SEO Beyond Your Site
The most common initial SEO strategy is to follow best practices for building user-friendly, well-formed websites. Optimizing your content and HTML, using good web page titles and generating links to your website are all ways you can help search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing index your site better and more accurately.
However, because of an updated Google search ranking algorithm (dubbed "Panda") — which aims to reduce the efficacy of content farms with shallow content that often have artificially inflated backlinks and black hat search engine optimized content — the status quo has drastically shifted.
Colors in Web Design: An Exploration
Creating the perfect color palette for each design project can be a time-consuming task. We might settle on a color scheme, only to change our minds five minutes later.
Sometimes we’ll feel like we’ve found a solid set of colors, but don’t know how to make them work together in the project we’re working on. Sometimes it seems like we don’t have enough colors or too many colors or the wrong combination of colors.
Giveaway: 5 TN3 Gallery Image Gallery and Slideshow Licenses
In this giveaway, we’ve teamed up with TN3 Gallery (a JavaScript-based image gallery and slideshow solution) to give away 5 of their Pro accounts (valued at $37 each). Read on to learn how you can be one of the lucky winners of this awesome prize.
5 Little-Known Web Files That Can Enhance Your Website
Previously, I wrote about 5 web files that will improve your website and discussed files that, while small in size, pack a solid punch and make our work that little bit better. In this article, we’ll look at five more web files that can improve and your website.
10 Free Productivity Tools for Busy Web Professionals
As a web designer or web developer, focusing on your core work responsibility — producing websites — is tough enough of a job. So, I want to share with you a list of free tools to help you in various aspects of your work so that you can spend more time designing and less time on the other necessary things you need to deal with as a web professional.
Getting Users to Sign Up: Factors in Design and Content
Conversions can be tricky to accomplish on any website. A conversion could mean more sales, more registered users or simply more engaged users. Having a great product and delivering value to the user are obviously the factors to focus on when you want to increase your conversion rate. But a conversion rate can also be increased with smart design and strong content.
Creating Focal Points in Your Web Design
Web designers don’t have much time to impress website visitors and persuade them to stay on the websites we craft. They want to find things quickly, and we should design sites to aid them do just that. One of the most important ways to do this is with focal points.
A focal point is a prominent section on a web page that we want to guide the user’s attention to. The focal point is the eye-catching centerpiece of the page; it stands out and is distinct than other components.
