This article will guide you through the preliminary project evaluation so that you come equipped with a clear picture of your future website layout and functionality:

Decide upon your business model.

Many online marketing rookies trust the success of their online business to web development firms, assuming that great sites are guaranteed income streams. In fact, the business model you have chosen for your business is the foundation for your site’s selling point. Be clear on the expectations you want for your business and afterward design the means for their attaining. In most cases web designers are technological savvy individuals with no marketing experience to assist you mould your marketing strategy as the designing project takes its course.

Decide upon a business name and slogan.

Don’t invest in marketing materials referring to prospective business names. You’re putting the budget in danger by fantasying on potential domain names and description tags and not working with available options. So, before even sketching a logo, go buy yourself a brandable domain name.

Decide upon the products/services you’ll be selling online.

It’s important to give your web designer such details because there are tens of features and designs to choose from in order to give your merchandise the best display possible. Determine whether these are digital or physical products, services you offer and whether there’s a viable possibility of expanding the market reach in the near future.

Clearly define your brand.

We don’t imply that you have to begin working on the preliminary sketches of your logo or other offline marketing materials. Still the designing team needs a marketing message to work with when designing your business’s visuals. This requires a deep understanding of your market and it’s far from being an hour’s work process. Having some ideas to extrapolate from would make a great difference for the resulting logo.

Of course when working with seasoned web designers you’ll enjoy competent assistance in the brand definition process especially when having to choose effective shapes, colors and sizes. Doing it exclusively by yourself or benefiting from an over delivering designing service, preliminary brand definition is essential for the message of transmit in the marketplace.

Determine the exact purpose of your website.

A website without a clearily defined marketing goal will deliver mediocre results for ANY goals you might have considered as it’s reason for being. What do you want your site visitors to do once on site? Is it taking a survey, joining amailing list, making a quick purchase? The only way to fullfil that need is by tailoring your website on that desideratum.

How you’ll be building a mailing list on an ongoing basis?

Let’s face it – even though the most cost effective, online businesses have lower conversion rates than traditional business models. In order to overstep this downfall you need to identify means to build a mailing list to market to on a regular basis. Just think out the plan and incline the technical aspects to your designing service.

Decide upon the website type.

Basically you have two alternatives – going with a set and forget 5-page static website or an interactive platform with web 2.0. features like blogs, community forums membership and shopping cart systems, etc.

Decide upon your development budget.

This will set the limits of what the designing service will accomplish for your site. Even though this tends to be the most sensible issue with many web marketers, know that your website is the most important marketing weapon you have at your disposal mainly because it’s ready to meet buyers 24/7. You could argue that there are cheaper alternatives like ready made templates and WYSIWYG designing packages. These might work to get you online or for businesses dependent on referral traffic, however making a site competitive in the search engines requires more than short fixes that cheap alternatives offer.

Consider the maintenance factor.

Maintaining a website is totally dependent on your expertise of working with a content management system or CMS. A CMS is basically a template where you log in each time you need to make updates or adjustments to your content. Even though this might seem facile at first there are some questions your geeky ego must be asked before knowing whether or not you’re truly capable of maintaining your own platform:

• Are you an experienced webmaster that knows enough about content layout and written advertising?
• Do you know how to search engine optimize content?
• Do you have at your disposal sufficient time for making updates and handling technical issue that might affect your site’s performance?

The piece of advice we’re trying to pass on here is to not waste time learning to be a web developer, instead spend your days marketing and supplying your business with quality fresh prospects and outsource the administrative tasks to dedicated professionals.

Based on all the requirements covered so far draw the web designer’s profile. Once you have it, research on community forums and look for the services that enjoy the best reviews. Also be mindful to those that claim to be web developers when in reality they only know how to use WYSIWYG or do it yourself software packages like Ms FrontPage.

It’s fairly easy to find programmers online. The difficult part is find those that will manifest a proactive approach in your project, namely coming with constructive ideas and suggestions off of their working experience and not do always exactly what you tell them to do. Because the end product might not measure up to your expectations.

Relating this to your own online business model, it’s without a doubt imperative that you need keep up with this forever changing landscape. I’m not suggesting that you should invest big corporate budgets for website development. Rather I suggest taking the time to consider how your website design will appear in one year time for it to remain competitive and attractive to your prospects.

If substantial sums of money aren’t in sight for web development projects currently, there must be, however, a significantly bigger dose of imagination and marketing intelligence poured into planning improve the appearance and functionality of your website. A sound strategy to improve the site’s overall performance in terms of conversion rates and readership would be to go for a simple, easy to navigate structure. Choosing a professional layout backed by topnotch information will earn you the professional status in your field. First step towards this resolution would be to find an affordable web designer that knows to follow specifics, give competent advice and all in all posses a good eye for competitive simplicity.

To give you a workable example, take the case of Microsoft.com site. It comes with a simple white background and straight forward navigation that points you in the intended direction in a logical manner.

Before you start looking for the web designer you must first have to have a clear mental picture of the site you intend on web-mastering. When you have it, start researching for prospective designers and filter them out based on their understanding of your needs.

Should you follow the simple layout alternative outlined in this article, decide with your designer upon an eye-catching featured service/project display, logo or a favorable background combination to make the home page pop. Referring to the size, think of your website as an online catalog or extended flyer you expose to all types of web traffic. The standard advice would be to adopt the A4 paper format, still don’t neglect the designer’s opinion that’s directly confronted with your business specifics.

Another aspect I want to touch here is the streamline effect obtained by having the same formatting throughout the entire site. This translates into smaller bounce rates which means increased navigation times on your site. In fact that’s the core purpose of web design – grabbing attention of visitors and keeping them on site for extended period of time.

Because newly discovered sites are all about visual impact it’s important that, besides details covered so far, your site possesses an appealing color combination that creates a comfortable learning environment instead of piercing the reader’s eye sight. It is said that expertise of designing professionals can be asses by the color combination they use. When uncertain, just go with the white background and elaborate from there.

The truth of the matter is that regardless how insightful you content is, there won’t be too many eyes to read it if hazardous color combination camouflage it.  There are precise rules that govern website coloring one being to respect the color wheel which denominates colors into three categories – primary (red, yellow and blue) which can’t be obtained by combining any other, secondaries obtained by mixing the first three colors and tertiary resulted from combining secondary color class.

It goes without saying that content is the best marketing agent your business has online. Set a designing priority to have content available  in all formats – written, podcasts, video – harmonically integrated in the site’s general layout.

Another important aspect to take care of is the site’s loading time. Even though the web technology develops at an outstanding rate, the reality is that the majority of internet connections on a global scale are dial-up connections with inferior speeds. A site that delays displaying the content discourages readers from staying around for long. Make clear to your designer that you’re interested in site’s looks but also good loading times.

A website that sells and builds a faithful readership has above else an user friendly GUI or graphic user interface. This basically can be resumed to having a light easy to follow navigation system that points readers in the desired direction with minimal click-thrus. Intricate platforms will certainly discourage newcomers from further investigating the site after they consumed the initial piece of information that brought them there.

Don’t pay for a site that screams hype all over it. Limit the number of pop ups, excessive advertising spaces and filter out unprofessional banner ads and promote only the most representative affiliate business. Turning your website into a Christmas tree it’s a clear indicator of poor salesmanship and this discourages people for buying.

Use these pointers in your preliminary research so that you know exactly what to ask from your chosen website designer.

One of the reasons for the cutthroat competition in the cyber world is the exponential increase in the number of websites that are dedicated to every imaginable niche. With thousands of other establishments just waiting to steal your business, there is very little room for error in your most effective and visual marketing tool – your website.

Business worth thousands can be lost if your website is still stuck in the dinosaur age, so here is a look at how you can determine the answer to the crucial question, should I re-design my site?

How to know when it’s time to redesign your website?

Your site is just a showpiece: The introduction of social networking sites have changed the way in which net goers interact with their colleagues as well as the establishments that they intend to do business with. If your site offers no scope for interaction, your visitors will soon tire of the one-way communication and seek respite elsewhere.

Incorporating a blog on your site is a wonderful way to keep in touch with your customers as well as to get real time feedback on your site and products. If you don’t already feature a blog on your site, you should seriously consider a redesign or at the very least use a free blog host.

[+] Your homepage disturbs visitors: If your home page is full of pop up ads, graphics, banner ads on both sides , text with a link in every second word etc; it may all be too much for a casual visitor to the site and a redesign may be in order.  It is crucial to remember that simplicity can pay off big in the cyber world.

[+] Your site is unreadable: This may be due to the content that offers little value to your visitors or simply because the designing team went overboard choosing the colors of the font and the background. Either way, you will need to remedy the situation at once.

[+] Your site has an unusual navigation system: There is some amount of comfort in the known; to put it simply, people are happy when they are faced with the prospect of using something or being in a situation that they are well aware of.

If you spring an unusual navigation system in their face such as a horizontal navigation bar instead of a horizontal one, your visitors may leave out of sheer frustration, so if you have any such design elements change them immediately.

[+] The site is incompatible with some browsers: If your site works well in IE but bombs in Firefox or Chrome, you can be sure that people who use these browsers are not going to take the trouble of downloading IE just because they want to visit your site; it would be simpler to take their business elsewhere.

[+] The site has only text or no text at all: If your site focuses only on content you will be robbing your visitors of entertainment value; however, if there is no content people will not want to stick around for long to see the graphics; so it is essential to find middle ground.

How to know when your site is outdated?

[-] The traffic to your site is limited at best: Although, you think that your site looks spectacular; it simply does not seem to attract visitors and even when a few people do trickle in; they quickly move on; these strongly point to the possibility of your site being outdated. It is obvious that your clients fail to see an element of appeal in your website.

[-] The people who do show up don’t buy from your site: There are two possibilities here; either the traffic is not relevant or even if t is, people still don’t want to buy from you.

If your site receives a number of visitors who are simply not interested in what you are selling or the information that you are offering; this can be attributed to the use of faulty keywords. However, of the traffic is relevant yet not interested in your offerings; this is indicative of a technical issue with the site such as a navigational problem that should be addressed at the earliest.

[-] Your content is a few years old: Content was and is still the king; the veracity of your content will often have a bearing on the clients’ decision to buy from you.

After all, when people are shopping online, they rely heavily on your words and if these words don’t live up to their expectations, you can certainly not expect them to be interested in your products

[-] There is no clear call to action: Your clients visit the homepage, they like what they see but then things go downhill because although they want to buy from you, they don’t know where to go next.

It is important that the site have a clear call to action; you should give your visitors a clear idea about where they should go next; whether you are selling products or are building a list; the conversion page should be easily available.

A poorly made and maintained website can has the same impact on your sales figures and customers as a dirty brick and mortar establishment with obvious chaos all around, so it’s important to act fast.

The web has seen massive changes in the past few years from new technology, social networking sites, blogging, RSS feeds, and more.  Along with these new innovations, new design trends have been popping up.  One of the most notable trends is the web 2.0 style where designs were friendly, inviting, clean, yet filled with personality.

It’s now 2010 and it’s time to change your old web design and suit your websites up with new designs.  There are many trends that have started and are completely different from the designs many of us are used to.  In fact, many of these designs go against the grain of conventional design templates where the whole point was to focus on the message and the message alone.  Now there is growing trend on focusing on the overall presentation.

As a designer and marketer, it’s important to try new designs, approach your business from a different angle, and stay creative.  This allows you to find things that surprisingly work even though you wouldn’t have imagined that it would make such an impact.

So here are some new web design trends of 2010 that you can try out

1. More White Space – Most websites on the Internet try to make use of every single space that’s available on the page.  There’s the left hand navigation bar, the right hand navigation bar, the footer, the header, and of course the main content.

But many websites are now taking another approach.  They are trying to put in more white space and focusing on their main message.  It’s a great way to get your visitors to relax and listen to what you’re trying to say.

It’s easy on the eyes and also gives your visitor the opportunity to learn more.

2. Big Header or Leading Images – Images definitely stand out more than words.  While it’s your words that help you communicate with your visitors, the images allow the viewer to really take in the whole experience.

They can immediately get what kind of idea you’re trying to present to them and it will help them focus in on finding what they’re looking for on your site.

3. The Magazine Layout – All of us are used to reading magazines.  They’re filled with interesting articles with beautiful images, lots of sub headings, and lots of quotations set under a sleek, glossy page.  Many websites are using the magazine approach to present their content.

Since we are accustomed to the magazine layout, it is more inviting to read and dig into the content and website.  The format also stands out from the other websites devoted to delivering content in the standard format.

4. Social Media Sites and Icons – By now, all your favorite blogs and content sites have icons where you can follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and MySpace.  Although most of us are already familiar with this trend, it’s still becoming more popular.  Many more sites are adding social media sites and icons to help connect with their readers.

It’s not uncommon to see icons that allow you to digg content, subscribe to RSS feeds, add them to your social bookmarking profile, and more.  There are even icons to add them to sites that are not as popular as the big social networking sites we’re familiar with.

5. Big Introduction Blocks – Rather than leave the visitors to figure out what you’re about, why not tell them in one big paragraph?  That is what many websites are doing.  They either state what their site is about or what kind of services they offer in a few short sentences in the header or right below the header.

If you’ve gotten a lot of criticism from your visitors about not being able to figure out what you’re about, then maybe it’s time you try this web design format to see how it works.

6. Hand Drawn Style Illustrations and Sketches – These types of graphics really stand out and catch attention.  Your visitors will really appreciate the artwork and it will set you apart from every other site in your industry.

7. Websites Designed for Mobile Phones – Smart phones are becoming more and more popular.  So it’s important for you to make sure that your site is compatible for smart phones to cater to your demographic that use these phones to browse the Internet.

This will give you another way to connect with your visitors and build a relationship with them.  It will also help you stand out in your industry if competing websites are not designing their sites for compatibility with smart phones.

These are some of the web design trends of 2010.  Try incorporating several of the ideas to your website to see if it works with your site and audience.  You might even be astonished at the results .

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“Color it perfect” when it comes to arriving at the best combination that will be vital for any website design when considering the elements of the page layout. Success can be absolutely dependent upon choosing correct color combinations as well as using a really poor one can lead to nowhere but miserable failure. How many times have you landed upon a particular site and seen the colors presented to you and could only say “Yuck?”

Well, unless you want a lot of people asking that old proverbially clichéd question, “What was he thinking?” you better be learning how to pick and choose color combinations correctly or find some help.

Color is such a psychological component. Therefore, it is one of those activities that must be meticulously executed in order to arrive at the right color combination that will match the theme of your website. Some of the best places to start include matching website colors is with your business logo colors. Or, employ a contrast of color combinations so your logo stands out, which will help strengthen your brand recognition. You also must understand that a particular color can change the mood and often this is done drastically when combined with other colors.

People relate to colors through experiencing mental sensations and brain reactions. Although when you view a particular color, for example blue, you may think to yourself that it’s blue, but your senses are displaying something totally different than the word “blue.” The actual visualizing of the color blue can have a brain reaction that may even differ from one person to the next. Although there are commonly acceptable sensations that the color blue apparently influences that are practically universal, such as a “cooling” sense, the reactions are far too many to make a specific declaration about how people “feel” blue.

However, the starting point for selecting color combinations does begin with what is universally accepted as what those colors represent as far as the effects upon the senses. Therefore, it is hard to imagine that a designer creating a website for a flamethrower manufacturer will employ use of the color blue. Typically, the human mind translates colors with those animated objects either found naturally or artificially in life. Fire is red, not necessarily blue, although technically a blue flame is hotter than a red flame, but it is the generally accepted popular version that selecting color combinations is based upon.

A basic understanding of color theory is something that all art students and website developers study as subject matter during their training. For the uninitiated, use of a color wheel will show how color is structured in a specific order. This starts with the colors blue, red and yellow which are known as primaries. These are the building blocks of all color. Next to these will be the secondary hues of green, violet and orange. We have a third level that comprises of various matches like blue/green, blue/violet, red/violet, red/orange, orange/yellow, and yellow/green.

Use of the color wheel will show you which ones are opposite each other. This helps to gain a basic fundamental direction of how to combine colors to make a combination. Note that blue is opposite of orange. Red is opposite of green, while red/violet is opposite of yellow/green. When you find colors that are opposites, they are known as complementary.

Additionally, colors are divided based on temperature, which is normally termed as warm or cold. Colors at the bottom right of the wheel are all based on blue and are cold colors, whereas the colors based on red are called warm colors. So, fundamentally, if a web designer is looking to evoke a cooler temperature, choosing a blue derivative color would be the proper way to go. On the other hand, if the same designer s looking to evoke a warmer feeling, he or she would use a red derivative color.

As you can see, color is suitable for a particular purpose, but sometimes choosing the right color combination that will instantly fit a particular purpose may be a difficult challenge, specifically if you’re starting from scratch and have no reference point such as a company logo. Obviously, if the colors contained within the company logo are cool, then this needs to be taken into consideration when you choose other colors on the webpage to associate with it. The same is true for the opposite, using the warm colors derived from red.

But what exactly are the types of links that you should seeking, and what’s the difference between all of the available options?

You can break down types of links into several different categories based upon what you’re trying to achieve with them, how much control you have over them and how much value they really provide.

+Links that Boost your Search Engine Rankings

Most people build links to help them rise through the search engines. Of course, an incoming link acts somewhat like a vote for your website in the eyes of the search engines, and the more of them you have, and from better sources, the more value you can see with them.

To see the most value from links that boost your search engine rankings there are a few different items to check off.

First of all, the links should be dofollow to make sure that you are getting full Page Rank value from them.

Secondly, the higher the Page Rank of the site with the link, the more that incoming link is worth to you. A few PageRank 4 or 5 links are worth more than dozens and dozens of links from PR 0 or 1 sites.

Other factors that provide you with more value for your SEO results from links include the relevancy of the website in relation to yours, and the anchor text that is used within the link.

A relevant backlink will be one that is highly related to your own industry or niche. If you repair bikes, a bicycle manufacturer is surely a more valuable and relevant link than a grocery store your Mom works at across the country.

The anchor text used within the link is hugely important, because it will align your website with the specific terms and phrases that you’re trying to rank for. The anchor text tells the search engines what you’re page is all about, and it makes you credible and relevant for those terms.

Sometimes you can control the anchor text, such as when you participate in article marketing, or perhaps with amiable webmasters participating in link exchanges. In other occasions though you will have to hope that the links used are as relevant as possible, and it will be out of your control.

+Links that Directly Lead to Traffic

Some kinds of links may not boost your SEO value that much, but they can help to provide you with a huge stream of traffic. This might be a link from a website that NoFollows it’s outgoing links as a rule. Or it could come from a social bookmarking or networking site that gets a ton of traffic but whose links won’t really boost your rankings.

Either way, the direct traffic is valuable and with the right content and links in the right places, you can help find a whole bunch of clients and prospects that you would not have found otherwise, with or without the search engines.

+Links that Grow Your Presence

Finally, sometimes you will be building links that are really in place to grow your presence and build your reputation. They might not send a ton of traffic to your site, or provide a whole lot of SEO value. However, you will be growing awareness for your brand, your website and your business, and helping to spread the word.

A popular example of this might be a Facebook profile page. Surely you will produce some direct traffic from your link, but it probably won’t be that much unless you really have a huge presence on the site.

But what you are doing is getting your website’s name and out there, and when you make a positive impact and offer help, assistance or simply friendship to others it can and will be remembered.

Of course, never forget that many links can help to do all of these things. A link from a relevant, high ranking and highly trafficked blog to yours will boost your SEO, provide you with a direct stream of traffic and grow your presence as well.

The more backlinks the better, and a varied strategy that gives you all of the above kinds of links will produce the best results.

If you’re the owner or manager of a local business and you’re trying to expand your reach and presence, then you surely already know the value of search engine optimization. However, SEO for local businesses is a bit different than just general, all purpose SEO. There are some tried and true tactics that you can use to help give your website a local boost, which will help you immediately find more prospects and customers and become more of a force.

Local Search Results

All of the major search engines include options for local businesses to create profiles. For example on Google you can visit their Local Business Center and include your website name, location and contact information, give yourself a description and classify yourself in an industry.

The other major search engines offer similar setups, and it’s all very easy to work with.

Use relevant keywords and terms in your description and then when people make local searches for those terms, you’ll pop up right on the top of the search engine results, above everybody else, with a map, your website address, business name and more.

That’s the quickest and easiest way to improve your local SEO, and it can be extremely effective.

Consumer and Community Websites

One of the great tools at your disposal for a local business and SEO is the slew of consumer and community websites out there today. Popular websites such as Yelp, CitySearch, Insider Pages, and Trip Advisor, just to name a few, allow consumers to review, rate and describe any business they’ve been to. Make sure your website is on there, and encourage your customers to leave positive reviews.

Also reach out to any specific community websites such as for your town, for your business district or anything else to get your business and service listed.

These will all add a lot of really valuable SEO power and links to boost your own rankings. Additionally, they will help to establish your presence and individuals who already use these services and websites for their communities as opposed to just the search engines will now be exposed to you as well.

On Page Content

Last but certainly not least is the on page content you have for your website. This may actually be the most important of all. You need to have content on your website that ties you to a specific region or location.

The easiest way to do this is to include your contact information with address on all of your pages, perhaps on the footer.

But avoid doing what so many people do which is just stuffing every city and town name within hundreds of miles somewhere on your page. This isn’t going to help you out at all, and will just make you look worse to people who visit your page.

What you do want to do is create some articles, original content, blog posts or other material that is directly related to local communities.

If you clean houses in California, you could have a blog post about cheap house cleaning in San Francisco, and another one the best house cleaning services in Los Angeles, and so forth.

These will help you get found in different areas and for different phrases, and you will thrive from long-tail keyword searches.

Also be sure that you do all of your keyword research to dig up these valuable terms and phrases.

Keep in mind that people from different parts of the country and the world use various terms and phrases to mean the same thing, so be sure to readily know what people in your locale use to describe your area, your products and your services.

Underused SEM practice  – Locally Targeted PPC

You can also create locally targeted pay per clicks. This will help you reach out to highly targeted prospects and customers, and to help drive up new business in a major way.

Create different local ads for a variety of towns or regions that you serve, and a host of your various products, services or other offerings so you can reach out to as many people as possible.

Using PPC advertising with local markets is also cheaper and more effective than generic, popular phrases. You’ll be targeting a smaller and less competitive niche as opposed to the whole available market, and the people who eventually click on your ads will be much more likely to be successfully converted.

You can also hire us!

Still confused? Don’t have the time to do it yourself? You can always hire us to do the dirty work for you, just contact us.

http://www.thegamereviews.com/story-1-Google-NoFollow-on-Links-working.html
http://www.michellemacphearson.com/do-nofollow-links-count-redux/
http://www.fastblogfinder.com/can-nofollow-links-hurt-you/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagerank-sculpting-with-nofollow-still-works/
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/discussion-once-more-at-wikipedia-about-the-use-of-nofollow/4164/
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006800.html
http://www.jonwaraas.com/nofollow-test-results-are-in/
http://www.bubub.org/rel_nofollow_test.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-update-to-our-testing-on-pagerank-sculpting-with-nofollow

Before we get started I would like to say that I DO NOT believe in the NoFollow attribute. Not in the sense I don’t believe in the ethical use of it but in the sense that I don’t believe it works. The only thing I believe it’s good for is keeping you from getting a penalty when linking to a site which is banned by Google. Otherwise, I think it’s fairly worthless. Now that this is out of the way, let’s begin with the blog post

One of the popular trends over search engine optimization over the past few years has been to use NoFollow tags on your links as an attribute that tells search engines the linking page doesn’t apoint editorial trust for the resource it’s referring with a link. The reason you would want to do this is to cut off the flow of Page Rank and other SEO benefits that links receive, in order to prevent others from receiving it or redirecting it to other areas on your own website. However, many individuals now wonder whether NoFollow tags still work at all.

When has NoFollow Traditionally Been Used?

There are several different times that the NoFollow tag would traditionally be used. The first of this is on blog comments and forum links.

Due to the abundance of spamming and other illicit and annoying strategies, webmasters began putting NoFollow on these links in order to tell the search engines to disregard them completely.

That way, no matter what kind of poor or blackhat websites tried to get links from you, the NoFollow would stop the spread of your “link juice” or your Page Rank value.

Another method for using NoFollow was for Page Rank sculpting on your own website. You could NoFollow specific pages within your website, in order to build it up higher on other pages of your site.

Since your PR is distributed throughout your entire site and all of its pages, with less pages getting it distributed, the theory was that this would help the pages included get higher PR values.

But does it still work?

Google and other search engines seem to have shifted their views on the NoFollow tag these days, in large amount due to the over usage of it to try to alter Page Rank and search engine rankings, as with PR sculpting described above.

Now, Google has recommended basically that NoFollow only been used on blog comments when you really wouldn’t trust what’s being put out there. In other situations, the usage of NoFollow has now been frowned upon.

When used within your own site, you are essentially manipulating the rankings and algorithms to try to get certain pages more favor within the rankings.

Of course the search engines don’t take kindly too this, and so when they see this happening your site can be marked as a black hat website, and could even be delisted or penalized in the rankings. It’s a serious consequence for a strategy that was probably never quite as effective as people hoped for.

Additionally, even when you do use NoFollow tags on your standard outbound links, some of your Page Rank value is still passed through! That’s right, even with that tag, the fact that there is a link at all means that some of your PR value is leaking out anyway. Therefore, the NoFollow tag has become somewhat obsolete, because it’s either viewed as being black hat, or it fails to truly do what it was originally created to do.

What it Means for the Future

The world of search engine optimization is always changing. That means that while the NoFollow tag has gotten some bad press lately, it doesn’t mean that it’s always going to remain that way.

It also means that just because Google or one search engine or platform speaks against it, it doesn’t mean that other services will do the same, and it doesn’t mean you have to abandon some strategies that you find are truly valuable or effective.

However, always keep in mind that when you engage in activities that are manipulating the way the search engine formulas evaluate your website and rank your website, you are putting yourself at risk for falling into a black hat or illicit category.

That’s a chance that in most cases you do not want to be taking, and using NoFollow for PageRank sculpting is currently being considered in that light.

Stick to using NoFollow on blog or forum comments that you really don’t want to vouch for at all, and the impact will be minimal and you will not lose any ground either. In other cases, open up your links because NoFollow is no longer being accepted and worked with in the way that it was originally put out there.

Post By: Amy Chokshi

Blog cosmetics play an important role in setting your tone and style as a blogger.  When the images and wallpaper on your blog are in alignment with your content, writing style, and tone, it creates dedicated and strong following.  One of the most important aspects of blogging is to find your voice.  Once that happens, everything else takes care of itself automatically.

Beautiful and inspiring photographs are not as difficult as most bloggers conceive them to be.  Simple photographs of flowers in your garden or some abstract object in your home make ideal complements to your blog by giving it a meaning.  Life’s small details that capture beauty and simplicity of day-to-day life create resonance and bonding with your readers.

Here are the 7 most important lessons on how to take stunning photographs to beautify your blog with inspiring images to create a strong and dedicated following:

Lighting: Natural lighting works best for most settings.  Indoor lights create dark images and look unnatural.  When taking photographs outdoors, make sure you avoid glare.  If it is too sunny when you are taking the photographs, you may need to use flash to fill in the shadows with the camera’s flash light and soften the contrast between the shaded and sunny portions of photograph.  In some settings, you may be able to exploit the light to show off texture and shapes.

Sharpness and Blur: Your camera’s shutter time is critically important to capture beautiful photographs of moving objects.  Set your camera to shutter priority so that the shutter times can be controlled directly.  For the camera’s that don’t have shutter priority option, you may change the shutter times to appropriately meet your needs.  Experiment with programmed settings for different shutter times to see which fits best.  If you set your shutter times to very long, you may be able to capture abstract colors of moving objects.

Zoom & Focus: Photo’s that are zoomed into the subject are much more interesting and reveal subtle details of the subject.  Zoomed in pictures capture the moment in its true authenticity.  Similarly, when taking photographs of landscapes, it is best to set your lens to wide angle.  If you don’t have a camera with adjustable lens, consider setting your camera mode to Landscape mode.  Most of the cameras have a zoom range of 3x to 5x.  In digital SLR camera’s, it is possible to extend this zoom range by getting wide-angle adaptors or telephoto adaptors.  If you want to extend the range of your camera to wider angel, consider getting a wide-angle adaptor.  Contrary to that, if you like telephotos, you may want to get a camera that has lens with telephoto extender.

Quality & Effects: To get one quality shot, you have to take several shots.  Most expert photographers take 30 to 40 photographs just to capture one awe-inspiring moment.  Especially with digital cameras, there is no reason to not take many pictures.  Effects play an important role in portraying the character of the subject.  For instance, when taking photograph of indoor fountains with sufficient lighting, using long exposures, i.e. 1/30 of a second gives a milky effect to water in the fountain, whereas using short exposure gives a frozen effect to water.

Accessories: A tripod is a must-have if you plan on taking your hobby to the next level.  It helps you you’re your camera steady and improve the focus of your picture.  Tripods are fairly inexpensive and absolutely worth for their cost.

Photo Editing: Learning the basics of Photoshop can take you far when it comes to embellishing your images with frames and other artistic details.  It also helps you in re-sizing your images.  If you are not too savvy when it comes to using graphics related applications, consider Picnik.com – It’s one of the most user friendly photo editing web-based tools.

Copyright Infringement: If is important to protect your photographs from copyright infringement.   Although watermarking is one of the most popular ways to avoid anyone from copying your pictures, doing so distorts the beauty of your photographs.   One of the best ways to stop people from copying your images is to prevent downloads using tables based design or doing a JavaScript right click disable.  Regardless of how many protections you put in place, someone will figure out a way to steal your image. So it’s best to copyright your images.

Following these 7 steps should get you started on the path of creating stunning images for your blog or websites.  The best part of using personally created images is that they will add a personal touch to your blog and thereby strengthen the bond between you and your followers.

To start it off you can see how great Digg was looking back when they started off in good ol’ 2k5!

Since then Digg has clearly spiced it up a bit and brough in spiffy buttons and nice shiny ads.

Reddit hasn’t really changed much.  Guess for them the more simple the better which seems to be working very well for them so far.

Blogger seems to be starting off pretty boring til Google got ahold of it and did work with the nice buttons and slick gradients.

Twitter starting off looking the best of all in my humble opinion with the text overlapping divs, nice sun yellow gradients coming off the text and the wonderful eye burning blue links.

Now looking fresher than ever twitter has a good looking logo and promoted tweets!  Never thought I’d see the day people would be shelling out big bucks for such short status updates.

Facebook or [thefacebook] started off very easy to understand and simple.  Minus the enormous list of new facebookees I’d say it looked pretty descent.

Today if you sign on Facebook you’re getting 100+ new group invitations, 5 new friend requests, grandma tagged naked baby bathtub pics and your girlfriend listed you as in an open relationship.  Getting completely overloaded Facebook should maybe revert and drop back to the good days.