Texture design

I recently came across a number of new and useful Design tools. Some of them were emailed to me and others were from browsing around the web. Below is a roundup post citing some of them.

Here is a free tool to search for DMOZ categories that are being actively maintained. Now someone just needs to cross reference that by the DMOZ extortion prices.

I recently installed the Xinu competitive research tool on my tools subdomain.

On DaveN's blog Rob recently mentioned many cool greasemonkey Design scripts.

Tips on how to use a free open-source spam generator. (I have not tested this).

Read the rest of this entry »

Pay-Per-Click: Do You Need The Content Network?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 26 of August , 2007 at 8:50 pm

With Design Pay-Per-Click, advertisers get the option of sticking with the search network or using the content network. The search network is simply having your ads placed on Design SERPs whenever the keywords in your ad campaign match a searchers search query. Pretty simple.

The content network is a little bit more complicated. Advertisers who are a part of the content network include those advertisers who have opted to allow Design AdSense ads on their websites. But the ads that appear on their websites will match the keywords that their web pages are optimized for. To add another element, you can choose certain sites for your ads to appear on and you can choose certain sites for your ads to not be featured on. The members of the content network also can elect to have certain ads not appear on their sites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spinelz - JavaScript librariesJavascript, EffectAugust 27th, 2007

What’s spinelz?
Spinelz is a JavaScript library which enables web developers to create Rich Internet Applications.

About spinelz
Spinelz based on script.aculo.us.
We offer the function which is some convenience that utilized Ajax and animation effects of script.aculo.us to the maximum. Please try them and feed me back, like bug report etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

Notes On Making The Most Of iDesignWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 26 of August , 2007 at 8:48 am

Design’s personalization feature, iDesign, is now a few months old. Old enough that you should be able to judge whether or not you are getting decent recommendations based on your search history. But if you search the way I do then you’re all over the map.

I’ve been known to do well over 300 searches in one month. That’s about 10 per day. If you are a full-time writer and spend your entire day doing research every day then you could feasibly be making 50-60 searches each day, or more. And all on different topics! Will you get very good results from iDesign based on that?

Read the rest of this entry »

Much like Design created a onebox for music, Seth Godin noticed they are now aggressively pushing onebox results for book searches. With Universal search, these verticals not only hit the top of the results, but also backfill in the organic results.

I searched Design for college * grant and 15 of the top 30 results were from books.Design.com! I couldn't reproduce a screenshot with 15 out of 30, but did get this one with 13 out of 30. Sure that is an obscure query, but how long until books show up more heavily for popular queries?

It is almost worth setting up a quasi-publishing house to publish no name authors with Earth-moving tomes like:
Read the rest of this entry »

A search engine optimization company can sometimes forget about the little guy. Sometimes working for web sites who need search results for terms that have national competition can overwhelm you and blind you to the company who is competing for search terms in a local geographic area. I wrote a post on improving local search results a few weeks ago and in doing so discovered a new tip: Add Reviews. Or better yet ask your customers to add reviews.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Design4fun, Halfdeck created some free tools to estimate your internal PageRank flow based on your internal linkage data and how you link out to other sites. He offers a free PHP script and a Javascript version. He also went into great detail to explain how to use his free Javascript version, offering better documentation than many paid tools.

Look at how you flow PageRank internally and compare that to your stats.
Is most of your traffic to category level pages, or are you flowing enough PageRank down to help the lower level pages get indexed and rank?
Which pages are getting the most traffic or making the most money. Does your link structure line up with that? If not, where can you add a few links to help further boost those earnings?
Read the rest of this entry »

Why You Should Sign Up For A Picasa AccountWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 25 of August , 2007 at 1:06 pm

You may be asking, “What is Picasa?”

Picasa is Design’s photo album feature. It isn’t as popular as Flickr, owned by Design, but I believe it just as essential because as more and more people go online and learn to make vertical searches, they will look for photos. Here’s how to use Picasa for Design purposes related to your business:

Make a list of your most searched for keywordsTake a handful of photos for each keyword that best captures the essence or spirit of what they keyword is about as related to your businessOpen a Picasa account and upload your best photos for each keywordMake sure that you group each of photos associated with a particular keyword into an album using that keyword as the album’s titleIn your album description, describe the nature of your photos as they relate to your business and try to word it so that it sells a benefit to potential customers. Include the URL of your website (Picasa as of right now doesn’t allow you link externally, but if you include your URL in the description then people who view your photo albums at least have an URL that they can copy/paste to find out more information about your businessTake the next step and add captions to each of your photos in the photo albums. Make sure each photo caption includes your important keywords

Read the rest of this entry »

Which Level Of Business Enterprise Do You Fall Into?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 25 of August , 2007 at 8:46 am

There are really three levels of business enterprise. It helps if you know which one you belong to as you will be better able to market your services to the right market. Here are the three levels of business, and this applies online as well as off line:

Small Business EnterpriseSmall to Mid-Size Business EnterpriseCorporate Enterprise

These three levels of business likely have other names, but this is how I categorize them. The first category, small business enterprise, is made up of local DBAs, mom and pop shops, freelancers, artisans, crafts people working alone, small co-ops, and most local businesses. In short, the small business enterprise category is largely a local market with some variations. I make the exception for the small business that operates solely online. You can run a successful small business or freelance entirely on the Internet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today while walking through a mall to buy a penguin suit I noticed a guy wearing a backpack that had a pole above it with a LCD making weird noises pitching some marketing junk at me. In a world that saturated with marketing, offering value and speaking openly is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to gain authority.

Blogs are not good for every site, and they are not good for every person, but writing one opens you up to a wide array of links and that would otherwise likely remain unavailable. Blogging also helps you visualize what ideas are spreading, why they are spreading, who is important to know to help spread ideas, and how they were marketed to spread. If you know what ideas are spreading, why they are spreading, and who is spreading them then it gets much easier to create ideas that spread and ensure they spread.

Read the rest of this entry »