Web Designer's Corner

WordCamp NYC 2009 Photos from Mal

These are pictures I took with my Nikon D-60 mostly of friends of mine from LexisNexis. There are pictures of Corey Eulas, Marc McDermott, Michael Andrews, Dave Minchala, Heman Patel, John Wahnish, and me – Mal Milligan. Included are WordCamp NYC 2009 Organizers Steve Bruner and Jane Wells and WordPress Theme Developer Superstar Brain Gardner. And there is a photo showing Matt’s back. Cheers –

What Will a Professional Website Do For Me?

A Web Design WordPlace professional website will enhance your business and probably pay for itself many times over the costs.

Advantages to our Professional Website Offer:

• bring in more calls and leads
• get you more exposure as an expert authority to qualified prospects that are shopping on Google, Yahoo, and Bing / MSN
• assist with your internet reputation management
• act as an attractive representative – sharp looking websites make sales
• prevent internet savvy prospects from turning away if you don’t have a website
• get you extra internet listings in Google Local Business Center (also called Google Local Maps)
• leave a convenient place on the internet where prospects and clients can access a quick contact form to email you
• allow you to challenge your competition in a more cost effective method than print media
• provide a central location for web videos, podcasts, case histories, testimonials

Of course the number one answer is to make more sales. Professionals and businesses that have beautiful websites make a better impression on prospects and clients. That leads to more sales and higher margins. Professionals frequently realize having a beautiful office can help their business, just like nice clothes, a nice briefcase, a classic watch. A website is in the same category now. Most clients expect it. If a prospect is 40 years old or younger, statistics tell us that if they see you don’t have a website, they will automatically assume you are not keeping up with the times and your lack of current technology is more frequently than not a deal breaker. Having an old or cheap looking site is also a negative.

Internet surfers spend an average of 7 seconds on a web page and they make several judgments and decisions during that quick time span. If they’re looking for a professional or a business, during the 7 seconds they spend on the web page, they will decide whether to go off the site and look for something better… or they will be suitably impressed and look for the phone number to call. A beautiful website with relevant content engages user interest and they stay on the pages longer… they go to more pages on the site.

When you don’t have a website, you’re leaving your reputation to chance or to the discretion of others – like your competitors. When you have a professional website, you control the information web surfers find out about you. With a professional website you can also setup internet references to yourself more easily with social networks and places like LinkedIn and Facebook. So if you setup a website and then add yourself to a hand full of social networks, you can push out internet information about yourself that you did not create in most cases.

Google Local is a fantastic tool to get business exposure and having a professional website defined in your local profile helps get you seen on the map. Sure old time businesses with no website can get on the Google Local Maps, but, the more information you provide in your profile, the better your chances are of getting those higher rankings. Subsequently that gets you more looks – and calls.

When you have web videos you can use them to your advantage better if you have a professional website to link from. It’s great to have business videos in YouTube or Vimeo or MetaCafe but it can garner you Google PageRank and real competitive search engine optimization power if you add those videos to your website.

Web Design Consultant Test

Web Design Consultant Test

How do you know the self proclaimed “web design expert” you are talking with has real skills? Give them this test:

1. Ask to see their best 3 pieces of website design work and then check their Google ranking for their top phrase. The most beautiful website in the world that does not rank well on Google might as well be under a rock because it’s not going to bring you in new business. Web designers that don’t understand the design has to be integrated with SEO on every page should work for your competitors – not for you.  I’ve talked with many web designers that told me they were a “real graphic artist” and their artistic vision was more important than visibility on Google. Wow, that’s from the stone ages of the internet and they just don’t understand clients in competitive industries want more business from their websites, you are not interested in “supporting the arts”.
2. Ask to see their top 3 most competitive Google #1 rankings. If they tell you that Google ranking has nothing to do with web design tell them they are right, don’t waste another minute of your life with them, and hope they work for your competitor. I want to rank top 10 for my most competitive phrases on Google so I can get more business. I really want to rank #1 for several phrases but I’m realistic and I know just getting on Google Page One in the top 10 rankings is outstanding.
3. Ask your web design consultant how they built “relevance” into each page of the website. If they can tell you that the page name, the page title, the page headings, the page text, and links to that page from other interior pages of the website all more or less have a relevant match on the primary and secondary keyword phrases for that page… you got yourself a web designer that knows SEO. That’s vital to bring in more internet shoppers. If you just want to look at art you can always go to a museum. I want a beautiful website that ranks well on Google so I can make more money.
4. Ask your prospective web design consultant to show you the meta title for your “About” page and the meta title for your “homepage”. If they are identical, it means the so called “expert” was either lazy or really did not know what they were doing in terms of integrating their design with search. That’s not going to get you any new business. Send them to work for your competitors.

Old School Web Design Has Nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization SEO

• 9 out of 10 web design consultants don’t know the first thing about SEO (search engine optimization) and that can cost you millions in new business.
• The same 9 out of 10 web consultants will tell you how design and SEO are 2 different things and you don’t need SEO for a website.
• I can tell you from experience 9 out of 10 web design consultants will tell customers they are an “expert” on SEO when they don’t even know the basics.

First of all, no matter how beautiful a website looks, if it does not rank well on Google… it’s nearly worthless in terms of attracting new prospects for your business. A website that does not rank well on Google might as well be invisible. Why bother?

Is it Important to Rank Well on Yahoo and Bing?

85% of all searches are done with Google. Many Professional SEO’s don’t bother doing anything for Bing or Yahoo. So the short answer is: No. I do a few things for Bing and Yahoo including verifying websites in Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer… but in terms of on page optimization Google is like the 800 pound Gorilla these days and you don’t get much in return when you score big on Bing or Yahoo anyway.

Web Design for business goes hand in hand with SEO for business, they can’t be looked at as different entities anymore. Web design and SEO are intertwined. They compliment each other. If your web design consultant tells you any differently, get a better one and send yours right to your toughest business competitor because you will be able to outrank them and gain an advantage using internet marketing.

Why Use A Web Design Consultant?

You have choices when you want to buy a new web design or SEO services. The first choice for many is to look at the “Big Box” company offerings, and that makes sense for a number of reasons.

• Comparison shopping is essential and part of the “due diligence” process.
• You can make more informed choices when you are familiar with all the players and their offerings and prices.
• You learn about what you can get and other options you might not have know before your research.

I can tell you from experience having worked for years at a Big Box Web Design and SEO firm that there are advantages and disadvantages to using the big firms. The advantages include:

1. Being able to buy a product from an experienced vendor – or you hope so if the company is big.
2. Having a well known brick and mortar brand name you can go back to in the future.
3. The ability to look at other companies in your genre and how well they did with the big box vendor.

But there are some huge disadvantages with using the big box vendors:

• You rarely get to find out exactly what they are doing for you and how much time they are spending. Big Box attorneys might tell you this is “proprietary information” even when you pay hundreds of dollars per hour in fees and want an itimized invoice.
• Forget about being treated like an individual. Take a number and join the faceless crowd. Get treated like cattle in a herd.
• When you want one stop shopping for all your needs, the big box company can’t do that. You might have to talk with 6 different people to find the right one to help with any given problem.
• What about quality control? You cannot expect the big box vendor to have an expert take care of you in every instance… many times the bg box vendor makes a profit by getting the cheapest help to service your needs.

Why Use a Web Design Consultant Then?

By hiring an experienced web designer, you get almost ALL of the Advantages of ta Big Box provider and NONE of the disadvantages. You get treated as a person and when you talk… the consultant listens. You get an expert on the phone with one call every time. You get the experience and professionalism you are looking for without sacrificing quality in any area.

But do your homework first before you sign a web design or SEO contract. Being an educated consumer has real advantages when you trust your company’s reputation and earning potential to another firm. When you go with the big box company you are swimming with a school of fish in the sea. If you are fortunate enough to retain a web design consultant with tons of experience, it’s like hiring a key employee without the overhead.

Trying Headway Themes – Not!

I was listening to part of the GPL discussion at WordCamp NYC 2009 yesterday. Basically it featured Brian Gardner (founder of Revolution and then Studio Press Themes) and Grant Griffiths (co-founder of the new Headway Themes), going head to head on the GPL issue in regard to WordPress “Premium Themes”. Gardner started as a non-GPL premium theme provider and he switched to be fully GPL compliant. Which means he went “legit” and became a legal theme maker. And you ask “who cares”? If I build a site for a law firm using a non-GPL compliant theme are they going to care? Probably not. Will they get sued because of it? Almost certainly not.

Then why don’t I even try Headway after hearing all the buzz about it?

Well, for starters, they force you to agree when you purchase the theme for the so called “personal option” to:

1. NOT Remove the footer credit
2. NOT Redistribute in any way, shape, or form
3. pay a minimum of $87 to play… there is no free version

They’ve got a lot of moxie to use open source code to sell proprietary code and it’s in exceedingly poor taste to force users into a link back. As if this was a “kid developer” selling scripts on HotScripts that included some kind of chinsey linking scheme as part of the payment. Having a PR3 on their young homepage compared to Studio Presses PR6 right now we can guess why. The truth of the matter is that PR3 on their homepage is perfectly normal right now considering their age and they are getting a lot of buzz right now from users who want to use premium themes but they find Studio Press too difficult to use. I think they should just play it cool like a mature player and drop the link back requirement in their licensing. They are catering to a crowd of non-developers that will probably give a link with out being forced to anyway. The non-distribute part of their licensing agreement is funny. I’m laughing. I’d love to see them sue someone for violating the license agreement that they made by violating the spirit of the GPL licensing agreement.

But the biggest reason for me is that I purchased the developer license for Revolution, REV2, and Studio Press which are all evolutionary Brian Gardner products and I can go nuts making sites for commercial clients. I spent a lot of money for those developer lics but I got a lot of different great themes and the absolute best support in the premium themes business. Headway wants to charge a fee for a developer license and then ON TOP of that a PER CLIENT FEE for each commercial client you have. Wow. It’s totally unenforceable in practice IMHO but if I did play ball it would have cost me an extra thousand dollars for the number of client sites I’ve rolled out so far.

With  a GPL compliant WordPress Theme, I can use it for free. My friends at work can try it for free or use it commercially for free. But I can’t even test Headway unless I spend almost 100 bucks for the “personal option” and then I have to play games and give them a mandatory link back to their homepage so I don’t violate the license agreement and subsequently break the law.

Headway features look nice and I’d like to try them.

But I’m NOT going to shell out almost a hundred bucks to try a theme. I’m going to find a few Headway Themes in the wild and check their built in SEO capabilities against the hugely popular AllInOneSEO plugin that most professional SEO’s like myself use on standard commercial client rollouts. You know the Headway guys are onto some solid ideas and they may push the envelope for other premium theme developers. But until they make a GPL version I think they are not playing fair to use the hard work of hundreds of developers who made WordPress for the benefit of the world for free, and I’m not going to try it at the tune of a hundred bucks a pop for a non-commercial developer lic.

(I was not paid by any vendor or individual for any of my comments in this post)

Here is a David Risley vid on Headway under the hood.

WordPress Site Review – Frugal Kiwi

I was looking at incredible food pictures on Tastespotting as I do every once in a while. An interesting picture lead me to a beautifully designed site from New Zealand by web designer and web copywriter Melanie McMinn. The Frugal Kiwi – “Live Well Spend Less”.

I exchanged a few emails with Melanie as she described her Thesis Theme WordPress website. Melanie called Thesis as “an incredibly flexible framework”. She mentioned other WP themes she’s used and she said the features and customization you can do with Thesis left the others “in the dirt”. She went on to say the price tag for developers was very reasonably priced. I was especially interested in Melanie’s report that the built in SEO options were handy.

For me the most impressive feature was that the site was so eye catching and artistically designed. It looked like it was built from an artistic composition… if you’re in the business you would just say “a comp” or a “PhotoShop Comp”. I really like the header integration with the theme and the fact that the Nav Bar is above the header and the image flows down into the context area seamlessly. The fat footer is nicely done with plenty of links to her recent posts and categories to make navigation easy and search easy. Her widgets on the right sidebar are artistic and interesting… also fitting the overall look and feel perfectly.

The Frugal Kiwi has a Google PR3 now on the homepage and a PR2 on the About Page.

I’m going to have to look more into Thesis. I’ve heard a lot about Thesis from Rae Hoffman at Sugarrae but this is the best design I’ve seen to date on Thesis. Nicely Done Melanie – cheers !!

(I have not been paid in any way by any companies or persons listed in this review – Mal Milligan)

Best Web Design Tools: FireBug

When I switched to developing WordPress sites exclusively, I needed a tool to help me find the places in the code where I could go to change background and text colors. That’s when I found Firebug and it became one of my “Best Web Design Tools”. I still use it every day.

Anytime you want to look under the hood of a website and see the exact lines of code that are creating the page element you are looking at, FireBug is THE tool for the job, and it’s now one of the modern classics, a tool fit for every developers bag.

OK lets get into it. When you are looking at a web page with a browser, you are actually looking at a rendition. Older programming languages were compiled… that is they were assembled and written into an executable file. Web languages are not compiled, they are rendered at the time they are displayed and they are known as markup languages. The web page you are looking at could be HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, and a number of other popular WWW oriented programming languages, or any combination of all of the above. You can go to “View, Page Source” using FireFox to look at the code at the time it was rendered. So what you are looking at is the final combo of what could be many files… .htm, .html, .css, .php, and so forth. It’s very hard or near impossible to figure out where a line of code originated sometimes just by looking at the source in the browser. That’s where Firebug shines.

Firebug is a free add-on that bolts beautifully to the Firefox browser. Once installed, you can drag on some text on a web page, right click, and click on “inspect element” to start Firebug. There are basically 2 panes, the left one being the exact lines of code in the currently executing HTML or PHP file generally, and on the right pane you will see the styles that are currently inherited and in play from various style sheets (your .css files).

You can also use Firebug to see exactly how many pixels wide and high your layout elements are. I worked on websites for almost 10 years before I discovered a tool that could do that and Firebug is incredibly valuable just for that one feature alone.

Another bolt on that I use frequently that works in the Firebug console is a tool called YSlow from Yahoo actually. YSlow sill tell you the load size of a web page and it further breaks down the page into the individual code and image sizes so you can quickly find over sized offenders. I don’t ever go over 1.2 MB on my homepages right now to eliminate the possibility that an oversized page might not be looked at favorably by search engines.

If you work on websites try Firebug and Yslow and tell me if they are worthy of me calling them the one of the Best Web Design Tools.

NYC Web Design – SEO Case Study

There are hundreds of bakeries in New York City and some have been in the same neighborhood for over 100 years. Generations of people have used the same bakery for their entire lives. Many New York City bakeries are world famous and they get magazine, newspaper, and tv coverage. The competition was tough.

The Century Cafe and Bakery was near a corner of one of the busiest intersections in Chinatown, on Bowery near Grand, and 1 block from the 2nd busiest subway stop in the neighborhood. Perfect location really and their storefront and fantastic product line did all their advertising for them. Classic brick and mortar story, build it and they will come. But being in the heart of Chinatown and featuring American and Chinese styled bakery products, the Century Cafe wanted a way to break more into the mainstream and compete along side the big boys. That’s where Mal Milligan stepped in and built them a website and worked it for SEO.

Mal started by taking 1100 photos using a Nikon D-60 SLR and 3 Nikon lenses. With 15 years of professional Photoshop experience, he cut the photos down to around 100 and cropped them and tweaked them for the website. He created a WordPress website using a Studio Press Theme and the magic began. The pictures became an instant success on Google images and Flickr. And more and more people started finding Centurycafe.com in Google, Yahoo, and Bing searches. The phrase “That’s the best food photograph I’ve ever seen on the internet” became common at the office when Mal showed off his latest web design project.

In the summer of 2009, centurycafe.com became the #1 Google ranked result for the phrase “Manhattan Bakery” and the business has never looked back. The website is getting more than 3,500 unique visitors a month consistently and it’s getting listed on Google Local and seen during searches up to 7,000 times a month now by local New Yorkers. What a difference, to go from no website to 40,000 unique visitors and 50,000 Google local impressions a year! It’s increased their exposure out of the local Chinatown community and into the mainstream. Now besides being known as the best Chinese bakery in town, they are known as the best bakery in Manhattan by many more more people that would have never known they existed if it were not for Web Design Workplace and their custom websites integrated with SEO.

The competition on Google for the phrase “Manhattan bakery” is serious major leagues for a medium sized multi-million dollar business. Google reports over 6,000 web pages it’s aware of that have the phrase “Manahttan bakery” in their title. To be honest it’s a little bit lucky to get a #1 ranking on Google but it generally takes a lot of hard work and adherence to the SEO best practices guidelines we commonly refer to as “White Hat SEO”.

In this case Web Design WorkPlace put the icing on their cake. The internet exposure has turned out to be very valuable and a lucrative return on investment for the owners. Another NYC web design success story for Mal Milligan and his firm Web Design WorkPlace.

Boutique Web Design

Web Design WorkPlace will always have a distinguished and small client base… essentially we’re a boutique web design company. We can’t afford to serve the masses at the same time that we are outranking them on Google for your big money keyword phrases. Every single customer we have ever had has become one of our friends, and we go way out of our way to help your business. Even if that means recommending another firm or a consultant for a particular situation.

Boutique Web Design Features

• when you buy a website or SEO contract from us, you get the cell phone of the owner – a guy who managed hundreds of office floors of mission critical computers and networking equipment for 5 different World Headquarters based in New York City – Mal Milligan.
• if you send us an email, you get a same day response that we got the email and a same day response about what we did about it
• we never put you on hold when we’re talking on the phone – your time is as valuable as ours and we serve each of our clients one at a time
• you get exclusive control of your geographic location and area of practice when you contract with us for SEO search engine optimization
• we don’t use black hat seo techniques like link buying
• our community of users are all friendly, professional people – they come from all walks of life, and they represent every ethnicity and many different parts of the world… we pride ourselves on the quality and the diversity of our customers

Big Box Web Design Features

Here’s a list of features you can get from almost all of the Big Box Web Design Firms that you will never get from Web Design WorkPlace:

• talking to 6 people before you find the right one to help with your problem
• getting put on hold during phone conversations, as in their time is more valuable than yours
• being told a problem will be fixed and then never hearing a follow up until you call again, sometimes repeatedly
• requesting an update and waiting weeks for it to be completed
• being told by your technician they were too busy to help you because they had a lot of other customers ahead of you in their work queue
• getting charged for hours of labor that were never performed – this is a universal feature with big web design companies
• getting calls from sales people with item after item they want to add-on… pushing “upsells” on you
• writing an email for support and never getting a response… big design firms incorporate the “black hole inbox”, your email goes in and never comes out

Down sides to going to a boutique web design company:

• you might feel guilty about paying so little for a website that is far superior to the big box company offering
• it may seem unusual to be called “Sir” on the phone or to get a response like “yes ma’am, we’ll take care of that immediately”… that may happen frequently when dealing with Web Design Workplace
• there could be a situation when you experience an elevated emotional level when you reach your SEO goals and get Top 10 Page One Rankings on Google for very competitive keyword phrases

What’s a favicon?

How do I make a favicon or just get one for free?

A favicon is the tiny 16px by 16 px image that appears on the left most side of your browser’s address bar. It was originally named for the phrase “favorite icon” when bookmarking became the rage. Now it’s part of the standard practices for a webmaster or webmistress to create a unique favicon for each website.

When an image is so small, it requires a special creativity to make something that users are going to be able to instantly recognize. Take a look at these examples:

Google.com
Yahoo.com
Facebook.com
IBM.com
HP.com

In each case the favicon is easy to recognize and surfers can identify the site… actually identify the branding instantly.

Now, if you’re like me and you have limited natural artistic abilities, but you being a kick butt webmaster and designer can adapt anything you ever saw in your life using PhotoShop or FireWorks or Corel, lets make some favicons !!! If you can’t jack any drawing you ever saw using PhotoShop there is still hope, there are collections of free favicons all over the internet. More on that soon.

Start with the Easiest

The easiest favicons to make consist of a background and a single big letter. I start by making an image that is 100px by 100px, convert it to a .jpg, and save it with an under 30 KB filesize.

Search on Google for the phrase “free favicon generator” and my 2 favorites show up:

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
and
http://www.favicon.co.uk/

Follow the instructions and your result is a file that is always called favicon.ico

You can place these anywhere in your websites hierarchy, but this meta tag will help your browser and keep you from having to drop these all over the place like Johnny Appleseed the way some webmasters used to do it:

OK, where are the free ones? Search on Google for “free favicons” and my favorite is:

http://www.freefavicon.com/freefavicons/objects/

If you want to get more advanced I’ve seen animated favicons that looked cool… check these folks out at:

http://www.animatedfavicon.com/

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