How to Improve a Newspaper Design in Four Easy Steps

Do you ever wonder why there are some newspapers that are really popular and have a wide readership? Then, try to take a look at their design. Remember, the first thing that people get to see in a newspaper is its layout. Nobody would bother reading the whole paper, especially if it doesn’t look interesting. So, if you want to make your publication look more appealing and increase your readership, try to do these four easy steps to improve your newspaper design.

Purchase a Publishing Design Program

Buying a software on publishing design can help a lot in creating the perfect layout for your paper. Try to look for programs that could create layouts for you, which includes typesetting and template features. It’s also a plus if it allows you to work with text and graphics.

Set Up a Basic Template

Templates not only make your task simpler and easier but can also help you come up with great layouts. You no longer have to spend so much time copying and pasting photos, text documents and other quotation excerpts. Try to, you could choose to refer to the designs of top newspapers for you to be able to take note of the preset typefaces for headlines, bylines etc. that they use.

Pick an Identifiable Typeface for Your Logo

Another thing to do to improve your newspaper design is to have an identifiable typeface for your logo. This lets your readers know the type of content your paper has. For instance, a more formal logo denotes a formal style of writing. Since the logo would be associated to your newspaper, carefully consider the typeface that you will use for it. Keep in mind that the simpler the logo, the better it would be.

Organize the Sections of Your Newspaper

For a better reading experience, try to come up with a way on how to organize your paper’s content. One good example is to separate it into sections and pages. Also, give each section a header so your readers will not be confused when looking for specific articles that they would want to read.

A newspaper’s design is an important factor in determining whether your paper will have a lot of subscribers or not. Try to buy a publishing design program to help you speed up your layout process. Create a basic template so that designing your newspaper won’t take too much time. Choose a great logo that would represent the vision and ideals of your company. And organize the sections of your paper for better readability. By following these four simple things, you’d definitely be able to improve your newspaper design.

Why Outsource Web Design Service?

Web design service: Web designing is the most popular tool in the world of computers. Today is a world of technologies and everybody wants to use this technology for their betterment. Web designing is used to design and develop websites. These websites can be used in businesses for their publicity or by an individual for their portfolios etc. Web design services are in demand as every one wants a good look for their websites as this is the first impression and first impression should always be good. An impressive look always attracts towards it. It includes designing and developing part simultaneously. It should be done by experienced web designers.

Web designing tools: Web designing services tools include flash, Photoshop, corel draw, illustrator, firework, dream weaver, HTML, and dhtml. The developing tools include php, asp.net, vb.net etc. These tools are used by experienced person for designing and developing a website. Now days either in business or individual every body wants to create a website for their publicity.

Why need of outsourcing web design service?: As time changes, new techniques are developed for everything. Like in old days, the advertisement had been done through news papers, pamphlets etc. But now as new technology becomes vast new ways are come out like websites on internet. Today every active person knows about this. But the question arises what about those people who know what web designing is but don’t know how it works? What are the techniques used? The answer is Outsource web design service. This is a good concept for those who has less or no knowledge about designing that how it works but has a desire to develop a website for their product promotion internationally. Outsourcing is beneficial for those who know how to beat the time. In outsource web designing; there are professional designers who worked out for either an individual or a company according to their requirement. Just explain what your requirements are? and a skilled people will do exactly the same for you. Outsource web design services provide full range of web services like eCommerce website design, flash animation web site design etc. Web development services include shopping carts, online software etc.

Why India? There are many companies which provide outsource web designing services all over the world. These companies provide their services across the world. Some companies provide only designing services, some developing services and some both. These Companies appoints experienced and skilled staff for providing the services. Outsourcing these services to India is always beneficial. India has many experienced and professional web designing companies who have skilled people who are best in their work. It is also cost effective area than other countries. India has many web designing service providers who work at very low cost than others. Also Indians can do their work according to given time span. Indian designers are hard worker and complete their work in time. Indians are very efficient that they can work for 24 hours. So it is always being beneficial to outsource to India for getting cheap and best output.

The 5 P’s of Team Design and Development For Managers

Teams are a useful business tool for process and quality improvement, which may lead to higher customer satisfaction or cost reduction. Many managers recognize the benefits teams may bring but do not properly consider what it takes to get a team functioning in the direction management desires. When forming teams, manager should consider the purpose, member participation and placement, as well as team processes and plans. With the 5 P’s of purpose, participation, placement, process, and plan, management can better design teams and determine development needs.

Purpose – Will the team clearly understand why it exists, what it is to do and how it will know they are successful? The team and management must agree to written purpose or mission statement so that they are working together in a common direction towards solutions that meet their overall purpose. Team goals and management deadlines should align with their overall purpose and will serve to guide performance and help them meet challenges.

Participation – Who would be the best people to include on the team and how large should the group be in order to accomplish its purpose? Management needs to consider necessary skill sets, professional attitudes, and process knowledge when selecting team members. In addition, for membership at the formation of team or as personnel needs grow, look for a balance between personality types for both task and people focus to be included so the solutions team may design will be more diverse and innovative to achieve team purpose and required work.

Placement – Where will the team members be physically located and how often should the team plan to have meetings? If the team is to be an intact work group, this may make some things simpler but the group will need a meeting room for complex problem solving. If the team is spread over multiple sites, managers will need to consider costs and possible problems team may have due to culture or time differences, and then determine whether travel for some meetings is required or if any special equipment is needed for members to meet regularly via phone or on-line.

Process – How will the team get to where it needs to go in order to accomplish its purpose? The members should develop and agree to their ground rules, any constraints that management may set related to decision-making authority or functional boundaries. Initial team training should include meeting management with a suggested meeting agenda and record-keeping formats, interpersonal communication, problem solving, and if relevant to team’s work include process mapping.

Plan – Will the team acknowledge when its project or assignment will be complete and know what it needs to accomplish its tasks? If the goals are specific to their purpose and the team agrees these are relevant and achievable goals, then the team needs to agree to a timeline for goals and a way to measure how they are doing towards goals. Not only should the team and their management define work deadlines and expected milestones in its goals and schedules, but it should also include necessary training to acquire cooperation and task related skills.

Considering the 5 P’s of purpose, participation, placement, process, and plan, management can design better teams and plan their development needs accordingly. Recognizing the benefits teams can bring to a business or organization is good, but teams are only effective when management understands what it may take to get their teams moving in the desired direction. Well designed and developed teams only become a useful for process and quality improvement when managers consider member selection for best participation and preferred placement along with the team’s purpose, process and plan.

Presentation Skills & Public Speaking – 10 Tips to How to Design & Prepare for a Presentation

Top 10 Tips to help you Plan and Design and Prepare for your Presentation

Next time you are faced with the daunting prospect of having to write a presentation, try out these tips from Skillstudio and you’ll be surprised at just how effective they can be at helping to design and prepare for a presentation.

  1. Prepare Prepare Prepare – The more time you spend preparing your presentation beforehand the more confident you will be on the day.
  2. Get to know your audience. Put yourself in their shoes. What’s in it for them? What understanding do they currently have? Do they want a detail or strategic level talk from you?
  3. What’s the one key goal you want to achieve by giving this presentation? Make sure that this is clear to your audience at the beginning and end of the presentation.
  4. Split your presentation into a beginning a middle and an end. Use the middle section to develop your ideas.
  5. Remember the power of three. Wherever possible think of things in threes. eg three key points to make at the beginining, three key points to develop further in the middle and three key points to make at the end. Your middle can further expand on the three points with three additional points each. etc
  6. Brainstorm the likely questions you will be asked by your audience. Prepare answers using the Power of three.
  7. Try using a mind map to help you organise your ideas into logical chunks. The clearer your thinking is the easier it should be to understand when you are presenting.
  8. Avoid the trap of preparing for your presentation at the last possible minute. It will only mean you lose a night’s sleep – on the night before you have to present!
  9. Lead your audience through your presentation using sign-posting. Recap on what you’ve just covered and then use rhetorical questions to move onto the next section. Always summarise your main points just prior to the end of your presentation.
  10. Plan to end your presentation with a call to action, a request for a decision to be made, or whatever you believe is the most appropriate means to achieve your overall goal.

3 Secret PPT Design Rules To Killer PowerPoint Presentations

In this post, you will learn simple PPT design rules to help you building powerful presentations people will care about.

This PowerPoint tutorial will introduce three generic rules that will get you on the way to design professional PowerPoint templates and creative presentations! These rules are an introduction, and they are the key to successful PowerPoint presentation design. Let’s get started!

1. Size

Your PowerPoint slides are usually sized 10 inches (width) * 7.5 inches (height). Resize them 12*7.5. Open a PowerPoint document, go to Design > Page Setup. With presentation slides of 12 inches width, or more, you will have more freedom and the ability to better organize the content of the slide.

2. Typography

Fonts can just make or break your PPT presentation.

I recommend you to pick ONE font for all your content slides. The default font I use myself is Calibri, it’s modern and it’s safe. Helvetica and Century Gothic are great options too. You can use ONE additional font for your cover slide or slide headings. Just make sure the extra font you pick is original and readable. Take care of your audience’s visual comfort.

For all your presentation slides, try to keep your font size BIG. Whether your plan to show your PowerPoint presentation at a public presentation or not. First, you will increase your audience visual comfort. Second, it’s a great exercise to help you develop effective presentation skills, as you will have to learn how to summarize content. I personally use a minimum of 20 for important parts, and 14 to 18 for less important parts. To comment charts or graphics, 12 is the minimum. Even if you have a lot to write, keep in mind that you don’t need to write down everything to communicate important points. Keep it short. People are busy. Less is more.

♥ Font Squirrel is my favorite source of FREE, high-quality and designer-friendly fonts. To install new fonts on your computer: On Window, download the archive > click Start > Control Panel > Font > Paste your font files.

3. Color Scheme

I suggest the use of TWO or THREE colors. For all your content slides, use of black for core text (in that case, your PPT background shall be white or light grey) and use the ONE or TWO additional colors to highlight important keywords, statements or figures. Colors picked must be visible, contrast between each other’s and with your PowerPoint background.

♥ Not inspired or just wondering which colors match well together? Try out Kuler, Adobe’s great color palette generator. It is free and you can choose y from thousands of pre-built schemes.

We hope you liked this article. We value every piece of feedback and if you’d like to let us know something, do it!

4 Delightful Garden Design Ideas for Your Hospitality Business

How to design a garden setting? If it’s been a while you’re in the hospitality industry, then it’s probably not the first time you ask this question. Actually, every single time a change needs to be done to the outdoors, this question pops in first. Although there’s no One Way of creating an outdoor living, you can follow some garden design ideas to have an attractive setting.

As a hospitality furniture company, we find it our duty to share with you and our clients, some garden design ideas to greet guests in a welcoming way. So take notes, and consider using these 4 trends:

Adopting vertical gardening

When designing the outdoors, restaurants, hotels and resorts mostly focus on the horizontal space by carefully choosing the garden furniture and coming up with a plan for the setup. However, what is usually forgotten is the decoration of the garden or patio’s vertical space. Most gardens contain plants, flowers, and statues, but forget to add a special vertical touch. A good addition would be the Greens collection from the outdoor furniture brand Maiori. Greens are planters with a simple drip watering system allowing water to flow from top to bottom, eliminating water paddles and overwatering.

Creating a semi enclosed outdoor living room

What’s the use of taking care of your garden and designing your patio if you won’t welcome guests in the open air? One trend to follow is by creating a semi enclosed outdoor room with 3 walls and a ceiling. This area will include restaurants tables and chairs, or hotel outdoor furniture to create a unique experience. The secret recipe to building a cozy space is by keeping the feeling of an outdoor area so guests enjoy the beautiful weather.

Placing a garden pergola

Another trend to receive guests in the outdoors is to install a pergola in the middle of the garden. This feature allows visitors to sit, eat, or relax on outdoor furniture, and at the same time to stay protected from direct sunlight. The pergola can either be made from wood or, for a more luxurious style, from aluminum. For example, Jardinico introduces Attitude, an outdoor umbrella that is used as gazebo.

Mixing new and old in the garden

Unless the theme of your business is to give a classical style by using old-looking furniture, it is time to start combining different approaches. After talking, in a previous article, about mixing and matching different materials and styles, now is the time to blend old and new outdoor furniture together. The only rule here is to smoothly pair the two styles as some elements might not go well together.

In order to bring these garden design ideas to life, it would be wise to get the help of a hospitality furniture company that can assist you with the proper planning. A lot of details can be overlooked by businesses, while remaining an important aspect for any outdoor furniture supplier.

4 Innovative Trade Show Booth Design Ideas

There are a host of factors that contribute to attracting and converting leads at marketing events. Proper preparation, a sound business plan and well-trained staffers can certainly go a long way to ensuring success, but the small space carved out on the floor for each business always represents the best opportunity to make an impression. Conceptualizing and implementing trade show booth design ideas that will draw attention, retain interest and ultimately convert qualified leads to paying customers is a responsibility that should not be taken lightly. Modern display designs can be customized to fit any need, but it’s up to you and your marketing team to ensure that they’re used to their fullest advantage. Here are just a few options to consider.

Full Display Branding

While any reputable designer will have plenty of “standard” shapes and layouts to choose from when considering trade show booth design ideas, there is also the option of a fully customized design. The trade show display itself is a (sometimes literally) huge opportunity to advertise a brand. Rather than square banners, tie the shape of advertisements into a branding strategy to make them stand out by constructing them in a shape that is relevant to your product. Create kiosks and tables that resemble a product or represent a service. Modern construction techniques allow for nearly any shape, enabling the opportunity to construct a large version of a product to serve as the setting for event marketing efforts. What better way for an industrial fastener provider to distinguish themselves on the show floor than by telling attendees to look for them inside the giant bolt.

Office Space Included

Despite all the noise and distraction on the show floor, many major business decisions can be made during marketing events. Consider incorporating a more private meeting space as one of your trade show booth design ideas. Create a miniature boardroom, separate from the main selling floor, to retreat to with qualified leads to discuss details of working together. Not only will such a space provide more privacy, but it demonstrates forethought in your commitment to the business at hand.

Integrated Technology

Advancements in technology have made their way onto the show floor in the form of screens and displays of every type. While setting up an iPad to display product details or a video is a good place to start, there are countless other options for using modern tech trends to your advantage. Social media integration is one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to increase visibility. You might incorporate screens that display a Twitter or Facebook feed, or track a desired hashtag. The ease of live webcasting means you’ll have the ability to broadcast your event presence and engage even those who can’t attend. When considering trade show booth design ideas, think about how QR codes might be tied into an overall branding strategy to link together all of your marketing materials from literature, to business cards and even the attire, name tags or badges employees wear. There’s truly no end to the possibilities modern social trends play in a successful plan.

Trade Show Booth Design Ideas That Can Be Changed On The Fly

Avoiding stagnation is a key to success in any business, and the same applies to advertising materials. While it’s certainly a good idea to update any overall marketing strategy regularly, consider utilizing fixtures that allow you to change the look of a booth even during the show. Manufacturers are constantly updating their product lines to include products that are easier to assemble and simple to change. Retractable bannerstands that can be easily swapped mean that a display might look completely different from one day to the next. Innovative inflatable fixtures allow for entire booths to be rearranged or swapped out with little effort, and at the push of a button. Keeping things fresh will ensure that potential clients aren’t put off by stale designs or out-of-date information.

Remarkable Tips For Freelance Web 2 Graphic Design Templates

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” – Albert Einstein

If we close our eyes and think for a graphic design for our website then a simple appealing template arises in our mind first. Graphic design is an art that cannot be done by everybody though it is related with our day by day life., just like our simple lifestyles we prefer the graphic design templates for our websites in a calm, simple and effortlessly accessible manner.

A calm poise of your site will differs your website from your competitors and the dashing appeal will attract your visitors at your site. These two things are known as the backbone of any freelance graphic design. Don’t collapse your optimistic thoughts while designing templates that will help you to bring much confident appealing web design templates.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. Never lose a holy curiosity to invent something new.” – Albert Einstein

Always follow this word to become a famous freelance graphic design professional, only your innovative thoughts can push you a long way ahead of your competitors. Nowadays web 2 graphic design layout makes this design process very easier and effective. These unique web 2 templates bring a new tide in professional graphic design industry.

These web 2 graphic designs are much affordable and effortlessly synchronized for the visitors. You can easily attract web visitor at your website through its various quality features. It populates more appeal on your website in an optimized manner.

Some valuable hints to attract your visitors through web 2 graphic design templates

Tempting logos: Recently web 2 logos are really very effective to draw someone’s attraction in a very first appearance. Unique large size good looking colorful logos are the prime weapon to bring visitors at your site and circulate them at per your wish.

Large fonts for important content: Formatting significant key phrases within content with different font is one of the top capabilities of web 2 style. You can also decorate your entire content with different colors for more attraction.

Innermost poise: Telling a story in a confident manner is always respected everywhere. Thus strong innermost confidence of your website will pay you lot more business.

Mild appeal: Calm as well as a gentle appeal is greatly required for the visitors when they enter at your website. You have only 4-5 seconds in your hand to attract their concentration and make them feel comfortable enough to stay at your website and to travel into your important web pages.

Using CSS: Previously websites have enormous numbers of tables which makes the coding very large and complicated which increases the page weight as well. But nowadays through web 2 style maximum professional graphic designers are using CSS style where they are describing everything about the page structure. After that they simply call those styles from all pages at per their requirement. It generally synchronized the coding which helps to reduce the page weight.

Labeling fluorescent color boxes: For highlighting important parts of your web page (like special offers, business news, gift packs etc) you can use different shimmering colorful boxes through web 2 graphic design style to easily provide main points in front of your visitor. In graphic designing term it is actually called labeling.

Wee icons: Attractive wee icons are playing an emotional role into the visitors mind. You should apply this weapon to attract them at your site but in a simple manner. Wisely inserting catchy icons for different business segments rather planning vast content is possible through web 2 graphic design style.

Reduction of columns: Website clarity always depends on number of columns. Through this designing policy designers can able to reduce the number of columns for different business segments on your designed template. Those segments can be colored differently for more prominence advertisement of your business plans.

Search Engine Optimization and Design

Building an attractive even beautiful is the goal of most website designers. In the process, sometimes the effectiveness of the website is diminished. We need to keep in mind that our goal is not only to have a beautiful website that will make people want to stay and look around and enjoy, but also a website that will be helpful to the engines in determining what our website is about or what it is relevant to.

Udi Manber, Google vice president overseeing search quality, in response to a question about webpage content evolving to be more search engine friendly explained, “It’s definitely still lacking. I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages.” Popular Mechanics – April 16, 2008

Search engine optimization or SEO is arguably the most essential way to drive targeted traffic to your website because it leads to improved search engine placement. Optimizing the benefits of a well-designed web site will result in much more traffic coming to the website thereby generating income for the company publishing the website. With this fact in mind however, optimizing your website might cost you thousands of dollars if you are not skilled in this area. Good search engine optimization that leads to improved search engine placement will, on the other hand, bring you a much higher return on the investment of either time or money you put into it.

My goal in this article is to give you the basics of search engine optimization so that you can understand it and incorporate it to help you accomplish your task. This will help you to improve your relevancy and search engines rankings for the best results possible through proven search engine optimization techniques.

What are the major mistakes in design

First is is important to remember that search engines are machines and read words they don’t see images or pictures. The most common mistakes form a search engine optimization standpoint are:

  • Making a website totally in Flash(TM)
  • Images without alt tags
  • Minimal or nonexistent meta title or title tag

Flash(TM) to the search engines is just like an image it is invisible although the Flash(TM) may capture the intrigue of the viewer it won’t help the search engine to know what your website is about. While the text display as a part of the Flash(TM) my be rich in keywords and information it will be lost completely to the search engines and you will go unnoticed. Flash(TM) and pictures can be used to enhance a website but the site must have text in order to build relevance for the search engines.

In the same sense images are also invisible, however we can include alt tags that will give the search engines an idea of what the viewer will see. In fact the alt tags can be very helpful since the search engines will place a little more emphasis on the text in alt tags. Don’t go overboard using keyword phrases in the alt tags but use some to help where appropriate.

The title tag as well discuss later is an important place to tell the search engines what your webpage is all about.

Where do we start?

Why is search engine optimization (SEO) so important? SEO is important because this will make your website relevant to your keywords during the search engine ranking process and will lead to improved search engine ranking. This is the reason why some businesses hire an SEO company to do this task.

You can get information on low cost related services anywhere on the internet. However, few are really showing you how to work out an inexpensive plan for improved search engine placement. Some companies will even use antiquated techniques that may slow the process down. Good search engine optimization should help you to start improving the search engine ranking of your website and start driving traffic to it in a matter of days or weeks with expensive processes.

Search engine optimization begins optimally on your website, as you plan and build it. If it was not done at first you are not too late, you can do it after you have it built and go back and revise it to improve the exposure to the search engines and still lead to improved search engine placement. It consists of the following elements referred to as “onsite optimization”.

  • Keyword Research – choosing the primary and secondary keywords you will use on your website or webpage
  • Implementing the keywords naturally into important elements in the website header and body.

Keyword Research and Usage

Let’s start first with keyword research. Why is keyword research important? The keyword research helps us to find the keywords that connect us with our targeted audience. They are the words that we want to use on our website in a variety of ways to build relevancy on our webpage so when search engines find our website and view / crawl our pages, they will then index us for those keywords. Once that happens, then when those keywords are typed into the search engine by potential customers, the search engine will then display our site in the search results, which is how they tie us to our targeted audience.

Ideally you will use a reverse search tool that will enable you to type in words you think are keywords people would search for and which will tell you the number of times those keywords were searched for over a given period of time. Depending on the tool you are using and the databases and the search engines they have access to for their search results you will get different numbers in your reverse search results. Your search engine optimization professional will know and have access to these tools and which ones are appropriate for specific uses. These tools can significantly speed up the process of onsite optimization lead to quicker improved search engine placement.

One tool you can use for manual research is http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html Keyword Discovery’s Free Search Term Suggestion Tool. It will limit your results to 100 keywords for any given search. Another manual search tool is http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword SEOBook.com’s Suggestion tool. Both of these manual reverse search tools will allow you to find the keywords that people type into the search engines and how many times they were searched for. Remember keywords are how we connect with our targeted audience.

How Do I Use My Keywords Once we have identified the keywords, next we need to know where and how to use them for improved search engine placement. The first and arguably the most important place to use our keywords would be the title tag for your website. The title tag appears in the header of the page and is the first opportunity we have to tell the search engine what our page is about.

The title tag should be 60 – 80 characters in length and use one or two of the most important and/or relevant keywords for that page and possibly your website domain name, especially if your domain name includes keywords in it. The title tag information appears in the blue header bar at the top of the window and is also used as the title of your listing when your website is displayed in the natural or organic search results.

The meta description should be about 2 – 3 sentences or up to about 200 characters that describe for the customer and the search engine what the webpage is about. In the natural or organic search engine results, this description will be the first choice for the text the search engine displays beneath the title. This description does not appear on the website page when the website is displayed for the visitor but is readable by the search engine and used in the search results primarily.

A third meta tag is the keywords meta tag which is also not displayed to the visitor of the website. The keywords meta tag is a hold over from early methods of search engine optimization, but because it was abused by website developers, it is seldom use by search engines. We still use the keywords meta tag, but most search engines ignore it due to those previous abuses. Some search engines may still evaluate it and you never know when search engines may start to use it again. The Keywords meta tag is simply a list of up to 12 keyword phrases separated by commas.

The example below exclude the angle brackets due to this article being written in HTML but the angle brackets are the less than and greater than signs.


meta content=”Basic search engine optimizations concepts presented to give business owners and website developers and understanding of good SEO techniques…” name=”description” /” enclosed in angle brackets.


meta content=”keyword phrase 1,keyword phrase 2,keyword phrase 3,…” name=”keywords” /” enclosed in angle brackets

Your keywords used in the title, description and keywords tags now need to be used on the page to validate to the search engine that your page is actually about what you told the search engine that your page is relevant to. If the search engine doesn’t see any of the keywords on your page, then it can only assume that your page is not relevant to the words you used in the title, description and keywords tags in the header area of the web site.

Now that we know that we need text on the page how can we use that text to help emphasize the relevancy of the keywords on the page? Mechanisms such as header tags for headings using keywords will give more emphasis to keywords. Hyperlinks where the anchor text is a keyword phrase will add relevance to the keyword phrase and since the anchor text and the associated hyperlink reference are indexed by the search engines, using a keyword phrase as the anchor text both on the website and in offsite marketing will increase your ranking for that keyword phrase. Bolding and italics also draw some attention to the keywords for the search engine. Each page needs to have enough text on it to allow that page to demonstrate the relevance of the keywords it displays in the header of the page to the search engine, if true search engine optimization is to be achieved.

Lets take a look at some of the other tags mentioned in the previous paragraph. Header tags alert the search engine to more important text on the page, much like the headline on the page of newspaper does to the reader. A header tag is a tag that contain a “H” and a number between 1 and 7. The lower the number the larger the text and the more important it is to the search engine. H1 tags can be formatted using font tags to control the size or .css files to control the formatting.

Hyperlinks consist of at least two components. The first component is the link destination represented by the term “href” referring to the hyperlink reference and the anchor text located between the beginning and ending anchor tags. An anchor tag is an “a” in angle brackets and ending with “/a” in angle brackets. The beginning tag also include the destination reference. Remember that you you could use a keyword phrase in place of the word home to designate your home page. That keyword phrase would be a link and would help to build relevance for your website for that keyword phrase.

As we use these structures in combination in a natural way we then are able to help the search engine to know what our page is about and also create a page that is functional for the user.

To optimize your website well for the search engines you should use unique meta tags on each page on your website. The keywords should be used in:

  • The title tag – big three
  • Meta description
  • Meta keywords
  • Header tag – big three
  • Opening paragraph – about 4% density
  • Alt tags on all images and using keywords on about 3 images per page
  • Link / anchor text or hyperlinks – big three
  • Body of the page – about 4% density (visible text)
  • Closing paragraph – about 4% density

They should be used in such a way as to feel natural on the page. If the page feels awkward, then look for ways to reword the information on the page and make sure you are not forcing the keywords in too many times. This in combination with other activities to build your page rank are the best ways to get your page listed on page one of the search engines.

These strategies are what we call onsite page optimization. Each page needs to have its own unique page optimization for the content on that page. Don’t make the mistake of using the same title, description and keywords meta tags for every page on your site.

Using these strategies in conjunction with the design of your website will vastly improve your search engine placement.

Do I Need Responsive Web Design for My Website?

The term “responsive web design” refers to websites that change and adapt their appearance for optimum viewing on all screen sizes, tablets, smartphones, ipods, kindles along with desktop and laptop computer screens. Occasionally, in the digital arts industry, it is called “fluid design”, “adaptive website design” or “RWD”. Unresponsive websites do not change to fit different screen sizes, which means they can be difficult to navigate and look at on smaller devices.

Desktop sales have been surpassed by mobile sales already, and most digital media education sources predict that mobile web use will overtake desktop use by 2014. Hence, it only seems logical that desktop search will be overtaken by mobile search soon as well. Sixty percent of web users say that they would be more inclined to buy from mobile optimized websites. Therefore, businesses that depend on SEO would have a lot of sense to start making the move towards mobile friendly sites, and responsive site designs specifically. Especially as the new Google algorithm updates now frown upon separate mobile only sites. Such as those with a.mobi in the url. More and more, new websites are built using responsive design methods to eradicate the requirement for standalone mobile websites. Also, this decision dramatically improves the user experience. This leads to more customer interaction and sales, as prospective customers are not alienated by tiny text and difficult navigation.

To make responsive designs work, a media query is used to determine the screen size that the site is being accessed from. The script can detect all devices, whether they are tablets, laptops or smartphones. Then, it uses CSS to show the website in a suitable format. Images can be re-sized accordingly to fit on screens that are smaller. The text is made bigger and the menus can switch to a variety of different dropdown formats, as opposed to the mostly standard horizontal display.

The benefits of using this kind of design, compared to setting up a mobile version of your website that is completely separate from your original site, are obvious. Whenever you update your website, it will updated for every device and display correctly on every screen. You only have to update in one location, where with a separate mobile site would require a separate location requiring updating as well. Often, your websites will be accessed from a tablet. If you have a two separate sites, a mobile and a desktop version, it is anybodies guess which version of the site tablet users will be seeing. With responsive design you get to control (mostly) what every screen size will be viewing.

Several companies provide both fluid design and mobile design for websites. However, RWD methods are constantly improving, so there appears little point in having a standalone mobile website. The only time when you might want a separate site, would be if you prefer to advertise differently to laptop or desktop users, compared to how you would advertise

to mobile users. For instance, a fast food company might wish to target individuals on the go with an instant special offer, but display their upcoming promotions and menu to laptop users. Nonetheless, in many cases, a website will cater to all users in an identical manner, thus a responsive design is the preferred option.

In the fast approaching future, all websites should have responsive designs, as users will come to expect it. Therefore, in a couple of years, businesses that build unresponsive websites will have to pay for a new site to make up to their users the lack in their website. Consequently, before starting any new website design projects, it would be advisable to learn more about the cost and advantages of adaptive designs.

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