to return useful and relevant results from user searches for specific keywords. For example if I were to type ‘web design Barnsley’ into Google, they would want to return the most useful websites that were genuinely relevant to the search key phrase ‘web design barnsley’.

In order to perform this task, Google and the other search engines employ software programs on their computers called search engine robots or ‘bots’. The purpose of these bots is to follow the links between web pages that they find on the internet, extract the text content that they find on each page and then move on to the next web page on its ‘to do list’. At no point during this process does Google or any other search engine stop to check out the intricacies of your company logo or stop to admire the lovely lighting effects that have been designed by your website designer. They simply take the text content, store it and move on! Think about it. Consider the mammoth numbers of websites on the internet, search engines don’t have the time to stop and think - they have more sites to visit!

Still not convinced? Let’s look at something else. Your website is made up from programming code called HTML which is used to structure the text and images that you have on your web pages. If you select view > source from the toolbar above you can see the HTML code that is used to make up this page! This is similar to what Google sees when it arrives at your site and this is where your optimised search engine content has to go in order for you to be able to rank well in Google and the other search engines.

Conclusion:

By considering the differences between the way the search engines view your site and the way you and I see the site, you can begin to appreciate the need to build content rich websites which provide search engines with the useful content that they are coming to your site to find. Of course having an attractive website is important. It will allow you to portray a professional image and encourage users to make online orders and enquiries. It is more important in my opinion to realise that without useful content, which is focused around your target key phrases, having a beautiful website design will do you little good, since the search engines will have no reason to send any traffic your way.

About the Author:
Stuart is a freelance web designer from Barnsley, Yorkshire, UK. Stuart specialises in search engine friendly website design in barnsley for businesses of all types.

by Camry Smith

Back when, blogs were just online journals that teeny-boppers use to air their daily angst. Now, blogging has also captivated the world of business promotion. Presenting one’s products or services has never been more easy and creative through blogging. A plethora of blog applications are ready for the taking. Some are offered for free while some will cost you some moolah. Get an idea of what these various blogging tools have to offer before you jump in the blogging bandwagon for any reason that prompts you to do so.

Kinds of Blogging Software

Learn about these blog applications that are either free or paid or both. Know which is tailored to cater to your needs or your business’ needs:

Blogger

This blog is available in free and hosted variety. Blogger or Blogspot, which was recently modified by Google, is one of the oldest blog platforms around. Newbies in the world of blogging can benefit greatly from Blogger’s easy-to-use formats. The drawback of this tool is it can’t be easily customized. Knowledge of CSS and HTML is required before you can effectively re-arrange your blog site.

Wordpress

Intermediate to advance bloggers will definitely benefit from the many features of Wordpress. It is one of the well-upgraded blogging platforms with all the plug-ins and user-friendly interface it boasts about. One can either avail of its free version or its paid hosting type. User support is excellent with Wordpress. Also, with the hundreds of Wordpress themes for various versions, one can easily find a new blog face that can be easily customized and that will suit one’s mood and business theme.

Movable Type

Six Apart’s Movable Type is one of the most popular blog publishing applications. However, this is for the more advanced types of bloggers as the customization of this platform is rather more difficult compared to other blog tools.

Expression Engine

pMachine’s Expression Engine is relatively unheard of. But its users label it as one of the most versatile blog tools around. Besides the usual functions and features of a blog application, Expression Engine also includes modules that organize mailing lists and image galleries. With Expression Engine, image editing while blogging is made possible.


About the Author
Profit Lance has taken the internet marketing world by storm! My reviews at http://www.honestreview.info/profitlance/index.html

This short article is intended as a roadmap of web designers should be made aware of. If you follow each of the following tips you will be well on your way to mastering web design.

So what is you have to do?

1. LEARN XHTML - Extensible HyperText Markup Language.
XHTML is the ‘markup language’ that every individual web page is made out of. Don’t worry, its not too difficull to learn XHTML or maybe XHTML is quite possibly the easiest programming language you can learn, so easy in fact XHTML isn’t technically classed as a programming language. You can write XHTML code in a plain text editor, such as notepad, or notepad++. You can browse Google for XHTML tutorials or head over to http://www.w3. org/MarkUp/Guide/ for a brief introduction to writing XHTML

2. LEARN CSS – Cascading Style Sheets.
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is only a little more advanced than XHTML and most books on XHTML also cover CSS. CSS is the language that controls things such as the colour, background images, font attributes, and so on. The beauty of using CSS is you can control the aesthetic features of multiple web pages with a single CSS file.

3. LEARN PHOTOSHOP
If you are aspiring for a web design career you are going to need to learn Photoshop. In my experience, i suggest you to make up all of your web page designs in Photoshop first. Once you are entirely happy with the design start slicing and dicing your photoshop file for the images you will need, and coding the web page in XHTML and CSS.

4. TABLELESS DESIGN - USE CSS INSTEAD OF TABLES FOR YOUR DESIGNS
Use CSS to control your layout, don’t use HTML tables for your design. Tables add a lot of unnecessary code, are time consuming and expensive to make changes to once the site is completed, and only affect the layout of the single page you are working on – as opposed to using a single CSS file that affects the layout of any page you want.

5. USE VALID XHTML AND CSS
Valid XHTML and valid CSS is code that validates with the World Wide Web Consortiums coding rules. There is plenty of information on how to ensure your code is valid over at http://www.w3.org. It is important to keep this in mind, as most web design employers will not touch web designers with a ten-foot clown pole unless their code adheres with the standards of the W3C.

6. GET INSPIRED
Browse the net for good web designers, don’t steal their designs, but analyse their designs and try to figure out what fonts, colour scheme, grids, and photoshop techniques they are using. A simple way to use this is search for web design in Google, and browse the portfolios of the top web design companies that come up in the search results. Digital art and poster websites also serve as good inspiration.

7. PRACTISE PRACTISE AND PRACTISE
The more you practise, the sooner writing XHTML and CSS code will become a second nature to you, and you should also practise utilising the information from the various theories I have just mentioned too.

Statistics show that, without a compelling reason, the average user will not wait for much more than 10 seconds for a page to load. So does that explain why your visitors seem to spend less than 5 seconds in your site? Probably your site is taking too long to load thus putting off visitors.

As you design your site, loading time should always be a priority if your site is to be an effective business tool. Balancing usability and aesthetics is a delicate matter when creating a fast loading site.

Below are tip that you can use while designing your fast loading website.
1. Use images sparingly. Remember, images may enhance the appearance of a website but it greatly increases its loading time.
2. Use and optimize your HTML. You have to create simple and elegant sites using plain HTML, CSS and few images.
3. Minimize animated gifs and flash usage
4. Use background images
5. Avoid using Javascript and flash scripts
6. Avoid using multimedia files
7. Use Templates. Using templates will not only ensure uniformity throughout your site but will enable subsequent pages load faster because the structural images will have cached and thereby reducing the load times significantly

demo  |  download

This is my first adsense friendly template. You can modify by adding an image above your adsense script. This trick will increase your CTR’s.

Template features: classic, blog archive, last post, friends link, adsense friendly.