10 Actions To Enhance Your Web Design Skills

10 Actions To Enhance Your Web Design Skills

If you ask the top web designers to name the one thing that made them so skilled at what they do, we are certain few would be able to answer in those terms. We say that because, to become not just proficient, but highly skilled in web design, takes more than “one thing”, as it happens due to several factors.

These factors will have been the many actions that those web designers took to learn their craft, hone their creativity, increase their knowledge, and master the skills required to become top web designers. Further, there is no secret to their success because much of what is required to become a top web designer is well documented.

All of the top web designers will have taken actions that moved them forward in their careers, and if you read on you will discover some of those actions. If you are considering becoming a web designer, or have already started but want to accelerate your career, follow as many of these as you can and you will be following the path already well-trodden by the top web designers in the industry.

Learn And Practice As You Go On Websites Of Family And Friends: In your early career, a great way to practice web design and learn more about it without the pressure of working for a client, is building, fixing, and upgrading the websites of those you know.

Enrol In Online Web Design Courses: There is no shortage of excellent web design courses online that you can follow at a pace that suits you, and which will arm you with much of the core skills and knowledge required.

Become Proficient In The Main Web Design Tools And Website Builders: The more knowledge and experience you have of the main web design software and tools you are likely to be using, the better a web designer you will be.

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WordPress Website

How Should I Use Google Analytics With My WordPress Site?

Although just a few years ago web designers were relatively uncommon, website creation and monetisation is quickly becoming an extremely competitive field. While a lot of people try and create their own WordPress websites with the idea of quick, easy money, most of them fail.

The most common reasons for failure are people not really knowing what they are doing and people ignoring crucial warning signs about their website. Google analytics is an extremely useful tool for web developers which can be used to provide insights into websites and their performance.

What exactly is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a freemium service provided by Google. It is designed to help you get the most out of your website by providing you with a wide range of insights into the performance of your website and the behaviours of your visitors. Some of the services that Google Analytics provides include:

  • Online advertising campaign management. The Analytics platform allow you to see how visitors interacted with your Google Ads campaign, how successful your campaign was, and what campaigns worked best.
  • Tracking visitor numbers. Analytics tells you how many people visit your website, where they come from, and what time of day they visit. Real-time monitoring is also possible, and tells you exactly who is on your website and where they are from.
  • E-commerce reporting. If you run some sort of e-commerce store, then a few stats are going to be extremely useful when it comes to optimising your store. Google Analytics can give you information about the people who are shopping on your website and what they are buying.

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Social Media Marketing

How To Use Facebook To Promote Your Family Lawyers Business

Even if you are not an active user of social media yourself personally, nor have never considered it as a means of promoting your family lawyers business, it cannot have escaped your notice that social media plays a huge role in the lives of many people. Individuals use it to communicate with friends and family across the globe, they get their news from it, and social media  is also a huge influencer with certain posts and stories suddenly going viral and being seen by millions.

At the top of the social media tree there is Facebook, and whilst it often is the target of some justifiable criticism, there is no denying that many people spend much of their lives on that platform. As a business owner,, this should alert you to the fact that many of those people will be those living in your local community and in the areas where your client base is located.

It is a simple fact of marketing that if you want to promote your business then you need to do so where your potential clients will be and can consume your marketing messages. Before the internet existed that would have been  local newspapers, TV, radio, and billboards. Today, it is on social media platforms such as Facebook where those same people can be found.

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Understanding Search Types for SEO

Understanding Search Types for SEO

Everyone uses search engines for everything now. Finding a local business. Researching a holiday destination. Figuring out how to fix something in the house. And it’s tempting to think of all ‘search’ as the same.

But it’s not quite that simple, and for those businesses that truly understand search, their search engine optimisation (SEO) can get a huge boost.

So, what are the main types of search and why should you care?

Classifying Search

Search classification is useful because it allows businesses to tailor their content to meet the needs of different types of searcher. This specialisation and specificity is beneficial because it allows more precise targeting of users based on what they are putting into a search bar.

Being clear and specific is also helpful. For example, if you’re trekking through the wilderness in North America and someone sees an something rustling in the bushes, then knowing that it has four legs and fur is sort of helpful because it tells you it’s an animal. But the specific detail ‘it’s over 2 metres tall’ is where the real value is because it’s this information that tells you that the animal is likely a bear, not a small household cat. More detail is always better.

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SEO Target Marketing

SEO Local Target Marketing

If you want to have a successful business, you need to make sure that all your company information and advertisements reach your local target audience.

This may not be easy, but digital marketing agencies like slinkydigital.com.au are experts in local SEO marketing, which can be a great help in attaining your local advertising goals.

The survival and growth of a business are greatly dependent on local target marketing. Unknowingly or by design, you may already be using target marketing techniques in your advertising campaigns.

Target marketing consists of directing your advertisements and commercials to focus on a particular segment of consumers. If you are selectively placing your commercials and ads on certain websites based on their readers and site contents, it means you are already using target marketing to promote your business. In this scenario, SEO target marketing is simply extending what you are already doing a little further.

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Understanding the ‘Plumbing’ of SEO – How it Works

Understanding the ‘Plumbing’ of SEO – How it Works

There are a lot of things in the world that we don’t fully understand, but that need to work so that our lives can go on. Things like Wi-Fi and the reliable supply of water and electricity are just a few examples of goods and services that only a small percentage of people fully understand, but that we all rely on.

The same concept applies to SEO: only a few people fully understand it, but millions of businesses rely on good search engine optimisation to get better ranking on results pages. That better ranking can drive new browsers, that then turn into paying customers. And from there, revenue and profit can flow.

To help break down the walls, we’ve come up with a ‘SEO Basics’ post so that you can better understand the concepts that make SEO work.

Web Crawling

The first thing that all search engines must do is ‘crawl’ the internet, and all the websites and pages in it.

This is sort of like an explorer from the 1600’s setting out on a ship to map parts of the world that had not been explored yet. But instead of using ships on the ocean, search engines send out web crawlers to find content. Content that these crawlers find can range from entire web pages to single images. It can also include uploads to web pages such as documents and videos.

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Understanding the Language of SEO

Understanding the Language of SEO

Have you ever been to a doctor or spoken to a tradesperson who just talks in jargon? That habit can lead to poor communication, as well as leaving you feeling like you don’t understand what the expert is saying or what they are advising.

It’s the same in search engine optimisation. As a fairly new industry, the terms are not used in common language yet. And because SEO is highly specialised, it has developed it’s own array of terms, phrases and shorthand that its own experts understand.

But SEO isn’t just for experts. Businesses of all kinds rely on SEO to ensure that their services are placed well on Google search results. And even for businesses that want to get some professional help with their SEO for their website(s) it helps to know the terms so you can ask informed questions when you interview people or companies for the role.

We’ve collected some of the terms you should know right here and made the explanations simple and easy to grasp so you can get up to speed quickly.

‘Google My Business’ Listing – possibly one of the most important and cost effective things any business can do (if they haven’t already). This listing is free to all local businesses and allows businesses to be found more easily in search, to add their location, be found on Google Maps and add their opening hours and contact information so that when a customer searches for them by name, that information appears in the search results.

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SEO Results

Latest Tactics To Boost Your SEO Results

By its very nature SEO is a constantly evolving field, with both the search engines and website owners continually looking for ways to improve. Whether that is the quality of search engine results on the part of Google and others, or with webmasters using the latest techniques and tools, according to SEO Perth Search Engine Optimisation is undoubtedly something that you must constantly keep up to date with.

If you wish to have any advantage in terms of website’s SEO, there are a few techniques which you should start, or if you have already started using them, should consider increasing your focus on. Whilst these are not exactly brand new, they are certainly having an ever-greater influence when it comes to how the search engines rank websites.

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5 Ways To Ensure Your Business Partnership Is Successful

5 Ways To Ensure Your Business Partnership Is Successful

Forming a partnership with another person is a highly successful way of doing business and it is also one of the most rewarding, given that not only do you share in the profits, but the burden of running the business is halved. Having a partnership agreement created at the start by your commercial lawyer at www.rowebristol.com.au ensures that there are no legal curveballs to overcome, and there are several others ways your partnership can thrive.

For a partnership to succeed, there are countless steps each partner can take, but to simplify this, we are going to highlight 5 of these ways, which can influence the success of your business partnership the most.

#1 Have The Same Values

If each partner shares the same values then it is a great foundation upon which they can build their business. By having the same values, sharing the same dreams, and having a desire to achieve the same goals, whilst partners may occasionally disagree day to day on small details, they will both be on the same mission with regards to the long-term success of their business partnership.

#2 Compliment Each Other’s Skills And Strengths

By this, we do not mean say ‘Well done’ to each other (although nothing wrong in that) but instead have a partner where the skills, knowledge, and experience that they have, fit perfectly with those that you bring to the table. They do not need to be the same, but instead complimentary, so a sales expert, teaming up with marketing champion means one partner finds the prospects, and the other turns them into paying customers.

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Top SEO Risks

Top 5 SEO risks you should avoid

Developing a strong SEO strategy can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience or a strong digital marketing background. However, there are some things that you should always do, and some things that you should avoid at all costs.

There are quite a few SEO mistakes that are a lot more common than they should be, and you should do everything in your power to avoid them. However, if you’re like many other people, you might not even know that you’re making mistakes.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this list of the top 5 SEO risks that you should never take:

  1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is essentially the process of creating low-quality content that’s filled with keywords in a way that’s unnatural and reads poorly. In the past, keyword stuffing was common, but Google has cracked down on it in recent years.

You might get away with keyword stuffing for a while, but you will be caught and penalized eventually. Don’t ever fall into the trap of creating poor quality content that’s unnaturally full of keywords. Instead, focus on adding well-written, informative content with keywords naturally placed throughout.

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Social Media Button

Adding Social Media Buttons to Your Website

Having visible social media buttons on your website is not just an option any more. Users are increasingly turning towards social networking sites to gain information about different brands, and trust the user reviews on those sites more than the client testimonials on your official website. While you may already have a business account on all major social media websites, you have to make social media buttons more prominent if you want to encourage people to find you on Facebook, Twitter, G+, YouTube, Pinterest, and similar websites.

You can use social media to interact and engage with customers, to gain their trust, and to advertise your products. Social media websites are a proven tool to boost sales and to increase market share. By adding social media buttons to your web design, you will still use your website as a focal point of your marketing strategy, and can still utilise social media to its fullest potential. When it comes to web design, you can use social media buttons.

Place the Buttons in Header/Footer

Most web designers place social media buttons in the header/footer with a “follow” icon. Usually, in such web designs the headers and footers on all pages contain the buttons.  This is a tried and tested way to improve the visibility of social media buttons in your web design, and to integrate your social media profiles with your website.

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Web Design

3 Web Design Trends To Avoid in 2018

It is now the 18th year since the turn of the new millennium, and the world of marketing has shifted into the digital world faster than we could have imagined. All businesses, big and small, know that a good online presence is more significant now than ever before. The importance of their presence in the digital world is going to keep on increasing. If you ask digital marketing experts like Peter Brittain, at the epicentre of a company’s online presence is their website. The trends in web design have been seeing shifts with every passing year with businesses constantly in a bid to improve the traffic to their websites and improve on their success.

The trends in web design are constantly changing. To stay ahead of the competition, the web design companies have to follow the latest trends. That being said, the trends for web designing that businesses follow have to be effective ones. Here are a few examples of web design trends that should be avoided in 2018.

  1. Floating Content

The floating content on websites is something that is right there in the middle of your website and stays there while you scroll up and down the page. This can be anything from the menu options to advertisements to social media platform sharing options.

This web design trend is somehow being used quite liberally but it is an annoying trend that does the opposite of encouraging your visitors to engage. They can block some of the important content on your website and visitors close the tab because they want to see the content and not some omnipresent options blocking the content instead.

  1. Endless Scrolling

Another strange web design trend that has recently picked up is the infinite scrolling. When people are scrolling down your website, the lower they go, the more content starts to appear. It is endless. This can become an annoying thing for your users since infinite scrolling effectively means they cannot access the footer of your website which is an important part of your website.

  1. One Page Design

You will see some websites have their web design done in a way that all of the content that they have is on a single web page. While it makes sense that their intention is to give all the relevant information to visitors on a single page, it can have an adverse effect on the engagement factor for your company’s website.

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On-Page SEO

What does Site Based SEO Involve?

Your site based SEO or on-page strategy is the foundation for your Internet marketing success. Your strategy should follow a strict methodology.

It should incorporate web page optimisation to give your users and the search engines a clear picture of what is on offer at your website – your product and/or service.

It also encompasses web page design, file structures, keyword phrases and coding that is clear and free of complex structure.

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Humor in Marketing

A Case Study in Humor in Marketing

Saw this story over at 37Signals and had to pounce on it for an object lesson. Every now and then, you get an opportunity for inspiration, but it has to be timely or it’s going to fold.

So, the back-story: In the United States, Barack Obama just got elected President… yes, you know that, but let’s move along… so he’ll be vacating his US Senate seat, and the responsibility to find his replacement falls to Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Whom, you might not have heard, blatantly solicited for a bribe to appoint somebody, effectively putting the seat up for sale to the highest bidder.
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Search Engine Marketing

Your Search Engine Marketing Guide

Advance and high technology has opened up opportunities to make our work easier.

But it has also brought some kind of bad effects with it. You can find lots of information on the Internet, some of them are truly useful and the rest is simply worthless information floating around the Internet. The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimizes the ranking of each page and brings the relevant information to you. SEM or search engine marketing is a term, which encompasses all kind of efforts to generate leads.

Search engine marketing includes search engine optimization, pay per click management, and landing page optimization.

Usually the task of SEM is to promote websites by increasing the ranking in major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are few steps in search engine marketing, which can guide you in developing your own website.

At the outset, do a thorough market research. Most websites have a targeted audience, which has a large proportion of similar age group, gender and income bracket.

Initially, you may find a smaller proportion of audience focused for a particular segment. As a result you have to establish a target market for your site before you start working on the design or content of the market. For this you have to decide on how you can make your website more appealing.

The next step is to make your visibility on search engines or a good quality Online Business Directory. It is essential to conduct a keyword research. While researching for keywords, you should keep in mind that every person browses the Internet in a different way and use different keywords. Hence, there is a variation of terminology and statements, which are determined by the age, profession, and the part of the world they come from.

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Are You a Front End Web Developer

Just ran across this link explaining the difference between developing the front end and the back end of a website. The “back end” is the “engine”: PHP, SQL, file storage, server interaction. The “front end” is the “body”: XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and Flash. It gets scary when you have to mix the two, but that’s exactly what AJAX is all about.

It’s worth pointing out that, as the article states in discussing Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and Adobe Pagemill, “As soon as you need the site to fulfill a specific task, these WYSIWYG editors stop being that handy.” And yes, your worst nightmare is to have to take a website done in a visual editor and hack on the code. Glory be, what a mess! As long as a web page’s only job is to sit there and look pretty, a WYSIWYG editor is the way to go… but then, why not just use Photoshop? Freelance web designers see this all the time: the client has drawn up a page in Photoshop, and now wants it sliced-and-diced into a working web page. Experience shows that this doesn’t always have the desired results. It’s like trying to make a banquet out of frozen instant dinners. At some point, those plastic trays and sectioned compartments really start to get in the way.

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Digg-ing

Digg-ing for SEO success

In case you haven’t been on the Internet for the past year or so, there has been a tremendous amount of attention being captured by social networking sites such as Digg.

As Digg explains things, it is “a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.”

So, what does this have to with Search Engine Marketing?

There is a phenomena called the Digg effect, which can bring a ton of traffic to your site in a small amount of time – sometimes within minutes.

Everything on Digg, from news to videos to images — is submitted by the digg community. Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for millions of visitors to see.

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Link Building

Effective Link Building Strategies

Link building is an important search engine optimization technique that helps bloggers or web masters get more traffic to their websites. Link building is popular among net marketers, and can result in a lot of traffic to their websites or blogs.

Even with a well designed site, you may find visitors can’t find you. Therefore, they will never see what you are actually selling. All your efforts will be in vain.

Link building works on the SEO technique. SEO is a service that helps to make the websites or blogs rank up the top on the search engines natural search results.

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Internet Advertising

Internet Advertising For Business

Whatever business you handle, it needs to be advertised. Internet advertising is one important way to do it through a website exposure. Advertising plays a key role for success of any business.

Initially television, radio and newspapers were major sources of advertising. However, today Internet has provided a vast resource to promote and advertise any business or professional business techniques. Though it is challenging, it is one of the fastest way to reach across large audiences and prospects anywhere across the globe. Today, there are several entrepreneurs, who wish to market their products and services on the World Wide Web.

Before you advertise on the Internet, you should be aware that the trends and modes of advertising keep on changing at a fast pace. You should be able to adapt to the emerging market changes and accordingly position your business on the Internet. There are several ways in which you can advertise your company or business. To begin with, you can place your ad on the popular websites through link exchange program. This will help you get some exposure through the frequently visited sites. You can also advertise next with a well-known blog or articles on the Internet to get noticed initially.

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SEO Services

When Should I Consider SEO Services?

SEO should be implemented during the conception of your website design strategy.

If you’re working with Slinky, we will SEO-design your site with every consideration for the search engine optimisation process from the beginning.

This saves you money having to correct those issues that might be creating website ranking problems within the search engines. We will give you or your web graphics designer clear guidelines to use that will keep the search engines and your customers happy.

Slinky’s site-based optimisation services are available if you already have a website, but are not having any success being found. We analyse your site to identify bad architecture in its structure and unhelpful content.

We can make recommendations that will make your site both user- and search engine-friendly.

In addition, during the search optimisation process we will make specific changes designed to improve your site’s functionality, appearance, and overall quality for search engines and your customers.

SEO Jargon

Some Of The More Colorful Terms From SEO Jargon

In perusing SEO literature (by gumbo, there’s a lot of you pecking away out there!), we like to stop and ponder a meme, phrase, or bit of jargon we encounter within the context of the SEO world. Search Engine Optimization has actually started to gain a culture now, and this is going to be the part where everybody looks back on “the golden age” fondly in 20 years.

  • astroturfing – Pretending to be a regular member of the audience while secretly being paid to push an agenda for a commercial or political group. Astroturf (TM) is fake, plastic grass, and regular people supporting a group is a “grassroots” movement.
  • bread crumbs – The little trail of links in a horizontal navigation setup, so uses can find their way back to the home page.
  • cloaking – Showing one version of content to search engines, and a different version to visitors. Instant black death when Google finds out!
  • Google bowling – An attempt to lower a website’s ranking by linking to it from dirty sites. May be an SEO urban legend.

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Online Order Processing

Make it Easy to Buy From your Website

To make it easy for the customers, there needs to be an online order processing system. It mostly involves a shopping cart to select and store orders.

Slinky Digital Agency advise that you will need a payment option like PayPal. This involves getting a PayPal ‘business account‘ – which is quick and easy. PayPal will need to verify you as a legitimate person by several levels of checks ie: bank account, credit card etc

If you choose to accept credit cards via your own processing account, you will need a bank internet merchant account – which can be a tiresome process and more expensive to set up and operate. If you are a serious business – it is the only option in my opinion.

For this option you will need to sign up with a secure gateway provider, which sits in between your website and the bank website. Providers such as Securepay or Camtech in Australia are a good option. Others are Verisign (owned by PayPal) – but they are a more expensive option.

There has to be enough security to allow payments online. The credibility of the merchant is a very important factor to be checked. Your order form should be secured which may be done using SSL encryption technologies. Additionally, you may also offer a money back guarantee to people to build up confidence.

Remember that it is also useful to display a price list of your products. It makes it easier for the visitor to make a decision to buy from your site.

Unless you provide a simple system for the potential customers to buy from you, you cannot keep him happy. It is important to make a system that would not frustrate your potential customer.

 

Penguin Update

Will Google’s Reign Of Terror Over SEOs Ever End?

Once upon a time, Google and SEO were at a relative truce. Then Google began swatting at black-hat SEO tactics. Then gray-hat SEO tactics. And now, it just hauls off and clobbers everybody, damn your hat color. The latest news on the Penguin update is just par for the course. It’s just getting to where if you’ve ever made page one ever in your life, Google now hates you.

We’re wondering how long it will be until paranoid conspiracy theories develop in the SEO rank and file. Well, of course, that’s “more than the usual conspiracy theories”. Yet we don’t see demand for the old-school black-hat SEO diminishing in the slightest – the more Google punishes some behaviours, the more people stubbornly cling to them. It’s like a battle of wills between a domineering mother and a rebellious teenager.

Social Media Marketing

Grim, Tough Questions About Whether Your Social Media Marketing Campaign Works

We have to admit, we flinched a little when we read, 10 Questions for Social Media Measurement Success. We know that a lot of ecommerce marketing right now is more enthusiasm than follow-through. Most web marketers still think in terms of ‘just push that message out to the public and they’ll click the link – something good is bound to happen, right?’

Well, actually, no. Even big companies are discovering that social media saturation only takes you so far. For instance, in 2010, Proctor & Gamble knocked themselves out on the biggest viral marketing campaign ever with actor Isaiah Mustafa making videos in a bathroom set and posting them on YouTube. The web audience laughed, sighed, applauded… and didn’t buy a single bottle of Old Spice. Thanks for the free entertainment, P&G!

Another example is more recent, clothing retailer GAP’s logo stunt… they changed their official logo to some bland plain text, and released the announcement to the media. Then retracted it in about 48 hours. Good thing, they generated some murmurs in the web for a weekend, they didn’t have to spend a lot of money, and it was out of our faces before we knew it. But most people’s reaction was “Who cares?” Well, that’s not what you want your customer to say about your products.