How to start your own blog

"Creating a ‘killer’ blog is not that hard to understand … but it is hard to do.

1. Start with a great blog software.
2. Get a great design.
3. Produce great content."

See the rest of this post at Killersites.com

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Email Marketing Success

Internet marketers should try to get the e-mail address of the people visiting their site. Visitors who are not interested in what you're selling today may find something else that would interest them in the future.

Things you can do are:

- Offer a free report with valuable information
- Ask them to sign up for your newsletter
- Entice them with a free draw for a prize.

Once someone has signed up for something, you've got a valuable e-mail address that you can use to build your list of potential customers.

Each communication you make in future with prospective client should do two things:

• The e-mail needs to offer them something valuable otherwise they'll unsubscribe. Give information or tips or helpful information that will have that person anxious to open future emails from you.

• You need a call to action at the end which will entice them to do something you want after they close the email. This could be to visit your website with a handy link, sign up for another service, refer their friends to you or even offer a purchase link so they can buy what you're selling.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Corporate Writing Style

A company writing style will unify written communications and reflects corporate identity and brand awareness. To achieve a unified writing style, create a style-guide.

A style-guide is a booklet that lays down the 'rules' to be followed when writing corporate literature:
- Word, phrase and sentence usage,
- How to write brochures, technical manuals or ezines, etc.
- Common errors in grammar and syntax.

A well-thought out writing style-guide will ensure clarity and harmony in your corporate communications and reinforce corporate personality. It's just as important as your logo and visual imagery.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

How Leaving Comments On Blogs Can Drive Traffic to Yours

You’ve probably heard the age old ‘how to find readers for your blog’ advice that goes:
“Leave Comments on Other Blogs”
It is one of the first tips that's given on how to find new readers. See this video posted at problogger.net.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Drupal 6, a winner?

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.
The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

• Content Management Systems
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Drupal 6 has a lot of great additions like:

• Built in triggers: you can tell Drupal to do things when say for example someone post a comment.
• Better Forums: more features now.
• Drag-and-drop admin UI capabilities. It is easier to manage where things appear on your pages.
• Much faster than it was in previous versions.

You can get Drupal at: http://drupal.org/

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Video advertising and monetization

Last month, Google product managers and marketers held a workshop on video advertising and content monetization at the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco.

You can hear some perspectives on industry trends, some new details about AdSense for video, and the opportunities that Google is offering advertisers to get their messages in video content.

Trends in video consumption, habits, and the estimated market size for video advertising.

Robert Victor describes the evolving needs of buyers and sellers, and previews how Google and DoubleClick In-Stream can fill the gaps.

Detail about AdSense for video, describing the various formats and recent success stories

Tracy Chan describes the compelling opportunities for advertisers on YouTube

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Is Google page rank really that important?

Google page Rank is based on links between your web pages and other web pages.
You can see the page Rank of your website in the Google PageRank bar on the Google Toolbar.
It shows a numerical value of 0 to 10.

The higher your Google PageRank, the higher Google is likely to list you in the search engine results pages.

The higher the Page Rank, the more relevant other people will consider any particular page on your website to be.

The higher your Page Rank, the more people will want you to link to their website.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Dreamweaver Video Tutorials

For those of you learning web design, here are some "killer" video tutorials. Not much has changed since the initial release of Dreamweaver in 2004 ... especially when it comes to the basics.

So whether you are learning Dreamweaver MX or Dreamweaver CS3, you should find these videos useful.

Click here to go to Dreamweaver MX Video Tutorials

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Google alerts to keep up with your industry

As explained by Google: "Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic."

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams"

Of course, we care about "keeping current on a competitor or industry."

Each time Google finds a reference to the topic you request, it will be send you an email with all the new information it finds pertaining that topic.

It's fast and free. Google Alerts can do all the legwork for you and send you all the relevant new information in your industry.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Why do you have a website?

If you have a website, and are not so satisfied with the results it's giving you, you need to ask yourself a few things.

What kind of website do you have and what's its purpose?

Is your website a brochure, an e-commerce catalog, or a direct-mail-style pitch?

Do it has audio and video? Is it of professional quality?

Is your website over-optimized for the search engines, and baffles your visitors when they get there?

Beware of search engine tactics and second rate media that actually gets in the way of effectively delivering your marketing message,.

When telling your business story, and creating a memorable brand image, you need to be on target, and eliminate the noise.

Deliver your message and tell our story in a memorable manner to a motivated audience.

Do optimize your website for the search engines, but don't let that get in the way of your message.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Use a Sitemap file to give information about your website to Google

There are two types of sitemaps.

1. The common HTML site map page lists the pages of your site. It is meant to help visitors find the information they need on your website.
   
   
2. The XML Sitemap - usually called Sitemap with a capital S is a way for you to give Google information about your site.
   

Simply put, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website.
Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Read more about creating a Sitemap for your website and submitting it to Google here.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Understanding A.J.A.X.

Can't really understand what Ajax is?

A.J.A.X.'s name comes from:

A = Asynchronous (means "lets open another URL without changing or reloading the page)
J = Javascript
A = And
X = XML

Here is a simple, easy tutorial that explains what Ajax is and how to use it.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

New beta of Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie's announced this week that the company has ″decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default″ in the new beta of Internet Explorer 8. Read more here.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

YouTube To Add Live Video This Year

YouTube's founder, Steve Chen said they will be adding live video support this year.Videoblogger Sarah Meyers asked Chen about video blogging, in which he said:

2008. We'll do it this year. Live video is just something that we've always wanted to do, we've never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.

There are many sites that offer live video, and we all know Yahoo recently launched Yahoo Live, which does live streaming video as well. How might this stream into search? Well, Google has been seriously pushing video ads and this is just one more way to generate content to stick ads in - preferably contextually relevant ads.

Live video is just something that we've always wanted to do, we've never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.

Here is the video of his response:

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Web hosting

How do you get a website live on the web?

You will need a reliable web hosting company.
A web hosting company rent you space on its web servers. Web servers are computers that are connected to the Internet 24/7, and display your website to the world.

We recommend finding a company in your area, so they can be reached easily when you need to. For Miami web hosting, go here MiamiWebHosting.net

A good hosting company will make it easy for you to contact them. So an easy to find phone number and an email address is important.

Check out MiamiWebHosting.net for reliable web hosting.

To get your site on the Web, you also need to buy a domain name.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Web Design Software: Which One is Right for You?

Do you need help in determining the best web design software to use for your web design needs.
There are a lot of options and choices, and it can be hard to tell which web design software is best for you.

Questions to ask yourself in choosing a web design software:

1. What operating software do you use primarily for deb design?
The operating system is usually the first thing that people look at when they think about what Web Design software to buy. The two most commonly used OS's are Windows and Macintosh.

2. Does your editor have to have WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) capability?
It allows you to view your page as it will look on the internet as you are writing it, so you don't need to know HTML to edit your web pages.

3. Do you need a CSS stylesheets editor included in your web editor?
If your Web editor doesn't have a CSS editor built-in, you will need to edit your CSS by hand or use an external editor.

4. Do you plan to use this software for professional web design?
Professional web designers have more stringent needs for their Web design software. Professional web design software often costs more.

5. Do you need this program to edit graphics?
If you don't have a graphics software program already, you might want to consider a Web design software program or suite that includes graphics editing in the software.

6. Will you be editing server-side scripts like PHP, ASP, CFM, or JSP?
Server-side scripting languages allow you more functionality on your web pages. They include languages like PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, and JSP.

7. Do you need to set up database connectivity to your Web pages?
If you're looking to connect to a database, it can be very helpful if your Web design software has that connectivity already built right in.

8. How much are you willing to spend?
Price is always important, but remember that you often have to sacrifice features to get a lower price.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Wordtracker Free trial, why you should give it a try

Wordtracker was established to answer a fundamental question in the search engine industry:

"What are people searching for on the Web?"

Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.

Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.

Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. So if you're not getting enough traffic from your website, retarget your keywords with the help for Wordtracker.

Try Wordtracker for free here.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Digital Painting Gone Wild!

Check out this speed drawing and digital painting of Jack Bauer from the TV show 24. It was created using drawing tools and Photoshop. Artist is Nico Di Mattia.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Web design advice: promoting your website

Avoid these common mistakes when choosing keywords for your website promotion:

Too Many Keywords Per Group

Don't group all your keywords into one or two groups. Break them out to rank for more keywords combinations.

Not Specific Enough Keywords

Some broad and generic keywords can certainly push a ton of traffic to your site. But a user searching on one of these generic phrases is often doing research in an early part of the buying process. And this approach may not result in contact and/or sales in the end.

Not Going After Long Keywords

Instead of "mp3 player", use keywords like "sony mp3 player" and "sony 2GB S610 walkman video mp3 player". When consumers are doing research, they know what they want and are most likely looking to purchase.

Not Attracting Local Clients Through Geographic Targeting

If you draw most of your business from a local area, geo-target your keywords to your area. This will bring the local market to your doorstep on non-local keyword phrases. This can be hugely profitable.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

How to get people to link back to your website honestly

You’ve probably heard, Google is now "punishing" websites for having paid links, because they feel it's cheating the algorithm. Google favors sites that webmasters link to because they want to, not because they were paid to.

How do you get webmasters to link to your site?

It's very simple, give people something worth linking to. Would you link to your website's contents?
Be a resource for people in your field, offer advice, guidance, and good information. Put your website out there, join communities, blog for business, issue press releases,

The best way get better rankings for your website is by providing good information and good service. Don't try to cheat your way into good rankings. I will take a little time and effort, but you will have real, long lasting results.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Miami Web Design

Hi,

Great news! Our Miami Web Design Blog is back, giving you web design advice since 1999.

Welcome to our Miami Web Design Blog, where we post information on different web design related topics, and try to answer your questions.
We serve the Miami Florida area, but have many clients all over the US.

Whether you need a brand new web site, or you would like help with an existing site, you can count on our talent, creativity, dedication and attention to details.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com