There’s no question about it: Google is great at search, and its huge lead over competitors is well deserved. But the site’s spartan design can sometimes leave something to be desired — sure, the company gradually makes tweaks to it, but we haven’t seen many radical changes in a very long time. Now WebMynd, a Y Combinator startup that launched back in early 2008, is looking to help spur the search giant to make itself a little better, or at least give it a few ideas to help. Tonight, WebMynd is launching a contest appropriately called RedesignGoogle.com that invites designers from around the world to give Google a makeover.
WebMynd has posted all the details details on its blog, but here’s the gist of it: designers are invited to revamp Google using any CSS modifications they’d like. The contest starts accepting submissions today, and will run through November 1. Then, a number of judges (which include Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, the WebMynd team and — full disclosure — myself) will pick the best designs. The winners will take home a brand new MacBook Air.
The nice thing about the contest is that it isn’t purely theoretical — you’ll actually be able to start using the new design in your browser, using a stripped down version of WebMynd’s browser plugin. The Plugin, which launched back in March, gives users the ability to customize their search experience and includes a number of other features, like a comprehensive browsing history (advanced features won’t be enabled by default on the streamlined contest plugin, but users will be able to turn them on).
Here is an early submission to the contest. You can see a full gallery here.
Google has just updated the way Flash files are Indexed in their Search Engine. External content sources will now also be indexed when used in SWF files.
In the not-so-distant past, sites built using Adobe’s Flash technology were invisible to search engines. Both search engines and SEOs have continued to work on ways to make those pages show up better in search results. Last summer, Adobe lent a hand, by providing its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo to help them figure out how to better index sites and pages created with Flash.
This week, Adobe went a step further, launching a new SEO Technology Center for Flash to help developers and other content creators build Flash applications in more search-friendly ways. The site, part of the Adobe Developer Connection, explains current SEO challenges and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices to overcome them.
Although the search engines are currently working on improving their indexing of Flash content, Adobe advises that at this point, it’s still best to offer them an HTML representation of the content. They explain that this could be done via hidden DIV tags, which they admit is considered to be hidden text by some, and may get you banned by Google if you’re not showing the same content there as you are in the Flash file. They suggest using the NOSCRIPT tag, since Flash files are called via JavaScript, and the search engines don’t use JavaScript in their crawlers.
Adobe advises setting up separate HTML pages for each important topic area of your site, and deep-linking to the proper area of the SWF file from each of those pages. That’s a best practice for non-Flash SEO as well, since a page that focuses more on a given topic is likely to rank better for keywords around that topic, while a page with six or seven topics is not likely to rank well for any of them.
There’s lots more great content on the new SEO Technology Center for Flash, so if you’ve got a site that uses Flash, or are considering building one, you should definitely take the time to read as much as you can about it before moving forward.
Google has launched a new blog that is dedicated to improving conversions. Dubbed the “Conversion Room,” the new blog is run by European Googlers. In addition to providing tips that are useful to a global audience, the Conversion Room will highlight events taking place in Europe.
So far, the blog offers tips on keywords and the most recent post talks about installing site search and tracking the results.
Your web site represents you. The website design serves as the virtual representation of your company, and its services. When doing online business, people cannot see you physically like they could if you were an offline company. Hence, your customers and clients will perceive you by your website design. Having an effective website design will give you a distinctive advantage. A business website design or a corporate web design goes way ahead of a novice like web design. It is just like having an offline company with your salespersons wearing corporate attire when dealing with clients.
Similarly through a robust custom website design, you send out a message to the customers that you have high concerns for quality and you mean business. This works simply because first impressions, of your website design, matter. On the other hand, if you have a lousy website design, you are literally telling your clients that you do lousy service and have no regard for quality. With a professional website design, your clients will be very happy and interested. They will regard you for your professionalism and love to work with you or ship off their work to you, by just seeing your website design. It is always best to hire services of an established and credible website design firm. They not only provide web design solutions but will also address your specific requirements through their expertise in web design consulting.
The best part is web design services have really come down in costs in the last few years. Incase you want to have a brief idea of basic website design before hiring a website design company, here are a few tips. No Splash Pages: Splash pages usually have a “welcome” or “click here to enter” accompanied by an appealing picture. Though it’s the first page of your website design, most clients will move away for a website that gives direct access.. Minimum Banner Ads: Many website design firms put up a lot of advertisements as part of the internet marketing campaign. However, such website design looks very unprofessional and it better be kept to the bare minimum. Let your visitors decide when to buy. You’ll only lose them by pushing sales. Simple and Intuitive Navigation: Having an easy and intuitive navigation for your website design will help your visitors stay in control.
Remember that visitors don’t have much patience to deal with complicated website design. Sitemap: Put a sitemap in your web design so that visitors know which part of the site they are browsing. By doing so, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. A confusing website design will only send your visitors away. Shun the Looping Audio: When your visitors stay a long time at your site, reading your content, they will be annoyed by any audio looping on your website. Make sure that your website design is engaging and you’ll have loyal customers pushing you to glory.
Article Source: Boosting Business through Professional Website Design - http://www.webdesignarticles.net
While you’d be hard pressed to find somebody in today’s digital age who doesn’t know what the terms ‘Web Design’ and ‘World Wide Web’ mean, the truth is that very few people have a thorough grasp of the extent to which web marketing can assist their business.
Your website provides a porthole into your business; it gives your prospective customer access to information about your products and services, as well as granting them insight into your company philosophy, history, and other important factors than can influence their buying decision.
Your website is a powerful selling tool that has the potential to reinforce your brand identity, inform and entice your customers, increase sales and nurture customer loyalty. Yet, to achieve these benefits, your website must comply with a few simple web design criteria: It must be visually appealing, easy to navigate and it contain relevant, succinct content.
Boasting a Web Design portfolio of several hundred successful websites, Quikclicks is Sydney’s leading web design agency. Make the most of the web marketing phenomenon contact us today.
Need to promote your products and services but don’t want to spend a fortune on advertising? Then email marketing might be just the solution you’re after. An effective email campaign can direct people to your site, keep your customers informed and, most importantly, drive sales.
But for your campaign to succeed, a few simple rules should be observed. Firstly, to avoid SPAM litigation, it’s essential that you only target people expressly interested in receiving communications from you via email. Don’t lose your message to the ‘delete’ button - capture your readers’ attention with attractive design and punchy headings, with links to your website for more information. And, be sure to include an enticing offer.
Sydney Web Design and Email Marketing specialists, Quikclicks, can deliver all aspects of your Email Marketing Campaign from design through to distribution. To launch your campaign and skyrocket your profits contact us today.
The internet is increasingly becoming an essential medium for businesses to engage consumers and capture market share. But while virtually every business these days has a web presence, how many of them are actually getting positive results?
An effective website does more than provide information about the goods you’re selling or the service you’re providing: it speaks volumes about the professionalism, competence and credibility of your business. Let’s say, for example, that you visit a site that has attractive web design, engaging content and easy navigation. Your immediate response would be favourable, right? On the other hand, imagine that the site displayed sloppy, amateur web design and obscure content. What impression would you be left with about that particular business?
Creating a website which gets positive visitor responses is a fine art that requires broad expertise encompassing web design skills, understanding of consumer online behaviour, branding and communications.
Sydney web design agency, Quikclicks, can help your business achieve the online credibility that it rightly deserves and, above all, help you profit by capturing more of the market.
The world is now becoming the web world. Day by day internet technologies are mounting with very high speed. Be a part of this web world and run with technologies to be successful. In present days, every company big or small, has their own website. But the ratio of the visitors visiting the site varies because of the factors like professional look & feel, visual appeal, user-friendliness, and accessibility of the content on the website. Overall look and visual appeal is the first thing, which is observed by the visitor on any website. Web design is very important aspect of your website.
To catch the attention of users your web site must look attractive at first sight. So design a web site in such a way that, it catches the attentions of the visitors and hold them for a long time. Before starting website design, first evaluate what type of website you would be creating. You want to emphasis more on functionality, usability, simplicity or visual appealing of the website. Next step is to think about the targeted audience who will be visiting your website. You must have some knowledge about your targeted audience and their website usage statistics. Design of the website must look clean & professional; choose professional colors which better suites your business rather than using unusual color combination. Your website structure should not be complex including menu, navigation and sitemap so that people can easily understand the website’s way of working.
Put attractive images but make sure that the loading time of your web site should not increase with image size otherwise the visitors will try to browse other websites while your webpage is still loading. Take care of each and every link of your site; it should not be broken and directed to right page. Try to make your website as interactive as possible so people take interest in it. To have a best website design you must choose a best web design company with great web designers which provides quality service and fulfill your expectation in your budget. Website design depicts how professional your company is and so web designer. Right web design company can grow your business to no limit.
Article Source: Boosting Business through Professional Website Design - http://www.webdesignarticles.net
