Sunday, 18 March 2012
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
SEO - Search engine optimisation, is a strange world. People can start up companies and charge a fortune as long as they sound like they know what they are talking about. But does anyone actually know? Or are they just guessing? The search engine's have been very clever in keeping these mythical logarithms a secret and only giving a few hints and tips on how it works. Companies dedicated to SEO come along and say "You must make your website w3c compatible! You must have 140 characters in your metatags! You must have a H1, H2, H3, H4, H5!" But are they just making this up?
To be honest I have no idea how search engines work, if I follow some of the rules I get good results and, sometimes, if I don't follow any of the rules I get good results, luckily that's not my department I just design stuff.
I find it frustrating that the internet is an amazing place for new ideas but unless you design your site in a conventional way or write about your idea using the correct amount of certain words then nobody will ever find you. But on the other hand, if you have an opinion about something and get higher than everyone else in search engines, your opinion could soon be everyone elses opinion. Say I have a useless theory about life the universe and everything. If I designed an official looking website and said "this IS the theory to life the universe and everything FACT!" I then got that website to the number one position on all search engines, why would people not believe its true and why is there nobody to stop me doing that? It's more powerful than publishing. But I suppose newspapers spout rubbish everyday, which is the same sort of thing.
However I have the opposite problem with our company's website design, I personally like the look of it, and I think we are a nice company that other people would enjoy working with, or for, though I would say that. http://www.tinydesign.co.uk My web site design goes against conventional design and so doesn't do well in search engines, which is annoying, but why should I design it for SEO purposes, surely websites should be designed for the viewer not for a spider.
I'm not sure if it's going against the search engines or working with them but there is a new 'punk' style of website design where the designers are talented but deliberately design sites to shock and get talked about. It is marketing genius! There are loads and loads of discussion threads and blogs about this site http://www.lingscars.com/ which is absolutely brilliant advertising, Lings site and business has won awards. I think Ling is a genius, if not a little mad, if only I had thought to design a site like that, not that it would work for a web design company! But now that it has already has been done it should not be copied, am I saying it's art, I think I am.
To be honest I have no idea how search engines work, if I follow some of the rules I get good results and, sometimes, if I don't follow any of the rules I get good results, luckily that's not my department I just design stuff.
I find it frustrating that the internet is an amazing place for new ideas but unless you design your site in a conventional way or write about your idea using the correct amount of certain words then nobody will ever find you. But on the other hand, if you have an opinion about something and get higher than everyone else in search engines, your opinion could soon be everyone elses opinion. Say I have a useless theory about life the universe and everything. If I designed an official looking website and said "this IS the theory to life the universe and everything FACT!" I then got that website to the number one position on all search engines, why would people not believe its true and why is there nobody to stop me doing that? It's more powerful than publishing. But I suppose newspapers spout rubbish everyday, which is the same sort of thing.
However I have the opposite problem with our company's website design, I personally like the look of it, and I think we are a nice company that other people would enjoy working with, or for, though I would say that. http://www.tinydesign.co.uk My web site design goes against conventional design and so doesn't do well in search engines, which is annoying, but why should I design it for SEO purposes, surely websites should be designed for the viewer not for a spider.
I'm not sure if it's going against the search engines or working with them but there is a new 'punk' style of website design where the designers are talented but deliberately design sites to shock and get talked about. It is marketing genius! There are loads and loads of discussion threads and blogs about this site http://www.lingscars.com/ which is absolutely brilliant advertising, Lings site and business has won awards. I think Ling is a genius, if not a little mad, if only I had thought to design a site like that, not that it would work for a web design company! But now that it has already has been done it should not be copied, am I saying it's art, I think I am.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
First Post, the post that hurts the most.
Okay so where to begin... I have a feeling I’m going to be too honest with my blog and that once you read this you will never want to employ me for anything, but here goes nothing!
Basically, as we all know, the internet is dominated by Google at the moment, everyone’s home page is set to it, and every company wants to be at the top of it. I have also fallen into its web, ha, no pun intended. But basically if you don’t know how to do something, type it into Google and there will be someone out there that has had the same problem and already solved it. I don’t really know how we coped without it. Fair enough it could be some other search engine but who cares about those guys when Google has analytics, pay per click, built in measurement convertor, calculator, dictionary, etc, etc and everyone wants to be a part of it, therefore it has the most data to find. It’s a vicious circle. Although I have recently come across Dogpile which searches the search engines, this could be a useful tool but at the moment I am far too comfortable with Google for that to even enter my mind. Anyway... back to the subject, Google is pretty handy, let’s take website design for instance, seen as that is what I am supposed to be talking about, you can attempt anything, anything is possible, you can say, yeah that should be possible, even if you have no idea how to do it, type it into Google and a few searches later you are an expert at it. The only limitation to why everyone can’t be good at everything is time, so I’m going to stick the website design route but you can go off and do your own thing. Maybe then you can come back and employ me to design your website for that new skill you have.
When I started web design, I had an education of graphic design but knew nothing about putting onto the internet. In about 2000 I got my hands on an early version of Adobe GoLive and found it to be pretty intuitive. Like most people, I don’t read manuals, I just attempt to do what I want to do and if I can’t work out how to do it with one piece of software I move onto another, I probably spend more time searching for an easy way to do something than I could have spent on learning how to do it the first way I found, but I am kind of peculiar like that, I like everything to work in the most efficient way possible. And if it doesn’t make sense to me straight away then I think it is badly designed or programmed.
So I got Adobe GoLive and did all the obvious stuff, designed everything in tables, found complicated ways of doing simple things and got all the coding in knots, but didn’t know this was a bad thing at the time, I was just happy making things look nice and hoping that the WYSIWYG editors would sort out the code for me. It wasn’t until I designed a really simple website for myself, quite pleased with it, put it on www.webdesignerforum.co.uk (now my favourite website) and they said “what the hell is this rubbish! Nobody should use tables! Your code is a mess! It’s junk! Get out!” they weren’t quite as harsh as that but you get the general idea. So after thinking, oh that’s a bit mean! I Googled how to design sites without tables and the benefits of not using them and so forth and so on and got really into the coding side of things. This suited my obsession with keeping things as efficient as they can be and soon came to the conclusion that they were right about my website it was junk! So I set out designing a new site with the smallest amount of code possible for what I wanted to achieve, trying not just to replace all tables with div’s as a lot of people do. I found doing this to have other benefits, it made the site faster, cleaner and was more likely to work on other browsers... That’s another thing, prior to this I didn’t like Firefox because it would never display my websites correctly, after learning to code I realise that Firefox displayed the sites absolutely correct, according to the code, and all the unnecessary code was causing it to fail. After finding this out Firefox became my browser of choice, as I think it is with most website designers. (I’ve gone off on another tangent again!) So, I put this new, cleanly coded site on the forum and they loved it and my obsession with website design began!
Basically, as we all know, the internet is dominated by Google at the moment, everyone’s home page is set to it, and every company wants to be at the top of it. I have also fallen into its web, ha, no pun intended. But basically if you don’t know how to do something, type it into Google and there will be someone out there that has had the same problem and already solved it. I don’t really know how we coped without it. Fair enough it could be some other search engine but who cares about those guys when Google has analytics, pay per click, built in measurement convertor, calculator, dictionary, etc, etc and everyone wants to be a part of it, therefore it has the most data to find. It’s a vicious circle. Although I have recently come across Dogpile which searches the search engines, this could be a useful tool but at the moment I am far too comfortable with Google for that to even enter my mind. Anyway... back to the subject, Google is pretty handy, let’s take website design for instance, seen as that is what I am supposed to be talking about, you can attempt anything, anything is possible, you can say, yeah that should be possible, even if you have no idea how to do it, type it into Google and a few searches later you are an expert at it. The only limitation to why everyone can’t be good at everything is time, so I’m going to stick the website design route but you can go off and do your own thing. Maybe then you can come back and employ me to design your website for that new skill you have.
When I started web design, I had an education of graphic design but knew nothing about putting onto the internet. In about 2000 I got my hands on an early version of Adobe GoLive and found it to be pretty intuitive. Like most people, I don’t read manuals, I just attempt to do what I want to do and if I can’t work out how to do it with one piece of software I move onto another, I probably spend more time searching for an easy way to do something than I could have spent on learning how to do it the first way I found, but I am kind of peculiar like that, I like everything to work in the most efficient way possible. And if it doesn’t make sense to me straight away then I think it is badly designed or programmed.
So I got Adobe GoLive and did all the obvious stuff, designed everything in tables, found complicated ways of doing simple things and got all the coding in knots, but didn’t know this was a bad thing at the time, I was just happy making things look nice and hoping that the WYSIWYG editors would sort out the code for me. It wasn’t until I designed a really simple website for myself, quite pleased with it, put it on www.webdesignerforum.co.uk (now my favourite website) and they said “what the hell is this rubbish! Nobody should use tables! Your code is a mess! It’s junk! Get out!” they weren’t quite as harsh as that but you get the general idea. So after thinking, oh that’s a bit mean! I Googled how to design sites without tables and the benefits of not using them and so forth and so on and got really into the coding side of things. This suited my obsession with keeping things as efficient as they can be and soon came to the conclusion that they were right about my website it was junk! So I set out designing a new site with the smallest amount of code possible for what I wanted to achieve, trying not just to replace all tables with div’s as a lot of people do. I found doing this to have other benefits, it made the site faster, cleaner and was more likely to work on other browsers... That’s another thing, prior to this I didn’t like Firefox because it would never display my websites correctly, after learning to code I realise that Firefox displayed the sites absolutely correct, according to the code, and all the unnecessary code was causing it to fail. After finding this out Firefox became my browser of choice, as I think it is with most website designers. (I’ve gone off on another tangent again!) So, I put this new, cleanly coded site on the forum and they loved it and my obsession with website design began!
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