Everything I’ve done with my blog design is intentional. I’m not saying that my blog design is perfect, and I certainly have other things I’d like to do in the future, but I wanted to share with you some thoughts about blog design, starting with my blog, but then showing some design ideas from other sites as well. Why should blog design matter? Because you want your blog to serve the purpose you’ve built it to serve.
Link: Make Your Blog Design Work For You
Posted in Blogs, Marketing, Website Planning • June 8th, 2008
For the last three months I have been hard at work learning SEO by optimizing a local small business website. The business is called Giggly Wiggly Preschool and is located in the Seattle suburb Issaquah, Washington. This Issaquah Preschool was the preschool I attended many years ago, so I am happy I was given the chance to give back to it. Optimizing for local search is a great way to learn SEO because there is less competition and it is easier to maintain a small and focused scope. It has been a slow process but has taught me a lot. The following is a checklist of all the tasks that have been necessary for me to generate great results. My hope is that this list can be used by inexperienced SEOs who are looking to learn the trade. (As a bonus, I have included checkboxes so you can print this and complete it in your spare time.)
Link: The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO
Posted in How-to, SEO • June 8th, 2008
…how does a web-worker today find a better web hosting provider?
Link: Finding a New Web Site Host
Posted in How-to • May 26th, 2008
As web designers, we’ve grown pretty good at understanding how to create a modern, semantic, accessible website using XHTML and CSS. We understand what makes a good website, and how to make it happen.
When it comes time to design emails though, do all the same rules apply? Are there things we should be doing specifically for email that don’t make sense on a website? In this article we’ll discuss the technical, design and information elements that make up a successful HTML email.
Link: 2008 Email Design Guidelines
Posted in How-to, Marketing, Writing for the Web • May 26th, 2008
Lately I’ve been sprucing up my collection of software applications, and spending time with some good online tutorials on my favorites. Many of these tutorials are free, and in this post, I’ll round up several that I’ve found worth paying attention to.
Tutorials for:
- Editing images
- Using Unix
- Open Office applications
- Microsoft Office applications
- And more…
Link: Free Tutorial Sites for Honing Your App Skills
Posted in How-to, Training • May 19th, 2008
With the popularity of blogging and online journals, writers working in the online realm have a growing number of opportunities all the time to practice and refine their craft, and maybe even get paid for it. And if you’re working online, why not take advantage of all the opportunities to get great free and open source resources that can help you to write, edit and organize your work? Here’s a list of fifty open source tools that you can use to make your writing even better.
Link: 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers
Posted in Writing for the Web • May 13th, 2008
Once you’ve started building media, like a podcast, or a new videoblog, the very next thing that happens is that you want people to actually see it and experience it. One of the most common questions I’m asked by people who blog or podcast is how to grow their audience. Audience does make a difference in making media, at least if your goal is to build conversations and relationships. Here are a few tips to getting the word out to prospective new people.
Link: Promoting Your Media
Posted in Marketing, Social Media • May 13th, 2008
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
This sounds about right in my experience. Follow the link for more numbers how Jakob Nielsen came up with these figures.
Link: How Little Do Users Read?
Posted in Writing for the Web • May 8th, 2008