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Web Design Wednesdays
Published by: on 04-09-2014
Every once in a while I come across other articles - usually under the Top "x" number of items to insert into your website. Today I found one such article and it adds a few more items to the list.
http://timmilesandco.com/top-40-website-fundamentals-small-business/
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http://timmilesandco.com/top-40-website-fundamentals-small-business/
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Published by: on 12-19-2013
Here are instructions to set up a Google Authorship profile.
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Published by: on 10-24-2013
Current Situation: Client has a website and their email is not being managed by their hosting company. This means they are using a 3rd party email hosting company.
Problem: When someone fills out the contact form on the website, the email confirmation that is being sent to the client's email at its own domain, is not arriving. (Sorry for the convoluted English but it's a tough problem to write out). So the example is HeartworksIntervention.com wants email confirms to go to someone with an email @heartworksintervention.com and the emails are just not showing up in their POP account. To be clear, the email confirmations to the customer's email address are arriving.
Solution: Below we are presenting how this problem can be solved if you are hosting with a CPANEL based server platform. The 3 screenshots below highlight the steps taken to simply add an MX record to the hosting account which tells the server what it needs to know to send the confirmations to the client's email accounts that have the same name as the domain.
First step is to login to CPANEL and get to the DNS Zone area.
This is where you access the DNS Zone which gives you access to the MX record settings inside CPANEL
This is what you set the MX record to be for the client's domain:
Published by: on 07-03-2013
Published by: on 12-19-2012
With the steady rise in sales of smartphones and tablets, we have noticed a rising trend in requests to design websites that are compatible with these different platforms. 2012 has been a year where we have been introduced to countless new laptops, smartphones and tablets, which each carry their own different screen sizes and resolutions. Why separately design a website for each different screen, when you can design a site that has the ability to instantly adapt to these different devices. The traditional method of website design for each separate platform may soon become a thing of the past with the introduction of Responsive Web Design (RWD).
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Published by: on 10-17-2012
It seems like there are almost no new ideas in webdesign, just old ideas fit into a new more modern concept. This could not be more true for the latest trend that's going to take web site design by storm in 2013, parallax scrolling.
So what is parallax scrolling? Basically, its using the scrolling motion you use when you vertically search on a site to create animated imagery. Back in the beginning days of video games, designers would use this technique to give games a more 3-d effect. Now, web site designers are using it to make sites more interactive and eye appealing than ever before. Here are some great examples of parallax scrolling we've seen on the web:
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Published by: on 09-26-2012
The gang at LADezign found a great article by Micah Buchdahl titled, "Lead Generation for Lawyers: Converting Visitors Into Clients". This post reflects on an issue a lot of businesses, especially law firms: How to track visitors on your site and help turn them into clients? This is a complicated issue, but Buchdahl has a great approach.
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Published by: on 09-12-2012
The team at LADezign has been on a mission to find out what it takes to create the best infographic. Infographics can have a huge impact on your company and site, but in order to have it give your site a good boost in rankings, it has to be good. So what does it take to make a great infographic? Here are our thoughts.
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Published by: on 08-29-2012
This is a fun tool for anybody looking to design or assist in designing their site when we may not have Photoshop at the ready (or even when we do).
ColorZilla is a color picker that can be used for small or large purposes. In its simplest form, ColorZilla is an eyedropper tool that you can use on any page you're on. It can identify any pixel color, analyze it, and load it into a personal palette for your needs. This is a great tool for designers and website owners to use together, be cause it doesn't require design software. So instead of asking for a "salmon-y" color for your new products page background and having your designer use the wrong kind of "salmon-y", you can actually have the exact color ready in your own stored palette.
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Published by: on 08-22-2012
We've discussed the importance of the right typography on LADezign before and with good reason. The right font can make an old site look modern, and a good site look better than the rest. Not only that, typography can help reinforce the branding of a site to a customer and help spread visibility in a professional community. But who has time to learn and re-learn the ever changing trends and ideas behind good typography? With the new Typography Manual app, no one has too.
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Published by: on 08-15-2012
Out of all the newest design developments we've seen at LADezign, some of the most entertaining come from apps. Apps are universally liked like companies and mobile users, because they provide a simplified, and often delightful, way to keep up with a company and/or organization's news.
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Published by: on 08-08-2012
We've spoken about the importance of making your site accessible to mobile users before. Mobile is in, desktops are out. The faster you adjust your site to fit the needs of mobile viewers, the less likely your site will be left behind. Here are two trends in mobile web designs.
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Published by: on 08-01-2012
A sign of a well done web design is one that is never permanent. Online businesses should always be on top of the newest advances in design technology, but changing your design for the sake of changing it isn't a good idea either. So what are some changes that will make viewers and customers see your site in a new light? We look at a few modern ideas to get your website into 2012.
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Published by: on 05-23-2012
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a bad typeface can ruin an entire website design. Typography used to be a fascination of only the few, but now more and more designers and CEOs are jumping on the bandwagon. It has become a vital part of the web design process, and the sooner online companies structure their typeface branding, the better. Here are a few tips and tricks to finding and harmonizing your website's typeface.
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Published by: on 04-11-2012
How do you infuse the images on your website with the worth of a thousand words? The various photo-sharing and editing programs and software make it possible to customize, embellish, and tweak your photos to enhance the uniqueness of your brand's online image. As my Los Angeles website design team often shows me, you can make things pretty ornate with some of these fancy tools, but sometimes the simplest (and thankfully easiest) tricks and solutions are the best to suit your needs, hence the explosive popularity of the photo-sharing app, Instagram.
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Published by: on 04-04-2012
What are the basic benefits of a Google+ business page? Google+ is the new social network recently launched by the search engine giant. Building a business profile on Google+ will help small businesses develop their customer "circles." drive traffic to their websites and promote their brand.
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Published by: on 03-28-2012
How long does it take you to check your website's various individual social media accounts? Nowadays, a company's online presence cannot live on a main site alone. It's necessary to reach out to your prospective clients and start dialogues through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites and applications that help increase visibility. Consequently, checking, updating, and moderating these accounts goes hand in hand with your website optimization, which can eat up valuable time. Instead, consolidate your social media into one inbox with Notification Control.
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Published by: on 03-14-2012
How do you create headlines that catch users' eyes but don't blind them to essential information by making everything big and bold? After all, depending on how much information needs to be included it is easy to make a headline that comes out looking crammed and "busy," and I've helped more than a few of my Los Angeles website design clients with balancing and adjusting the size and amount of text on their home and inner pages to make an impression and still successfully convey messaging.
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Published by: on 03-07-2012
Aside from implementing user-minded navigation, text, graphics, and other elements of your homepage, how else can you ensure that your website is not only enticing and functional, but accessible to each and every one of your users? This is tricky as you cannot put yourself behind the computer and browser of each individual user that visits your site. Some will be using a brand new top-of-the-line laptop with high-speed wireless and all the latest flash players and plugins. Others might be accessing your site through a clunky eight-year-old desktop through a dial-up connection. Your users' browsing circumstances are out of your hands, but with deCSS3 you and your webmasters can have a much clearer picture of everything will load and look.
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Published by: on 02-29-2012
Webmasters and designers, how do you stay current on the multitude of new developments, tools, and tactics in your constantly growing field? Aside from this blog, I mean. In the current Google economy when nearly every individual and business either wants a website created or improved, there is no such thing as doing too much homework to stay at the top of your game and entice prospective clients with your knowledge of the latest and most effective design and content management concepts. Thus, Dolody needs to be added to your reader today.
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Published by: on 02-15-2012
Is your company site or blog displaying an excess of ads, or if you don't accept them does any of your content have the appearance of advertisements? This is important as too many flashy ads, or navigation tools that look like them, can not only put off visitors, it can affect the way their eyes travel across your pages and cause them to miss the content that could lead them to the product or service of yours that would meet their needs. If you look at a few of the homepages of my Los Angeles website design clients, you won't notice any flashing boxes
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Published by: on 02-01-2012
So your website's written content is now thoughtfully composed, geared towards SEO, and resizable; are we forgetting anything else? Think about how you read informational content on a website. You don't really read it, do you? You scan it for the most concrete details relevant to what you want or need. If your text is not conducive to being scanned, then you might be inadvertently feeding your bounce rates by frustrating prospective clients who are pressed for time and getting headaches from sifting through huge chunks of writing. I'll explain.
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Published by: on 01-26-2012
Do you make your website�s features adaptable to the needs of your prospective clients, or do you assume they will make the effort to adapt to you? For Los Angeles website design and business owners alike, optimizing a site for usability can be difficult when it comes to the look and feel of your vision versus what will best accommodate the full spectrum of your users.
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Published by: on 01-18-2012
Aside from "click misery," what other site navigation issues can plague users? There are numerous features and programs that served the now dwindling printed world well that are not carrying over to the Google world as smoothly, and the presence of PDF's on websites is one of them. You'll notice that no portion of my Los Angeles website design site presents you with a PDF file, and that is because my team and I are aware that if it did it would inspire lots of eye rolls, groans, and bounces. Yet, there are still quite a few websites that employ these files, often in excess.
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Published by: on 01-11-2012
Want to gauge your site's usability for first-time visitors? An easy way to do this is to put yourself in their shoes and spend a few minutes playing around with your search function. Look up various products, services, or content you offer with slight variations in spelling or search terms. How accurate are the results that come up and how many attempts did it take to pull up what you were looking for, if it came up at all? If it took several tries, you may want to assess the search capabilities you offer your prospective clients within your site or risk a significant bounce rate.
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Published by: on 01-04-2012
Do you ever venture somewhere and get the instant feeling you've been there before? This can happen online when we click on a website or inner page we've previously visited because nothing made it apparent we'd been there before, thus causing us frustration and eating up valuable time. And as you'll notice if you look at any of my Los Angeles website design clients' retuned sites, my team produces navigation that saves users' browsing time instead of wasting it.
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Published by: on 12-14-2011
Just as it can be helpful to learn from the errors of other webmasters and designers like those whose sites were featured last Web Design Wednesday, it can be just as informative and inspiring to look through sites that are doing things right. A brand's online presence doesn�t necessarily have to offer a multitude of top-of-the-line functions and features; it might just offer a single solution that works especially well. Such is the case with many of the websites that made the cut for Digital Inspiration's 101 Most Useful Websites
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Published by: on 12-07-2011
Which website problems stand out the most to you? The answer to this question can differ from user to user depending on their patience, online browsing prowess, and technical knowledge of how a highly functional and optimized site should load, look, and run. Yet one thing remains certain: in terms of user feedback and observations, no webmaster ever learned anything from a compliment, which is why this Web Design Wednesday encourages business owners and designers alike to spend some time looking through a helpful site called Problem Websites.
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Published by: on 11-30-2011
While it's important for a site to look polished and visually pleasing, aesthetic features should never be added at the expense of usability or your SEO campaign. There�s no use in making your pages attractive if their functionality is significantly impaired. From image resizing to simple but eye-catching calls to actions, I�ve helped many of my Los Angeles website clients find a balance of professionalism and flair. Many inquire how the placement of their Flash files (vector graphics, animation, gradients, etc.) fits into this picture. Oftentimes, it doesn�t, and I can give you a few reasons why.
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Published by: on 11-16-2011
Have you taken a peek at how your website loads, looks, and functions when viewed on a mobile phone? Many business owners doing so for the first time experience a rather rude awakening, and immediately appreciate the growing necessity of having a mobile-optimized version of a company website, which marketers indicate 64% of companies now do.
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Published by: on 11-09-2011
How do you tackle having to correct, sharpen, or otherwise edit massive numbers of images? For even the most expert Photoshop user, such a process can consume valuable time and resources. If you or your designers are spending hours making the same repetitious adjustments to hundreds of image files, this Web Design Wednesday has a helpful tip for making the process much faster and easier: automating your Photoshop actions.
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Published by: on 11-02-2011
In yesterday's Traffic Tuesday post, we pointed out that creating Youtube videos is an excellent way to enhance your SEO success and to connect with your prospective clients. While this point is a given for many business owners, the finer points of making their videos valuable to users and effective in increasing conversion rates are not always so obvious, to the point that entire consultancies like Paul Bryan's Usography have been created. Bryan, who has been designing websites since 1995, offers some tips on how to optimize user experience or "UX."
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Published by: on 10-26-2011
Is an overload of content on your homepage obscuring the key messaging of your business website?
While there exist plenty of functional and eye-catching features, your own site doesn�t necessarily need to employ them all at once.
In fact, the purpose of this Web Design Wednesday is to explain why you should take care to do the opposite if you want a homepage that really does its job.
Ask yourself this question: "How many people land on your website for the first time and start running for the hills without leaving you their forwarding address?"
Tim Ash, CEO of Sitetuners, a landing page optimization and conversion consulting company, elaborates on a commonplace problem on many company websites in answering this fundamental question.
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Published by: on 10-19-2011
On many a Web Design Wednesday we have stressed the importance of having a website that not only looks appealing but offers optimal usability. Like I emphasize to all of my Los Angeles web design clients, representing your brand with an inviting and user friendly website is not only valuable for catching the attention of prospective clients, but also for interacting with and retaining existing ones. You will likely find users turning to your site not only to check out your blog and updated products or services, but also to seek customer assistance.
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Published by: on 10-12-2011
Tonight at sunset begins the annual Jewish Festival of the Harvest, Sukkot, when we traditionally come together to construct a thatched booth, or Sukkah, in our backyards and then share a meal under its roof. The purpose of this holiday is not only to commemorate the Israelites' desert exodus from Egypt, but to remove ourselves from our typical surroundings and be moved to reconsider the true sources of our joys. At one time or another, we each get a little fixated on the black-and-white, surface level definitions of goodness and quality, and end up neglecting the valuable details within both our personal and professional lives.
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Published by: on 10-05-2011
How Credible Is Your Website?
In nearly every prior Web Design Wednesday blog post, we�ve discussed how the topical feature or suggestion would serve the underlying purpose of building your online credibility.
Cultivating the credibility of your website is important because in the current age, the online image of your company will be the most prominent and easily accessible representation of you available to prospective customers. Not only do their initial impressions of your website matter, but also the ways in which they perceive and respond to it long term, because this ultimately makes the difference between your enterprise establishing itself as a leader or getting passed over for competitors.
In fact, you may even find yourself questioning the various tips we share in this Los Angeles website design blog every week and wondering how credible and effective they actually are.
If you�re still finding yourself a little skeptical of my own words, take a look ...
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Published by: on 09-28-2011
We've all heard the adage, "Nobody ever learned anything from a compliment."
Well, this can also apply to determining how to optimize your business website.
One of the most helpful ways to avoid web design mistakes is to recall your own visits to sites that already made them and ended up putting you through a less than convenient browsing experience you don't want your own visitors to endure.
As we have discussed on several other Web Design Wednesdays, making your online presence user-friendly is all about putting yourself in your users' shoes and behind their cursors. I know one basic detail- or lack thereof- that really gets under my skin is the absence of a HOME tab.
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Published by: on 09-21-2011
Have You Ever Thought About What Keeps You Interested in A Website You Are Browsing?
Put in another way, what content really helps to sell you on a provider or seller�s quality?
For me, a big factor in what makes me go from a browser to a buyer is an indication that a company has not only worked with but satisfied and even impressed other clients with circumstances similar to mine.
As we�ve discussed in multiple previous blog posts, when a prospective customer visits your homepage, you�ve got a very brief window in which to catch a viewer's attention and demonstrate your value and relevance to their needs.
An excellent way to slip under their radar and still achieve this goal is by displaying ....
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Published by: on 09-14-2011
If you have used the internet you have probably had the experience of clicking on a link and being greeted with an error or redirection message categorized by a three-digit code, the most common being 404 (meaning the site no longer exists), 302 (meaning the site has been moved temporarily), or 301 (meaning the site has been permanently redirected).
The last of these codes is especially important- and noteworthy for Web Design Wednesday- because moving your site or changing its domain carelessly can cost you both users and search engine ranking.
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Published by: on 09-07-2011
If you have TEXT on your website, read this blog post and don't even consider forgetting it. And as Dr. Oz just wrote, this sentence it followed with a period and then a paragraph.
Seriously don't forget what you are about to read because the free website I am referencing is mind-blowing. I won't even steal an image of something graphically mindblowing because this blog post is about text, let it convey the message with text (just conveniently ignore the image of the website).
Updating and adding new written content to your website can be a complex and time-consuming process, even if you are just making minor changes to your web copy.
It is important not only to proofread written content for accuracy and professionalism, but to select just the right font to make the text updates consistent with the rest of your site.
Web Designers will go crazy with what i am about to share.
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Published by: on 08-31-2011
OK. So It's Time to Hire a Website Designer.
Should be pretty easy.
Right?
Not exactly.
Just because there are more website design companies than $.25 cent corner lemonade stands does not mean they are qualified to do the job you need for the market you serve.
Finding an optimal website design firm takes a bit of leg work - even though there are really good ways to cut down the time.
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Published by: on 08-24-2011
How Safe is Your Website?
Both your website and business can sustain irreparable damage from hacking or content that was not meant to be published.
The search engine world of Google, Bing, and Yahoo moves very quickly so if there is incorrect, outdated, or mistakenly published content from your site that you want to keep from being indexed, you need to move quickly before both current and prospective customers spread negative word of mouth about your brand.
In cases like these, the Google URL Removal Tool can be especially helpful.
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Published by: on 07-06-2011
How Successful is Your Website at Connecting with its Audience?
When you think about the potential of a website to inspire a customer to reach out and touch you, it's critically necessary to ensure you have compelling "touch points" to enable a customer to feel that at least it will be easy to make that connection.
In our 22 Step web site design and conversion assessment process, we spend a lot of time with clients trying to uncover different ways of helping them design a website that connects with potential and prospective customers.
Essentially, any business with a presence online would agree that you want to foster connection points to your targeted customers any way you can.
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Published by: on 06-29-2011
Welcome to our first WebDesign Wednesday where we tackle the issues that hurt websites and drag down their performance.
Today�s issue is about �content creep�.
How often do you look at a webpage trying to find the information you need?
And how often do you fail to find it because the page just looks too busy.
We call this �content creep�.
And many websites inadvertently suffer from it.
And so do their sales and leads.
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Published by: on 01-11-2011
Coming up with a memorable logo and catchy slogan when doing the website design for MagMall, my business magazine subscriptions service, was a critical step to take in the visual and verbal positioning of my brand.
The explosion of online businesses has made it very difficult for any entrepreneur to make his or her messaging really pop to his or her targeted audience. The right logo with the right slogan can enable instantaneous communication and brand recognition. The most powerful examples of this kind of success are Avis (we try harder) or Amazon (earth's bookstore) but for a younger company like mine I knew I had to start building my brand with some basic and fundamental tactics.
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Latest Blog Posts
- Top 40 Website Design Fundamentals
- Set up a Google Authorship profile
- How to configure cpanel and mx records to send email confirmations
- "The ‘Big Tall Sandwich’: A Recipe For Winning Online"
- Responsive Web Design: The Future of Website Design or Simply a Trend?
- Web Design Trend Back In Style: Parallax Scrolling
- On Client Conversion and Visitor Tracking
- What Makes An Infographic Great?
- Make The Web Your Palette With ColorZilla
- The Typography Manual and You
- Create A Win-Win Strategy With Your App
- Two New Trends In Website Design
- What Should You Integrate Into Your Web Design?
- Choose Your Web Design Typeface Well
- Storywheel Spins a Telling Tale for Photo-Sharing
- 10 Ways a Google Plus Website Will Help Your Small Business
- Click 50 Times or Just Once with Notification Control
- Make Headlines Smart, Sleek, and Strong Headlines with SlabText
- Preview and Prepare for Design Degradation with deCSS3
- Do Your Weekly Web Design Homework with Dolody
- Don't Let Ads Blind Users to Your Messaging
- Scannable Text is User-Optimized Text
- Enable Resizable Text and Reduce Bounce Rates
- Prevent PDF Shock in Your Site's Navigation
- Simplify, Simplify When It Comes to Search Functions
- Don't Make Users Retrace Their Steps: Change Visited Link Color
- What We Can Learn from Digital Inspiration's Usability Wall of Fame
- Avoid Design Mistakes by Browsing the Website Wall of Shame
- To Flash or Not to Flash
- Optimize Your Online Presence for Mobile Web Users
- Automate Your Photoshop Actions and Speed Up Image Editing
- Why UX is the Crux of Your E-Commerce Web Videos
- Tim Ash Explains the Tragedy of Content Commons
- What Customer Service Tools Does Your Website Offer?
- A Special Web Design Wednesday: Taking a Step Outside Our Walls
- Stanford University Studies The Top 10 Rules for Website Credibility
- Always Offer Your Users a Simple Way 'Home'
- Customer Testimonials Make a Case for Your Brand Quality
- Retain Your Website Users and Rankings with 301 Redirects
- Test Website Fonts with this Fantastic Free Website
- So It's Time to Hire a Website Design Agency, Right?
- Use Google URL Removal Tool for Problematic Pages
- Put Your Business on the Map ... the Google Map, That Is
- Turn Bouncers into Pouncers with Drop Down Navigation Menus
- Logo With Targeted Branding Slogan Appeals to Magazine Subscribers (#2) - MagMall.com Seo Resources
- What is SEO?
- Frequent SEO questions
- Optimization checklist
- Why we're good at SEO
- Web design tips Seo Case Studies
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