Whenever I’m designing an interface for a new site, i always like to have my safe starting points to build upon. Ill do a quick design of some general elements so that they are there for me to see, then ill go about detailing everything.
Good button design can be crucial to a good usable site so here’s my 60 second button design in Photoshop to give a good base to build on.
Super Quick PSD Button Design
The Anatomy of Cool
What is cool?
Cool is something that is almost undefinable yet you know it when you see it. It’s timeless and stylish. It has attitude, has no respect for authority and cares not for the status quo.
Not everybody understands it, and not everybody has it. It’s exclusive and desirable.
Bad Links Insights
As we complete more and more Insights reports we see very weird influential links within some specific industries.
So why do we see non-relevant links within some industries?
There are large number of reasons why this appears. Here are a few examples of different scenario that we see.
Is Social Media a Good or a Bad Thing?
“Okay, so what’s all this hype about social media? I know everyone says they love it but people just use it to be nosey now-a-days. I’ve had Facebook for about four years and there have been times when I have seriously thought about deleting my account because I don’t do anything with it. I probably write a status once every three months and go on it every other week to be nosey about what people from school are now up to.
And Twitter, what’s that all about? I’ve never even bothered with it, I don’t understand it and I can always find out what celebrities are up to on gossip websites or in magazines, so I have no need for it. And don’t even get me started on all of the other social media websites out there, I never knew there were so many!”
That was my viewpoint on social media a few months ago but now that I work at Neil Walker Digital my whole viewpoint has changed…
Viral Marketing: The Bug You Want To Catch
There are many tried and tested successful marketing techniques to gain brand awareness but what is it that makes a campaign go viral?
Firstly, you have to understand what viral is. To get straight to the point and to eradicate the negative connotations that come along with the not so sexy word that is viral, I’ll start by explaining that viral isn’t a disease which has infected the internet in a way that will make you need to approach your machine with sanitizers and a surgical mask.
I Want Google to Fancy Me
I’ve been working in the SEO industry now for just under three months. Trying to get your head round it can be a bit hard sometimes, so I try to think of a website as a living entity. Think of your site as your own body. Link building is food, on page SEO is exercise, social media is human interaction and think of the search engine as someone you would like to go out with (bear with me, it should make sense as we go on).
I’ll start with link building, you need to build your energy and sustain yourself by eating. You are what you eat and so it would be better for you to eat one healthy meal, than to eat five burgers. If we extend this analogy to link building, build a few good links and your site will have more reach and a better quality reach; build a load of poor links and this will affect the quality and quantity of traffic being driven to your site.
Hacked Website`s in the Payday Loan Industry
In my blog post this week I wanted to talk about websites that have been compromised for the purpose of increasing rankings in the search engines. (Google)
The one that annoys me the most is the Payday Loans. For the last month I have been tracking the search results on Google UK page 1. And what I have seen is not only annoying but very concerning.
There`s a bunch of talented black hat SEO`s out there using their skills to hack into well-established websites and rewrite the htaccess file`s and/or drop in anchor links to point to another website. I have been seeing that practice quite a lot recently especially in the Payday loans industry.
Patience After Penguin: The Road to Recovery
If you have a website then over the last 4 months you may have heard the word “Penguin” over and over again. The fact is that the algorithm which must not be named is not necessarily something to be feared, however it is something that you need to understand and respect.
SEO bloggers and tweeters usually post a great article once a week but since Penguin everything has slowed right down as people have tried to figure out what to do now. I literally read 80 articles last week that had been clogging up my Google Alerts Inbox, yet there are no pearls of wisdom to be found. And the Reason?
Resources, Resources, Resources
Over time web designers and developers collect a number of different tools and resources to make their every day workflow easier and more efficient. There are a large number of different online tools and software available to cater for anybody’s needs from the very advanced down to the plain and simple.
The obvious choice for many people (mainly designers) is to use the complete adobe software library, which includes Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Flash to name a few.
Anybody that choses to use the adobe packages will have almost every modern tool available to complete the task in hand and then some. Now this may seem ideal for some people, but for me, simplicity is key.