When doing any type of design you must remember C.R.A.P. Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. (Robin Williams book “The Non-Designer’s Design Handbook has some great information for any new designer.)Text needs room to breathe. The eye needs to rest in that white space. Alignment and spacing are critical when creating a concept that is visually pleasing – thus enticing your audience to read your ad. The key thing to remember is creating 1 eye-catching element that draws your reader in and once they are hooked they will take the time to read the rest of your piece no matter if the font is small or surrounded by ample white space.

I recently tried to educate a client by saying, “Your layout will work fine, but you will get more clicks if you put that button on the lower right corner instead of the top left.” Her response was, “I don’t really need you to educate me, I know where I want my button.”

I have never had a job where people take so much offense when you present a piece of advice. What is the point of hiring a designer if you don’t want them to help you with the design?

My temptation when working with clients is trying to create something that will make us both happy. This is a mistake. There are some clients that are going to want to mix fuchsia with brown and red and orange and while it looks like a pile of poop they may be elated with it. I have learned to stop trying to force my ideas on a client and instead try to come to a happy medium. While what I design might not go in my portfolio, the money will still spend just as well out of my bank account.

The temptation to over please a client is a common one among designers because we take pride in our work. It is hard for us to break rules that we know are important for good design, but in the end, the customer is always right (as long as they have paid me a deposit up front).

If you are looking for premium grass fed beef then this is a great site.

I’m quite proud of these since I did them in Photoshop from scratch. Sometimes I use stock art in my designs, but these I just had to have some brush.

This is an open proposal and if I knew where to find you I would get down on one knee and pop the question – are you really as awesome in person as you are in all of your videos? You are perky and hot and you make geeky gadgets sleek and sexy. Even something as boring as Mozy’s online backup solution is suddenly made cool because you are promoting it.

I mean, wow, look at her…

I love anyone who can take an idea and do so well at it that they get paid to do it for a living. Now only idiots don’t know what blogging is and fools who think blogging and social media are just fads. It isn’t a fad people, it’s the next big thang.

If you want more cool reviews and some fun videos, then check out her website. http://www.tastyblogsnack.com

1. You aren’t updating it often enough

2. It’s boring

3. It’s irrelevant

4. It doesn’t fit into a niche

5. It’s poorly designed, ugly, covered with ads or cluttered

This list could go on forever, but the simple fact of the matter is: people have so many great options to choose from, why should they choose you?

Are you really that funny? Is your content special? Are you an expert at anything and if so, is that what you are writing about?

People come to the web for a variety of things, but I think we can all agree we come here to mostly do these four things: Buy/Sell, Learn/Teach, Entertain/Be Entertained, Network/Interact.

So what are you doing and if you are doing it, are you doing your best to be THE BEST? If not, then I suggest you redirect your efforts into avenues that might be more productive.

Smashing Magazine is a tips and tricks gold mine for anyone who is into anything web related. I find it hard to believe that I’ve been a fanatical blogger/designer/social networking junkie and that I’ve never run across this site and so that is why I am sharing it with you. Check it out, you will be glad you did. 

So how do search engines work? How do they rank sites? How do you get your website listed at the top of those results? 

After doing some research it is clear that this is much more complicated than just adding a few key words to your meta data. It actually involves a lot of work and know how and like all things technological, it is constantly changing. However, Google and Yahoo both have published tips for better ranking in their search engines. 

Check Out Webmaster Tools from Google – These tools are free, but they do require some technical savy since they require you to upload content into your websites in order to verify that you own the site. There is also a few additional features such as setting up a Sitemap. Google also has Google Adsense where you can purchase ad space and increase site traffic, but their system isn’t as easy to use as Yahoo’s. You can also sell ad space relatively easy but I have had mixed results with my monetary earnings, but I have had friends that have been quite successful with earning some extra income with Google Adsense. Google also has a website optimizer tool which will allow you to run tests on your site based on where you place content such as images, links, etc.

Check our Yahoo Search Marketing Tools – I can’t seem to find any ways to improve your search ranking on Yahoo’s tool without becoming a paying customer. They have a lot of great tools but most of them seem to reference ads that you are selling and how to improve their performance. I used this feature to promote an event http://08ball.com and the results were pretty good. However, you better be sure to setup your credit card not to auto-renew for payment or else the system will bill you excessively! Customer service is excellent though and when I submitted a trouble ticket I got an almost immediate call from a real person.

Other ways to increase traffic to your site is to become involved in social networks. This concept has been around for quite some time but only recently seems to be getting the attention it deserves. A Recent article published in February of 2009 states, “if you want to be effective in getting the word out about your content to a community, you need to understand the community.” 

I’m often surprised by the number of individuals who don’t understand the power of adding a blog to their business website. Sites that are updated often can use Technorati Pings and Google Analytics to notify various services that their site has been updated, not to mention RSS Feeds and other services that tell users, “Hey, we’ve updated our site!” 

Lastly, don’t ever underestimate the power of a simple domain name. If you are doing “Affordable Web Design” then get the domain name http://www.affordablewebdesign.com because if your domain name is the search string that a user enters, well, most likely it will be at the top of the list and you don’t have to do anything to get it there. Try typing in my name Eddie Renz or my blog Posted Note  and see where they rank in Google. 

So I’ll end it for now with this post, but check back as I continue to scour the web for the best ways to improve your search ranking.

My recommendation for businesses or bloggers is to use WordPress for all of your online web needs. It’s an excellent content management system that allows you to easily update your website with content that not only look professional but is easy to change by novices that still have trouble with the double-click. 

I’ve been blogging now for 8 years and I started out writing each html page by hand and adding it to my site. Nothing was dynamic and the static pages were an cluster (insert expletive) of bad organization and poor writing. Eventually I upgraded to Blogger which is a great tool for beginning bloggers who aren’t web savvy at all. 

After Blogger I looked at using Moveable Type, Drupal, Joomla, Textpattern – I even installed a few of these complex CMS – but they just weren’t as user friendly as WordPress. I now feel that Xanga, MySpace, and Geocities are all Junior High and High School versions of these newer and better tools: WordPress, Facebook, and Blogger. 

There are a number of companies now that can create a great website for you, but you can do a lot of it yourself by editing a template that has been created for WordPress. With literally thousands of templates to choose from you can easily find a layout that works for you and if you don’t know how to modify it, then you should be able to find someone who can customize it for a few hundred bucks. 

Check back often on this site as I will be updating it with popular links for affordable – and GOOD – web design, social media, marketing, advertising, and best web tools such as Flickr and Twitter.