The field of website design has become more competitive as it was five years ago. This is because of the emergence of several website design tools, scripts and website design techniques. Nowadays, you can download website design tools that can aide website designers in the website design process, tools such as Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Illustrator, HTML editor and other What You See Is What You Get Hypertext Markup Language Editor (WYSIWYG HTML Editor). Scripts like JavaScript which now evolved into Ajax, PHP, ASP and VBScript have also emerged to give a website design that much needed dynamism and usability. Website designers have also integrated several new techniques in approaching an endeavor in website design. One such technique is the production or the making of a mock-up for a certain website design.

Due to the stringent competition among website designers and due to the meticulous taste of clients and how a website design will fit in to their company motto, color scheme or even their company’s purpose, website designers have resorted to carefully planning the over all design of a website. This gave birth to the use of mock-up in website design. Mock-ups are basically an image that is created using Photoshop or other image editing software to which it will stand as a proposal website design to the client. Once the client approves of the mock-up then and only then can the website design process can proceed.

The Mock-up process is divided into two and these are the following:

First Sketch Mock-up, this type of mock-up is done with the use of paper and pencil, this is the initial planning stage where the website designer or graphic artist will draw the design of the website on a piece of paper and such must contain the different website content and the desired colors to be used.

Second is the Graphic Mock-up, this type of mock-up will commence once the sketch mock-up is approved by the client or if the website designer is already satisfied with the sketch. The Graphich mock-up entails the use of graphic or visual applications such as photoshop in order to have these sketches be “computerised” or “digitised”.

Following these two mock-up processes could surely save you some time and prevent you from spending unnecessarily.

For so many years now Google and Microsoft have been locking horns with each other trying to battle an or challenge the competition in every field possible, may it be in the field of videos, applications, operating systems and even on search engines and online marketing strategies. Recently, Microsoft has released its newest upgrade to the MSN live search engine and this new search engine is said to have performed very well on it’s debut even surpassing the current numbers in terms of share in the number of people utilising the website. The new Microsoft Seach engine named Bing even beat Yahoo in terms of the internet usage share.

Despite of these success that Bing is already garnering since the start of it’s operation Google remains to be unfazed. In an interview to the Google CEO Erick Schmidt he enunciated that Bing is not Microsoft’s first entry, the company, Microsoft that is, has been building and testing several other applications but it always have come back short of something. The Google CEO believes that search is about freshness, comprehensiveness that functions in a large scale capacity such are, as the Google SEO believe is among their search engines’ characteristics.

Commenting on Bings win against Yahoo and the formers’ impressive performance after being lauched, the Google CEO stated that “One day is one day, it does not a trend make”. This means that whatever Bing has achieved it was only for a certain period of time which is considered to be negligible and should not be viewed as a new trending process.

It is not a mystery that blogging is now one of the latest internet craze. Blogging is the process of posting your Blogs on to your blog site. Quite a lot of blog words? Let me break it down to you. Blogs are also known as web logs this is where blog got it’s name, further blog is a process of writing articles or commonly known as blog posts that will serve as the bloggers’ (the person who is writing the blog post) journal such journal is posted on a website or a blog site intended for public viewing. Because of the popularity of blogs SEO company’s and SEO consultants have devised ways in order to exploit the blogging process for the benefit of one’s Search engine optimisation campaign. At present SEO’s are utilising blogs and blog sites to boost their search engine ranking by utilising such blogs to create backlinks to their website and by using keyword rich texts incorporated into the blog posts. Although not all are born to write, there are several ways for a writer to learn when posting a blog for SEO purposes and these are:

First, determine your target audience. Knowing the demographics will help you a lot rather than aiming at something not feasible. From your target audience you could actually already provide the necessary theme and writing style for your blogs. For example your target audiences are children then utilise only words that are appropriate for the target age group.

Second, organise your thoughts first before starting on writing. Blogs are being read by the public and this should always be a motivating factor for SEO practitioners worldwide. Organising your thoughts will actually give you the best possible start in the writing of your blog post as you will have by then known the different terminologies as well as the keywords needed to be incorporated in website design.

Third, when writing articles or blog posts there is no need to write more than one thousand words just to fill your blog site. What is important is in your article there must be some incorporation of word strategies to entice users not to mention also the inclusion of backlight, despite of the small number of words, targeting the keywords immediately and with the incorporation of backlinks to your websites’ home page.
These three tips on using the blogs are just some of the guidelines that can help you raise you SEO campaign.

The world of e-commerce is constantly evolving at a much higher rate. The incorporation of different marketing techniques such as Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-per-click method among others has sparked the beginning of a continuously changing face of online marketing. For every new Web Technology that has been developed SEO companies and SEO consultants have also been keeping themselves updated and have been found to utilise the different new products of web technology. Although change has been a constant event in the world of e-commerce, SEO companies, SEO consultants and other online marketers have observed that not everything actually changes, and those that seems to remain constant are actually the different factors essential in the field of e-commerce. From the different data gathered by online-marketers and Search engine optimisation practitioners the following are the different tips that could land you a higher success rate in your e-commerce business.

1. Learn from others – there is a vast resource in the field of e-commerce, basically, most websites pertains to e-commerce or has something to do with e-commerce. Therefore, before you do anything drastic researching about the fate of other companies that are in the same field as your line of business would be the proper road to follow. It would be best that we learn from what others especially on the mistakes that they have committed this includes from the set-up of your website design up to the Search engine optimisation part.

2. Start with a good website design – most online business or e-commerce business requires the utilisation of websites. Having your own website to transact business online would require you to have a website that will conform to the most basic requirements of websites, these are aesthetics and usability. Aesthetics refers to the visual value of the website design or the website as a whole, a website that is pleasing to the eyes would give you a higher rate of chances in having your website be browsed longer by internet users and most probably gain a conversion. Usability on the other hand refers to the ability of the website to be user friendly, remember not all website visitors or internet users for that matter are well versed on the technical aspects of the web thus it is imperative that your website design be as much usable as possible.
3. Augment by using Viral marketing – due to the fact that the field of online marketing have become very stringent in terms of its competition there is a need to augment your Search engine optimisation campaign, because having just only one type of online marketing campaign might reduce your chances of having a successful online marketing campaign. One way for you to augment your online marketing campaign or your SEO campaign is via the incorporation of viral marketing campaign. Viral marketing campaign is spreading your business via the word of mouth, in online marketing this can be achieved by using forums, chats and the social media networks such as facebook and twitter.

4. Keep your customers informed – keeping your customers informed on updates about your products or services will make your clients to be keeping on coming back to your website. Keeping your clients informed can be achieved by sending newsletters on your products or services updates, do not overdo this process as this would have the tendency of being interpreted as a spam mail. Frequency of sending newsletters will depend on the volume and frequency of updates in your website or in your products and services being offered.

5. Provide avenue for feedback – providing an avenue for feedbacks will allow you to promote your website better. These feedbacks would become in turn to be the websites’ or your business’ testimonials. Having a good review and a good testimonial or feedback is a proof that you are running a legitimate, honest and quality e-commerce business.

Google has been constantly under fire since the last quarter of the previous year until today. This comes not as a surprise regarding a company that has so many years of experience in its field of business and a company that is considered to be a giant in the business due to its constant hold to being number one on the same field of expertise. To prove this, Google has been continuously sweeping the competition in terms of search engine internet user’s share. Although, Google has ventured away from its original line of business, that is the search engine, it was still clear in the last survey conducted by the different online research firms that Google still is the number one search engine worldwide. It is because both of these, constantly being number one and venturing outside it’s mainstream business, that Google is being attacked. Attacks such as the emergence of new search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft’s Bing in order to compete for Google’s number one spot in the search engine shares of internet users and the antitrust probe brewing in light of Googles’ suspected monopoly of the online advertising field a cause of action which emanated from Googles’ constantly being number one in internet users’ share on search engine use and its new project the book search.

The Government probe is the one attack that Google had set its eyes on defending against. This is because of the fact that recently Googles’ public affairs lead Adam Kovacevich have released a presentation which states in essence that Google is anything but anti-competitive. The presentation further states that Google became successful because of its implementation of a learning by doing method, thus clearly showing and claiming that Google never resorted to any “dirty” tactics just to get where they are now.

For more information on Search Engine Optimisation or Website Design news visti our SEO Blog.

The Cascading Style Sheets of CSS as commonly known in the field of website design functions to separate a websites’ content with its presentation or appearance. This means, in layman’s term that CSS is in-charge of the design for the website or web page for that matter. This further means that such presentation incorporated through the use of the Cascading Style Sheets have allowed separation of the scripts or codes for the website design or presentation aspect and the content or the structure of the website itself which is taken cared of by the Hypertext Markup Language of HTML. The Cascading style sheet was introduced along with HTML 4.01 in order to compliment the latter on the different limitations on HTML’s website design capabilities. Although HTML and XHTML can still be utilised to create a website or a web page there are several advantages that the Cascading style sheets provide over the Hypertext Markup Language among these are:

1. Color control – Cascading style sheets allows the website designer to control the incorporation of colors in the website design. Unlike when integrating colors using HTML such has a very limited capacity. The cascading style sheets allows website designers to manipulate or change colors of texts, headings, the overall background of the website design and backgrounds for specific elements such as the texts and headings.

2. Font control – fonts are very important not only to display a websites’ content but to aesthetically display it. Cascading style sheets being an element-driven or tag compatible scripting language allows website designers to fully control the different texts’ contained in the website design. Font manipulation ranging from the font family, font size and text decoration among others are the features of the cascading style sheets in terms of font control.

3. Allowing simple animation or dynamism – have you ever seen a text or a navigation link that changes every time your mouse pointer hovers over it? This is attributed to the Cascading style sheets’ ability to integrate simple animation due to the pseudo class property of the said scripting language. The example stated is mainly applicable when the pseudo class :hover is used.

4. Free positioning – unlike for HTML the Cascading stlye sheets allow website designers to freely position their images, contents and videos anywhere in the website design. Proper positioning in HTML is done through the use of tables but because of its limited positioning ability the cascading style sheet was designed to position website design elements anywhere in the web page without the use of tables. The CSS properties such as position, top, left, right, margin and z-index allows the free positioning of the different website design elements.

Videos or online videos at least are also subjects of a search engine spiders’ crawl. Online videos are, nowadays considered as another important avenue for website owners and even SEO companies and SEO consultants in marketing their website or target website. This new search engine capability of indexing and ranking videos created an avenue for SEO companies and SEO consultants to utilise the power of multimedia to augment a websites’ conversion convincing power. The power to convince internet users to convert from a website visitor to a client is increased due to the incorporation of videos on the website which utilises several multimedia approaches such as spoken words, animated images among others. Being a useful tool in Search engine optimisation campaign online videos must also undergo such process of SEO. The following are the different ways on how one can optimise a websites’ online video content.

1. Remember that an online video is just part of the website or web page for that matter, therefore you have to utilise conventional Hypertext Markup Language and integrating on the same web page the different keywords and key phrases that you are targeting.

2. Since you want your online video to be indexed and ranked you have to incorporate in your keywords the word “video” this is to signal the search engine crawlers to apply a different indexing method and rank it according to the videos SERP and not the conventional SERP.

3. Maximise keyword utilisation by incorporating transcripts of the video. Video transcripts allows you to make a keyword rich .txt document which increases your chances of being crawled by the search engine spiders. Transcripts are text (.txt) files where it contains the title of the video, brief synopsis of the video and the different words spoken on the video. For Google it prefers a time coded text file where every transcript has the time when the words are spoken in the video. This method gives you the best avenue to intensify your SEO campaign via the use of keywords.

4. Finally but not the least make your video’s title catchy so as to entice internet users more in clicking on your video link.

Colors are integral part of a website design because without it the whole website design would look dull and “boring”. One of the major purposes of website design is that a website must be aesthetically pleasing and it is in this purpose the colors play a major role. Colors usually brings out the artistic side of every website designer because of the fact that he or she would have to mix and match the different colors in order to get the right combination. Usually the right combination would also depend on the type of demographics that your website is targeting. Here we will try to understand how the color scripts are interpreted by the different web browsers and how the website designers code for them.

First we look at the structure of a script that integrates color on the website design, this principle applies to both the Hypertext Markup Language and the Cascading Style Sheet scripting languages. Colors are incorporated in the code as RGB or the Red Green and Blue which are also the there main colors in website design. The color values are written in the script either using the English or the hexadecimal values. The English values are of course the common enumeration of the different colors while for the hexadecimal values these are values ranging from 0 to FF. The hexadecimal values are commonly utilised because it gives website designers the flexibility in terms of color mixing and matching via controlling the colors’ intensity which cannot be done using the English value.

The hexadecimal value in color scripts is divided, as previously mentioned, into three to compensate for the RGB format but each color in such format will have two digits of hexadecimal value that would account for the colors’ intensity. For example the color reds’ intensity is 33, green is AA and blue is FF then the color script hexadecimal value would then be #33AAFF.

One main problem being encountered by most website designers is the fact that most website designs will start with mock up which are done using Photoshop or other image editing applications. The problem will arise by the fact that Photoshop and the other image editors are usually using decimal color values instead of the hexadecimal which the field of website design is using. Even though this presents a problem to website designers there are ways on how to synergise the two color values.

The first step is to take the decimal values of each main color the Red, Green and Blue. Using a scientific calculator convert the values for decimal to hexadecimal the resulting value is now your hexadecimal value for your website design. Few other rules in writing the hexadecimal code, when you encounter a conversion which yields a single digit always add zero before the digit, for example the conversion yielded 5 as the value when writing it on hexadecimal form it should be 05. When writing the color script code you now put the six digits together and to form as six character strings that will start from red, to green and blue. Finally, do not forget to integrate the number (#) sign to signify the beginning of the string of characters for the color.

Google started a Book search project way back last year which claimed so many criticisms from the different sectors of the society. I was October of last year that this copyright dispute was settled and is now under the scrutiny of the New York federal court. Also at the moment, the Department of Justice has also given a keen interest in this matter as it is one of the main subjects for the anti-trust probe that would befall on the search engine giant. The Book search critics have been claiming that Google, if given the power to implement the book search, will be able to gouge people from giving their money in order to utilise the book search services without the writer benefitting from it. Google in response, have denied such claims and has in fact set aside thirty-four million five hundred thousand dollars ($34.5 million) which will be utilised to establish a non-profit registry that would allow authors to make claim of their work and choose the option on whether to participate on the book search project or not. Even with Google giving the public their assurance, critics have still pushed through with filing a copyright suit against the search engine giant. The copyright dispute emanated from the so-called orphaned works or those books that are out of print but are still on the copyright. Which means for the critics would allow Google to lay claim on these orphaned-works and with the increasing number of such orphaned-works Google will manage to have a strangle-hold on this types of books thus removing the authors’ every right on the book that was already claimed by the search engine giant.

Google insists however that the Book search project aims to lessen if not totally eliminate the number of orphaned works via the establishment of such non-profit registry which will allow authors to come forward and claim to be the book’s author. Google further claimed that the fears of the critics were of no basis at all.

For more information on the Search Engine Optimisation industry read our SEO news in our SEO Blog.

The Hypertext Markup Language or commonly known as HTML has been revered to be the lingua franca of the web or the main language for the web. This means that every website design or web pages will have to contain the HTML scripting language the other scripting language incorporated in a website design is just secondary. Thus we can safely assume that a website design will have HTML to be its structural programming or scripting code or in other words HTML is the building blocks of a website design. So what is an HTML document? An HTML document is actually a text file that contains HTML elements that are made up by HTML tags. The HTML document follows a basic structure which allows a web page in a website design to be considered as a web-understandable document. This is because of the fact that a website design may not be created entirely by using the HTML scripting language, but because of HTML’s ability to provide the basic structure for a web page in a website design it now also allows the recognition and the interpretation of other scripting languages incorporated within the web pages’ basic structure.

The Hypertext Markup Language’s basic structure is made up of four components namely:

1. <html></html> tag – the <html></html> tag signifies the start and the end of the entire HTML document. Similar to the terminal commands in any programming languages, all those contained within the <html></html> tags will be interpreted by the web browser as part of the web page in a website design.

2. <head></head> tag – this tag is considered as the header of the web page in the website design. The header tag are commonly utilised to contain the meta tags that will contain the web pages’ keywords used in Search engine optimisation. Further the <head> </head> tags will also contain the different link tags <link> that will connect the web page to any external scripting languages that should be incorporated in the whole website design, scripting languages such as CSS and JavaScript are common in the area of external files being linked into the web page using the link tag within the head tag.

3. <title> </title> tag – the title tag as the name implies provides the title for the whole web page. The title tag will contain a webmaster defined title and whatever is contained therein or within the opening <title> tag and the closing </title> tag will be displayed on the web browsers’ title bar indicating the web pages’ title.

4. <body> </body> tag – this tag will contain almost all the website design features of a web page. This tag will contain the other tags and scripts that are needed in order to instruct the web browser to display the desired appearance of the web page.

Having the four basic structure of website design using the Hypertext Markup Language create a basic format to follow wherein within the basic structure you can apply your creativity by incorporating different website design strategies utilising various scripting languages.