Several years into promoting my site using search engine optimisation techniques, I have found the amount of time invested is reflected in the rankings weeks and months later. You could spend the equivalent of time to a full time job working just on the SEO of your site, and unless your site converts visitors to sales you can’t afford to do this yourself. So, how do you get to the top? Using a reputable SEO company like the WordApe SEO company to do it for you is the best option (to find out more about them click here… or to find out more about the services they offer here.), but there is a lot you can do for yourself to get started and in that way at least you will be able to hopefully rank well against your competition.

My site ranks fairly well, and my expenditure on SEO is negligible. How do I do it? Well, I make sure I am listed in all the major search engines to begin with. Seems like a silly starting point, but actually being in the search engine database is the first step to being found. Adding relevant keywords to describe your site in the page coding and having a simple yet effective description for your site will help no end. It might not push up your ranking result but the traffic to your site will be much more targeted to the intended audience of your site.

Add your site to niche search engines, nowadays you can find sites that house links to all sorts of topics. Every time I find a graphic designer search engine, I make sure I add in my site. (but not the paid inclusion ones as I would be broke if I paid for every site I found).

Making sure your online social profiles have a link back to your site can help, but the best tip is always to check where your direct competitors are linked from. There are many ways to check these, but the easiest two are to simply search for their website address and see which sites are linked to them. The other way is to use yahoo site explorer and use the results you find from these as a starting point to source links to your site. Just having the sites linking to your competitors also linking to you will improve your chances to get closer to them or even surpass them.

You will never be as good at this as someone who does it professionally, but this will get you started and will teach you a bit of what’s involved in the process. This means you can spot some more of the dodgy operators and not end up wasting your investment in SEO with someone who might just spam the online forums with your link to push up your ranking for a short period.

The other tip is to make sure your website has great content and doesn’t rely on a gimmicky flash animation to make your site look fancy. Better content will improve your site visitor conversions to sales and will help drive referral traffic to you and not your competitor. Any investment in a good copywriter for your site will reap you much greater rewards in sales conversions long term than you would see otherwise.

The only other tip is to start now. Not next week, next quarter or next financial year. Do it now, the sooner the better. During economic tough times you should be investing more in your online presence as this is something that will help push you out to new customers or reassure your current clients that you are investing in one of your best sales tools.

Where would we be without the arcetypal villian to struggle against in our online games? My generation grew up with the first Star Wars trilogy. Let’s face it, without the Emperor and Darth Vader what would the movie be like? It would certainly not have had the interesting edge that it did without them. I would name Vader as my favourite bad guy of the associated computer games. Especially in Star Wars Battlefront, which has to be one of the best games for quick pick up and play gaming in my opinion.

Another villian of note would have to be the liche king in World of Warcraft. Without having a focus for your game it seems just too disconnected. Consider the Arkham Asylum game, who would Batman fight against without the Joker there? The janitors? No, the game would be terrible without the legendary Joker making his presence felt in the game.

Do you have a favourite villian? Or maybe there is a bad guy in a game that just annoys you more than any other!

Over the last few months, I seem to be dealing with more and more start ups. These are for the most part small home based businesses done on the side to gain some extra income. But for every business they need a logo, a website, letterhead, business card and promotional/advertising material.
Each of them has the same limited budget for all of this, and when they start having to pay for design of these items, printing costs come into play. Can they afford to get a thousand business cards printed for something that might not take off? Well, no. And they certainly don’t want to invest in thousands of flyers advertising their business when they may change their business model in six months.

So, what options do they have? Well, if the designer supplies them print ready PDFs for all the business cards and letterheads, they can choose to use a short run printer, or to save hassle use one of the online printing services. Printing via one of these is quite simply a case of setting up your user account and loading the artwork. You get a PDF proof emailed back, and then once you approve it, it gets printed and shipped to you. The bonus being you can get short runs printed, and if you take off in business instead of getting 50 cards printed, you can go back and get 500 or 1,000.

I have found this helps restrict initial costs for the business and its something they can do to test market reactions to new advertising before rolling out a huge run of a flyer. An early cost saving can sometimes mean the life or death of a business, especially when you are trying to pay for advertising, design AND the printing all at once, invariably before any real income for the business is being generated!

Recently I have been looking at adding free extras to my own website, and I was recommended the Visualscope.com website as an example of what can be added to help boost the value of your website to your clients. Although they are a Seattle web design team the free webmaster tools and the resources available on their site are useful to not only their clients but to other web designers like myself. I can certainly see myself visiting their site to check out their articles, and to return again to see what other articles they add in future.

The free webmaster tools are easy to find online, but to have a whole group of them in one place makes it so much easier for people like me who prefer to have a single bookmarked website to visit and to get everything done through the one spot rather than having to go to five or six sites to do the same thing.

My intent for this site is to add free things like desktop wallpapers, iphone wallpapers, twitter icons,  icon sets and other useful custom graphics, but I could definitely see how much added value any site could have by incorporating resource tools and articles on website design and development. 

For the most part my website design and development services requirements are done in-house, but after reading through their testimonials I would consider them as a source for overflow work.

For most people SEO could mean just about anything, and Search Engine Optimisation seems almost as vague. So, what is it, and why should I need to know about it?

Well, it is simply the practise of making sure everything is done to your website so that it has the best chance to be in the results on a search engine search.

And why would you need someone to do that? Today we see an ever increasing reliance on web based search engines for all our information requests. Do you even open your yellow pages or do you simply hop online to do a search through google or yahoo? Now with the iPhone even more people are simply using their phones web connection to do searches.

If you are not in the results, people simply won’t know you are there or be able to find you.

The search engines keep it a secret how their software works for sorting results, so it is an ongoing requirement to keep on top of your search engine optimisation. There is no magic bullet or secret to get to the valued number 1 spot in all the search engines.

Although you can get a book on SEO, the engines change so much and so quickly, even a book that is six months old may be out of date and useless for SEO. (or worse give you a negative result from it’s advice!)

To select a SEO firm, make sure they have a process in place for measuring results, and are able to show positive gains for previous clients. I remember a client coming to me saying the other design agency had simply told the client to ‘make a blog, that’s what the search engines need to rank you highly’ it was a terrible piece of advice they got, and one that didn’t reflect the needs of the client whatsoever. My advice was to find a specialist in Search Engine Optimisation and talk to them about what sort of package they could offer to them. (without the need for the business to generate a blog that they didn’t need, want, or have the time to maintain.)

Having a specialist in the field look over your website can show up simple errors or things that can be fixed to help push up your ranking simply by having it done right whereas your competition may not have it done in the right way for the search engines.

I saw this while walking through the CBD, is this the fate of all our poster design work? To be covered over, and eventually piled so thick that the layer of paper peels itself away from the wall?

It is scary to think everything is so temporary.

As a designer, we are allowed a certain measure of casual dress code every day of the week, rather than just a casual friday like other office workers.

So, in response to that, I have been trying to do ‘formal friday’ rather than casual friday. But no matter how hard I try, I always seem to end up going in the other direction and taking it to a higher level of casual with a flanny.

Now, a flannelette shirt is hardly a sleeveless shirt, but it certainly is down the list in regards to how casual I normally dress.

Should designers pick up the formal friday thing? Or are we just too determined in our casual dress code to ever mess with it?

Recently I have been discussing the different values between free and paid content.

Free brings traffic, more traffic means more for advertising on your site/conversions versus less traffic and a harder time to convert sales (more work). Less work (giving away free content) is better as you can focus on making better free content. Long term free over the charge model in my mind is a better business model. Mainly because there is no added complexity for chasing your earnings. The earnings on a free model come from advertising and similar rather than having to qualify and convert sales through the paid content method.

A month ago I received a thankyou gift from a client for the completion of a large project. This gave me the idea that I should write a post covering it. This is something that people forget, that whether giving or receiving a thankyou gift, it helps reinforce the client/supplier relationship. As an added bonus you can give your branded products to the client (like an iPod with your company name laser etched on the back, and preloaded with some free music/corporate ads) helping keep your name in front of them that much longer.

Most Web Designers are lackadasical when it comes to proofing and checking their work as it can be easily fixed at any point in the process, for no real cost. Print on the other hand, once a job has gone to the proof stage, fixing a simple spelling mistake on a proof can mean getting new print film made, not cheap, but if a job goes to print and something has been missed, it can mean fifty thousand copies (or more) get shredded and binned, followed by a full reprint at the cost of the designer.

Sometimes this could be sorted by a procedural checklist, where everything is ticked off as completed. This is relevant for both print and web, as I know of several websites and magazines that have simple spelling and grammatical errors. Things that just wouldn’t happen with a procedural checklist. If you look at something for long enough, you are bound to miss something.

We all suffer from laziness at times, thinking ‘it’s all fine, I don’t need to go through the checklist’. That’s when you miss something and you end up with egg on your face.

Things to always think about are:

• Spelling and grammar
• Client sign off
• Is it meeting client corporate branding?
• Has someone else looked it over?
• Is it the correct size and format?

These hold true for both web and print.

Print and web are really different mediums, but they also have a lot in common when you are looking at production, deadlines, checklists, client sign off, etc. The difference is down to what happens in the final stages.

Print, once it is cut to a cd and art is sent out, you wait on proofs, whilst digital, you look at tidying up the code, compressing the graphics that little bit more, droping in credit notes into the script. Even when it goes live, you can tweak the location of buttons, modify copy and even change how everything runs.

Print has a level of permanence that digital doesn’t seem to have. People and libraries keep archive printed materials. Whilst digital forms get trashed and replaced by newer and shinier formats.

I have built both print and digital checklists and briefing forms. Forcing yourself to sit down and build the basics of one really helps you pin down what might go wrong, and if something does go wrong, then add that as another step, as the checklists are invariably built upon mistakes that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Building a checklist makes you review your whole work process and makes you more aware of the production method, and you are not just focused on that beautiful end product.