When putting together a basic web site proposal, you should include the following elements:

Your Information:
Your background or company history, qualifications, skills, past achievements and contact details.

Project Overview:
The company you are submitting the proposal for, your understanding of their products and services, the target market, the goals of the web site and a rough outline of how you will achieve them.

Project Theme:
A description of style of site you are proposing. Elements from the client’s current branding you will utilize or new elements you will develop.

Special Considerations:
such as language, security or other issues pertaining to the company, site or target market that will need to be addressed.

Web site flow chart:
A diagram showing the different pages of the site and navigational structure.

Flowchart Description:
A detailed description of each web page, how it fits in with the overall web site theme and the project element it addresses.

Development Timeline:
This should be a description of each stage of the web projects’ development, the estimated completion date and notes regarding client consultation and supply of information/feedback from the client. This may also include milestone payments for involved projects and site promotion activities. Make it clear that traffic takes time to build up after implementation and promotion should only occur after the site has been tested thoroughly. Improper implementation can cost months of traffic.

Project Costing:
A descriptive breakdown of costing and total of quote including an end date before the price will need to be re-calculated. This will include items such as domain name registration, hosting fees and outsourcing for sections of the site you will not be able to develop yourself. Ensure you take into account items including travel time, electricity, telephone and consumables.

Factor in the cost of the proposal as well; a good proposal will take hours of your time and you should be compensated for that. In your eagerness to gain the contract, you may lose money if you quote too close to the bone. Bear in mind that things rarely go strictly to plan in web design and delays can be expected. Time is money. The going rate for web design services seems to be between US$25-$75 per labor hour at present; dependent upon the complexity of the task and the competency of the designer.

Terms and conditions:
Expectations and commitments. It is not unusual for web projects to be delayed due to clients not supplying feedback or content necessary to complete sections. It is just as important to be clear in what you expect from your clients as well as explaining your commitment to them. Conflict resolution issues and feedback mechanisms should be described.

Your clients will need to know what will occur if they do not supply information when requested, or request changes mid-stream and the action that you will take if you are running behind in the project yourself. You need to be clear on payment details and consequences of failure to pay for the services that you provide.

Mock-ups (samples).
Be careful not to give too much away, just enough to give the client a good idea of what the site will look like. Ensure copyright notices and intellectual property statements are in place.

Ongoing web site maintenance.

Summarize an offer of ongoing site maintenance or the implications of the client deciding to update or maintain the site themselves after it has been established.

The above points are usually sufficient to put together a professional web design proposal for a small to medium project. If drafting a proposal based on criteria given to you by the prospective client; be sure to address all the points.

If the client suggests the proposal documentation be a certain format, respect that. In the culling process, the first proposals to be binned will be the ones that do not address all the criteria the client has laid down.

Bear in mind that not all the web design proposals you submit will be accepted. Be prepared to do some heavy revisions to satisfy your clients and to find a middle ground where all parties feel comfortable. A prospective client asking for revisions is a good sign – they are genuinely interested.

Also remember that some companies will ask you for proposals purely to use as a comparison against another designer that they are interested in utilizing; so try and limit the amount of time you spend on the draft until the client gives indication of serious interest.

ColorCombos – GRAB WEBSITE COLORS

When designing a website, one of the firsts (and most important) steps of the process is to choose a color scheme.
Color Combos allow you to browse thousand of different colors combinations for getting inspired for your upcomming design. Color schemes can be browsed by colors.
Visit colorcombos.com

LIpsum

Who doesn’t know the extremely popular Lorem Ipsum text? This text is used by webdesigners worldwide to simulate the render of real text on a design.
Lipsum.com allow you to create th desired number of paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum, quickly and simply.
Visit LIpsum.com

What the font?

You just saw a logo or website using a particular font and you enjoyed it. You’d like to use the same font in a design of yours…but you don’t know the font name. At this point, you have only two solutions: Searching for the font during hours, or using the What the font service.
What’s the font allow you to upload a logo or an image containing a font, and it will tell you which font is it. Results are incredibles.
Visit What the font

ConvertIcon

Favicons are a must have for any website, mostly because on modern browsers as such as Firefox, it is displayed along with the site name in tabs. It is also used in bookmarks. Favicon can be in various file format, including the popular .png. The only problem is that using png as a file format for your site favicon will not work on Internet Explorer. Happilly, there’s ConvertIcon a free online service that allow you to upload an image and get a .ico file, for maintaining compatibility with Microsoft’s browser.
Visit ConvertIcon

BgPatterns

background Patterns is definitely one of the current webdesign trends.
On BgPatterns.com, you’ll be able to browse a wide selection of patterns that you can freely use on your designs.
Visit BgPatterns

HTML Encoder

Do you display code on your website? If yes, you probably know how boring it can be. In fact you have to type < to display <. If you have to display a 50 lines code, this may take a while to manually convert HTML symbols. The HTML Converter simply takes a code and returns it to you after converting HTML entities. I use this service daily for displaying codes on my blogs. Note that a HTML Decoder is also available.
Visit HTML Encoder

Xenocode Browsers

In my opinion, Xenocode Browsers is the ultimat tool for checking your website in different browsers. Xenocode Browsers allow you to lauch IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Google Chrome and Opera directly from the web. The only weak point: The service isn’t available for Macs and GNU/Linux powered PCs.
Visit Xenocode browsers

Test Everything

Do you ever wished to be able to test your design in many browsers as well as checking a page PageRank, and even validate your code standards compliance all in one place? If yes, Test Everything is definitely a site that you should visit. It aggregate over 100 different tools to test almost everything on a webpage.
Visit Test Everything

Sprite Generator

CSS Sprites is definitely a great technique to use, mainly because it reduces the number of HTTP requests. Thought, CSS sprites require time and particular knowledges, which make the technique kinda hard to use, especially for begginners. The amazing Sprite generator allows you to send a zip file containing your images. It will returns you your images combined into a sprite, and even better, the CSS code that you’ll just have to paste in your main css file.
Visit Sprite Generator

Buttonator

Sure things, good looking buttons is a must have for any serious blog or website. If you don’t know, or haven’t the time to create some cool buttons, don’t worry: Buttonator is an advanced button generator that you can freely use. By the way, don’t forget to check out our Top 10 CSS buttons tutorials list if you have an interest in CSS buttons.
Visit Buttonator
Load Impact

How many time have you ever seen websites down after they were featured on the frontpage of popular sites as such as Digg or StumbleUpon?
The free Load Impact service will allow you to test how your website can handle various blasts of traffic. The results with sites hosted at WpWebHost are excellent.
Visit Load Impact

IconFinder

Good looking icons are a must have in any professional website. There’s plenty of free icons on the web, so the folks at IconFinder decided to create a collection of free icons for you to use them in your designs. It is definitely easy to find what you’re looking for in seconds.
Visit IconFinder

TypeTester

Testing how fonts will renders on your design is sometimes a fastidious operation. Happilly, TypeTester allow you to test how fonts and their attributes will look. A definitive gain of time.
Visit TypeTester

CSS Tidy

Even advanced developers often needs to optimize their CSS code. CSS Tidy is a free, online application that will fix errors and optimize your CSS code. For example, it can automatically detect redundant styles, a very common problem of CSS codes. Lots of settings are availables, to ensure you’ll be happy with the results.
Visit CSS Tidy

Contact Forms Generators

Forms are a very important part of any website, because they allow your readers or customers to interact with you. By using Contact Forms Generator, you’ll save a precious time by creating your forms, including the PHP, ASP or even Perl code needed for sending emails from your site to your mailbox.
Contact Forms Generator doesn’t even require programming skills.
Visit Contact Form Generator

Website Grader
Is Your Website Working? How well is your website doing? Is it getting traffic? Does it have SEO problems? How popular is it in social media? Find out the answers for free. Just enter your website URL and click Generate Report.

websitegrader.com

Monitoring and Maintaining Your Quality Index
In your account, ad quality is represented by your quality index. You will see the quality index shown as one to five bars—the more bars an ad has, the higher its quality. Monitoring your ads’ quality indices, which are displayed on the Ad Group details page, can help you figure out which ads need more work.

Writing Effective Ad Copy
Well-written ads get the attention of your customers and may improve your click-through rate (CTR) and ad quality. Here are some tips for writing great ads:

Find out which Ads Work Best
Make sure you use ad testing, also known as A/B testing, to test multiple ads. When you create more than one ad in an ad group, our system will automatically display the higher performing ads more frequently in search results. With different ad copy, you can see which ads attract the most customers.

Still hungry for more information? Visit our Help Center.

How do these signals factor into ranking?

Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.

So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links?

Many webmasters have written about their success in growing their audience. We’ve compiled several ideas and resources that can improve the web for all users.

Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general

• Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.If you’re interested in blogging, see our Help Center for specific tips for bloggers.
• Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.
• Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.
• Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they’re more likely to link to you.

For more actionable ideas, see one of my favorite interviews with Matt Cutts for no-cost tips to help increase your traffic. It’s a great primer for webmasters. (Even before this post, I forwarded the URL to many of my friends.

Pursue business development opportunities

Use Webmaster Tools for “Links > Pages with external links” to learn about others interested in your site. Expand the web community by figuring out who links to you and how they’re linking. You may have new audiences or demographics you didn’t realize were interested in your niche. For instance, if the webmasters for example.com noticed external links coming from art schools, they may start to engage with the art community — receiving new feedback and promoting their site and ideas.

Of course, be responsible when pursuing possible opportunities in this space. Don’t engage in mass link-begging; no one likes form letters, and few webmasters of quality sites are likely to respond positively to such solicitations. In general, many of the business development techniques that are successful in human relationships can also be reflected online for your site.

Now that you’ve read more information about internal links, outbound links, and inbound links (today’s post , we’ll see you in the blog comments! Thanks for joining us for links week.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Check your rank

DMOZ supplies its listings to thousands of other directories on the web through its RDF file. So its worthwhile to take all the necessary steps to get your site accepted by DMOZ. If you want to get good position in Yahoo, you must make sure that you are accepted by DMOZ. It is said that Google too has certain soft corner for websites listed in DMOZ. Moreover, even Google’s directory uses DMOZ data and we again know that getting listed in Google directory will do a world of good to your website.

It is noticed that listings from DMOZ directory do well in search engines; DMOZ listing will generate highly targeted traffic because DMOZ’s listings get good visibility in search results and this will generate more traffic.

If you have observed the pagerank of DMOZ, you will be able to notice that the pagerank which is received from the root level PR. DMOZ has a general PR of 9 and many categories inherit this PR and it ranges from anywhere between 4 and 9. So you will find favor with Google. If you are lucky you will be able to get good anchor text when you get listed in DMOZ and if this happens it will pep up your site’s performance for that keyword.

One of the drawbacks of DMOZ is that you may not be sure how long it would take your site to get reviewed and included in the listing as this is a manual process. DMOZ has been very particular from day 1 about manual review of sites even though it is a time consuming process. Since DMOZ depends or voluntary editors, to get an editor for your specific category may consume more time depending on how competitive your area business vertical or your category is. You should learn to be patient with DMOZ and you cannot do anything but weight.

If the benefits that you are going to get from DMOZ is going to be high then waiting is certainly worthwhile. Unlike most of other directories, DMOZ as a manual directory you must make sure that your site is visually appealing as well. Since it is free you are not going to lose anything by submitting your site to DMOZ; do a basic check on your site to ensure that it complies with general website development standards . Do every thing within your reasonable limits and see how you can get listed in DMOZ so that you can reap the benefits.

The following list of SEO Techniques will help you optimize your website so you will get a higher Search Engine Results Position (SERP). Some of the items can be done quickly — others will take a bit of time.

If you complete all the items on the following list of SEO Techniques, give the Search Engines some time to send out their bots to deep crawl your website, your site traffic will increase. Make sure you are ready for it!

Search Engine Optimization — What is it?

Optimizing your website so you will obtain a high search engine results position is what SEO Techniques is all about. It is reported that 65% of all websites visited start with a search from a search engine.

For people to find your site via a search engine, the site will require a high Search Engine Results Position (SERP). This means when they search keywords phrases like SEO techniques, they will find you site page on the first page of the search engine results. Ending up on the 10 page of the search engines results will not get you any traffic.

Getting a high SERP is a combination of a number of things. Leaving out any of the items on the following list of SEO Techniques can result in your page not getting as high a search engine results position as it could.

The SEO List

There are no tricks here, just a bit of work and some time. So let’s get started by reading the following list of SEO Techniques!

1. Domain & File Names:
   Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. You keyword phrase also should in many cases go in your file name. Read this thread Keywords in the URL from SEO Chat Forum.
   For example I use the file name seo-techniques.html for this page.
2. Keyword Phrases:
   1. Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword phrases with either the Search Term Suggestion Tool or the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being searched. You can also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for different keyword phrases.
   2. Add keyword synonyms to your content.
   3. Put the keyword phrases in the <title>keyword phrase</title> .
   4. Insert the keyword phrases in a <h1>keyword phrase</h1> tag at the beginning of your page. Keyword synonyms should be put in your h2 & h3 tags. The h1, h2, h3 tags are used for titles and subtitles in articles.
   5. Make sure you use your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to, in your anchor text on the site map. i.e. SEO Techniques.
3. Keyword Density:
   Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. To high a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted.
   Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
4. Bad Techniques:
   Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.
   While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt you.
   Google has a good article on Google information for webmasters that is very imformative if you are considering Getting a SEO Company to so work on your website.
5. Title & Meta Description Tag:
   Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.
   Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your meta name description content=”Description phrase” or from the first sentence on at page. You description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also what to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. Also you can consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.
6. Meta Keywords Tag:
   The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn’t ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway. It is as follows, <meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords,go,here” /> and put in it all your keywords and keyword phrases. This tag should be different for each page.
7. Author & Robots Tags:
   The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a #1 position for your company’s name.
   <meta name=”author” content=”Solutions with Service” />
   Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic robots tag.
   <meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
8. Quality Content:
   Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind
9. Quantity Content:
   The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both quantity and quality.
10. Changing Content:
    You can do this by hand or with a script. For example you can have a php script that draws five paragraphs from a pool of twenty paragraphs when the content is different each time the php page is accessed.
    www.carsinlondon.com/used-cars-london-ontario.php shows a sample of php script that will do this.
11. Avoid Dynamic URLs:
    Are you pages via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have a problem indexing them. Create static pages whenever possible. Avoid symbols in your URLs like the “?” that you will often find in php, asp or cf pages.
    Static pages are the best but if you have a db driven site, make sure the menu and site map like go to inventory.cfm not inventory.cfm?vn=0 .
12. Frames:
    Many search engines can’t follow frame links. Make sure you provide an alternative method for the search engines to enter and index your site. For more information read Search Engines and Frames.
13. Site Map:
    A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system that is on each page and contains a link to very page on the website is all you need.
14. Site Themes:
    All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic when they crawl a website. If your site is about one specific topic you will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.
15. Site Design:
    You may think, what does site design have to with search engine optimization. Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page.
    These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site.
    Use W3C Link Checker to make sure all your page links are good. If you have broken links on your site this can effect the ranking you are given.
    Put a proper doctype on each page. If you don’t have a proper doctype on each page Internet Exployer will go into quirks mode and display it different.
    Use The W3C Markup Validate Service to verify that your pages are Validate HTML or XHTML code. The W3C validation will verify that your HTML or XHTML is not broken. This validation show you any broken code that could cause your webpages from displaying properly in all the different browsers and browser versions.
16. Separate Content & Presentation:
    Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your file, the better you get rated. Read why tables for markup are stupid for an overview.
17. Robots.txt File:
    While this file is not really required it should be included so that the search engine bots don’t get 404 errors when they look for it. Just include the following 2 lines and drop it in the root.
    User-agent: *
    Disallow:

For the Gods of Google to accept your site, you must do more than offer up a golden cow. Here are the Ten Commandments to follow. Sinners will face purgatory with a penalty or be sent to hell with a lifetime ban.

The First Commandment – Thou Shalt Have Fresh Content

The easiest way to accomplish this is with a daily blog. One to three paragraphs of original content related to your site.

The Second Commandment – Thou Shalt Do Keyword Research

For each of your daily blogs, go to the Free Keyword Researcher on our Free Biz Tools page and identify a keyword string of 2-4 words long to title your blog.

Use the Keyword string in your blog content 1-3 times.

The Third Commandment – Thou Shalt Submit Daily Blog to Social Bookmarks

The exact keyword string that you identify for you blog’s title will be used in each submission. Change up the description for each submission.

Here are the angels of Google that will help you ascend in the rankings and find a home in Google Heaven:

http://bibsonomy.org
http://bringr.com
http://buddymarks.com/
http://clipclip.org/
http://clipfire.com/
http://del.icio.us/
http://faves.com/home
http://folkd.com/
http://linkagogo.com/
http://mixx.com
http://multiply.com
http://myweb.yahoo.com/
http://netvouz.com/
http://newsvine.com/
http://panamanewsblog.com/
http://pixelgroovy.com
http://reddit.com/
http://searchles.com/
http://shoutwire.com
http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl
http://sphinn.com/
http://spurl.net/
http://startaid.com/
http://theoryoffun.com/
http://wikio.com/
http://www.a1-webmarks.com/
http://www.blinklist.com/

For the complete list of Social Bookmark Sites go here.

The Fourth Commandment – Thou Shalt Use the Site Name in the Title

The Google Gods want you to be true to yourself and not try to trick your fellow man.

The best way to accomplish this is to use it in the second half of the title. Ex: The Ten Commandments of Search : Sta.rtUp.biz

The Fifth Commandment – Though Shalt Have Links from Directories

Identify the keyword string that you want your index page to rank for and use it in the title of your submissions. Also, only do a couple of submissions each day.

Here is a list of PR4+ directories that have free submission. The $299 Yahoo directory submission is also a good move.

http://www.dmoz.org/ 8
http://www.la-ma.org/ 6
http://www.mxdu.com/ 6
http://www.jayde.com/ 6
http://www.mygreencorner.com/ 6
http://www.ghinmeca.com/ 5
http://directory.classifieds1000.com/ 5
http://www.concensus.org/ 5
http://www.directorydice.com/ 5
http://www.domaining.in/ 5
http://www.freewebsitedirectory.com/ 5
http://www.illumirate.com/ 5
http://www.info-listings.com/ 5
http://www.publimix.net/ 5
http://searchsight.com/Directory.htm 5
http://www.uc33.com/ 5
http://www.amray.com/ 4
http://www.a1webdirectory.org/ 4
http://www.boshuda.com 4
http://www.businesspagesupdate.co.uk/ 4

For the complete list of Free Directories go here.

The Sixth Commandment – Thou Shalt Post Comments on Blogs with Do-Follow

Do-Follow simply means that a link on a page is valued by the Google Gods. Be sure to post a good comment and use the keyword string that you are focusing on as your name.

Here is a list of Do-Follow Blogs:

http://brownsista.com 6
http://foolswisdom.com 6
http://www.billhartzer.com 5
http://howtosplitanatom.com 5
http://andybeard.eu 5
http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net 5
http://www.davidairey.com 5
http://www.fastlanetransport.ca/blog 5
http://lifelearningtoday.com 5
http://www.pixelheadonline.com/blog 4
http://www.logon.ie 4
http://www.howtowakeupearly.com 4
http://www.joebartender.com 4
http://jakeldaily.com 4
http://tallfreak.com 4
http://blog.achille.name 4

For the complete list of Do-Follow Blogs go here.

The Seventh Commandment – Thou Shalt Use Signatures in Forums with Do-Follow

Focus your signature around the main keyword string for your home page. Try to be the first response to new posts and participate on long discussion threads that will consistently be pushed to the top of the main discussion page.

Here is a list of major forums with Do-Follow signatures:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/- SEO
http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/ – music
http://forums.seroundtable.com/ – seo
http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/
http://www.startups.co.uk/ – business
http://www.v7n.com/forums/ – seo, webmaster
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/ – webmaster
http://www.webicy.com/ – Webmaster, seo
http://forums.comicbookresources.com/ – comic books
http://bzimage.org/ – photo
http://www.earnersforum.com/forumsindex.php – ecommerce, advertising
http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/ – domains
http://forums.onlinebookclub.org/ – books

For the complete list of Do-Follow Forums go here.

The Eighth Commandment – Thou Shalt Use Free Classified Ads

This is an easy way to get a little push and some customers at the same time.

Here is a list of some of the large free online classified sites:

http://www.craigslist.org/
http://www.thefreeadforum.com/vbull/
http://www.adlandpro.com/
http://www.gumtree.com/
http://classifieds.yahoo.com/
http://www.google.com/base
http://caklassifieds.com/
http://classifieds.myspace.com/
http://expo.live.com/default.aspx
http://www.kijiji.com/
http://www.adlandpro.com/
http://www.backpage.com/classifieds/
http://www.usfreeads.com/
http://www.oodle.com/
http://www.adpost.com/

For the complete list of Free Classified Websites go here.

The Ninth Commandment – Thou Shalt Create and Submit RSS Feeds

Here is a list of free RSS feed directories that will get your feed slurped up by Google:

http://www.aspin.com/
http://www.bloogz.com/
http://www.daypop.com/
http://www.daytimenews.com/
http://www.devasp.com/
http://www.dummysoftware.com/
http://www.feed24.com/
http://www.feedage.com/
http://www.feedbomb.com
http://www.feedcat.net/
http://www.feed-directory.com/
http://www.feedfury.com
http://www.feedooyoo.com/
http://www.feeds2read.net
http://www.feedsee.com/
http://www.feedsfarm.com/

For the complete list of Free RSS Directories go here.

The Tenth Commandment – Thou Shalt Not Forget about Google Images

Google images accounts for a large amount of traffic and should not be ignored. On each daily blog, you should have an image that is clickable. Remember that Google images shows a bunch of thumbnails and not your blog content. Then use the keyword string to name the image, alt tag, and caption.

Although I may not be Moses, this list just may save the soul of your website.

Some of the necessary skills to design and build a website are:

•HTML knowledge – some basic knowledge is necessary but good web design software can help.
•Artistic ability – a good eye for color and generally good taste are necessary for a web designer to create an attractive web site.
•Graphic software expertise – some knowledge is necessary to produce attractive clean photos and site graphics. It is also needed to optimize the pictures to the smallest possible file size for quick loading.
•Navigation Expertise – Understanding the functionality of website navigation design and implementation is a critical skill.
•Programming – you could possibly need CGI, JavaScript or database programming to add interactive web pages or integrate it with an online database.
•Marketing and business experience – whether you are building a personal website, or a business website, there are some major business and marketing aspects that need to be taken into consideration right from the beginning deisgn stage of the website.

What if I Can’t Do All of That ?

If you don’t have either the time or the skills needed to build your own website, you can hire a professional to do all or part of it for you. A good place to find a professional web designer is one of the many freelance jobs websites available. These freelance job boards allow you to hire individuals with the expertise you need: web designers, programmers, SEO specialist, copywriters and more. It can be one person or an entire team of individuals. Alternately, you can hire a local web design firm. Freelancers are usually cheaper because many of them live in countries where there is a 5:1 ration in salaries. That means $1 in the US is the equivalent of $5 in their country. So, paying them $5 an hour is like paying someone in the US $25 an hour, which is the minimum price you can hire people with the necessary knowledge.

Content writers who are native English speakers charge from $0.05 per word and up. Non-native English speakers can be hired for around $0.02 per word. But if your website is in English, you probably want to hire a native English speaker to write your content.

Make sure you communicate to the web designer, web developer or copywriter you hire exactly what you need to achieve. A good website designer understands how to build internet marketing into the site design to make it search engine friendly.

What does outsourcing cost ?

For a simple five or six page website, expect to pay anywhere between $100 for just the web page design and $1,500 for the entire site with graphics and content. For a more complex interactive website you may pay from $500 for just the programming to $10,000 and up for the entire website.

There is all a cost in your time as well. You will need to manage the project: writing the project specification, spending time writing emails to the freelancer, doing some quality assurance testing, etc. In some cases you will find that developing a website in-house can be cheaper then outsourcing it.

Remember, it’s not always about the money. If you already have an established company brand, you probably want to seriously consider hiring a professional web designer to be certain that you maintain your brand and present it professionally on your website.

Summary

The decision whether to hire a professional web designer or to build the site yourself depends on what skills you have, how much time you can spare and really whether or not you want to do the work yourself.

About the Author:
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

http://articles.webdesigners123.com/design_it_yourself_or_hire_pro.php

Teasing your curiosity

“Do Not Click Here”. How many of you have seen this slogan in a banner? What did you do when you first saw it? If you are like most people, when you first saw it, you clicked on it. What makes this simple sentence so powerful that it compels the visitor to click on it? The answer is curiosity !!!

Copywriters and web designers are always looking for ways to arouse the website visitor’s curiosity. As banner designers their goal is to attract the visitor to the banner, usually completely ignoring the other elements on the web page that are more important to the website owner. However, because the “Do Not Click Here” slogan tells us nothing about what is on the next page, it arouses the visitor’s curiosity and makes it almost impossible not to click on this banner to see what’s behind it.

Simple integrated design

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin first introduced their product, “Google”, to potential investors, they mentioned Adwords as a backup option in case they didn’t make any money. We all know how lucky they were that they eventually needed to use that backup plan. What made these “boring” ads such a great success?

Unlike other ads, Adwords neither arouse the visitor’s curiosity nor disturb the main flow of the web page. In fact, the opposite is true. Adwords are meant to look like part of the search results giving the user the feeling that those ads are there because he asked for them. No one has any doubt that this simple design helps Google to promote both their search engine and the Adwords advertising program.

Take part in the action

Banner designers wisely used interactive technologies like Flash to develop type of banners that invite the user to take part in the action. Drawing the user into the action can be accomplished in many creative ways. Some web designers use popular old games elements as part of the scene. You all know the famous game pacman. One of the banners that I like the most is the one where the user is allowed to let pacman “eat” few dollar signs. At the successful completion of this mission, a nice slogan is revealed asking him to open a saving account that will earn money with a fixed interest rate. The idea behind those interactive banners is simple: Let the user take part in the action and then at the right moment when his mind is less resistant, show him the sales message. Those interactive banners proved to be very efficient. Their biggest disadvantage is that most webmasters will not allow that kind of banner because it distracts too much from the web page content.

Back to Black and White

Website designers are always seeking to be different with their design ideas. One banner fashion trend that can be found lately is Black and White banners. Although research shows that blue and yellow are the most efficient color to use in a banner, Black and White banners have been seen a lot lately. It’s probably something that will eventually vanish, but the idea behind it is to be different and to make the user wonder what’s up and hopefully click on the banner to find out.

Get Out of the box

Have you heard about the milliondollarhomepage.com? If not, check out this website before continuing to read this article. This website has proven that creative thinking not only can bring you money but also create a whole new trend. Right after the milliondollarhomepage.com got the internet community’s attention, many designers used this idea to deign a banner on which they sell a 10×10 pixel area. Like the original concept, this banner design had its impact. Advertisers are investing money on these ad spaces while at the same time visitors are curious enough time after time looking at those unorganized pixel banners to click on them.

What about the next trends

What the next trends of banner design will be is something that probably no one can accurately predict. It’s up to some web designer to come up with a new concept that proves to be efficient. There is no doubt that in the future we will see new ways of designing banners, especially when more and more advertising budgets are being spent on the internet instead of commercial TV and other types of advertising media. I guess we will just need to be patient.

About the Author:
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant