Nice guy, nice site, nice database.

Get it out here:

http://www.zipcodeguy.com/blog/

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Grey, it seems to be the remedy against the rise of boring glossy web 2.0 design. Everywhere is adopting this new trend, for one reason, it works. It allows users to be put as as close as possible to the content of the user interface. No more distracting colours, grey is set to take over web design user interfaces, especially for large websites. Lets take Wordpress’s latest update to 2.7 they completely overhauled the design to make it, well grey.

You seriously couldn’t get more grey. The reason why it works is because it creates a colour heirachy for design. The brightest being the most important, the greyest being the least important. Notice how the “Publish” button is surround by blue it is the only element on the page which has this privilige. This is because it is the most important.

Grey Works, Because Colour Works.

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They seem to get to the very heart of social activity online:  forums, blogs, instant messengers. How do we beat the rise of the robots?

Let me explain: humans can adapt spectaculary. When bots started to be a real problem captchas where introduced and suddenly everyone was used to typing a random series of letters to prove that they where human. We are being tracked more than ever: ip addresses, referring links, location, bounce rate all used to determine whether we are human and more than that: to determine if we are a useful human who click ads or buys products. This is how we have been trying to beat bots, but even with increasing levels of security they can still get through. Why is this? Well, just as humans can adapt so can bots, because behind every bot there is a human, most likely one who knows these security systems like the back of his pale, RSI ridden hand (not to say I don’t respect the people that make these, I think they’re pretty clever). We are essentially trying to beat bots with more bots that try to guess whether the other is human. These security systems are destined to become bloated, because coders will adapt their bots with every new change. So what’s the real way to stop these intruders?

People. The human brain stores more information than anything else on the planet, we are only thing which can decide what is real and what isn’t. Lets take some examples: Youtube, DMOZ and now even Google (with Search Wiki) all understand the power of people to overcome any bots, it is the only surefire way to beat them. The larger your site is the more problems you will have with spam, however you can counter balance this by using your users (something I will come back to later) and creating a community that will always try to keep itself alive.

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It’s pretty simple really, but people overlook it. It’s a basic element of interactive UI design. All you have to do it make anything ‘clickable’ change when the user’s cursor goes over it. When it changes your brain understands that it is a dynamic element and you know that you can interact with it by clicking it. Here are a few examples I picked up on just from using the Wordpress and Windows Vista UI:

As you can see there are a variety of ways to show the interactivity: changing text colour (1), adding an extra image (2) and outlining (3) are simple ways to incorporate it.

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On every webmaster forum there are an increasing number of people selling their services: design, coding, directory submissions, content writing, templates, social bookmarking, the list goes on. But do you really need any of these services? Making a website from scratch is your only way of finding out. That means no Wordpress, no templates and no copied content. What you should aim to do is create a site which ranks in search engines and recieves regular traffic as well as hopefully making some ad revenue. When you have finished your site with these conditions covered, look back at what went wrong and what took up too much time. Perhaps you don’t have a flair for design or can’t grasp SEO, whatever you stuggle with, don’t give up. On the internet it is so easy to learn, there are tutorials everywhere, so if there is an important skill which you don’t know, challenge yourself to learn it.

Once you have practised making sites for yourself only then should you pay for people to help you out with your website. Even then, it should only be for grunt work such as submitting to directories and social bookmarking sites. Keep you websites close to you, you should put more effort into your website than anyone else. Learning saves time and money so eventually you will be able to create a effective websites quickly, leave the tedious tasks alone and focus on improving your skills.

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Okay,  let’s think about people for a minute: why do they search for things? Maybe they are looking for something in general (eg. a paperclip), but often they are searching for something very specific (eg. a certain book). This knowledge helps people create websites that will satisfy the searcher. Specific keywords are known as longtails and general ones are known as shorttails. Many search engine marketers have moved to using longtail keywords because there is less competition for them: not many people have websites based around used 1993 Ford bumpers, however people do exist who are searching for that exact thing. The disadvantage of longtail keyowrds is that they do not get much traffic, not enough people want used 1993 Ford bumpers. Some people solve this by creating lots of websites, one for every longtail that they can think of, but this takes a lot of time and effort just to make a few sales or clicks. Let me tell you how it’s really done.

That introduction was about the little guy, but lets now thing about some mulitnational operations. For example ‘Facebook’ gets over 45 million searchs a month. Just think about that: it’s more searchs than there are people in Poland. It’s like having a whole country of people who are interested in your site. These people are searching for a keyword that until 2004 meant absolutely nothing.

So the real question is why do people want to search for ‘facebook’? Because they a looking for something specific, just like when you search for a specfic book at the library these people are searching for a specific website. Not many people search for: ‘online social networking friend communicator’ because they already know that one exists.

We’ve talked about why, now lets talk about how. How does a word meaning absolutely nothing with barely any seraches a month become one of the top searches in the world and how can you do something similar? It all lies in promotion. You have to go back to basics and actually get people talking about your site, whether it’s virtually or in the real world. It’s not about backlinks, it’s not about H1 tags or keyword density. It’s all about people knowing that your site exists. If they know that your website exists then they will cut to the chase when searching and instead of using keywords they will use the name of your site.

You can use this for your own websites. Think about marketing and brandability:  you need a short, snappy and memorable name. You need this name to be everywhere - online and offline. The crucial thing that I haven’t put in however, is that you need to have product or service behind this name. People search for the website because they know that something good is inside it.

A sustained marketing buzz is neccessary to keep the people searching, just take a look at Cuil (an alternative search engine relaesed by former Google employees). Again, the word ‘Cuil’ menas nothing in English (actually it is the Gaelic word for both knowledge and hazel) and had little search volume until a website with it’s name was promoted. The difference bewteen Cuil and Facebook is that, as you can see on the bottom graph, Facebook has been talked constantly about in the media since its release.

For your own smaller sites to promote them you should:

- Release press releases to google news

- Post in forums to do with it’s niche

- Purchase high volume target banner ads with your name clearly on them

- Set up a blog where you can talk about your money site

- Purchase cheap local newspaper ads

- Tell everyone you know

In short: make people search for what you want them to.

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Okay, recently just transferred my blog to a new server. Please keep with me, I think it’s all set up now, but there may be some more down time. I’m planning some fresh new posts on design and SEO so stay tuned!

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For all the beginners out there these videos will help you understand how blogs, rss and twitter work in very simple form put in a video by guys at Commoncraft.com.
Blogs in plain english:

Read more…

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I have this coded CSS business template that I created a long time ago and as it has absolutely no use I decided to put it out maybe some of you will actually put it into use.

Rating: (2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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Type: Coded CSS/XHTML template.
Validation: Valid CSS. Valid HTML.
Preview: Click here
Download: Click here

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