Archive for July, 2008

About a week ago i received an email from DesignFirms stating that Kazak Media, LLC had just won the 2008-2009 Web award. They stated that Kazak Media‘s Website had been found as one of the best on internet and was awarded the 2008-2009 Web Award.

As a result of winning this award i decided to take the current Kazak Media Website design offline. I am currently revamping the entire site and replacing it with a brand new design. This site should be online by the end of August.

Additional Links:

• DeisgnFirms Homepage
• DesignFirms Web Award Page

Every web site needs a good web design and in fact there is so much scarcity of good web design that people are eager to pay premium price to make sure that their web sites are attractive as well as easy to use. So if you have an eye for good design and you are comfortable with learning new technologies then you can make a good living designing web sites for various clients.

To become a web designer you need to be able to tick the following boxes?

• You will need excellent communication skills in order to promote your website design services.

• You will need to keep abreast of emerging web technologies and be able to implement them as necessary.

• You should be able to demonstrate your skills with current web design software.

• You should have some working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a bit of scripting.

• You should definitely be artistically inclined or know some people who can create great layouts.

• And it obviously helps if you know Photoshop, Flash etc.

If you can tick all the boxes and are confident that you have the necessary skill set then one of the first things you will need to plan for is your own website to get you started in the web design business. If you can put together some client testimonials these will definitely increase your conversions. You will require a convincing copy on your main page and good content on other pages. Competing on the search engines for web design frankly is going to be a tough nut to crack but somewhere you will have to make a beginning. You can either hire and SEO Company to increase your search engine visibility or you can on your own spend some months optimizing your website.

You will also need to consider the more mundane housekeeping items, such as:

• Local advertising and marketing (formulating a marketing strategy).

• Stationery pack including letterheads, compliment slips etc.

• Setting up a business bank account.

It is also a good idea to have freelancers (particularly in areas where your own skill set is weaker) available to undertake work that you are unable to complete yourself for whatever reason.

Now, to the important stuff – what do your clients expect from you as a web designer?

• Great designing abilities.

• Ability to create pleasing color themes.

• Writing W3C compliant code and possibly no errors.

• Knowledge of manipulating graphics and images * Working knowledge of JavaScript and other scripting languages.

• Exceptional service. Transparent communication.

Whilst some may add low cost in to the mix, in my experience clients that appreciate an excellent service understand that more time is involved and are prepared to pay a higher cost (but this is only the case if they are aware of the extra value you intend to give them).

On the Internet, by the end of the day, it’s all about traffic, and more so, it’s all about relevant traffic. Relevant traffic is the lifeline of your online presence and you need to make a continuous effort to keep getting good traffic to your website. Now, you can get targeted traffic from:

The search engines: The search engines are the primary source of your relevant traffic, in most of the cases. It doesn’t cost you tons of money to get traffic from the search engines. Millions of users conduct billions of searches every month.

Pay-per-click programs: Maybe there are not quite as hot as some of the search engines but they do guarantee targeted traffic more or less instantly. Sign up for a pay-per-click program like AdWords and you’ll be getting traffic within fifteen minutes. Pay-per-click advertising options are present on independent content publishing websites too.

Inbound links from other websites: If you publish compelling content then many website owners put your link on their websites to add value to their existing content. Such links can be put their voluntarily, or through link exchange. Link exchange is discouraged these days, so the best way of making others link to you is to produce high-class, linkable content, on a regular basis. You can even interact on various online forums to increase your link visibility.

Emails: Up till a few years ago email marketing was considered the most effective advertising tool the world had ever witnessed. Spam killed its charm but in some quarters it still performs well, especially the opt-in email newsletters. Email advertising campaigns, provided they are done properly, are still the best way of getting highly targeted traffic.

Blogs and RSS Feeds: Only the most ignorant can discount blogs and RSS feeds as highly productive tools in terms of generating targeted traffic. Blogs are a constant source of quality information and hence they get instant traffic from other websites and the search engines. RSS feeds, without being intrusive like emails, instantly notify people whenever you publish something new on your blog or website.

Social media and bookmarking websites: Some of such websites are: Digg, Netscape, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

Offline sources: If you prominently display your URL on your visiting cards, letter heads, brochures and other stationery you can get some good traffic from there too. I have seen people printing their URLs even on their T-shirts and vehicles.

In order to get traffic from all these sources, you have to take care how you create your website and how you organize your content. Given below are a few things you should constantly keep in mind while creating and maintaining your website, and while writing content for your website.

Stick to your central theme as much as possible; if you can keep consistent with your central theme, the more expert your content will appear. Don’t try to create content for every interest under the sun (or the moon, or the stars). Think vertical if you want to get high-value traffic. Cover all the topics that belong to your central theme. It acts like fodder to the search engines. Search engines love specialized content; give it to them and they’ll give you loads of traffic in exchange.

Sticking to your central theme also earns you great respect and loyalty, and also hundreds of inbound links. When expert and linking to you becomes a prestige factor. It also increases your keyword-density across your domain.

Provide information that helps your visitors; this is what keeps them coming back to your website. Realistically it is difficult to constantly this thing or that thing. More than that, develop a bond with your visitors. Show them their happiness matters to you. Make your website a resource of useful information. Publish content that adds value. This is a sure-shot way of increasing traffic as well as loyalty. Information that provides help, for instance, how-to articles, get linked to a lot by other web masters and blog publishers, and this leads to higher rankings on various search engines.

Conduct a thorough keyword research before generating content; Most SEO campaigns fail to zero-in on the right keywords. You’ll be surprised to know what all keywords and key expressions people use to find businesses such as yours. Target a few wrong keywords and you can bid good bye to an effort of six months of SEO. It’s not always necessary to use keywords that your competitors are using. First of all, they might themselves be optimizing for the wrong keywords, and second, there might be a slew of keywords that are being used by the users but are being ignored by your competitors. Use your keyword research to find out such keywords and optimize your web pages for them. This will increase your traffic manifolds.

Create a simple, accessible but elegant design; when you create quick-loading, stylish and accessible web pages you accommodate the entire spectrum of your prospective market -you don’t exclude particular sections of the society. Even search engines prefer accessible websites because almost all accessible websites conform to the W3C web designing standards. Good design also means using the right colors (that cause no eye-strain) and right contrasts to assist seamless browsing. The navigation bar should be designed in such a manner that all your important pages should be reachable within 2-3 clicks. A well defined sitemap referencing all of your pages help your human visitors as well search engine crawlers. Do well-organized onsite optimization; Onsite optimization means using your keywords at all the right places like within the header tags, as anchor text (and especially in your navigation system and again within your bulleted lists). In addition, try to highlight (bold) the occurrence of your keywords here and there, but don’t overdo it. Although this is not necessary, use the keyword at least once in every paragraph. Create a title (the text that comes between) that not only carries your keywords, but also represents the true highlight of your page content. Never try to deceive your visitors with a title that does not completely represent the content of your page. Your title shows up on the search engine results pages when your link appears on them. A compelling title makes people click it, and having those keywords in your title that people are looking for increases their probability of being clicked.

Regularly create new, relevant content; People come to your website again and again if they are expecting something new there. Similarly, the search engines index and re-index your pages with greater frequency if you update your website regularly. Having many pages increases your chance of at least few of them getting ranked higher by the search engines.

Remain active on the Internet; Known people get more traffic on the Internet. Keep the buzz alive by maintaining an active blog, participating in the comments sections of other blogs and various subject-specific online forums. Blogs are a great way of getting high quality traffic both from the search engines and from other blogs and websites. If you continuously generate quality posts and encourage productive conversations on your blog more and more people gradually start coming to your blog and some of that traffic gets spilled over to your actual business website. Another benefit of maintaining a popular blog is that if you put your business website link their, it gets extra point when the search engines rank your website.

Link to others; Link to them and they’ll link to you. Getting links on the web is a two-way activity especially if you are not well known (if you are a celebrity people tend to link to you anyway). If you select the outgoing links with caution it also tells the search engines that you link to quality information sources. People who are looking for such links will visit your website repeatedly knowing that you constantly add new links.

More often than not people, to whom you link, link back to you.

Well, I could have written a 101 Ways of Increasing Traffic to Your Website but my main purpose was to give you exactly the pointers you can use to increase traffic. Follow the steps mentioned above and you’ll definitely notice a surge in your online traffic.

What makes a good web site design? Is it a design that showcases your prowess? Can a website design that prove what an excellent graphic designer you are? Will your website design bring you more designing awards? Or do you want your website design to establish a platform for you and your visitors to interact with each other unhindered by usability problems? What do you think? Is the last point the most important factor that establishes the basic difference between a successful and an unsuccessful website?

The criteria for good web design depends upon the person and the purpose of each site. That said there are some established conventions that you are advised to follow to ensure that your completed site has as wide a reach as possible. When you are designing your website, especially these days, you have to be constantly conscious of the fact that there are numerous browsers and numerous devices that people may use to access your website. No longer do people browse the Internet just through their PCs and laptops; there are many handheld devices that can directly connect to the Internet and enable people to browse your website; people can even browse your website using their mobile phones. The days when 99$ of the population used Internet Explorer as their primary browser are far behind us.

What are you showcasing or what is the main focus of your site as this will drive the overall design of your site: will it be just text or images or videos or a mixture of all these? You have to design your website accordingly. If it is merely text that you plan to publish then try to make it as less graphical as possible as people coming to your website will be interested in your text and not your images and videos. Similarly a website showcasing your Flash animation expertise will expect lots of Flash work so you needn’t worry about making your website textually accessible.

So when you are designing your website you have to take all these parameters into consideration. But does it mean that you’re always accommodating browsers and devises and do not focus on your own business, whatever that is? No, I’m not suggesting that. Just take care of the following website design guidelines and you will make sure that 95% people (well, there will always be those odd 5% who can never browse the web easily no matter what they try) surfing the Internet can access your website:

1. Create a lighter design. Where possible do not overuse either Javascripts of Flash thataffect the major functionality of your site, including menus. For instance if there is some crucial information on your website and people need to access that information before doing business with you then don’t make that information accessible only through a JavaScript on an image file or a Flash animation. It goes without saying that possible you important text should be available as text and not images, if this is not possible then you need to consider image replacement techniques.
2. Don’t use colors that cause strain to the eyes. If you want people to come to yourwebsite again and again and consume your content or do business with you then you must make their stay over your website as pleasant as possible. No matter how awesome your design looks if the color combinations are strain-full, after a while they will tire of your website and stop coming. Always take care that your background behind the text is far lighter than the text, and vice versa.
3. Plan a carefully considered (from the user’s perspective) navigation system. If you havemultiple pages on your website then there should be a prominently defined navigation system that is easily accessible to everybody. As mentioned above don’t let your navigation depend on images, JavaScripts, or Flash animation. If possible create just a text-based navigation bar. With CSS designing you can create great looking navigation bars.
4. Design your website using CSS because then you can make your content and yournavigation bar appears in a linear fashion. Since all the layout-related placements take place through CSS definitions no matter how your text appears texturally, graphically it will appear as a pleasant layout. The CSS designing techniques also enable you to dabble with intricate layouts without making your website inaccessible. CSS designing will always help you arrange your main content before the navigation link despite making it visually appear beneath the navigation bar or to the right of it. Follow these basic web design principles and you will have a good website design to boast of. Never forget that the main purpose of your site design should be to create a good user experience for your visitors, the design is not there to indulge your design whims and fancies, so do not get caught up in the temptation to over complicate things unnecessarily.

Although search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask will no doubt play a major role in sending users to your web site, there are other areas of promotion that you should not overlook. These include social networking sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon, online forums, blogs, online directories and of course article directories.

You need to make your website search engine friendly and properly communicate to their algorithms what key phrases and keywords are important to your website, in order to derive maximum traffic from various search engines. Let us quickly go through a few steps that can help you make search engines fall in love with your website.

Write for the people and not just for the search engines: Some people have this misconception that you need to manipulate text in order to rank well on the search engines; partially this is true but most often it is not. The best way to fair well in the search engines is to write and organize your content in such a manner that it is best suited to human reading. The more human-friendly content you have the more search engine friendly content you have. The search engines will favor relevant, well-organized content so that they can present quality results to their search engine users.

You should be very clear about what keywords you want traffic from the search engines and research your keywords in the beginning; all your effort will go to waste if you focus on the wrong keywords. If you’re not sure about what keywords to focus upon them go head and hire a consultant but never underestimate the importance of keyword-research. Don’t postpone the selection of your key words until the completion of your website because during many stages you will need to know what relevant keywords your website is trying to target.

Organize paragraphs under headings and subheadings Headings and subheadings quickly tell your human readers as well as the search engine crawlers what your pages all about. Headings and sb-headings are used to summarize the overall content of you page so it is important that you place your keywords here; preferably use your keywords and key phrases when writing them.

Emphasize your important words when you highlight or emphasize your important words it conveys both to your readers and the search engine crawlers that these words are important to understand your message.

Give distinct titles to your web pages just as your name is important to your existence, the page titles are important for your web pages. Never have a single title — your company name, for example — for all your pages. Your page title should a property represent your web page and in fact use the central sentence of your web page as your page title. Avoid creating esoteric and confusing titles although they may seem attractive. Always use a title that clearly defines the message of your web page. Preferably use your keywords with creating your title but make sure you don’t unnecessarily stuff the title with all your important keywords: this will end up spoiling the effect of your title. Organize your keyword-distribution carefully although he shouldn’t manipulate your content for the sake of search engines you can arrange your keywords without seeming spammy. For instance, use your main keywords a new title, in your headings and subheadings, twice or thrice in your first paragraph and then at least once in every paragraph, highlight your keywords once or twice on your web page, use your keywords as hyperlink text when you link to other pages of your website and when you are organizing your thoughts using bullets then use your keywords did to.

Submit your link to niche directories there are online directories available to all niche markets and some of these online directories are highly trusted by the search engines, that is, if your website appears in one of these online directories than it automatically gets a higher ranking in the search engines. There are many business and consumer directories; very carefully select the most appropriate category and then submit your website under that category.

Publish a blog Not having some blogs is so passé; a blog is such an effective marketing, branding, combination, awareness and SEO tool that it is highly recommended that you have a blog for your business. Highly targeted blogs are quickly indexed by the search engines and whenever you post your blog posts they get the text quicker than your normal web pages. Also somehow the blog posts get ranked higher than the normal pages for the same sort of content. There are many other numerous benefits of publishing a blog but here are just talking in terms of SEO.

Use bread crumb navigation Bread crumb navigation is a system that you often come across on category-based websites. Take for instance a directory listing: initially ago on the homepage, then you click one of the categories, then you click one of the sub-categories, then you click one of the sub-sub-directories — and so on — until you arrive at the desired page. On top of the page you will see something like Main->Clothes->Shirts->Men->Large>Striped. This type of navigation system allows you to click on a parent directory and immediately move to another section of the website. This is good for your SEO.

Search engine friendly URLs You get an SEO boost when you’re URL contains some of your keywords. The search engines don’t appreciate dynamically generated URLs much; they prefer URLs that make sense in the real language. For instance, doublesparkseo.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/ is always better than doublesparkseo.co.uk/page.php?p=34. Manually it is easy to achieve but if you are using a content management system that make sure that your content management system generates search engine friendly URLs and not dynamic URLs that require a parameter to access a page. So these are a few things that you can do on your website that will make the search engines fall in love with it.

Organic Search Engine Optimization
If you’re hoping that I’ll cover the magic formula to guarantee yourself the #1 top placement on search engines here, you can stop reading now. I can’t. I don’t know it. Neither does anybody else, by the way. And even if they did, they wouldn’t within 30 days.

Here’s the deal, folks. Search engines are a moving target. They HAVE to be. Not only does technology change like clockwork, but unscrupulous folks constantly try to “game” the system and rig things to get ahead. “All is fair in love and war,” right? Or you can take the Machiavellian approach that “the end justifies the means.” The whole point, though, of a NATURAL ranking (also called an “organic ranking”) is that Websites achieve their position based on the merit of their content relevant to what people are searching for, rather than a ranking that is attained by artificially playing an angle to gain an advantage.

As a result, search engines handle their criteria (their “search engine algorithms”) in three ways. First, they keep them super-double-top-secret. Second, they continually make them smarter, becoming more discriminating and countering the antics of people who try to play them. Third, when cute little tactics are employed by people to gain unfair advantage, the search engines penalize those gimmicks when the algorithms are updated. A few tricksters may still accomplish their goals periodically, but overall, search engine companies are VERY focused on the integrity of providing untainted results.

The difference between “tactics” and “strategy” is quite simple and very important in working with search engines. Tactics are short-term efforts intended to react or respond to the immediate here-and-now to achieve quick results. In the SEO world, they can be a house of cards. Strategy, on the other hand, is a long term plan the employs proven techniques and generally proactive methods to steadily move forward in achieving your goal: top placement on the major search engines.

When you are seeking a qualified SEO professional (someone who studies the search engine TRENDS and that understands the big picture), ask about their strategies. If what you hear appears to be “special ways to take advantage of loopholes” rather than a well-formulated, long-term plan, then you are likely dealing with a tactician rather than a strategist. If the tacticians plan fails, the cost is YOURS. In other words, they may be clever enough to fool the system for a month or two, but eventually when their methods catch up with them, your Website goes “bye-bye” from the search engine listings. Um… oh by the way, there’s usually some clause in your SEO Contract that says “no guarantee, no refund.” It’s up to YOU to be the smart one and not get conned by someone who is boastfully “smarter than the average bear.” They’re either fooling the search engines (temporarily), or they’re fooling you. Either way, they get paid.

Look for the SEO person who is willing to explain what they do. Unless you have studied the SEO process and have kept up on all of the latest trends (in other words, it’s part of what you do for a living), you would be crazy to try optimizing your site yourself. You would likely fall prey to some of the “gotchas” that search engine algorithms are programmed to detect, or you would miss the mark altogether. Yet a number of SEO people seem afraid to “share the secrets of the trade” because they either 1) feel that you’ll do things yourself and they won’t earn your business, or 2) they’re trying to protect you from doing something damaging to your own site. One reason is obviously more noble than the other.

Regardless, I think it is important that an SEO consultant educates their clients. I look at it this way: when I go to the doctor, I like to know what he (or she) is going to do to me. If he pulls out a rubber glove or a needle, it’s nice to know what it’s all about BEFORE anything happens… and it’s certainly not something that I would endeavor to try to do on my own. In a not-so-vivid kind of way, I see Website and SEO work in a similar fashion. Just as I’m not trying to put an M.D. after my name when I expect the doctor to explain a procedure to me, your Website solution provider shouldn’t try to make an expert out of you by giving you the basics of how they do business. They should offer the information in simple, explainable terms. If they don’t, ask. It won’t hurt, I promise.

“A lot of people have come to us with questions, and one of the most common is this: what do I do with my old iPhone when I buy a brand spanking new iPhone 3G?

Well, how about a free iPod touch—how would you feel about that? Because as far as I can tell, that’s what you get when you set up a new iPhone 3G to replace your existing original iPhone. After the Apple Store’s Mac specialist did whatever mojo he needed to do to get me up and running, I walked out of the store with a fully functional iPhone 3G.

But what of my poor, lonely original iPhone? Waiting in line for six hours turned out to not be the best thing for its battery, so I had to plug it in to recharge it (using the brand new teeny-tiny iPhone power adapter). As it juiced up, I turned it on to see what was still working—would I get an activation required screen? Would any of my data be accessible?

Imagine my surprise then, when I found everything still working as expected. Sure, there’s no cell phone signal, but Wi-Fi appears to work, and so do all my applications—including the ones I installed on the new 2.0 software yesterday. That left me with a pretty darn functional iPod touch—albeit one with a recessed headphone jack, and a non-functional EDGE antenna (which, I’ll point out, thanks to the newly refined airplane mode, you can turn off without deactivating Wi-Fi).

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. I had envisioned far worse, anyway—Apple bricking the old iPhones, or crippling them in some way. But a free iPod touch might be just the thing for a friend or family member. And remember—you can also turn it into a perfectly functional phone again, just by signing up for an AT&T plan.”

Source: Mac World

When it comes to eCommerce web site design the ultimate goal of the site is to lead customers to buy products from your site. Therefore the design needs to be aesthetic and not take away from the central purpose of purchasing. Nowadays there are many service providers who provide you with affordable web design for your ecommerce site. Here we outline some of the tips that make an ecommerce site more effective in design.

Buy paths that are structured

One of the most important elements of any internet web design for ecommerce is to create a structured and definite path to coax the customer into buying something. You could possibly create a flowchart that showcases the different web page elements on the ecommerce site along with the path direction in each. Even if it is a small business web design you are looking at, paying attention to these details can really go a long way in increasing the purchase rate from customers!

Prominent product button

It should be your aim to have the product buttons on display right on the home page itself. Any good quality custom web site design company will tell you this. It directly enables the customer to go to the product page and make a purchase. Also, since it will usually be the very first thing a visitor sees, there are more chances of having a success at purchase through this method. Most high quality eCommerce web site design approaches will place these product buttons on the top left hand corner as this is the area most frequently seen by customers. Also by using different font sizes or colors you can guide the customer to click on the product buttons.

Accurate search results

It is imperative that you have a search button as part of your internet web design in your ecommerce site. However, make sure the results are accurate. Ideally you want the results of a query to point to a product description web page. This narrows down the search and makes it easier for customers to find what they are looking for. Many vendors today provide you with top quality affordable web design as far as e commerce go.

Price display

As part of any good small business web design for ecommerce, you want the customer to have to click through as little as possible. That means when you display the product information you should also include the price upfront. This will prevent customers from having to click too much and will also increase your conversion rates. A good quality e commerce web site design will always focus on these elements. For simple, innovative and affordable web design solutions, there is only a single solution. Come visit us at KazakMedia.com for ecommerce, ebusiness solutions, ecommerce web design development, web hosting to small businesses at affordable prices.

My world series pick is the NY Mets, they have won 8 and are 9-1 in their last 10. They swept the San Francisco Giants 3 straigt and are on pace to do the same to the Colorado Rockies. *knock on wood*

Below are some links relating to recent Mets activity.

• Wright make NL All Star Team
• Pedro only part of Mets’ recent run
• ESPN – New York Mets News, Schedule, Players, Stats, Video

Horseshoe Lake is located near the golf course in Bidwell Park, Chico, California. It was constructed about 1930 as a reservoir to provide storage of water diverted by gravitational flow from Big Chico Creek for irrigating the golf course. Its original purpose was abandoned after a few years when it became apparent that maintaining the diversion flume cost more than pumping water. Horseshoe Lake has remained as a shallow, turbid pond, fed by winter and spring runoff, gradually losing water between wet seasons, but never going completely dry. Horseshoe Lake water is usually turbid and quite green due to a dense bloom of bluegreen bacteria. This water bloom is undoubtedly a result of the large quantity of nutrients entering the lake in the feces of the domestic ducks and geese.

The fishing at Horseshoe Lake is alright, mainly an abundance of channel catfish with the occasional , bluegill, large-mouth bass.

Supposedly there are black and white crappie, carp, brown and black bullhead catfish, and small-mouth bass.

A link to Paul Maslin’s study about Horseshoe Lake from 1990-1997 can be located by clicking here.

Additional links reguarding Horseshoe Lake can be found below:

• Chico Wiki
• Going Outside