was read­ing an arti­cle the other day that stated that web design com­pa­nies lack SEO knowl­edge and ‘their com­pany’ not only builds sites but also makes them search engine friendly.

This is not new and this is not news.

My opin­ion is in this day and age any­one who hires a web design com­pany must ensure that the com­pany designs with SEO in mind. Long gone are the days on web design alone. As an exam­ple, and this is a very basic one, a CSS should be cre­ated with any new web site. You may ask what a Cas­cad­ing Style sheet has to do with SEO since it really is a design issue — well, basi­cally, too much un-necessary cod­ing is not SEO friendly. A CSS should be cre­ated in an exter­nal file and linked in the page. Let me show you an example.

Here is an image a site with no unique CSS:

Here is an image of a site with a unique CSS:

Lots of dif­fer­ence in code — right!

JavaScripts should be in an exter­nal file as well.

So, yes, ensure that your web designer is con­sid­er­ing SEO when design­ing. It is a must now!

Jan

All the web sites we cre­ate are cre­ative to vary­ing degrees. Clients that are in par­tic­u­lar indus­tries need a more cre­ative site than oth­ers. For exam­ple, Gre­gory Col­lett, actor, required not only a graph­i­cal cre­ative web site but he also needed a show­case of his work, both print and film. This require­ment brought some chal­lenges and, in my opin­ion, won­der­ful results.

For exam­ple, his still pic­tures needed to be dis­played with some­thing more than just thumb­nails that you click on to make them larger. So we used a script and cre­ated this photo gallery:

You don’t really see the ‘beauty’ of this until you start to look at the pho­tos. First you can pick the cat­e­gory from the drop down side menu (series). When you land on the page it is on Bas­ket­ball and Soc­cer. Now if you take a pic­ture and drag it up the larger area it shows the larger photo with the small thumb at the side. Try another — again the larger pic­ture in the main area and small thumb at the side. To see other types of still pho­tos just click on the drop down box and dif­fer­ent images appear.

Photo and move reels is a page with thumb nails of movies Gre­gory have done. See here. There are thumb nails that when clicked on take you to a new page with some stills show­cased, or in the exam­ple of Bor­ing Or, for exam­ple, you can also click on ‘movie reels’ and see a sam­ple of the film.

Of course the resume rounds out the actors portfolio.

It’s chal­leng­ing and fun to do a cre­ative site like this for actor Gre­gory Collett.

I will show you a dif­fer­ent one next time.

Click here to view our gallery of web sites we have created.

Jan

What is Web­site Storyboarding?

Basi­cally it is break­ing the whole into small man­age­able pieces. It is not just cre­at­ing pages, the link­ing struc­ture, though that is part of it, but also the flow of where you what your vis­i­tor to enter, the paths you want them to fol­low (guide your vis­i­tor) to reach an end result.

This sto­ry­board will end up telling your story to your vis­i­tor both visu­ally and structurally.

In one of my employ­ment incar­na­tions I worked for the film indus­try. Part of my edu­ca­tional train­ing, which is crit­i­cal for film pro­duc­tion (in fact pro­duc­tion of any kind), was sto­ry­board­ing. The story board cov­ers every last detail of the pro­duc­tion to ensure noth­ing is missed, tim­ing is cor­rect, there is con­ti­nu­ity, etc.

My train­ing in I.T. Publishing/Web Design/Programming also had one very crit­i­cal part of the course which was Project Man­age­ment. Under that umbrella was also storyboarding.

Read more of the arti­cle here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Two

Jan

When I took my train­ing in I.T. Publishing/Web Design/Programming one very crit­i­cal part of the course was Project Man­age­ment. Project Man­age­ment is com­mon place in large com­pa­nies as many will have var­i­ous staff deal­ing with dif­fer­ent aspects of the project. How­ever, Project Man­age­ment is also used in smaller companies.

Man­ag­ing the project of a web­site is not only hav­ing the begin­ning idea and final prod­uct end­ing, but many steps in between to not only help you orga­nize what is needed to be done, deter­mine a time frame, but also to bring the project in on budget.

Learn the begin­ning steps here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Organizing

Jan

We have been hear­ing a lot about the Law of Attrac­tion lately with Oprah hav­ing a panel on her show dis­cussing “The Secret”. In fact the Law of Attrac­tion has been around for a very long time. It cer­tainly is becom­ing a more pop­u­lar pursuit.

The Law of Attrac­tion and Web Site Design in the same sen­tence should not sound strange to you.

When you think of the Law of Attrac­tion, “you get what you think about, your thoughts deter­mine your des­tiny” then of course this would enter into your web site design goals.

When you start to think of what type of web site you want designed, color, lay­out, graph­ics, etc. you of nat­u­rally want to “attract” your clients/customers to you.

Read the full arti­cle here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Attraction

Jan