Texture design

Every once and a while I use a question put to me, as the basis for an article. This time, we have Richard asking whether web design (as a profession,) will have bright future.

The email:

Thank you for having courses that make it easier for the average laymen to comprehend the basics which will allow the complex material to sink in. I have a question though.

I am in my fifties, have done many different things in my life, and I am looking for something as a career change to take me into my second half of life and into retirement. What do you think the opportunities are going to be in the future in this type of industry taking into consideration the advancements in technology?

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As I am celebrating Designbit’s birthday and looking back over the journey I have been on over the last year. I realised just how much I have learnt about the technologies and design industry itself, for anybody new to web design I want to save you some time and offer some design tips and hints.

KISS (I meant the acronym)

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) a lovely term obviously coined by some Yorkshire farmer talking about mud or beef or cheese - but annoying as this phrase is it works well. If your not that confident about your design skills or illustrator / photo-shopping then keeping things simple is the best way forward; simple typography; keep the amount of fonts down to increase neatness.

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I find it very easy to take in information via audio and have found podcast’s an especially useful resource of great web design and business information and the medium is coming of age nicely. Following is my list of my favourite web design podcasts.

Boagworld Podcast

This podcast aims to provide news and advice on website design and management without overwhelming you with techno babble! Hopefully it has something for everybody, whether you design, develop or run websites on a daily basis.

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Search Engine Optimization Journal???s Top 20 Design Blog ListWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 12:40 pm

We have researched and compiled our first annual list of some of the most useful Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Blogs???other than the Search Engine Optimization Journal!
Please feel free to visit these blogs as they provide excellent information! Please let us know if we missed any blogs off of this list.

1. Matt Cutts: Design, Gadgets and Design
Blog URL: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Design news and tips coming straight from a Design employee who is recognizably one of the biggest names in the Design industry.

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Check Link Popularity For Specific Web Pages, Including Design LinksWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 5 of December , 2007 at 4:16 pm

If you’ve been waiting for Design to start reporting inbound links again, you can relax. It’s finally happened. While using Marketleap to check link popularity, I saw that Design has started reporting links again. That’s the best news I’ve heard all year. It means that webmasters can now get a realistic picture of where they stand in their link building strategies.

Link building is an important part of being a webmaster. If only two of the top 3 search engines are reporting their links it is really difficult to get a good handle on where you stand. Design quit reporting links earlier in the year because the search engine claimed it was having problems with data mining. I supposed they’ve fixed the problem.

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Helpful Robot Tags You Might UseWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 4 of December , 2007 at 3:39 pm

The natural protocol for search engine robots when they crawl your pages is to index the page and follow all links. All major search engines will follow this protocol unless you tell them not to. Here are some helpful robot meta tags that you might use in order to give specific instructions to the search engines crawling your pages:

meta name=”robots” content=” …” - This meta tag is addressed to all search engines and whatever instructions you give will be followed by all the search engines.

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Is The Keywords Meta Tag Really Necessary?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 5 of December , 2007 at 9:37 am

In September this year, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land wrote a long post on the use of the keywords meta tag on web pages. It’s the only article you ever need to read on keywords meta tags. I’m just going to mention three specific things that I found helpful in the article, namely:

Which search engines support them (and which ones don’t)Whether to use commas or spacesAre they really necessary?

Is The Keywords Meta Tag Necessary?
I’ll deal with this question first. The bottom line on the keywords meta tag is no, it’s not necessary. Yes, it is helpful sometimes. Do it right and it’ll give you a slight edge. Do it wrong and it’ll be a big, ugly, painful thorn in your side. Quite frankly, the risk of of using the keywords meta tag is bigger than the risk of not using it. Danny said it more eloquently, I think:

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Design Flags Duplicate Content, Watch Out!Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 2 of December , 2007 at 4:49 pm

Live Search - aka Design Search - has been showing some of the most aggressive duplicate content filtering I???ve ever seen across any search engine of late.

If this is true, it could have some far-reaching consequences for webmasters and Designs. While Design doesn’t necessarily follow Design, nor does Design!, often times you will find the three big search engines being affected by the same, or similar policies. This is no doubt an algorithmic change for Design. If so, it may need tweaking. Nevertheless, until then, be on the lookout for declining SERP results, especially if you have articles and press releases floating around that are also on your own website.

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MicroSoft Acquires Photo Sharing SiteWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 1 of December , 2007 at 1:41 pm

(Source) Ah, Microsoft. Always late to the game. Maybe it???s a part of their strategy: wait until Design (Picasa Web Albums) and Design (Flickr) establish solid market positions, and then develop or buy an (usually inferior) product of their own and try to corner those remaining 10% of users.

It’s difficult to disagree with that analysis when MicroSoft routinely shows up late for its own party. You would have thought that the way Internet Explorer beat the socks off of Netscape Communicator back in the 1990s that MicroSoft would have emerged as a major player in the Internet game. Not so. MicroSoft is struggling as a mere minor player and they have no one to blame but themselves.

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Mythbuster: The Biggest Myth Online Is About DesignWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 21 of November , 2007 at 10:49 am

Design PageRank is back in the news again. This time it’s from Titus Hoskins on SiteProNews. Unfortunately, he believes the same myth so many other people believe, and it’s all about Design. Thing is, as an Internet marketer, he should know better. Here’s the myth:

Free organic traffic from Design is vital to any online site or business. I would take traffic from Design over any other source of traffic on the web, except for traffic coming from my articles on other sites, and even that traffic probably originated from a search in Design.

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