Aviary - another feather in your design cap?

An "early-bird" invite for the intriguing looking Aviary suite plopped into my particular corner of the Freshleaf inbox today. I've been following the development of this collection of Flash-based online tools for a while now, so I couldn't wait to get my hands covered in a few feathers...

Read More » July 31st, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Aviary, online tools, review / Trackback

Search Engine Optimisation Terms Explained

If you’re looking into SEO for the first time, it can appear to be some kind of mystical hybrid of rocket science and magic. There are a number of buzzwords which are often liberally thrown around: PageRank, backlinks, keyword density – but what do they all mean?

Search Term – The words which a person searching the web puts into the search engine. So if a user is looking for someone to redesign their company’s website they might cast their net wide and put in ‘website design’ or ‘web design’ or they might be slightly more speficic with ‘corporate web design’, or they might prefer to go local and type in ‘website design dorset’.

Keywords – The website equivalent of a search term. So if you think your customers are going to be searching for ‘corporate website design’ you would list ‘corporate website design’ as a keyword on your website. You’d need to think about all the search terms which people might put in if they were looking for your specific products or service, so you’d also list various permutations, like ‘corporate web design’ ‘corporate site design’ ‘professional website design’ etc. You might even include mis-spellings if you think that words will be frequently mis-spelled in the searches (“corporate webstie desing”?).

Page optimisation – This is the practice of ensuring that the page looks important to a search engine for your particular keywords. Meta-data, image titles, link text , urls …. and also vitally the copy itself (sometimes overlooked). Search engines rank some elements as being more important than others, so having your keywords in your content is better than just in your meta data, and having the keywords in the title of the page and the content is better still.

Read More » July 28th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: seo, seo terms / Trackback

Web Design Toolbox .. or Library.. or something (a web designers reference)

As we go on our merry way round the world of website design, every now and then we come across something useful. Sometimes it’s a handy tool or application to make life easier, sometimes it’s a bit of a hack to get you out of a some sort Internet Explorer based disaster; or sometimes it’s just something which for some reason strikes a chord.

And after many years of rummaging through my bookmarks saying things like “I think there was a site which had a really cool solution for that…. now where did I put that link?” and “didn’t you say the other day that you’d found something to do such and such?”, I've decided it’s time to compile a library of, for want of a better phrase, “useful stuff”.

Read More » July 25th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: web design, web design toolbox, code library, useful web design stuff / Trackback

Should we all have Corporate Blogs?

Here at Freshleaf, as you may have noticed, we have a company blog. We update it regularly with our thoughts and experiences around our key business, corporate website design. We also often encourage our clients to maintain a blog, but in many cases our clients feel that it isn’t appropriate to their business. Make no mistake, blogging is a growth trend and is definitely here to stay, but is it appropriate to all sectors of the corporate world?

Corporate or Business blogs are becoming popular for a number of reasons. Blogs give companies a more informal, user-friendly channel for communicating with their customers and their investors, interacting with the target market on a more personal level. Blogs can effect a more open and direct view than traditional channels. They are also usually based around one of a growing number of excellent blogging applications, making them easier to update than the company website itself. And last but not least, a good blog not only gives users a reason to re-visit the site, but also helps improve search engine optimisation by adding fresh content.

Read More » July 21st, 2008 / 3 Comments / Tags: corporate blogs, business blogs / Trackback

Why you should keep your SEO tactics clean

Search Engine Optimisation is all about getting your website to the top of the pile and beating your competitors at any cost, right? Not necessarily. We were recently asked by one of our clients to carry out Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on their website so that they would be found at the top of the list in key search engines like Google and MSN. This is something we’re good at and we know a lot about so we confidently told our client all about the sort of strategies we would be implementing, mainly focussing on ensuring that there was plenty of keyword-rich textual content on the page. Now by keyword-rich, I don’t mean just writing big lists of keywords like: “… search engine optimisation, SEO, search engine optimization, search engine friendly, search promotion …” or whatever, I mean writing informative and useful content for your website visitors and ensuring that it has plenty of relevant keywords in it in a way that does not make the site difficult to read.

We duly warned our client that we would not use any “black hat” tactics (this involves doing anything which goes against the Google webmaster guidelines or appears in any way sneaky), since the penalties for getting caught breaking the rules can be severe. We also pointed out that you really can’t fool Google much these days and if you do somehow trick your way to the top, your success will be very short-lived. It’s only a matter of time before you’re found out.

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July 5th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: seo tactics, spamming / Trackback