Here are the top five rules to consider when designing your blog:

1. Simplicity – Be very careful to not overload your blog with tons of plugins, widgets, etc. Going overboard with these will make your blog look cluttered & distract your readers. Choose features wisely and keep it to a minimum.

2. Choosing the Right Color Scheme – Make sure to pick a color scheme that matches your current site design and/or logo. You don’t want to have a blog that looks completely different from your website. Keep it consistent.

3. Easy Navigation – Make sure that your page links in the navigation are in a noticeable/obvious place (across the lower part of the header or in the sidebars). You do not want to have your readers searching for the links.

4. Easy to Classify – Within the first seconds of visiting your blog, the reader should be able to identify what your blog is about. This can be done by having a prominent headline/tagline and by including a small description that is visible when the reader lands on the blog.

5. Include a RSS feed – These days, more and more people are taking advantage of feeds. Make sure to include links to the RSS feed throughout the blog in locations that will grab the readers attention. Ex: tazsol.com/blog – In the right hand sidebar, you will see how we do this by allowing our readers to subscribe to our feed. Each time a new blog post is added, the reader that has subscribed is notified.

The homepage is the landing space for everyone who seeks you out online. It should be well laid out and organized. It should let your brand breathe and not be crowded. Too much text or copy on the homepage can overwhelm your audience. Think of your homepage like a jacket cover to a book. It should have a picture, a title (or branding tagline), your name and a description of what the site is about. Make it short and condensed. Your homepage tabs (also called verticals) are where your audience can go deeper into your site and find more information about your product and services. Anywhere from 5 to 7 is a good amount, the topic verticals can also have a drop down menu, which is helpful.

2 Key Tips to Remember:
The homepage is NOT about YOU, it’s about your CLIENT. It should engage and promote enthusiasm for your product. It should be outcome focused.

Pick a tagline that is geared towards the consumer and answers the question of how they will benefit from your product or service. Steve Job’s tagline for the iPod was “A thousand songs in your pocket.” In this tagline his target market is defined along with the benefit they will get in buying an ipod. It’s simple, short and clear.

More Tips:

Site readers have a shorten attention span and are always one click away to something else.

How can you really capture your audience? Give them something for free, develop a free opt-in on your homepage.

Have a logo.

Putting too much content on the homepage loses your audience. They are overwhelmed.

Make sure to have several people look over your site before you launch it. Errors happen.

Blogs are important and you should have one.

At Taz we love using Wordpress and highly recommend it!

I hope these tips are helpful! The homepage is your one chance to reach your target audience, it’s not often they come around twice. Make sure to spend time getting it done right by giving your brand some much deserved breathing room.

Open Source Software
It uses open source software, which means that it can be used free of cost. It is built on PHP and MySQL, which again reiterates it being open source and also means that it can be fully customized to fit your needs.

User Friendly
You don’t have to be experienced with any kind of coding to use WordPress. With its easy to use dashboard you can add articles and post entries within seconds.

Themes Support
There are prebulit templates abound in the internet today, which means thousands of custom made WordPress sites. These provide a shell for you to choose from Plugins which extend functionality.

Plugins
WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything that you want and have the ability to be installed in a matter of moments.

Standards Compliant
WordPress is one software that follows all the web standards and keeps your blog or website compliant to all the rules that have to be followed.

SEO Friendly
Search Engines definitely have to be kept in mind when building a website. WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example, sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging your posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc.

Below are the top 3 web design trends of 2010:

1. Huge headline and images – More and more websites today are sporting huge headlines and/or images. This is a great way to grab users attention and invite them in. It creates a great visual impact that will help the visitor to remember your website.
2. More visual effects – Pay attention to the backgrounds of most web designs these days. Web Designers are replacing backgrounds with patterns or subtle/textured backgrounds. Doing so gives the site a nicer look and more modern web 3.0 feel as well as creating a visual effect for the website tone and feel.
3. Social media icons/links – This is a must! This is a great way for visitors to connect with you and for you to interact with them. The best way to do this is by placing social media icons/links in above your header, in the footer, sidebar or wherever you think is best on your website design.

So there you have it. These are the top 3 trends to consider for your upcoming web design projects or redesign of your website/blog. Be creative!

Consistency – This is important in a few key areas

1. Fonts. Always default to the most common fonts across all platforms; Ariel, Times New Roman.

2. Color. Make sure the background contrasts well with your text. Keep in mind to keep colors few, more color does not make a better picture.

3. Logo, Copyright, brand. This makes up who you are and stops people from stealing something you worked hard to create.

4. Navigation. Make sure it’s easy to use and understand. Make sure all the links navigate to where they are supposed to.

Rule of Thirds
1. Header should only take up a maximum of 1/3 of the page length, the body another 1/3 and the footer a maximum of 1/3 the page lenght.

Functionality
1. Make sure all links work.
2. Make sure forms send where they are supposed to.
3. If flash for DHTML is not supported by the user then it needs to be able to default to the other forms of media; Replacement text, HTML5, Captions under audio and video.
4. Make sure downloads work properly.
5. Download times are stated.

Websites that meet this criteria have worked hard to make your experience with them exceptional. The future of web continues to grow in age from its humble beginnings, and as time passes as the past has shown the standards become tighter as the amount of platforms continue to grow: cell phones, ipads, tablet PCs. Futher posts will discuss the best practices for each of the languages that go into building a web page to make the user experience rich in all environments.

• Make sure that title elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
• Make sure your web server supports the HTTP header.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
• Avoid using too complex of tables when laying out your page.
• Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster.
• The URL structure http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. You should use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

The top four things that you MUST have on your site:

• Analytics to track your stats (Google Analytics is our recommendation)
• Email Opt In form (I Contact rocks)
• A phone number in clear view (If you want a 1-800 # check out Ring Central)
• A clear call to action — don’t make people guess what you want them to do

There are many others like: clean coding, good graphics, compelling story etc.  However, these are the top four that have no exceptions.

Is your site missing any of the above four?  If so, make the adjustments – you will be glad you did!

Links – Linking is one of the most important strategies used in search engine optimization.  In addition to making sure backlinks to your Web site are available, SEO experts know how to use anchor text and other techniques to boost your rankings.  A designer without SEO knowledge will not know about these techniques and may not focus on building links when designing your site.

Meta Tags – While meta tags are not the most important factor in getting ranked, they do have some impact on your rankings and how potential visitors see your pages.  Meta tags are HTML tags that contain information about your site.  The meta keyword tag should include the main keywords for each page on your site.  The meta description tag should contain a short description about your site; this is what the search engines display when your site comes up in the rankings.  Designers who do not have SEO knowledge may not use any meta tags, or they may fill the meta tags with generic keywords that do nothing to help get your site ranked.

Content – If your Web design firm also provides content, you need to be sure the content is optimized for search engines.  Without SEO experience, your designer may not know how to select the best keywords or implement them in your pages.

Taz Solutions is an Internet marketing and Web design firm with experience in SEO.  We have graphic designers, Web designers, copywriters, and Internet marketing professionals on staff to ensure that your site gets the results you want.  Contact us today for a free quote.

The only people that can get away with this are companies that have high-power brand recognition – Disney, Pepsi, Lexus and so on.  These companies are not concerned with the top ranking for “Disney World” because they already occupy those top spots. 

You may be thinking: well how can they have a web site that is ranked #1 or #2 for all their search phrases that is designed with flash?  The answer – links!  Companies like Disney, Lexus and Pepsi have hundreds of thousands of links that point directly to their web site – making them “untouchable!”  

The key lesson here – design a web site that looks nice for your customers/prospects, but one that is search engine friendly.  Check out our web site design services:  SEO Web Design – Dreamweaver Web Design

Enjoy your Weekend!

Did you also know that most consumers will leave a flash web site within the first ten seconds?

Plain and simple – design your web site with the search engines and consumers in mind.

When is flash on your web site ok?

• To provide a product demostration
• To demostrate a services

Please keep in mind – do not have anything flashy load right off the bat, have the flashy stuff on your secondary pages for the people that want to watch it!