Mystic Liquid

It’s Valentine’s Day and the love is all around. With said, I would like to let everyone know that we love building websites and SEO. We wake up the morning and think about what great ideas we can try today and it fills our hearts with that anxious feeling you get staring into the eyes of someone you care about….ok, maybe not that much!

All over-dramatics aside, we do enjoy creating websites for Scranton small businesses as well as enjoy the fact we are the leader in the Scranton SEO field but it didn’t happen overnight. Learning about the different intricacies of website design and better yet all the different theories behind search engine optimization is a large task. The trick is knowing where to look. Here are a few posts that I read over the past few days I found extremely helpful. I hope you do to.

Search Engine Land has a fantastic write up on why they love small business SEO.

Lisa at Bruce Clay wrote an informative piece on 6 easy steps of SEO.

Aaron Wall has a video explaining why business owners need to start blogging immediately.

Brian Clark at Copyblogger has another great post on writing innovative and interactive content.

I hope you have a wonderful Valentine’s Day and give that special someone a day to remember.

Being a successful web designer has a lot to do with the way you work. It’s true you can learn the basics of it but everything else is up to you and it never hurts to learn a few new tricks.

Here are a few different pieces of advice to help you make the most of your talents from our expert website design and development team:

• Join design forums – Many people who design websites work from home or sit on their computer all day kind of like what I’m doing right now. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to anyone else. The best thing to do is to talk to other people in your field. Website design forums are the perfect opportunity to do that. You’ll be pleasantly surprised with how many talented people out there willing to talk about design ideas and helpful hints.
• Know the latest tech news – The last thing you want to happen is be in a meeting with a client and they know more about the latest in industry news than you. You instantly lose all credibility. Never fall behind the times with both design and technology. You also don’t want to follow every new fad out there. Keep up to date but also stick with what works well for you.
• Simplify – Trying to keep everything simple is a fine line to walk. You don’t want to seem like you’re not working your hardest and also nothing in life is simple, especially in this industry. Try not to complicate and distort your original message by throwing too much busy things on the site. For example, if a client wants a site with a lot of complex visual elements, keep the colors simple, and vice versa.
• Experience is everything – As with any field, the longer you work at it, the better and more experienced you become. The longer you have worked in the field of web design, the more experience you have compared to someone else. Spend extra time learning the applications you use the most to speed up your production, increasing your efficiency and developing more knowledge on their feature sets.
• Use a pen and paper – More and more designers forget about this useful tool of times gone by. Little do they realize, it can be their best friend. Before you sit at your computer desk, spend some time sketching out a few images and then scan them into your computer. Now you can upload it into Photoshop and play with it from there. This idea of drawing out a site design by hand can help build a more organic look and original feel to your work.
• Learn more – You can never know too much. Spend the time to read books on the subject of design, Photoshop, or computer programming. Most of the manufacturer websites of the programs you use can also give you invaluable advice on tricks you may not have known about. For example, when I knew that I would be working in Flash, the first thing I did was go out and buy two books on the subject.
• Use texture – Add hand made gestures to the site by bringing texture to the work. This gives pieces of the site a more organic and warm feel. Don’t overdo it or your visitors might miss your intended message.
• Go into the shade – Enhance the look and feel of the site by adding a few shadows and darker areas. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how a few small touches will create a flow in to the design. If you plan on using vectors, shades bring a little smoothness to an otherwise sharp composition.

The last piece of information I want to leave you with is this – Design and graphics do not sell your products, words do. Carefully crafted content can persuade a customer to make a purchase more than the flashy graphics produced by any web design software. Only use graphics when they are necessary to communicate something not possible with words alone.