Webmaster Marketing and Internet Design

When building quality sites you shoot for a large amount of long tail keywords. While running various campaigns for them that might include popular forum posts and advertising search engine result pages change a lot. It's hard to keep track of such movements and compare them long term. That's why Rank Tracker from Link Assist can be a valuable tool for recording historic result movements. It checks preset keywords and phrases every day for your domains and it's easy to compare them my analyzing numbers and charts. You can also track your competition and create competitive charts. It runs on various platforms including Mac OSX.

'Less is more', has always been a true statement, not just for advertising and design. If you have powerful content and text minimal design can help to emphasize your outstanding performance and presentation. Just recently I found this fantastic compilation of minimalistic and functional websites, many of whom are from creative minds like designers and architects. Just wanted to share this with you. Getting back to the essence of successful blog design by observing your goals. The way is always our goal, isn't it?!

Sometimes it is tough to build a website from scratch. Missing ideas, time and budget pressure to deliver on schedule. In this case researching design templates is a good alternative. Existing commercial designs are available as Photoshop and Flash files for moderate monthly subscription fees from many sources. It's usually allowed to modify files using them on any of your own and clients' websites (sometimes a developer license fee is applicable if your work for commercial entities). Using web templates shortens production time frames for presentations and site development. Many sources offer skins for popular content management systems like Wordpress, Joomla or b2evolution.

There are a lot of things a webmaster can do himself, but many simple procedures turn out to be rather bothersome for newbies. Sometimes I want to prove to myself that I am smart enough to install scripts and make modifications to them. A couple of hours later I do get it done, but it takes longer than expected as I had no clue about some very simple things like permission settings, file ownership, server paths, etc. This can be very frustrating at times. My learning experience made me come to the conclusion: it is not worth the effort to know everything and be able to do it by myself. If I don't know how to make modifications on a script or I expect problems during installation, I rather hire a coder from Scriptlance. It's a marketplace of freelancers and outsourcing companies. I just place an add and describe my project.

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Every webmaster makes his strategy a little secret. For good reason as nobody wants to give up a good idea and surrender his most important ideas for the benefit of competitors. However, many website developers agree on one basic idea: organic growth!

When starting up a new website a realistic vision for the ultimate goal and a roadmap for the development are the most crucial items. It's hard to give advice, but use of common sense is usually the best guide.

Ask yourself:

- What would a visitor seek on your site?

- How would he reach your site?

- What to offer to returning visitors?

First step: registration and content guidelines
After I register or buy a domain my first task is to install a basic index page that contains relevant info about what the site is intended for. In the past this was a simple html page with a title, meta description and keywords together with 2 or 3 paragraphs of text. If possible I would ad a couple of picture with corresponding alt tags. Additionally, I would insert a handful of links to other relevant pages. Let's say I would start a site about sports shoes, links to i.e. Addidas, Nike and Puma would suit well. I would achieve the following goals: people and bots would occasionally come by the site and take note of it. Additionally, I would set one or 2 links from my own sites to the new project. Then I usually don't touch the site for awhile. My first aim is achieved: I want the search engine bots to know about the site, index and categorize it properly. Sometimes I have a lot of ideas flying through my head and I register like 10 domains for different things, so I put up a basic page while I plan further development. To be honest I have modified that strategy a bit. I no longer use a simple html page for the initial site, but install a blog or cms script on the server, choose a neat skin and publish my first article that is pretty much containing the same things as mentioned above.

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Hi guys, this is my first post on Mides Media blog. There is nothing here, yet. I am just typing a couple of sentences for our designer. This way she can customize our little online marketing blog with new graphics and css files. Hey, you are still reading this? Are you sure you are human? hehehe. Okay, I will tell you a secret. This blog will feature tips for webmasters on how to make money online, where to find good hosting and graphic design and so on. I will tell you a couple of secrets about offshore hosting, money markets, forex and marketing in general, outsourced staffing, freelancers, coders and so on. Still reading? Hey ... I am getting some sweat on my forehead, now. I need to take a shower, brush my teeth and send a message to my graphic designer so she knows how to customize this blog. As soon as she is done with her work I will come back and publish the second article. That might be pretty soon so check back in a short while :-)