PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

A lot of people can recognize good design when they see it on the web. But most people don’t really know what makes that design good.

How do you define “good design?” Is it subjective, like your favorite flavor of ice cream? Although there is some subjectivity within good design, there are artistic principles that good design is built from. Here are a few that form the foundation of good design.

1. Proximity

Because items that are in close proximity to one another become one visual unit, items that are related to one another should be grouped together. Laying out related items on a website page this way helps the eye associate the information and enables the viewer to mentally categorize the information easily. The flip side of this principle is that items that are not related should not be placed in close proximity to one another.

The purpose of the principle of proximity is to organize information in a way that enables viewers to quickly and easily comprehend. When information is organized, people are more likely to read it and respond. People are also more likely to remember information that is organized.

How can you determine if items form a visual unit? Squint your eyes and look at the page on a website. Now count the number of times your eye stops as it views the page. On a page that is using the principle of proximity well, your eye will stop three to five times. In other words, there will be three to five groups of information for the eye to comprehend separately. Continue Reading »

The typical question that gives many SEO professionals a bit of a gut-check is, “How long will it take for you to show me results?” Typically, the answer will vary based on the age of the site in question and the level of competition for high volume keywords, if boiling it down to two major factors.

However, there are considerably more elements to a fully-fledged answer. These are also split into new vs. redesigned or reformatted (URL) Web site. Continue Reading »

It can be challenging to develop links for drop shipping sites. This is especially true when all these sites are selling the exact same products.
The perfume marketplace is a good example of this. Most of these sites even look almost the same. How is a drop shipper to get noticed and develop links?
For those not familiar with drop shipping, it’s a program where the distributor or manufacturer handles all the inventory and shipping for the site owner, even to the point of inserting custom sales flyers in packages. This allows the site owner to focus on customer service and marketing. Continue Reading »

A recent Harvard study of Twitter usage found that just 10% of the microblogging service’s users generate more than 90% of the content, and half of all people using the service update their page less than once every 74 days. The researchers also found that most people only ever tweet once.

“Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who was part of the team that conducted the study. “This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the team said in a blog post. The Harvard study queried 300,542 users in May 2009. Heil noted that on a typical social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to grow like a weed. According to recent figures from Nielsen Online, visitors to the site increased by 1,382% from 475,000 to seven million between February 2008 and February 2009. The most recent estimates peg the site’s usage at around 10 million visitors per month. Facebook, by comparison, has 200 million active users and grew 228% during the same period.

The big news of the last few days has been the launch of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Many people seem to think that Google has built an unstoppable machine via its domination of search, and that Microsoft should just focus on Office and its enterprise software business. I’d suggest that all our experience of the last 15 years tells us that this would be foolish.

Nothing can lose value quite so fast as an Internet brand, and Google are perfectly positioned to make a huge misstep at some point or another. If Microsoft can stay in the game, they should. Who knows what can happen, and in the meantime they still have a billion dollars a year in free cash from Office alone with which to keep pushing at the door. Which brings us back to Bing. Continue Reading »

Professional website developers know the importance of web design and the role it plays in making a website successful.

Designing a successful website is no easy task, especially for someone who is new to the world of web development. With the help of web development applications many people can and do create decent websites. But decent in most cases is not good enough to make a site successful from a traffic or financial standpoint.

There are five crucial components of web design that you must focus on in order to make a site valuable to its visitors and successful for you.
Continue Reading »

There has been a lot of debate lately among Web entrepreneurs about online ads. As growth in online ad spending shrinks, ad-based start-ups are searching for new revenue streams and Twitter is explaining why it does not run ads.

Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate brokerage, contends that Web start-ups that do not carry ads are forced to excel at certain things that are essential to Silicon Valley’s promise, like developing software that solves users’ problems and upending the way certain industries run. Continue Reading »

Restructuring a site can present some major SEO challenges. It’s one thing to make simple changes, where a page on the new site corresponds exactly to every page on your old site. But it’s much tougher when you’re making more fundamental changes to the layout, organization, and content of your site.
If you have a reasonably popular site, it has several assets that are put at risk when you change its structure:
1. Users will have bookmarked pages on your site. When they attempt to go to that bookmark, you want to make sure they still get to the content they want.
2. Pages from your site show up in search engine results. When users click on these, you’ll want them to find the right pages on your site. Continue Reading »

There has been a lot of talk about whether or not keyword and description meta tags are even worth doing anymore. Here’s my opinion – YES!

Here are the actual facts:

* Back as far as November 26, 2007, Search Engine Journal was reporting that the keywords tag has little impact on where a site will appear in the Google search results.
* In an article published April 25, 2008, at searchengineland.com by Barry Schwartz (originally by Eric Goldman), a US Court Judge ruled that since the keyword meta tags do not influence search results, having trademarked terms in them are immaterial.
* The Google Webmasters/Site owners Help section on Meta Tags does not identify the keyword meta tag in the list of meta tags that they support but it does list the description meta tag: Continue Reading »

1. Keep your content network clean. Used properly, content networks can add significantly to paid search lead generation. Though the click-through rate (CTR) is generally lower on content than on search, the cost per click is generally lower as well, and conversion rates are often quite respectable. The key, however, is to periodically check on the sites where your ad is appearing and exclude sites that are inappropriate, unproductive or spammy.

In Google AdWords, click Tools in the Campaign Management tab, then go to Site and Category Exclusion. First, click the Topics tab where you choose to preclude your ads from running on various kinds of sites such as those focused on sexually suggestive content or death and tragedy. Nest, click the Page Types tab where you can control the display of your ads on parked domains, forums and other types of sites. Continue Reading »