http://www.timous.com/ Learn about new technologies and methods, along with news about web design from Timous Design. 2008 Timous Design, All Rights Reserved Wed, 14 Nov 2007 Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:52:21 -0400 http://www.timous.com/en-us/images/top.jpg http://www.timous.com A constant trend is to overdo websites. What people need for their professional websites is a simple, clean design that simply points the user where they should go. When people start to add lots of color and flashy graphics is when the visitor gets confused and starts to become afraid of the page. For example, when you enter someone’s home, do you prefer it to be very clean, with neutral colors and a few accents or do you like it to be very colorful with stuff covering everything and a very cluttered looking? The same is true for your website. Don’t let it get cluttered, keep it simple. http://www.timous.com Wed, 09 Apr 2008 Many starting internet business get caught up in the idea that the more incoming links the better. The reality is that you can have a million incoming links and still have poor search engines rankings. The goal is to get a many high quality sites linking to yours. Blogs, forums, and other social sites can enhance your ranking. Truly getting your rank up requires time and effort. Don’t fall for instant success or that quantity is key; always strive for quality links and quality content, the rest will take care of itself. http://www.timous.com Thu, 20 Mar 2008 One tool that didn’t exist when I started web design is an amazing site called YouTube. YouTube has tons of tutorials on it that can help you learn web design and how a website can help your website. The web has grown much since its infancy and for what I had to pay hundreds of dollars, you can now get for free. Take a few minutes and checkout the information of YouTube and you will be amazed. http://www.timous.com Wed, 19 Mar 2008 The one thing people don’t realize is that it takes time for a website to gain credibility. One thing to do is to start today and build up your website. One thing is to get as many links to your site as possible. Again it takes time to build quality links. If you are starting a new internet business, don’t rely on organic search results to drive traffic to your website. Try to find creative ways initially to get the visitors you need to your site. Creativity can be the way your site makes it on top. http://www.timous.com Tue, 18 Mar 2008 Many web designers are too interested in turning out websites as quickly as possible. The problem that they seem to miss is the use of good and consistent color schemes throughout their website. Here are some tips for choosing a color scheme for your website. 1. Choose colors that fit with your brand identity. If you already have a logo designed, you have a color scheme chosen. 2. White on yellow? Make sure that your background and your text color contrast enough to make it easily readable. 3. If you are using background images, make sure that text properly aligns with the images. Don’t allow the text to overlap borders. 4. Minimize your use of harsh colors such as reds, oranges, and yellows. Use these colors as accents, not main colors. 5. When choosing font colors, choose colors that are pleasing to the eye. This will help users be more willing to read your content. Choosing a color scheme is important in designing a quality and effective site. If you are uneasy about a color scheme, walk away from your site for a week. After a week, look at your site again. Any major visual issues will appear hear. http://www.timous.com Mon, 17 Mar 2008 A major pitfall of starting websites is that they want to have a huge site to start off. The problem is that it takes a lot of work to start a site. Do you think Yahoo!, Adobe, Microsoft started off as big as they are now? Of course not. Not only would it be extremely time consuming, but it would also cost a small fortune. I recommend the following to keep your site small, manageable and effective. 1. Start off with a theme to your site. 2. Stick to offering one or two products or services. 3. Start with 5 or so pages. 4. Make the navigation throughout the site simple and consistent. 5. Don’t crowd the pages with content. If you have that much content, add another page. 6. Make sure all the content makes sense to a 5th grader. Explain complex ideas. 7. Don’t stop editing your site after you deploy it. No site is perfect and all need to be continually updated. When planning a successful web presence, you should think big, but start small. http://www.timous.com Sun, 16 Mar 2008 A great problem with the internet is that too many people mistake it for instant. While most transactions and communications happen almost instantly, most of the web takes a while to update and refresh. It is not a “get rich quick” place. Having a successful website takes patience, time, and a lot of work. To be successful you need to do the following: • Get a quality, effective website up. • Keep your content updated and fresh. • Establish trust in online communities. • Get quality incoming links. • Be patient. • Continually work to better your web presence. • Don’t ever be fooled by "instant success" schemes. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than having instant success on the internet. It all comes back to wealth does not come quickly, neither does internet success. http://www.timous.com Sat, 15 Mar 2008 One of the main problems people face when creating a website is creating an extraordinary look. Many businesses go to great lengths and great expenses to create the WOW! factor on their site. The issue with this is that after visitors hit the WOW! factor, it gets old and they start to focus on the actual site content. If the business has resourced its majority of resources in creating a WOW! factor, then they will lack the content necessary to convert visitors to customers. When designing a site, remember that a good quality site with good content is a priority over the WOW! factor. http://www.timous.com Fri, 14 Mar 2008 One of the most important things for business over the internet is to keep your website fresh and up-to-date. If you keep your site static, your rankings will drop and visitors will stop coming to your site. One way to keep your site fresh is to add a blog. A blog can allow you to easily add thoughts and articles about your business. Another thing you can do is to add a CMS (Content Management System) which allows you to add news and other content to your site easily without having to know web design. The important thing is to always update your site. http://www.timous.com Thu, 13 Mar 2008 A common mistake of many businesses is to depend on the “fluff” that many companies use to lure you into buying expenses SEO services. The problem with this is that (1) search engine rankings cannot be guaranteed and (2) many times their service can be damaging to your website. There are two things you need to do in order to get good rankings. The first is content. The more quality content you have and the more frequently updated it is, the higher your ranking will be. The second factor is the number of quality sites that link to yours. This is a challenging part of Search Engine Optimization. For a high ranking site, you need to add new content to your site daily and find quality sites to link to your site. This is a daily process. Your site won’t become number 1 instantly, but overtime your rank will increase. http://www.timous.com Wed, 12 Mar 2008 A main problem with the widely popular Flash content on the web is the inflexibility it has in web pages. It cannot be easily manipulated to fit changing designs and search engines can’t read it. One thing that I like to do is use a script to display alternative content if the user does not have Flash installed. This allows the search engines to get keyword rich content and the user to have a stunning flash animation. http://www.timous.com Tue, 11 Mar 2008