Blog - Archives April 2012

How to use royalty free music in your web videos

20 April 2012

For designing and marketing a successful website, nothing beats an entertaining video. Properly formatted, well edited and enjoyable, a video is the perfect method of conveyance. Any message you want to get across, a video can do it. On the upside, great videos keep watchers interested and wanting to come back, so an enthralled base and repeat visitation is what you have to look forward to if you produce high-quality videos.

One of the best ways to make a video really sing, pun intended, is to add a music track to the video. However, whether you’re posting these vids on YouTube or Facebook to create a buzz, or whether you’re posting them directly on your website, there is always a chance of violating copyright laws.

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How to optimise your website for a Google Places listing

18 April 2012

As every would-be website designer learns, search engine optimization is the key to getting noticed via search engine results. Figuring out the best keywords and phrases, the best linking methods, and the best moves to have the engines recognize and promote your site is a blend of constant attention, steady tweaking, trend-riding, and artful craftsmanship. There are also many directories and listings provided by companies like Google you can use to increase your business’ or website’s profile.

Google Places is a premier free listing directory that millions of businesses use around the globe, both on-location and online businesses alike. If you can optimize a Google Places page correctly in your website’s respective category, and subsequently link the two together, you can create a steady stream of new traffic for your website

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What images you can use and which ones you can't use for web design

16 April 2012

Constructing a website is tricky enough without having to deal with any copyright infringement issues. Building a personal template, meticulously designing pages and loading them up to your server, and troubleshooting to ensure that everything’s working smoothly – the task can be quite daunting. Once you start dealing with legal issues, though, your entire effort could be for naught.

Images are a huge part of website design, whether we’re speaking about brand logos, header images, or any other types of images displayed on a website. More often than not, the images you use aren’t going to be your own; this means finding legal images that you can display.

So, which images are okay for you to use and which images should you stay away from?

To put it as simply as possible, you should always avoid any image that is not free to use. It is possible to find an image out there via a Google or Bing search that you can use, but unless it’s clearly stated that the image is free for public use, you should avoid it

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What to Look For when Researching Working Websites

13 April 2012

Out of the hundreds of millions of websites available online, only an incredibly small fraction are noticed by the public at large. And what’s worse, this small fraction is inherently niche specific, so it becomes even less likely that a website will ever be found. This is obviously why search engine optimization plays such a vital role in website design, and it’s also why a smart site designer will model his or her site after a working, successful website.

Researching the web to find different successful websites can be a lot trickier than it sounds, however. Just because a website receives traffic and is popular, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s anything you can—or would want to—duplicate. So, what exactly are you looking for when researching a website to serve as a model for your own template? That’s a relative question that’s awfully tough to answer

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How to Use WHOIS to Learn about Your Competition

11 April 2012

As you will learn when building and promoting a website, the internet is extremely competitive. In fact, the World Wide Web is probably the most competitive industry in the history of mankind. And it’s not because big companies spend big money; to the contrary, it’s more the fact that anyone can start up a website with little capital and use common sense methods to market within their respective niche.

This means that the internet is also a cutthroat place, where some pry, lie, steal and cheat in order to get ahead. At the very least, you will have to put on your detective hat to do a lot of research on the competition if you hope to succeed in your chosen marketplace.

To research your competitors out there, WHOIS is undoubtedly the strongest resource you have at your disposal. WHOIS is a free-to-use database that catalogs every single legally registered domain in the world. By searching for a domain via this directory, you can learn a lot of details about the site. Needless to say, this information can be vital to your own campaign; learning details about your competition can help you propel past them

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The importance of good navigation design for your website

09 April 2012

Take a quick moment to reflect on some of the best-looking, most popular websites you’ve ever visited. If you had to name a few reasons why they were so popular, you probably wouldn’t think about big-dollar marketing campaigns or teams of designers and SEO experts working to promote the site through the ranks. Instead, you would probably think about how easy the site is to navigate; how conveniently everything is packaged up for visitors.

This is a huge selling point of any website – its navigation. However, many people do not take this part of their site seriously. Sure, they may tweak and tinker until things look streamlined and presentable. But that’s not navigation. Building your site with proper navigation in mind is an aspect far more crucial than keyword placement, because while having new visitors to your site is important, having repeat visitation is what ultimately makes a site popular.

Navigation is about how your content is formatted and laid out, how your features present themselves to your visitors. It’s about the functionality of your site and how quickly someone can cycle through the content. It’s about a visitor realizing what your website is about within the first few seconds of loading the URL, and then being able to access any part of the site without having to fumble around looking for buttons and controls

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5 Advanced white hat SEO tips which you should use

06 April 2012

To understand white hat SEO, you only need to understand an old phrase: “Wearing the white hat.” This means, essentially, someone who is honest and incorruptible, a person with integrity who leads by example. Translating this to white hat SEO tactics, these different optimization methods focus on organically building site rank through hard, honest work. This includes keyword searching and link building, running analysis, backlinking and writing high-quality content.

In general, white hat SEO tactics are on the up and up. They’re used by site designers who strive for longevity and who want to build a solid brand reputation going forward. But you probably already knew that, and you undoubtedly already know some general SEO strategies to use.

What about advanced SEO methods? Are there are any complex white hat tactics that one could use when building a website?

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5 black hat SEO tips you should avoid using

04 April 2012

If white hat SEO is ethical optimization, then obviously black hat SEO is its polar opposite. When you complete a black hat technique, you are being dishonest or a little unscrupulous in your attempt to game a search engine into giving you a higher ranking. These methods are widely used by upstarts who are seeking a quick rise in the ranks, typically the most popular amongst affiliate marketers. However, for longevity as a website owner, black hat tactics will leave you at the bottom of the barrel.

There are just as many black hat tactics as there are white hat tactics, and sometimes people enter into a black hat scheme with the best of intentions, believing that they’re doing nothing wrong. So just to be clear, if you’re attempting to deceive people or to manipulate results in any way, shape or form, then you’re performing a black hat technique.

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Rackspace: Review of Services and using Cloud Servers to go Virtual

02 April 2012

Founded in 1998 and based in San Antonio, Texas, Rackspace US, Inc. is a web hosting company that is responsible for millions of sites around the globe. They also cater to many of the world’s largest businesses and have won a slew of awards for excellence in hosting. They’re best known for their security and support, but since 2006, the new Rackspace Cloud has been turning heads in terms of an affordable and easy to use cloud server.

Rackspace Cloud Servers Review

As a cloud infrastructure, Rackspace’s Cloud Servers is a service allowing basic users to deploy multiple servers in an instant or to create advanced architectures. Their servers are virtual machines that run on Citrix XenSever for Windows and Linux and Xen hypervisor for strictly Linux.

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