By Emily VonSydow

One of the first deliverables in a website design project is the sitemap. This seemingly simple document, usually no more than a page in length, often causes a great deal of confusion. The sitemap is a critical piece of every website, so it's important to understand it.

The sitemap is the spine around which your website will be built. The sitemap dictates-or rather, it demonstrates-the navigational structure of your new website. Here's a breakdown of what the sitemap contains:

• Parent Pages: These are the pages that appear in the top-level navigation. The pages that appear in the navigation bar are those that your clients are most likely to be interested in. Remember, it's a hard fact of business that clients and prospectives care more about themselves than they do about you. Having one parent page about your company is good-having three relating only to you, not so good.
• Child Pages: These are the pages that belong "under" the parent pages. Sometimes a child page can have its own child page. Anything beyond a "grandchild" page is unadvisable, as it can make your website look messy. Make sure the child page is a good fit for the parent page. Putting your Team Bios under the Services page is a sure-fire way to confuse your visitors.
• Top Links: This is typically reserved for social media links. We won't discuss here the pros and cons of the various social networks. Suffice it to say that you should only post a link to social media accounts if you plan to update them regularly. A Facebook page that hasn't been updated since February 2010 is worse than not have a Facebook page at all.
• Bottom Links: These links are typically overlooked. They include pages like Privacy Policy or Legal. While you may think no one reads this information, it's important to include it nonetheless. Your visitors have a right to know what information (if any) you're collecting from them and how you're using it. A Privacy Policy is especially important if you have a contact form or an email newsletter sign-up.

Even if you aren't developing the website, it is just as important that you understand the purpose and value of the sitemap. Every website project should start with a sitemap. Without it, you risk your website becoming a wobbly, unstructured mess. When selecting a web designer be sure that a sitemap is included in the project plan.

Emily VonSydow, Project Manager at Bop Design Bop Design is a San Diego Web Design and Marketing Agency Bop Design is a boutique marketing communications firm. We express your business' values through branding, advertising, print design and custom web design and development. We also help attract your ideal customer through affordable seo services and search engine marketing. Our focus is on small businesses that want an external team of marketing specialists to help give their brand an edge in the marketplace.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Emily_VonSydow http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Sitemap:-The-Backbone-of-Your-Website-Design&id=6723961

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By Bob Pardue

Learning beginner web design is a pretty nice way to hone your skills in this area. Whether you plan on designing websites all on your own or you want to be a part of a company, learning beginner web design is the best way to increase your skills and progress at a much faster pace.

What most people don't seem to understand is exactly where they should actually learn: online or offline? This is a tough question to ask yourself, especially since both teach you the same things. So, learning about the different benefits and cons of each one could easily help you to decide which way is best for you.

� Benefits of online school

One of the main benefits to going online is the fact that you can easily take your classes from the comfort of your own home. So, instead of having to leave home every single day, you can learn from your computer and send in your work there.

I suggest having a good computer or laptop that can potentially handle the rigorous downloads on your computer, as most downloads just won't work on an ordinary netbook. Online schools are great to join, but the price can be a bit more expensive concerning the fact that it is more convenient than an ordinary traditional school.

� Benefits of going to a traditional school

When you go to an ordinary school, you'll learn everything that you will learn online, but instead of just learning from home, you'll get to meet other like-minded people who are also interested in the same things as you.

The truth is that ordinary school is hard to get to, especially when you realize that you'll have to leave home and possibly leave your kids everyday if you have any. Traditional school is great, but it's good to outweigh all of the possible cons as well.

� Making this your career

No matter what you decide to choose, it's important that you know how to make a career out of this once you finally finish off your training. You can work individually and possibly make your service known to several companies on your own if you'd like.

However, nothing beats working with a professional company who will provide for you a good salary. These people will probably pay you based off of your experience and education, so it's vital for you to have a good education to rely on to show your expertise in this field.

Learning beginner web design is very easy to do, but it's even easier to get jobs and make a good career as a web designer when you have lots of training under your belt.

Remember that an investment is going to be needed for your online tools and possibly for that new laptop if you need one, so don't take this too lightly. If it's something you really want to do, then you should really try to get started as soon as possible. The investment is surely going to be worth it once you start making a lot of money.

Find information about the ways for learning beginner web design by checking out webmastercourse.com.

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By Kevin K James

In other words a blog can be termed as a kind of website or a part of website that is regularly updated with new and fresh content. Often blogs are run by individual with regular updates in the form of commentary, news about events, sports, books, tips & tutorials, technical stuff and many more. Entries made to a blog are mostly displayed in a reverse chronological order. The content that is added to a blog is called blog post or entry and person that makes entries to a blog is the blogger.

Blogs are regarded as the fastest growing form of mass communication on the internet today. Following are the effective ways that should be implemented to create a good blog:

1. First of all, you need to carry out a research to find a good topic by looking at the other successful blogs. This will help you find out what your interests are and what you really want to write about. 2. Search and find out the blog sites that are related to keywords and topics that you have chosen and check out the features that attracted you to those web blogs. 3. Select a domain name for your blog which is relevant to the theme or the content of the blog. 4. Decide on a design for your blog keeping in mind that it should be fresh, easy to navigate internally and appealing to your target audience. Minimalist design is becoming more and more popular. It is advisable to design the blog according to your theme. Say you have a software technology blog, then you can have a computing or software oriented design. 5. Do a good research on relevant keywords for your blog, write some good post related those keywords and use those keywords in the content of the blog too. 6. While adding a post, remember to preview it to make sure no errors have been made and then confirm. Also remember to add relevant keywords to the post so that your blog is able to appear on major SERPs. 7. Share your posts on various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in order to make users read them. 8. Make a webmaster account on Google and Bing and track various user activities like traffic, page views, bounce rate, visit duration, etc. on webmaster tools like Google Analytics.

After the creation of the blog, it's most important that you write new article and publish them regularly on the website, especially if you are using that blog as a marketing tool. Blogging has become a vital part of business marketing for many software development companies and is also vital in bringing traffic to your site. Once there is a regular flow of visitors on your blog you can interact with them through commenting. Try to encourage users to post comments on your blog by your informative content and try to connect them and engage them in ongoing conversations, this make the site interesting.

If these tips are followed your blog will soon be very popular and lots of users will be engaging on it.

Kevin James is the author of this article. He has been demonstrating his writing skills by writing the articles for software technology blog like Q3 technologies from last two years. He also has a keen interest in writing stuff for software development companies related firms.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kevin_K_James http://EzineArticles.com/?Tips-for-Effective-Blogging&id=6749352

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By Lyka Winnett

As Google keeps pushing out algorithmic updates in its persistent and growing need to feed its users fresh and high-quality content, now more than ever, it has become "SEO life-threatening" important for webmasters, site owners, and professional SEOs and the like to fine-tune existing content and most significantly add new relevant quality content to their sites.

As one looks forward to the 2012 Panda-dominated world of SEO, one of the most essential methods that SEO Service providers should be looking at in order to build back links and generate traffic, as well as to capitalize on the web masters' need to have quality content regularly published on their websites, is guest blogging.

What is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging is the act of writing informative relevant content for another blog, provided that the website owner publishes the written content on their website.

It's commonly accepted ethical practice that site owners will accredit the content to the writer, who will usually include a short bio that is placed at the end of the guest post. Within this bio, the author is allowed to place a link back to his/her website, or several links, or even a back link from within the content of the article if the publisher deems it relevant and adds value to the content.

Guest-blogging is the best method for building or getting quality backlinks, generating traffic, gaining exposure, and building relationships.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging creates a mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationship as the blog owner benefits by getting free content and the site's audience is treated to diversity in content and in writing style while the author's needs of backlinks are attained.

Here are some of the benefits of guest blogging:

1. Gain Quality Traffic. By posting content to well-known blogs (guest blogging) in your niche, you'll have the opportunity to reach your target audience as most blogs have their own established subscribers who, via email or their RSS reader, receive all posts made on a blog, including yours. You can also have the chance to quickly increase the size of your audience.

2. FREE Advertising. Guest blogging provides free advertising for your blog as many website owners promote guest posts to their network in order to increase traffic.

3. Gain Subscribers. As most blogs have their own established subscribers who via email or their RSS reader receive all posts made on a blog, including yours, you will then have the opportunity to make these subscribers subscribes to your site.

4. Increased exposure. Through guest blogging, you will be open to a new audience. By posting guest articles several times at a particular relevant blog, this will increase your chances of readers clicking on your link. New blog visitors or readers may become your loyal subscribers.

5. Build Backlinks. As authors, you will be allowed to place backlink to your site at the end of your guest post, so in this way you can build your backlinks. This in turn will increase your rankings with search engines especially if you get backlink from relevant, quality websites.

6. Networking Opportunities. Make sure that the articles you posted on another site are fresh, relevant, and of high-quality. By doing this, blog owner may ask you to write guest posts for other websites he or she owns. Moreover, if you provide great posts, you'll build relationships in the blogging world which is very advantageous for your site.

Premium SEO Solutions is a professional SEO Company that provides ethical and result-oriented SEO Services.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lyka_Winnett


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By Paige Bailey

Starting a blog can be a difficult task, and getting people to subscribe can be even more difficult. But what if you have an established blog and your numbers just aren't growing, or worse yet, what if they are falling? Here are a few reasons why people may not be interested in your blog, and believe it or not I've seen blogs with all of these problems and they all had relatively low numbers of subscribers regardless of how great the topics may have been.

1. Writing style - Yes, your blog is your online space to be yourself, share your opinions, and be an expert on what you know. No, that does not mean that you can skip punctuation, leave out 'extra' letters, or abbreviate 'you' with 'u' or 'please' with 'plz.' You aren't writing a text message or a Twitter post and you generally don't have a limited number of characters.

2. Spelling and grammar - These are important. Regardless of your topics or posts, your followers won't see you as a thought leader or expert in anything if you don't take the time to spell check and edit your posts. It doesn't take long to edit a post, and not doing it could result in a loss of followers.

3. Topics - Blog categories and keywords are there to help organize your blogs and make them easy to use, but it also shows readers what areas you're knowledgeable in. If your list of categories is close to the number of blog posts you have, this could be a problem. Readers want to see that you really know about a few topics - not that you know a small amount about a lot of unrelated topics. Find a way to focus your categories.

4. Language - Is the level of understanding in your blog equivalent to the amount of education your readers have? Make sure your blogs aren't too simple or too difficult for you followers to understand. Remember, they are most likely coming to you because you know something they don't. Make sure to use language that helps them understand, but isn't so simple they aren't interested.

5. Frequency - It's good to have a schedule when you're posting. If subscribers don't know when to expect your next post or you have too much time between posts, people can become uninterested in your blog. If it's been several months between posts, then maybe you should rethink having a blog. You don't need to post every day, or even every week if you have a smaller blog, but frequency is important.

Paige Bailey
eImagine Technology Group
http://www.thinketg.com
IT solutions provider and Microsoft Certified Partner specializing in custom software, staff augmentation, and CRM.

We are dedicated to:

• Our employees growth and advancement
• Delivering technology solutions that help our clients work more efficiently and increase profitability
• Giving back to our communities

Click here to read our blog posts on similar topics.

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Author: Andrew

WordPress plugins can add much need functionality, else save you or your visitors time. From improving search engine optimisation, to making it easy to display photo galleries and much more besides, WordPress plugins are extremely useful.

Though it is all too easy to get carried away and install too many plugins. This can impact website performance, plus cause issues with WordPress automatic updates. However if you pick a small selection wisely, including those actively worked on, hopefully you reap the benefits of using WordPress plugins.

So I thought I would share with you, two hWordPress plugins that I find useful. These two plugins help with images and search engine optimisation.

NextGEN Gallery

I remember back in the day trying to use photos with websites was nothing but a pain. Sure I still optimise my images to this very day to load in quickly and help performance, but it is a different ball game when it comes to uploading multiple images.

Some people decide instead of bothering with a gallery, they will choose a small selection and then create articles that seem to scroll into the abyss, which after the first few photos I tend to leave, plus not incredible happy precious bandwidth was used loading those images.

Other times people will upload their images to flickr, then people are invited to leave the website to view the images. Anything that suggest people go elsewhere, rather than staying on a website, should be avoided, unless truly necessary.

So it is with much relief that I found the nifty NextGEN Gallery, a WordPress gallery plugin, that is incredibly easy to use, but has a lot going on under the hood. I must admit I only use a fraction of its capabilities, but it says me time, stops me from uploading my photos elsewhere and makes the viewing experience easier on website visitors.

What I do is optimise the images, to make sure they are not too large. Then I place them in a compressed archive, aka a zip file and then upload via the WordPress dashboard. The plugin then loads the data in, and gives me a tag, which I then insert into the page or post.

When the visitor visits the page or post they are presented with thumbnails, that when clicked open into a lightbox and they can either close the image, else continue to browse the gallery. I love this plugin!

YARPP

YARPP stands for Yet Another Related Post Plugin and again is pretty easy to use. Basically it covers off the headache of internal blog post linking. At the end of each blog post it will present a list of related posts. YARPP does the hard work of compiling the list and using the titles in the anchor text link. This means it contributes to my internal SEO strategy.

Plus hopefully it contributes to increasing visitor time on the website and the amount of posts each visitor views.

Article Source: http://www.articleclick.com/Article/WordPress-Plugins-that-I-find-useful/1954476

About the Author:

About the author: Andrew is a writer and passionate about SEO strategy.

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Increased technology has flooded the web with many marketers and bloggers. However, only those become successful who know the tricks of this trade.
Money making is not a difficult task but many people are still seen as struggling to earn their livelihood. You can easily earn your dream salary ONLY if you are aware of the possibilities of earning online!
In today's world, the fast paced technology has led people to believe that making money is a quick and easy task.



Even this is true; it is not so easy for someone who is new in this trade. In fact, specialists at online marketing also suffer from losses while trying to attract visitors to their websites. People due to a lack of awareness and proper methods fail to get success and suffer as a result. In the desire of increasing traffic on their blog, people put in so much effort and waste so much time but still face difficulties because they do not have the right ingredients to success unlike those smart and clever marketers who know the exact method of making their blogs appealing and tempting.



We plan to reveal to you that magic recipe! The right ingredients to get your blog a big hit!



For all those helpless and unsuccessful people who have been looking here and there for help, we present the WP slide In, a wordpress plugin, which fulfills all the requirements and ensures success for all the frustrated marketers out there.



WP Slide In is a list building tool used by marketers to capture the addresses of their visitors. These email ids can be used later on for marketing purposes. WP Slide Ins looks so attractive that viewers feel irresistible and end up filling out their information!



What is so special about WP Slide Ins and how to GET GUARANTEED SUCCESS?



• WP Slide Ins have a unique and creative design, it attracts, almost lures visitors to subscribe with the blog.

• Slide Ins are bright, striking and eye-grabbing! These colorful slides make it impossible for the visitor to avert their eyes from the packages provided by the marketer.

• Flexibility and customization options to alter the Slides according to the need of the blog. You can adopt a theme and can change the Slides accordingly to match your aesthetics.

• No limit to the number of Slides! Have more than one slide and easily capture the attention of your viewers.

• Make your slide appear from any direction. Be it from top, bottom, left or right WP Slide Ins allows you to choose your own sliding options.

• Pause, add, delete and edit any slide with complete ease! You can amend the slides at your own convenience without having to leave the admin page!

• LIMITED TIME BONUS OFFER!




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Avail this limited time offer to get two supplementary slides to start off immediately! The supplementary slides will give you're a quick start while you can experiment and explore the Slide options to make your own slides. Be creative and boost your page viewership by creating your personalized slides! All you have to do is: Download this plugin COMPLETELY FREE NOW to get BOMBARDED WITH VISITORS!

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Get hold of this One-in-all plugins! WPSubscriber is a word press plugin which is a complete package that any marketer would need to increase the number of subscribers on their page.



Now you don't need to install different plugins to attract the customers. Imagine what a relief that would be. One plugin would do all the work. With WPSubscriber you can create a popup page in which only your popup would be in focus and the rest of the page would be darkened, this allows the visitor to either cancel your page or join it. Moreover, you can also choose any area of the page, the top or the bottom, in which you want your popup to appear, so that the visitors do not get annoyed by the popups appearing in their face.



Make life easy for your visitors!



WPSubscriber allows them to join your page in a very fast and easy way. You can get a lot of subscribers by just putting up a subscribe box in your posts and by making it visible anywhere you want on your WordPress page.



Why make subscribing so complicated for people who already comment on your blog actively! By providing a tick box for subscription, you can allow your regular readers to subscribe quickly. This is the best way of increasing your list.



Also attach a 'subscribe box' with a sweet request. If your readers like you and read your articles, the best way to use their loyalty is to make them subscribe, a pleading request with the right text is all that you need.



Use your Subscribe Box smartly! Put your box where it becomes compulsory for readers to subscribe. For example: The first half document could be given for free and the second half document could be made free only for subscribers! This would obviously get many people to subscribe because subscribing is preferred over the cost of reading the article.



Moreover, you can use the Pop Up flight option which serves as a hyperlink to take the visitor to any specific URL. Use this 'exit' option to take your subscribers to their pages of interest.



There's so much more available with this Plug-In that it is almost unbelievable!



Get all these Additional Features:



• Referral system for your subscribers: Give points to those subscribers who refer others to your blog. These loyal subscribers can be awarded points which can later be redeemed.



• Headers with beautiful and bright images to attract the attentions of your readers.



• Add a timer on your page! If you are offering something for a very limited time then you can emphasize this by adding a timer on your page. It will show the number of hours left for that offer to be availed.



• Footers to remind members to subscribe with catchy texts and templates.



• Update, customize and maintain your page as you want! This is the ideal 'ALL in One' Plug-in that will let you do whatever you can think of to attract subscribers.



• It works with all browsers and any opt-in email marketing service.



• The best feature is to automatically capture your visitors email address and name to make it easier for them to fill in the subscribers' box!



• Get a pop up on hidden content so that your visitors are forced to subscribe.



• Last but not the least, it allows subscribers to add themselves from popular social networking sites such as facebook which makes it very convenient for the subscribers allowing them to quickly subscribe themselves.

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Get your plug-in now or you'll end up paying a much greater cost by having to add different plugins for different purposes!

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