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!

I used to see everyone with iPods and now it seems like at least every second person has an iPhone. Apple has changed the music Market and the phone Market. Will the upcoming islate tablet (which looks like a bigger version of the iPhone) change the portable computing market? The mass uptake of the iPhone would certainly not hurt in getting people to consider the iSlate when they arrive. As a designer I am pretty excited about what possibilities it brings me in regards to remote work and telecommuting.

Travelling to and from work would be certainly more productive, as long as I was designing new tshirts and not just watching happy tree friends episodes on it.

That’s right, I have found a great little site that converts your existing mp3 files to m4r files to use as iphone ringtones. Longer songs will need to be cutdown using the interface on the site, but for those of us who already have a bag full of mp3 ringtones from older phones, this is a handy little tool to get them converted.

mp3 to m4r

I know I have quite a few to convert and put up for sharing!

Further to my last post on the switch to zazzle over cafepress, I am finding it easier to work with the free store that is included with zazzle over having to pay for the same thing in cafepress.

Best part is, you can now build category folder images to brand your store even further.

I may not have mentioned in my previoous post about the interface for building designs on zazzle, as most of them allow you to upload the final design to the site, zazzle has a little interface which allows to tweak the image locations, add text in a variety of fonts, and best of all, it tells you if your image is not high enough resolution for the size you scale it to. Why is this so good? It means I can add some text to a tshirt when I think of it, rather than have to wait to get to my computer, put it in photoshop, and then upload the image of the text. Plus, you can add text to existing designs on the site, to personalize them for yourself. Which is something I have done on more than one occasion!

Next step is to look at using the coding to make the store from zazzle sit on my website without ever having to leave it for impulse purchases!

Check out some of the products below.

To celebrate the new Space Hulk boardgame from Games Workshop, a few of my friends asked for some new iPhone wallpapers for their phones.

They liked the graphics from the game so much, they suggested I share them further.

Disclaimer // None of the images are mine, all intellectual property rights are owned by Games Workshop and this in no way an official release, nor am I purporting to be associated with Games Workshop in any way. It is simply the graphics generated for people to have in a format for their phones.

Over the weekend I hit and surpassed another one of my goals for eBay! The first one was to crack $1,000 in sales, and the latest was to hit the 100 stars. Which now qualifies me for Powerseller status if I can make enough sales in a 3 month period.

I am certainly going to try!

After I hit that goal, I am thinking of writing up a help guide as to how I acheived it, and some tips to selling. Would anyone be interested in that?

Just started switching over to zazzle from cafepress. After some decent results with cafepress, I have found that zazzle offers payments via paypal to its sellers rather than only by cheque like cafepress and that decided it for me. I don’t want to have to wait an extra month for commission payments anymore. So, I intend to switch over most designs to the zazzle store. Any designs that have dropped off cafepress that aren’t in the zazzle store, let me know and I can add them or send out a link for them.

I am still taking custom design jobs for product designs, and can set up private product links for you to them. Just send any requests through to tshirts@bittenbydesign.com

Recently I added a little desciption on all my cafepress storefronts mentioning if anyone had any requests for t-shirt designs to send me an email.

Quite a few emails have come in with positive comments about the tshirt designs.

If anyone has one (or more) of the designs I have available, I would love to get photos of them in use, to put up on the website here, and to put into the catalogue of the designs I am starting to put together.

However crazy the photos are, I am glad to see people enjoying the designs.

But at least make the photos reasonably tasteful, otherwise I won’t be adding them to the site.

Also, if you want model credit, just send me your twitter/web address to add to the photos.