What is the Responsibility of a Web Designer in Regards to SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that cannot truly be accomplished by designing a website in a particular way, although a designer can cripple a site’s chances with a poor foundation. Building a search engine-friendly website should be the task of the designer, but there can be some gray areas.

First of all, what makes a website search engine-friendly? Things like optimized page titles, clean coding, proper use of header tags, alt tags, the location in the code of primary content, and anchor text are just some of the elements involved. Equally important, the designer should avoid using elements in the design that harm the site’s ability to be crawled. For a more in-depth look at the construction of search engine-friendly websites, see How to Create Search Engine-Friendly Websites.

10 Reasons Web Designers Should Blog

Maintaining an active blog has been one of the best decisions I ever made in terms of my career. I feel that every designer could greatly benefit from running a blog if they have the desire to share their thoughts with others. Here is my list of 10 reasons for designers to blog.

1. Increased Exposure

Vandelay Website Design gets far more exposure as a result of this blog than it would from any other method, outside of spending a ton of money on advertisements. Without the blog, 99% of those who have heard of us probably never would have. There’s obviously no shortage of designers and design firms out there, so we all need to stand out in one way or another. In my opinion, a blog is as good a way as any.

25 Beautifully Dark Website Designs

A few weeks ago I published a gallery of Beautifully Colorful Websites that drew a lot of interest from designers. I thought it would be appropriate to follow that up with a collection of great designs that feature dark colors. As always, feel free to leave your comments and mention your favorites.

Hydra Studio

21 Ways Your Audience Affects Your Design

If you look around at websites that are well-designed and are effective, you’ll see that the target audience of a website has a profound impact on the design of the site. Obviously, different audiences prefer different types of websites and they will also have different needs.

The term user-focused is commonly thrown around. In this article I’ll take a look at a number of different ways (in no particular order) that the audience of your site will affect they way it is designed. This is an attempt not to be all-inclusive, but rather to show just how many ways the audience of a site can impact its design.

Weekly Links – February 23rd

Web Design:

Powerful CSS Techniques for Effective Coding from Smashing Magazine.

Grid and Column Designs from Web Designer Wall.

Fighting Form Spam with CSS from CSS Globe.

Using Weather Data to Change Your Website’s Appearance through PHP and CSS from DZone.

Building Your Website On A Solid Foundation

This is a guest post by Alan Johnson, find out how to build a
profitable website in 10 days over at TheRatingBlog.com

Are you excited about a certain idea of yours and think that there’s absolutely no time to waste? Are you eager to get started and see results? Well guess what, most webmasters out there choose the same approach and let’s just say that their results are nothing worth bragging about.

Secondary Results of Social Media Success

Social Media Marketing is attractive for several reasons, including loads of free traffic and the increased exposure that comes along with it. However, achieving success with the major social media websites can produce many other results as well. Most of them are positive, but not all. Here is a look at what you should be prepared for as a result of hitting it big.

popurls

The most popular submissions on major social media sites including Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us are displayed on popurls.com , which has a significant amount of traffic itself. So, if you are fortunate enough to get thousands of visitors from a particular social media site, you may also get hundreds or more from popurls. In a few cases I have received almost as much traffic from popurls as I have from del.icio.us on the day that a particular blog post made it to the del.icio.us front page.

Stepping Up Your Skills: Areas for Continual Improvement as a Web Designer

Being an effective web designer requires developing a number of different skills. Not all of these skills are limited to the technical and artistic aspects of web design. Communicating with clients, project management, and promotion are all important as well.

Freelancers and designers that work for small firms typically have to wear many hats, and being well-rounded in design and business is almost essential.

Data Security: 29 Services and Techniques to Backup Your Hard Drive

Web designers, especially those who work from home, need to have a system in place to back up their hard drive on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this typically becomes a priority only after a disastrous loss of data has already occurred.

There are a number of methods to go about backing up a hard drive, and there are almost countless online services that can help you with this task. Some are free and others charge on a monthly or yearly basis. Personally, I would stay away from free services. If your data is important enough to backup continually, isn’t it worth paying a few dollars a month for a better service and peace of mind?

In this article we’ll take a quick look at some of the leading options for backing up your hard drive online, as well as link out to a few tutorials for doing things on your own. Many of the services listed here are extremely similar. Most offer automatic backups at time intervals that you can set and adjust. Free trial offers are very common, and they have been listed here whenever possible. Some of the free trials don’t even require you to enter any credit card information until after the trial period is over. In a few cases, I could not find prices on their website, which makes me a bit leery. The services and prices are most likely competitive, but with so many other options available, I doubt I would ever sign up for a free trial of a service not knowing what the full service will cost on an ongoing basis.

Weekly Links – February 16th

Web Design:

Create Resizing Thumbnails using Overflow Property from CSS Globe.

Make Sure Your Website Works With or Without www from 456 Berea St.

7 New Webmaster Tools, Services and Products I Tested and Recommend from SEO 2.0.

Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress from Darren Hoyt.

70+ Visually Impressing Header Graphics from Noupe.

Simple and Stunning: 10 Websites that Inspire from Bits O’ NewMedia.