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Good Web Design
"There are two types of web sites. There are those web sites you date, like 'The Data Was Lost Collective...' ...and then...there are those web sites you marry, like Yahoo! The trick is not to confuse the two."
Many web designers get confused...
Hiring Professionals: 5 Things to Look For
So you've decided that it might be best to leave web design to
the professionals, have you? Well, the unfortunate thing about
web design professionals is that not all of them are exactly
professional. Some of them are working from wildly out of...
How To Design Your Web Site With CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to create fast loading pages, increase your search engine rankings, and modify your whole site with one style sheet. So why don’t more people use them? This is because they got so used to html design and are...
Some basic tests to check your website for accessibility
The Disability Discrimination Act says that websites must be made accessible to disabled people. So how can you check that your website is up to par? There are a number of basic tests you can make to address some of the main issues. The following...
The DRC Blew It
The DRC (Disability Rights Commission) recently announced the results of their year-long investigation into the accessibility of 1000 websites. The DRC's report ( http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/2.pdf ) concluded that most websites...
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Content is King - Believe It
Somewhere between ever more sophisticated graphic design and
more complicated CSS, many designers have are starting to forget
one of the ground rules of the web. This rule is the arguably
the most important rule to follow at all times; one that you
should always keep in mind when you're designing your website.
So what is it? It's simple. Your visitors are at your website to
get information. Content is King.
The Search-Driven Web
Studies show that well over 90% of users now have a search
engine as their homepage, and use it for around half of
everything they do on the web. Unless you're advertising your
site heavily, most of your users are likely to arrive through a
search engine. However, they're relatively unlikely to just be
searching for a description of your products. What are they
looking for? Information. There's a reason why the web was once
referred to as the 'information superhighway' - while some
people might be actively looking to buy things, most of them are
just looking for information.
Relevant Articles
So, if you're selling products, you need to provide articles
that your potential customers are likely to want to read. The
bigger the audience you can build for your articles, the more
conversions you're going to have to sales. It can't be
emphasised enough just how important your content is: if it's
badly-written, or not useful, your visitors are likely to just
go back to their search results page and try another link. If
you give them good information, though, you instantly create the
kind of loyalty that no number of advertising dollars can buy.
What many practitioners of techniques like 'search engine
optimisation' don't realise is this: you can't fake good
content. However many keywords you might stick into it, you'll
fool search engines, but not the visitors they bring in - all
you're doing is costing yourself money in bandwidth and wasting
people's time.
No Time to Write?
The most common objection I hear when I tell people they should
write great content is that they have no time to write the
amounts that would be needed - and, yes, writing can be very
time-consuming. What you have to realise, though, is that
Crashing On Couches To Talk To Musicians
Jason Crane of <em>The Jazz Session</em> interview podcast is touring the U.S. via Greyhound bus.
Around The Jazz Internet: May 18, 2012
Ten albums for newbies, the hated Cabaret Card and composer/arranger Gil Evans' centennial.
The Harmonica-Playing Baron Of Belgium
Whistling guitarist and harmonica master Toots Thielemans has played in everything from Charlie Parker's band to commercials for Old Spice. In his childhood home of Brussels — really, throughout his homeland — the celebration of his 90th birthday is on.
there
are plenty of ways around this, such as hiring a freelance
writer to do some of the work for you, or using speech
recognition software.
You might also consider buying in content from people who resell
it, or even getting your users to write the content - there's
nothing better than getting visitors to write their own content
and then getting more visitors from search engines where people
have found it. There are even sites offering content for free in
exchange for a link back to them at the bottom of the article,
although you should be cautious about reviewing the quality of
content offered this way.
Keep it Updated
Here's something that many people don't realise: it's better to
write a little occasionally than to write a lot all at once.
This means that, even if you have written hundreds of articles,
you should release them one by one on a regular timescale. Both
visitors and search engines prefer sites that are updated often
to ones that have a big pile of content dumped on them once and
then aren't touched for years.
Content Makes Money
Nowadays, it's once again possible to make money from good
content without even having anything to sell. Plenty of
businesses were based on advertising back in the dot-com boom,
but ad prices eventually dipped too low for this to be
sustainable. Ad prices have now recovered, however, thanks to
text advertising.
You can sign up with most of the big search engines now for
context-sensitive ads for your site that are chosen
automatically - Google AdSense runs the most popular service.
This kind of advertising eliminates human 'ad editors'
altogether, while producing ads that are targeted enough to give
far better returns than they ever used to. Purely content-driven
websites with ads are once again a viable revenue stream, and
content is as much King as it's ever been.
About the author:
Original Source: Eclipse-Articles.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
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