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Coffee in hand, you stagger into your office and sit down to read your morning emails and sort through them like you always do.  Pushing on the button that lights up the CPU on your system and it’s blank. No light, no fan, no nothing. You start to panic and go through the obvious problems.  You look at the clock and hope that its not moving cause that means your electricity is off. Darn, that’s not it.  You crawl under the desk with the dust bunnies and hope that just maybe you accidently discconnected the power source from the power strip. Nope…

After running down a full list of potential problems, you realise that now, it’s a lost cause and your repair guy is going to get your panicked call and he won’t be available for hours if not days.

Sound familiar!?

It’s happened to a few of us and we are no exception.  In that hardware failure, you also start to wonder if all that work that you had on your hard drive is still good and all those files will still be there when you need them most.

The only way to reassure that you can rest at ease is to be sure to back up your files on an external hard drive.  External hard drive prices are coming down in price extensively and they can hold thousands of file with some drives hold up to 400-500 Gigabytes in memory.

Backup software such as GoodSync, can be set to auto back up your files on a schedule that keep you as up to date in your files as you want to be making it very automatic.  There are other softwares out there that are just as good, just do your research to see how versatile they are.

Remember, there is a big difference between backing up system files and doing data backups. Be sure you do both otherwise you might find yourself without some information that you needed. Data backups are the most important as that holds the information for your letters, pictures and so much more.

Keyword research tends to be a bit tedious for those who are starting out building their reputations with their website.  There is no exact formula or science that gives away the “secret” to obtain the perfect words or words to use in their site and ultimately is just an element of ‘keep trying.’

Good couple rules to use for searching for those keyword elements are:

1. Use two to four word keyword phrases that people might use to find your website;
2. Search your competitor websites with tools such as a keyword density tool to help identify what they are using.
3. Using the keyword effectiveness index or KEI to help identify how effective your choice in keywords will be is ideal.  The KEI if too high could mean that you are choosing a word that is highly competitive, as well as if you choose one that is too low on KEI then you may not see the effective traffic to make using that particular word useful to you.
4. Avoiding dead words such as “a”, “the”, “but” in your keyword phrases is not advisable and will only break up your phrases into elements that will probably not be as useful as you would like.
5. Utilizing your keywords in not only your content, but your domain name, your links, ‘alt’ tags and in headers, titles and beginning and end of your page will give it strength and credibility with the spiders;

As you can see, it is important to plan a good deal in advance to where your business will come from, the demographic that you need to appeal to as well as your competition in order to start off on the right foot.  Most spiders visit about once a month, and if you plan right and your developer/designer is on their game your keywords, design and presentation of a live site should start  helping your traffic and your ranking with the search engines.  Keyword research and development is important before you start development of your site.

Finally, after putting together the team and brainstorming, we have come up with a new look and our new logo.

Still offering the same prices and the same excellent services!

I do get asked often, about the element of SEO for a website, but truthfully, most people don’t understand that it’s not the website that we optimize, but the page. Each page that we handle is optimized carefully for the following elements:

1. One keyword phrase. We always recommend using a phrase that is longer than two words, but no more than four and eliminates dead words such as ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘but’, etc.
2. Alt-Tag usage.  Labeling your images not only with a key word element but for the use of computers equipped to browse the Internet for the visually impaired is crucial.
3. Header matches URL.  It seems that this would make sense, but many sites find that giving a URL that doesn’t match the domain confuses your viewer and it also is frowned upon by the search engines. Make sure they see that they are visiting the right place.
4. Utilize keywords in your links and text links.  Buttons are all good and in this day, CSS provides us with the ability to give buttons a good visual appeal but still offer a text link for the search engine spiders to follow.
5. Make sure that your page is linked to your site map.  This gives the ability to give the spider’s complete access to the rest of your site to your other optimized pages.  Why limit their browsing capability?

Each of these items should be found in a page that is on the right track of a properly optimized page.  Search engines are constantly sending out their spiders and bringing back tons of data for listing you.  Be sure your designer has implemented these once you have decided on your layout and content for the page.  This will get you a leg up with getting your site and pages listed right, right out of the starting gate.

In the graphic design industry there are two ways to identify an image. There are vector images and rasterized images. Each of these types of files differ a great deal in resolution, file size, color and in file formats. The differences also limit what a graphic artist can do to each image without destroying the integrity of the actual image still use it for the purpose that it is intended to be used for.

Vector Images

Resolution is normally NOT depicted by the pixel size of the image but the mathematical size, giving these images a huge advantage when it comes to resizing the image from very small to very large. This gives this versatility to resizing without losing the integrity of the image.

Color is determined by the object itself, and not per pixel giving you the ability to color inside the lines with a line drawing, much like a cartoon artist would by hand.

File sizes in vector images are typically very small in size, which gives a great more versatility and used widely on line for smooth loading of pages.

File formats can include EPS (Encapsulated Post Script), WMF (Windows Media File), AI (Adobe Illustrator), CDR (Corel Draw) and several others that are used in architecture and other none widely used software.

Rasterized Images

Resolution is determined at what level the image was scanned at or what mega-pixel that the picture was taken at.  Smaller images cannot be up scaled without loss of integrity and scaling down images that are large doesn’t necessarily scale down the size of the image.  Most of the images at 300 DPI (Dot’s Per Inch) are used for printing, and normally anything 72 DPI is used for the Internet for smoother browser loads.

Color depth is important and depending on the scanning quality be it 24-bit depth or 256 depth.  At 24-bit it is using colors so close that most of the time you are unable to tell the difference between the scanned and the original copy.  At the 256 color element, there is a significant difference.  Because of this, the scanner uses a process called ‘dithering’ so that it can approximate the color element and use it to soften the color adjustments.

File size is also a much bigger challenge with rasterized images. Each of these images are much larger in memory size for because of the pixelation, color and elements involved.  The reason being is that the software must remember where each color and each pixel is placed in order to reproduce the image as it should be.

File formats can include BMP (Windows Bit Map), TIFF (Tag Interleave Format), JPEG (Joint Photographics Expert Group), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) , PNG (Portable Network Graphic), PSD (Adobe PhotoShop) and CPT (Corel PhotoPAINT).

By using and having the knowledge of the difference, your graphic artist should be able to manipulate each of these images once they have the right file to fit your needs.  Determining the best image for your project will be just as crucial as determining the best wording for your projects.  A good image gets the right point across in a visual manner that impacts all readers.