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Archive for June, 2010
Ways to Get Unblocked
Web designers, like any creative person, can suffer from writers block. But because of our work, there are many ways you can learn to deal with the blocks and get unstuck. These six suggestions have worked for me to get new design ideas in the past and will work again.
- Be prepared for procrastination to try to block you. When I’m working on a new design or article idea, I find that that’s when ideas for other projects will come up. For example, I might start thinking of ways to paint my office, about the wool I need to wash, or a possible location for a new kitchen garden. I realize that these are just ways of procrastinating, but they are also things I’d like to do. So, if I’m writing or working on a Web design, I write them down and continue brainstorming my current project. I’ve found that if I write down the things I want to procrastinate, they don’t press as much as they would if I try to simply ignore them.
- Start in the middle. For some reason, many Web designers feel an intense need to start at the top of their Web page and design down. Yes, ultimately, you’ll have to think that way about the HTML or CSS, but when you’re working on a design, you should focus on the most important part first – and that’s not usually the navigation, branding, or advertising found at the top. When writing content, the same is true, I’ve found that if I start writing with a title, my articles are usually completely different than what the title says. So I have to write a new title when I’m done anyway.
- Step away from the computer. I’ve found that it can get very easy to get hung up on technical issues like HTML or JavaScript when I try to do an initial design on the computer. While I do most of my rough writing drafts on the computer, I do most of my designs on paper first. For one thing, they’re easier to erase and scratch out. Plus, since I use scratch paper for most rough drafts, so if I decide I hate an idea, I don’t feel bad about throwing it out.
- Take the time you need. Planning is one step in most projects that is both the most important and the least used. Most people, including Web designers, prefer to jump right in and start building things. If you prefer designing a page, you probably get out Dreamweaver or Photoshop immediately after starting a project. If you prefer developing pages, you probably jump right into the PHP or JavaScript to generate behaviors. But most Web design and development projects end up over budget, over time, or not meeting the requirements – and this is usually because the planning phase of the project was glossed over in favor of action. Take time with your planning and when you think you’re done, take a little more time. Planning won’t hurt your designs, but lack of planning will.
- Ask for help. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, but be sure to find people who can provide you with constructive criticism. It doesn’t help if they are too effusive about how wonderful it is, but someone who can’t find anything good is also not a lot of help.
- If you’re really stuck, do something else. The idea is to get your mind off of the problem you’re working on. This can allow your subconscious to think about it unobstructed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to sleep and woken up in the morning with the ideal solution completely formed in my head.
Choosing a seo team
1 year ago
by admin
in Search Engine
- Be extremely cautious of anyone who places great emphasis on “submissions.” They’ve never been trained and do not understand search engine marketing if they place a lot of emphasis on submission services. Submitting to a “Directory” is still important, but there are good reasons why, you should NOT submit to search engines.
- Ask outright to see the individuals “SEO certification of skills.” If they have one, take a good look at the company that delivered their certification training. Do a search to see if that training company’s Web site can be found in top results for competitive SEO training phrases. For example if the training company only shows up in PPC advertising, how could they possibly be training others in gaining visibility in the organic results, if they cannot achieve it for themselves. The same with any company that uses unsolicited e-mail marketing to push their services. Think about it….if they were up to date in their skills, they would not be resorting to Spamming you.
- Beware of anyone who “guarantees” a number one ranking in Google or other search engines. These offers are designed to “look safe” and “sound safe” so that you * think* you cannot possibly lose out. A great deal of confidence is bolstered using superlative laden language that convinces you that there is no possible way you can lose. We have seen many people come to study in class to build genuine SEO and SEM skills (unfortunately after they trusted their Web site to the wrong people.) In some case their sites had been banned and then we’ve had to help them clean up the mess to get back into the search engine’s good graces.
- Watch for hints in dialogue when someone speaks of knowing all the “tricks” to “outsmart the search engines.”
SEO Professionals do not “outsmart” or “trick” the search engines at all. But they’ve been trained in how to create truly relevant, high quality content that ranks based on developing useful pages that deliver high value to the visitor and satisfy the reason why the visitor searched in the first place. Many bits of dialogue are quite telling, so listen carefully when someone is describing there services to you. - As strange as it sounds, this industry is not JUST about top rankings. Ultimately, the goal is to gain top rankings but also you must understand how to compel visitors to respond. It’s only when these two elements together are working that you’ll produce your ultimate objective….to make sales, or earn money and profit from your Web site.
Even if your objective is not to make sales, you’ll still need to be easily found and you’ll need to compel your visitor to take some kind of action to fulfill whatever objective you have. - Ask the company you are considering for hire, to provide you with a few business referrals where you can obtain a phone number and actually speak to a few of their clients. This can be someone who is in a different type of business and it can also be someone who can answer your questions in general.Questions you might ask of their client: 1) In terms of percentage, how much has your company profited by using this service? 2) Are there any pages on your site that you wish might perform better? 3) Would you say that these SEO services have exceeded your original expectations? These types of questions will encourage the referral to reflect on their relationship while not sounding too threatening or prying.
- Don’t feel that you literally have to become an SEO expert in order to get your Web site performing well. If you have no interest in building the skills, you can still get a solid education in all of the principles and techniques that will help you easily identify truth from error. This education can literally save you thousands of wasted dollars and get your project launched correctly the FIRST time.
- Watch out for so called “training companies” that may have a secondary agenda (other than teaching you the genuine SEO skills manually.) There are companies that say they will teach you the skills, but in the end, they are hoping to make learning “seem more difficult” in hopes of having you end up hiring THEM to do the work. Some schools give you some general knowledge but in the end, they want you to buy their special SEO tools like an up-sell.
Top Internet Marketing Strategies
1 year ago
by admin
in Internet Marketing
Internet marketing can attract more people to your website, increase customers for your business, and enhance branding of your company and products. If you are just beginning your online marketing strategy the top 10 list below will get you started on a plan that has worked for many.
Start with a web promotion plan and an effective web design and development strategy.
Get ranked at the top in major search engines, and practice good Search Optimization Techniques.
Learn to use Email Marketing Effectively.
Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs.
Request an analysis from an Internet marketing coach or Internet marketing consultant.
Build a responsive opt-in email list.
Publish articles or get listed in news stories.
Write and publish online press releases.
Facilitate and run contests and giveaways via your web site.
Blog and interact with your visitors.
By following the above tips you’ll be on your way to creating a concrete internet marketing strategy that could boost your business substantially.
Outsourcing in the IT industry
1 year ago
by admin
in Outsourcing
Information technology is one of the most popular areas of outsourcing. It can, however, involve a range of issues. For example: software, equipment, premises, people, third party agreements, and so on.All these will need to be carefully considered, and steps to address them included in the transition plan, the SLA and the outsourcing contract.
THE EARLY STAGES
When considering the outsoucing of IT services, management must be very clear with respect to its expectations. It must clearly define the services themselves – in other words, exactly what it wants to be delivered.
It is always a good idea to measure these against the existing services, almost a benchmarking exercise. At the very least, this will provide useful data for use downstream, when consideration of suppliers is undertaken.
Having defined the requisite IT service, costs should be considered. Again, it is wise to start close to home. What are the current costs? How are these projected to increase (or decrease)?
Essentially, a picture is being built here of where the organization currently stands, and where it wishes to stand, with repsect to the IT service. Having established this information, the path to IT outsourcing should be far clearer.
SEO: Key Concepts
1 year ago
by admin
in Search Engine
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of building a website so that it is given a top position in search engine results.
There are two criteria for SEO: On-Site Criteria, which is the structure of the website itself, andOff-Site Criteria, which is based on a combination of the quantity, importance and relevance of links from other websites. There is also some importance given to the age of the website domain name.
The best way I have found to describe SEO is as a set of layers, with the broadest scope at the top. Each of these layers needs to be set up with a specific focus, to give a clear picture to the search engines as to what the site is about.
Internet Focus – Also called Off-site Criteria or Link Building, involves focusing the influence of other websites at your own site, by building links from as many relevant and important sites as possible.
Website Focus – Each website must be focused around a specific theme. If your website is about “fine art” then each page should be about some aspect of fine art, and also the website domain name should contain the words “fine art”.
Page Focus – Each page must be focused around a topic related to the website theme. The page must be properly structured by tagging and labeling the areas that are used as markers by the search engines, such as the file name, page heading, title, META tags, body text and hyperlinks. You can also help give a page focus by linking to it from other pages on the site.
Image Focus – Images, as well as videos and graphical elements related to the topic, must also be correctly labeled. An image needs to be labeled in the file name, the ALT description tag and also with a caption below or next to the image on the page.
Using all of these SEO methods together will give the search engines the clearest possible picture of what the site is about. Also the search engines expect to see growth in both On-Site and Off-site criteria over time, so you should plan to regularly expand the site with related content and more links from other related websites.
Tips for Effective Web Design
Listed below are some useful and rather important tips for designing a professional and high quality web site:
- Neat and Easy Navigation: Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining the stickiness of your site (how long your visitor stays and explores your site). Ask yourself this, What do visitors do as soon as they open your site? They would probably read the content of the present page and then look around to find any other page that interests them.
- Clean Layout Design: A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site’s looks. Try to keep the focus on your content, use dreamweaver templates for this. Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your site looking messed up.
- Program using pure CSS: The world is moving away from table based websites to pure CSS websites because it offers accessibility, reusability and considerably reduces file size apart from giving greater control over the look of your website. The single most important skill you can learn today to become a quality web designer is CSS programming! Even if you are not an expert at CSS you can learn to use the following simple CSS Styles Effects to enhance your website:
- Cool Text Effects using CSS Styles: Text Links Rollover, Text Case Setting, Text Spacing, Line-through Effect
- Bullets in HTML or Deamweaver: Using CSS Styles with bullets (shapes, decimal, roman-numerals, images, etc.)
- Links without Underline: Use CSS Styles to display links without the appearance of the underline.
- Optimum Load Time: Make sure your load time is low. For this you must:
Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size.
Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster. - Design for all Screen Resolutions: A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay and read your content. For site with long pages of content this is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. Suppose your site doesn’t look good for a particular resolution it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and professional site.
- Ensure Web site scalability: Make sure your code and design is scalable. As technology advances and configuration of computers & their monitors keep increasing and varying it is impossible to test your site in all screen sizes and platforms.
- Cross Browser Compatible: Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1+, Opera 7+, Safari 3+ and Netscape Navigator 6+ as they constitute 95% of the worlds browsers.
PSD to Xhtml conversion
1 year ago
by admin
in Web Development
HTML is simply the short form of hyper text mark up language. This is the most basic and elementary language in which web pages or websites are developed or written. This language was the prominent and perhaps the only option to design web pages or websites, prior to the formulation of the Xhtml language. Xhtml was figured out by the web specialists to crack the dilemma of file switching over process that occurred in the transformation of the formats from PSD to HTML. Xhtml simplified the exchange processes from one file draft to the other type of layout.
As it is clear from the name itself, Xhtml is simply the expansion of the HTML standardized mark up language and is called as the extensible hyper text mark up language. Xth or .Xhtml is the extension to these files. This language was formulated to enhance the interoperateabilty with all other file formats and especially with the HTML and Photoshop documents which was not possible earlier in situations where the transformations were to be done in animations or graphics designed on the Photoshop or any other graphic based software. But now with the advent of the Xhtml all the conversions from PSD to Xhtml are now viable.
And thus if you are also blocked with these file transformation processes then don’t just panic. There are so many web development based companies in the market that will work out on all your problems and cater to your requirements. You can also contact these organizations through internet as well. You just need to browse through the internet and you will easily find out the list of all the reputed web developer companies that will help you rebuild your ordinary designs into the highly proficient and cross browser compatible one’s. These companies have their highly qualified teams of PSD to Xhtml developers, who work throughout the day and night to offer quick and efficient solutions. In addition to these web conversion tasks, these development companies also offer other web services like flash development, link building and other SEO base solutions.
Xhtmldevelopers.com is one such important name when it comes to the web conversion processes. Providing complete web solutions to the clients they also offer certain discounts and money back guarantee on their web services. What’s more exciting is that they even offer online assistance to all their customers. Some of the prominent services offered by them are the following – Hand coded XHTML Strict markup, W3C Validated and compliant code, HTML/XHTML as skins/templates for Word Press.
Meta tags for search engine optimization
1 year ago
by admin
in Search Engine
Web site owners and search engine optimization professionals used to spend a lot of time worrying about meta tags. Which keywords should be added to the KEYWORDS tag? How to compose the content in the DESCRIPTION tag?
These days the issue of meta tags is easy to handle: They no longer play any role in ranking your site in the major search engines.
Come again? Yes, Bing and Google along with Ask and any other search engines that pass for competition do not use information from meta tags for ranking your site. It’s as simple as that.
If you want to go the extra mile, you could optimize the description tag, which Google may choose to use in the snippet on the search results page. It is not relevant to ranking, however.
To help the search engines robots crawl your site properly, you should mind your ROBOTS tags:
- <META NAME=”ROBOTS”
CONTENT=”ALL”>
tells the search engine to index the page. However, this tag is superfluous. Search engines will also index pages without this tag. - <META NAME=”ROBOTS”
CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
indicates that a robot should neither index a document, nor analyze it for links. - <META NAME=”ROBOTS”
CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
means that a robot should not index this document, but that it should index the pages it is pointing to.
Note though, that if you need to limit the search engines access to your site, it is better to put a robots.txt file in the root directory of your site (provided that you have your own domain).
Outsourcing Risks & Rewards
1 year ago
by admin
in Outsourcing
In 2007, Standard & Poor’s reports that companies spent some US$150 billion on international outsourcing. Market research firm IDC sees that amount rising 65% to $250 billion by 2012.
Technology-based outsourcing is one of the fastest growing trends in international trade. However, operational outsourcing involves tradeoffs between client cost-savings and loss of control on the outsourced activities or functions.
Types of Outsourcing Service Providers
Some outside vendors take over major assets and resources including employees from a client company. These business process outsourcers assume full responsibility for one or more specific business processes that the client would otherwise perform.
The scope of this analysis is restricted to application service outsourcers who provide specialized functions for multiple clients.
Broadridge Financial Solutions
For example, Broadridge Financial Solutions is a full-service outsourcer that provides technological services for global financial services companies including banks and brokerage firms. Seven of the top ten broker-dealers in the United States outsource parts of their securities processing functions to Broadridge.
With over 45 years of experience and more than 4,200 employees world-wide, a specialized third-party outsourcer like Broadridge has a proven track record managing back-office processes for financial institutions around the globe.
Advantages of International Outsourcing
An international outsourcing firm can save the high maintenance costs and the specialized attention demanded by back-office operations like electronic securities transaction processing. Freed from the ongoing burden of daily back-office tasks, clients are able to focus on core competencies such as sales and new business underwriting.
According to third-party systems provider Cyber Futuristics, companies that outsource non-core operations also enjoy the following advantages.
- Outsourcing specialists have the technological resources, expertise and mandate to invest in new technologies that would otherwise be much more costly and risky for a client company to continuously manage on its own.
- By outsourcing to a team of technology experts, client companies access skills and training expertise not internally available while saving on human resource costs. The latter ranges from recruitment, training and performance incentives to employee group benefits.
- Ideally, highly skilled outsourcers increase their client company’s productivity while lowering costs.
Disadvantages of International Outsourcing
One of the most publicized potential disadvantages to outsourcing is poor quality control. Case in point is last year’s melamine-laced pet food crisis, caused by a Chinese outsourcer overly focused on cost-savings.
Other disadvantages include:
- Lengthy bid and negotiation processes to find an appropriate outsourcer.
- Difficulty selecting the best outsourcer for specific business needs because differences among service providers are unclear.
- Outsourcers often demand longer term contracts, which can decrease company flexibility.
- Loss of strategic alignment with client company goals once operations are outsourced.
Within the client company, fear of losing jobs to outsourcers negatively affects employee attitudes. Employee morale and motivation falls, just as company loyalty decreases.
Ways to Mitigate Outsourcing Risks
Client companies usually have a strong understanding of their own specific industry and business environment. Therefore, outsourcing experts advise firms to only outsource non-core functions that do not directly affect the products or services that the business offers.
Companies should define exactly what business processes make sense to be outsourced to a service provider. That list of processes must then be prioritized, starting with those projects that offer the highest benefits to the company at the lowest possible cost.
An outsourcing firm must be selected based on credible referrals. The selected vendor must have experience with similar businesses, and be able to provide priority service to the client’s unique and specific needs.
Outsourcing Service Level Agreements
Finally, an effective service level agreement is key to a successful outsourcing relationship. That contract must clearly define responsibilities, performance criteria, financial incentives to meet deadlines, confidentiality rules, ownership rights to new ideas and technologies as well as outsourcing termination rights.
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