The following guest post was written by Sarah Scrafford of Web Design Schools:

We’ve all come across our share of the DIY people – the ones who are jacks of all trades and masters of none. This may be good enough for your pet projects or hobbies, but when it comes to your profession, professionalism pays. So if you own a web-based business or if your website plays a major role in contributing to your income, it’s best if you hire the best in the business. And this is why you need to ensure that the designer of your choice has nothing to do with these five fictional designers:

• The Search Engine Submission Guy: Sure, you want your pages to be picked up by all the search engines, especially Google; but beware of the designer who tells you he’ll pull all the strings he can to submit your site to as many search engines as he can. For one, that’s not the way your site needs to be optimized to be search-engine friendly; and for another, you’re highly likely to get labeled as spam.
• The Friendly Neighborhood Designer Guy: He’s a hit with the whole family, because he designs all their personal sites and doesn’t charge a dime for the same. But if you want the hits on your pages, steer clear of this one. A family designer should stick to his roots and design just those sites that will gain approval of adoring kith and kin. Aspiring to step out and experiment with your site may be on his agenda, but must definitely not find a place in yours. Read the rest of this entry »

It is important to optimize your web page’s title, both for visitors, but also for search engines. Having a relevant, and optimized page title can greatly improve your pages ranking and therefore increase your web site traffic.

Rule 1) Don’t leave the title blank
This is a fundamental, but it should be stressed. Leaving your page title blank massively inhibits your chances of getting high rankings. Even today, you may see some sites where the title simply says “Mozilla Firefox” or “Microsoft Internet Explorer” – by this, you know that the web designer hasn’t specified a title. Always make sure you specify a page title on each page - search engines prefer pages with titles that include relevant, descriptive keywords for the page content.

Rule 2) Always keep the title relevant to the content
Having a title that is completely unrelated to the content is a blackhat SEO method that some people use to attempt to get more traffic from search engines – using popular keywords in the page title, even if the actual site is unrelated to the specified title. Not only may your site be penalized by search engines if they discover that you are doing this simply to mislead people, but it actually means you won’t be receiving any quality traffic either. Instead, people will come to your site expecting something similar to the page title, and as soon as they see the site isn’t about that topic, they’ll leave. In fact, people actually looking for your site may find it harder if the title isn’t what they are expecting it to say! Read the rest of this entry »

When redirecting a visitor from one page or address page on your site to another, it is important to also bear in mind the effect this will have with search engines. Not all redirect methods are search engine-friendly, so to make sure that the search engines find the new page, and that any “link juice” from the old page is carried on to the new one, make your redirects SEO friendly.

As a general rule of thumb, the redirect should take place server-side, rather than client side. While client-side methods exist, such as meta-refreshes or Javascript redirecting, search engines often ignore these and will continue to cache the old page, rather than the new one. While visitors will see the new page, search engines might not.

A server-side redirect means that the new page is fetched on the server and sent directly to the client (in this case the search engine bot) in place of the old page – the search engine doesn’t get to see the old page anymore, even if visiting the old page’s URL. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since businesses started using the internet, Search Engine Optimisation (S.E.O.) has been constantly evolving to maximise the benefits from online marketing. SEO is a branch of online marketing, focusing on improving how a site is seen in search engines and helping to boost the number of visitors that a web site receives from a search engine. Of course, there are a number of common mistakes made when trying to optimise a site for search engines:

Using images where plain text is more appropriate

This is both an accessibility and SEO mistake for obvious reasons. Search engines cannot read text displayed in images, so using images or backgrounds composed mostly of text, instead of plain text, just for aesthetic purposes can be seen as a mistake. This does not always pose a problem where the text in the image is non-essential, but many designers continue to design a site in a graphical program such as Photoshop, then just splice (cut up and stick back together) in a web browser. The effect is usually not noticeable to an end user, until they try to highlight some of the text on the page and realise it’s an image. For disabled users, e.g. a blind or partially sighted user, the page may be completely unusable as their text-to-speech software will not be able to read out the text in the images, unless alternative text is specified.  Read the rest of this entry »

Whym Web Solutions has been operating for over a year now, during which time I’ve learnt a great deal, and I’ve decided the time is right to create a new business blog. This will be a place to learn about web design, online marketing, search engine optimisation, web hosting, and other internet related topics. Working online in web development is a continual learning experience, and one I hope to share with blog readers.

A bit of background information

I’m Dan Price and I started Whym Web Solutions in July 2007, then trading under the name of Whym Web Hosting. After picking up some basic design skills, I designed the hosting site from scratch using HTML and CSS languages. It was from here that my interest in web development really took off. Since then, I’ve worked on a number of personal sites (some still in the pipeline), whilst also building a couple of professional sites for customers including my local church and Sitting Pretty toilet hire. Read the rest of this entry »