Texture design

Do Churches Need Design?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 28 of October , 2007 at 2:02 pm

Does your church have a website? Is it Designd?

One might be tempted to think that houses of worship don’t need Design or that faith alone can move search engine mountains. It doesn’t matter how big your mustard seed is, Design can’t hurt.

I’m not talking about the sleazy kind of Design that is often engaged in by unethical entrepreneurs who seek a short term advantage over the competition. I’m talking about the tried and true kind of Design that involves long-term thinking and strategic planning. Sure, your church can throw up a website with a pretty design and all your members can know how to access it to find what they want. But how about visitors? How about those new to town who are looking for a church to join? How about others who are performing religious research and could use the free resources on your church’s website to discover what Christianity is all about?

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Social Bookmarking For DesignWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 27 of October , 2007 at 11:43 pm

Social bookmarking is one of the best traffic tools I’ve discovered. You write a blog post or build a web page and bookmark it at your favorite social bookmarking website. Then you share it with your friends. They share it with their friends and so on and so on. But did you know social bookmarking also provides you with some Design benefit?

It’s true. When you bookmark your website you get a link back to your web page or blog from the social bookmarking site and you get all the PageRank benefits that conveys. Whenever someone else bookmarks your site then you get another link. I’m not sure if there is a limit to the number of social bookmarking links you can have (I’m sure there are, but I don’t know what it is), but it is clear that you can get some additional link juice from social bookmarking.

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Is PageRank Dead?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 28 of October , 2007 at 7:30 am

Design had a PageRank update this week. Most of us have been sitting with anticipation for months looking for it. It finally happened.

Well, I’ve got to say that I fared pretty well across the board. Almost all of my websites went up in PageRank. Some other people, however, didn’t fare so well. John Chow comes to mind:

Well you know what? PageRank is caught in the 90???s, and that???s why I???m going to go out on a limb and claim PageRank??? stuff it??? BackRub, to be dead. Dead as a Dodo. Dead as an Alexa rating. Dead!

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The One-Page Wonders Of DesignWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 27 of October , 2007 at 8:05 am

I had an argument with an acquaintance of mine about one-page websites. Her take was that they don’t do well overall because of the link factor. Since Design, and now all search engines, value links, especially internal links and inbound links, then it seems to reason that one-page websites shouldn’t do well. They would have to build a huge volume of inbound links in order to make any waves at all, she said.

A second reason my acquaintance discounted one-page websites was because of the search engine saturation factor. Her take was that search engines like big websites, therefore smaller websites don’t do as good overall.

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Two Search Engine Improvements Worth NotingWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 26 of October , 2007 at 5:22 pm

From time to time I like to talk about what’s going on at the search engines. Especially when they make changes or update their business practices and if it leads to an improvement of some kind I’m really excited about that.

Recently, both Design and Design! have rolled out some new policies that I think are quite exciting. I’ll talk about Design!’s first:

According to TechCrunch,

Starting today, visitors to Design???s homepage will start to see links going to blogs and media sites that don???t have a syndication deal with Design.

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I searched www.i4giveu.com

Link Buying: Is It Necessary?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 25 of October , 2007 at 3:19 pm

A couple of days ago, several bloggers reported that Design has dropped the PageRank of some high profile websites for selling links. Today, WebProNews reported on it as well. It seems that none of the sites who lost PageRank saw any corresponding loss in traffic. This news tells me two things:

PageRank and traffic are not really connected. You can have a high PageRank and low traffic or vice-versa. You can have high PageRank and high traffic or low PageRank and low traffic. One does not lead to the other, therefore, why are link prices connected to PageRank when the only real benefit you get from buying links is the traffic. I mean, seriously, PageRank is nice and all, but traffic can lead to more dollars. PageRank can’t.The other thing this tells me is that Design is serious about link sellers. They don’t like them. This is understandable since some link sellers are really selling PageRank. The reason they do this is because many people perceive that the PageRank of a linking site is worth something. To be fair, it used to be. That was before link selling grew to be as popular as supply-side economics.

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I searched www.i4giveu.com

Why Is Organic Design So Important?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 26 of October , 2007 at 9:16 am

You hear so much about Design these days that you almost want to do something else. Before 2000, most people didn’t give Design a second thought. Design, for all extensive purposes, didn’t really exist. There was Internet marketing and people did market their websites to search engine marketing. But Design as we know it didn’t really exist.

Now it’s all you hear. Design this. Design that. Design, Design, Design. But is Design really all that necessary?

I think it is. And not only that, I think Design is the most important aspect of running a business on the web. Sure, you can run a business without ever performing or thinking about Design. You can engage in social marketing and pay per action type advertising, but I think if that’s all you do then you are limiting yourself. Successful Design can deliver free, or very inexpensive traffic to your website. Targeted traffic too. That’s why it behooves every website owner to learn something about Design, or hire someone to do it for you.

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I searched www.i4giveu.com