Archive for the ‘general’ Category

The key to search ranking in a phrase is still “add original quality content often”, and a recent article on the official Google Webmasters Blog provides advice to implement this strategy. Read the post entitled More Guidance on Building High Quality Sites, and then compare your website content to the Google web design quality list plus the analysis here.

Rather than list each question or duplicate that portion of the Google blog post, readers may follow the link above and read for themselves.

Instead, our analysis will pick out the negative web design and seo search engine optimization factors as mentioned to highlight strategies to avoid that violate best practices.

The photo shown is a Google logo bumper sticker that I received by mail. Google represents more than 80% of search engine traffic to my website. It makes sense to follow their quality advice. Here’s my analysis.

Avoid the following seo or web design strategies:

• duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles
• spelling, stylistic, or factual errors
• attempting to guess what might rank well
• content mass-produced or outsourced
• sloppy or hastily produced content
• an excessive amount of ads
• lacking in helpful specifics
• content that might cause users to complain

Knowing the negative factors and realistically evaluating your website content to eliminate violations is key to ranking well in Google. Each item listed above violates the words “original and quality” in the phrase “add original quality content often”.

Apply this analysis to your plan for creating new web design content as well as evaluating existing site articles or pages. Older sites may have outdated content published years earlier that may not accurately present facts about information that has subsequently changed.

If adding content often is important, some website owners may be reluctant to remove previously published information thinking more is better. However, outdated or inaccurate content violates the word “quality”, so reasonable choices are to edit the information and republish, or remove it entirely.

Important: Negative ranked content can impact and lower the ranking of all pages on your website including quality content pages.

Our advice? Edit or delete poor content that violates the rules for a high quality website design, and then follow the advice from the Google blog and our quality analysis presented here.

This tutorial is for custom web designers looking to offer clients optional QR codes, those square barcodes that link mobile devices to websites. The target market to reach is users with an iPhone, smart phone, or other capable mobile device when thinking about adding mobile app QR codes in web designs.

After “What are QR codes?” and “How do you create QR codes?”, the big question becomes “Are QR codes appropriate in web design?” This tutorial answers those questions.

What Are QR Codes?

You’ve likely seen print ads with a box of complicated black and white coded squares and rectangles that remind you of common line bar codes. Perhaps you’ve wondered how to create the complex mobile app version that people scan with their camera, and exactly what data you can embed.

The graphic above shows two versions of QR codes as examples of what designers could use in a custom web design. The left one with the blue background decodes as a clickable hyperlink to the home page of this blog. The right one with a green background will display a simple text message of that same link though not clickable.

The background color is for illustration only and is not required for the QR code to function. The graphic could be further enhanced in a variety of colors for aesthetics, yet that doesn’t improve the ability to scan and decode them with the camera on your iPhone, smart phone, or other mobile device.

At least 7 types of data may be encoded in a custom QR code including: URL website link, text message, phone number, SMS message, email link, contact entry, or calendar entry. At present, and in addition from research I’ve done, less than half of mobile device owners know how to scan a QR code.

How Do You Create QR Codes?

How can you create the customized QR code graphic? This online tool to generate a custom QR code was used for this blog post illustration. Visit that link to try theirs or search Google for others, as well.

The example QR codes above were purposely put close together to make them difficult if not impossible to scan. Think about hyperlinked QR codes in a web design for a moment. That link is viewed while on your website, so it doesn’t make sense to force a site visitor to take the extra time to scan the graphic when a simple text hyperlink will do the job.

Are QR Codes Appropriate in Web Design?

Before adding a QR code to a web design, consider the practical point of view of your website visitor. They don’t need links for navigation. A well designed website will have contact methods to include mailto: links for emailing, your physical address, and certainly phone number info on every page.

A mobile device owner on your website likely has an app to use those links or copy/paste text of contact info. The other data options are secondary until an introduction is made and the casual prospect shows genuine interest in becoming an actual customer.

For those web designers staying in touch with the latest in technology, and hoping to justify adding mobile app QR codes in web designs, all is not lost. Whether you provide graphic design services or your client takes care of artwork for print, you can still use the advice in this QR code tutorial including that online tool to supply the “artwork” of the custom QR code.

Conclusions and QR Code Tutorial Tips

My advice is avoiding QR codes in web design, yet web designers can demonstrate sophistication by teaching clients how to use a QR code with an embedded link to their website for print ads, brochures, and more. Don’t try embedding a lengthy amount of data in a QR code. It may be too complex to scan for some devices and others might give up trying.

Bonus QR code tutorial tip: Before adding mobile app QR codes in web designs or providing a custom QR code graphic for print, make sure to test the artwork to confirm it actually works. Test on a variety of devices, not just top of the line mobile phones.

Don’t offer QR code artwork for print if you do not have software to generate a high resolution version at 300dpi or better. It would be a disaster and likely ruin your reputation if the client pays for 10,000 post cards or 500,000 newspaper ads with a defective QR code.

Back by popular demand, readers may now download free custom business card artwork with the release of my free 2012 business card artwork download.

New BONUS! I’ve added 3 new colors for 2012, so besides the original grey marble, white granite, and plain white, take your choice of marble in pale green, light blue, or pink salmon for 6 versions of the free business card artwork.

Click on the graphic to the right for an enlarged (low-res) view of all 6 colors!

FREE ARTWORK LINK

Use this link for free 2012 business card artwork to download now. (zip folder, 2.9mb)

Artwork is enlarged 300 dpi high resolution in CMYK 4-color for at home or professional printing.

Unlike some free resources, you do not have to register or reveal your email address to enjoy another set of free business card calendar artwork to add to the back of your 2012 business card.

Questions or blog comments are welcome.

When your personal computer performance slows down and makes you miserable you may want to consider CCleaner and Defraggler to boost pc speed. A custom web design client recently asked us to replace a few photos on their website, then couldn’t see the new graphics later after the work was done.

The reply and pc speed tutorial and review of CCleaner and Defraggler from Piriform may help other website owners, so here’s the email to the client explaining what happened, why, and the solution when old web page graphics persist after replacement photos are uploaded:

Those new photographs are there as referenced. Your computer is displaying old versions stored on your computer. Here’s why, and the solution.

Your computer stores temporary text and graphic files or cache, of web pages you visit, and displays those on return visits. Some genius software geek at Microsoft decided saving a nanosecond a billion times over a lifetime was important without realizing a billion times is just one second.

What makes things worse with all those temporary files is over time your computer speed becomes sluggish.

Follow this tutorial to view missing replacement website graphics: For a fast solution press the browser top menu refresh button or the shortcut top row F5 key once. If still missing, or do this first, do a hard refresh. Hold the CTRL key and press the F5 key once. When I encounter a graphic that doesn’t update to the latest when doing changes I jump right to the hard refresh.

Computers come with built in software tools to clean up cached temporary files and other fragmented file storage that slows down computer speed and performance. I prefer third party methods rather than the default Windows tools, and use CCleaner and Defraggler free computer maintenance software from Piriform. Learn more or download those (not just trial software – actually free) at http://www.piriform.com/products.

Running those 2 programs every 3-6 months helps keep your computer up to speed.

Piriform offers other computer related informational or maintenance software including Recuva and Speccy, as well.

Here’s a web design META Title tutorial with positive advice to follow after the post recently about page titles and what NOT to do.

Each page META Title on your site is like a newspaper headline to grab attention. A single sentence that web designers use is the META Description that states the essence of the content on that page. These elements appear in the code and require key words to optimize the seo value and rank well with search engines. This strategy is part of the technical aspect of writing for the web.

The title of your page is usually the visible headline at the top in the on page content, plus if properly used as the META title it will appear off page at the very top of the screen next to the logo of your browser brand. If bookmarked as a favorite the title becomes a summary or reminder in your visitor’s bookmarks, too.

The page title continues to be THE most important seo high value item on each website page. It makes sense to give extra thought to your equivalent of a newspaper headline to capture the interest of readers and motivate them to continue exploring your site.

A good website page or blog post title often takes as much time to write as the actual article. Keep the POW factor in mind as you write title headlines. Less is more is an old yet accuracte advertising adage. In the case of titles my advice is using 6 words or less for website page or blog post titles. “Man Bites Dog” is a favorite example of a short headline that grabs attention.

This advice bears repeating: The page title continues to be THE most important seo high value item on each website page.

If you take all the advice written by dozens of experts, the ONE top key seo factor for ranking well is something you can learn to your advantage over competition to attract search engine traffic to your website.

Interested readers may want to learn more about seo for META Descriptions and search engine strategy in a blog post written last week at my collaboration web design site opened earlier this year with my son.

This is a lesson in SEO Search Engine Optimization. Imagine a web design where your website is listed in Google results on page one out of one billion SERPs (search engine result pages).

The search term would need to be a very popular, very generic, or frequently used phrase just to have a billion search results.

Today I discovered that this blog acheived #10 on page one for a one-in-a-billion phrase I made fun of nearly 3 years ago.

Some site owners make the mistake of wasting home page seo search engine optimization value by using the page title: Welcome to our website.

For optimized content for seo use descriptive phrases with key words about your business.

In a blog post about seo search engine optimization on 14 December 2008 I wrote about that phrase and why certain page titles are inappropriate when trying to compete for search engine traffic in your web design. The phrase is so generic and mistakenly used so often by web design amateurs that I decided to do a search just to see who was #1. Someone had to be.

The problem is the phrase has zero key words to rank well for terms related to actual website content. Afterall, who really does a search on “Welcome to our website“? At the time of my blog post a university was the “winner”. While working on seo search engine optimization for a new project, I decided to see if they were still #1.

The university is no longer on page one out of one billion SERPs, yet this blog is, and maybe in another 3 years this post will make page one for “Welcome to our website“.

Web design is an art that requires being creative while providing a digital product that will compete successfully against others in the same field. Being creative means having an endless stream of web design ideas to capture the essence of the customer’s business in an attractive format.

The goal is a unique high quality web design that helps sell or presell a product or service. To achieve that goal don’t shoplift parts for your web design like graphics, photographs, illustrations, or html code. It is a crime to “borrow” copyrighted content from websites. Easy access does not mean that the content you discover and admire is free to use.

For amateur or do-it-yourself web designers there’s often the temptation to take shortcuts. The internet provides an almost endless world of content that appears free for the taking. There’s no storefront or door to breach, or any safe to crack to get to this wide choice of material for a web design.

Part time web designers who equate easy access as permission to use are either unaware or don’t care about violating copyright. There are viable alternatives for sources of public domain content, royalty based content, or paid content that allows you to use creative materials made available by others.

Some owners may provide creative content with or without restrictions. An example might be the yearly custom business card calendar designs that I offer my site visitors. Others could be manufacturers who allow their distributors to use product photographs. The bottom line is if you did not create or purchase rights to your web design content be sure to have permission in writing to avoid violating copyright law.

Take a moment to peek into the future with this Google+ social network video preview from the official Google YouTube account.

Google tried a social network type application called Wave that flopped to some extent and some think Google+ (pronounced as in Google-plus) will be a winner. From the video you’ll see that they overcome some of the pitfalls of the top social sites, Twitter and Facebook, by avoiding sharing too much information.

The idea of defining multiple circles of “friends” so that content you post may be selectively shared is excellent. I am personally amazed at the number of young people publicly trashing their boss, using profanity, or admitting facts that could come back to haunt them in a job interview later in life, or worse. Divorce attorneys already use social content to gain advantage for their clients.

I think the overall plan for Google+ is a winner and expect they will soon dominate online social interaction in ways we could only imagine a few short years ago.

Website risk and vulnerability factors include browser security and quality web design. Site owners depend on the quality of their web design to help prevent hackers from taking control of site functions. Best practices by your designer and your internet service provider can help deter malicious visitors from doing damage.

However, a persistent hacker can invade almost any small business website if truly determined to gain access, yet most micro small business clients would be unaffected because hackers choose larger targets.

The majority of my custom web designs are informational websites instead of e-commerce, so only a handful process financial information which is commonly a target for identity theft.

For websites that are compromised, the next consideration besides site owner issues is the risk to site visitors. Readers may be unaware that website visitors could be more vulnerable depending on the software they use to visit a malicious website.

Recently, I came across an article about an annual hackers contest held each March since 2007. Your vulnerability can vary depending on the equipment and browser or mobile OS Operating System you use.

TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Laboratories or DVLabs does an annual pwn2own hackers contest in March with cash and electronic equipment prizes to hackers able to break into devices running on the most popular computing software.

The expert hacker contestants sign up and then attempt to hack into computing devices running on the following software listed here alphabetically under PC and then Mobile:

PC Browser Software

Apple Safari (hacked)
Google Chrome
Microsoft Internet Explorer (hacked)
Mozilla Firefox

Mobile Devices and Software

Apple iPhone 4 running iOS (hacked)
Blackberry Torch 9800 on Blackberry 6 OS (hacked)
Dell Venue Pro running Windows 7
Nexus S running Android

From the results above (hacked shown in bold), Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox were clear browser winners and the iPhone and Blackberry under mobile devices were hacked. Besides the results linked above, you may want to read the pwn2own article on Wikipedia for a historical perspective.

Multiple options for a PC browser give users control over how they surf websites from a desktop or laptop computer. The same is not true for proprietary software used in mobile applications. Does this mean you’re defenseless if using a browser or OS that was hacked? Not necessarily.

You can be proactive about security. When evaluating browser security and quality web design our advice is being aware of risks and then take preventative action by using antivirus software for your computing device. Finally, use care before visiting any unfamiliar websites.

After 15 years in custom web design including the last 7 years full time, the relationship between web design and continuous improvement cannot be denied. The quality principle of continuous improvement is a lesson I learned 40 years ago before any websites existed.

In summary, the concept of continuous improvement means always strive to improve quality and processes in everything you do.

The result of continuous improvement is more efficiency which lowers cost while generating higher profits. At the same time you can balance a better product with price reductions to gain sales momentum and still grow profits based on higher volume.

Customers benefit from your goals of continuous improvement as you become better at what you do. Bigger customers may expect you to strive to lower prices every year, too.

Recent developments in the evolution of custom web design allow creating better websites faster. For my business, that means the price for a custom cms content management system web design at $1500 now costs $1000 less than a year ago.

For static informational sites that the client wants to launch and forget without growing or adding pages, a 5 page site at $500 is also $1000 less than a year ago.

Continuous improvement is a business quality principle that applies universally including the world of custom web design.