What It Takes To Successfully Embark On A Career As A Web Designer
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What It Takes To Successfully Embark On A Career As A Web Designer

For anyone looking to start or change their career, one thing for sure is that there is certainly no shortage of possible careers to follow, and a career path available now that did not exist some 30 years ago is to join the thousands of web designers who have created the websites that we visit when we are online.

We said that web designing was not a career that existed 30 years ago, and that is for the simple reason that the internet had not yet become mainstream and thus websites back in the early 1990s looked nothing like the websites of today. In fact, such is the speed at which the internet and web design principles change, some websites built just 5 years ago now look somewhat dated.

This ongoing advancement in website design means that a career as a web designer is one where you will always have opportunities to advance your skills and knowledge. This will be the result of new developments in website design tools and software, what users online want to find when they visit a website evolving, and broadband speeds getting ever faster, for example.

We hope that the fact web design is continually evolving appeals to you, but for you to be involved in all of that you must first become a web designer, so read on and we will outline some steps that will allow you to embark on this highly creative and rewarding career.

Acquire The Knowledge Required

You do not need to go to college or gain a degree to become a web designer, although if you do, you will gain an excellent web design education. Otherwise, you will need to gain as much knowledge as you can regarding website design, programming language, UX, etc via online courses and other media.

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How To Launch Your Own Lifestyle Website
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How To Launch Your Own Lifestyle Website

There are many reasons why web designers are asked to create websites, and the types of websites they are requested to design can vary significantly too. This can include corporate websites for large companies, eCommerce websites that will sell products, or websites for small businesses targeting a local audience, to name but three.

It is also the case that not every website that a web designer is asked to design will be purely for business purposes and to make a profit. One of those website types is a lifestyle website. As for what constitutes a lifestyle website, it can often depend on the person you are asking, given the broad scope of what might be classified as a lifestyle website.

Our definition of a lifestyle website is one where an individual takes something they are passionate about, be it a hobby, pastime, or anything else which plays a huge role in their life and publishes content relating to that passion. Content can include blog posts, videos, images, and audio that inform, entertain, and shed more light on the website owner’s passion.

A choice that many lifestyle website owners have to make at some point is whether they wish to monetise that website. It could be they are perfectly happy not to, and simply see their lifestyle website as a form of a personal journal that allows them to share their passion with others. Alternatively, they might choose to monetise via affiliate programs, ad revenue, or even selling their own information products, for example.

As to how you can start a lifestyle website about a passion you might have, here are the main steps you will need to take.

Select Your Lifestyle Passion: If you have just one passion, you can skip to the next step. However, if you have more than one, then our advice is to choose the one that you have the greatest enthusiasm for and would never get tired of writing or talking about.

Find A Web Designer: Next, you want to find a web designer who is going to help you create your lifestyle website. This could be a freelancer or a web design agency, but either way, research them and check their portfolio, reviews, and testimonials.

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5 Basic SEO Errors You Must Avoid When Trying To Rank Your Botox Clinic’s Website
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5 Basic SEO Errors You Must Avoid When Trying To Rank Your Botox Clinic’s Website

If you want your Botox clinic’s website to rank higher in the search engines, the primary way to achieve this is to invest in an SEO campaign, and there are several ways to achieve this. As the SEO specialists report, there are lots of people who try to do SEO, but it is true to say that not all of them achieve the same level of success.

Regardless of whether you choose to do your own SEO, hire a freelancer, or employ a professional SEO agency, you will be hoping to see relatively quick results. If you set about your SEO goals professionally then those results should appear before too long, but whatever you do, do not try to take certain shortcuts, and worse, do not let someone who claims they can do SEO for you, convince you to take them.

In addition, you want to ensure whether it is you or someone else that certain mistakes do not get made. Whilst some are worse than others, if they occur they can, at best, delay your improved rankings, and at their worst, damage them. Here is what you should avoid.

Not Enough Relevant Content

When the search engines are scanning your Botox clinic’s website they are looking for many things, and one of the most important that needs to be there is relevant content. Apart from the fact that it will inform and entertain visitors to your website, it also gives the search engines a much clearer indication what your website is trying to rank for, and so the better and more relevant your content is, the better chance it has of ranking.

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3 Options Your Fitness Business Has To Implement An SEO Campaign
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3 Options Your Fitness Business Has To Implement An SEO Campaign

If you would like to grow your fitness business and see your website as a means to achieve that then you are going to need to attract visitors, aka traffic, to your website. As the SEO professionals will tell you, there are basically two types of traffic, namely paid traffic , which is done through paid advertising or organic traffic which is generated through the use of SEO.

For those that prefer traffic from the search engines using SEO, we have to make it clear that is not a free option to begin with as it does require a degree of investment with respect to money and time. However, once your SEO goals have been achieved, your website receive plenty of traffic from the search engines.

If you choose SEO as the means to generate traffic then you basically have three options as to how to proceed which are, 1) Do it yourself, 2) Hire a freelancer, or 3) Employ an SEO agency. Each of these options has its pros and cons, so let us take a closer look to help you decide which one is right for you.

Do It Yourself

If you are comfortable with the technical aspects of the internet then you might choose to learn SEO and implement your SEO campaign yourself. Whilst this is laudable, the commitment in time is of going it alone is considerable.

You will certainly need to have your SEO knowledge up to expert level which is further time investment  whilst you learn, plus the time for implementing and maintaining your SEO is huge. Bear in mind, each hour you spend on SEO is an hour that you are not managing your fitness business, which may suffer as a result.

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Blackhat SEO Tactics
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3 Blackhat SEO Tactics You Must Not be Tempted To Try

In any activity that brings rewards, especially financial ones, there will always be those who are tempted to use underhand tactics to gain an unfair advantage.

According to well-respected SEO agency SEO Perth Experts, the fields of SEO, link building, and SEO keyword strategy are no different, and there are countless examples of website owners trying to game Google’s algorithm so that their websites rank higher.

Whilst some have succeeded, it is often a victory that is short-lived, and the whole time those website owners had the dubious pleasure of looking over their shoulders waiting for the moment Google eventually delisted their website.

Those who like to gamble with their website and their business may feel it is a risk worth taking, but for the majority who wish to build a sustainable and long-term business, blackhat is not the way to go.

Another problem with blackhat tactics is Google has become more and sophisticated in the way it crawls websites and in identifying the ranking factors within a website. For this reason, it has become harder to manipulate rankings by using some of the tactics that Google is totally opposed to, like the 3 outlined below.

  1. Paid for Links / Link Exchanges

It is incredible that these ventures still exist but unfortunately, they do. For a start, there is no guarantee that any of the links you buy carry much, if any, authority at all. Bear in mind the whole point of building backlinks is to get some of the authority of the site you are linking from to flow to your website. The only links that you can genuinely have any confidence in doing that, are natural, organic links which have been created legitimately.

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Reduce My WordPress Bounce Rate
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How Can I Reduce My WordPress Bounce Rate?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an essential part of managing and maintaining a website, whether you’re a seasoned pro or a beginner web designer. Optimising your WordPress website can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience in web design and related fields. However, there are plenty of little things that even the average person can do to improve their site’s search engine rankings and SEO score.

One of easiest things to do is reduce your website’s bounce rate. Bounce rate can be defined as ‘the percentage of visitors who leave your website without interacting with it”. Basically, if someone clicks on your website, but then exits straight away, they are said to have ‘bounced’.

Reducing your bounce rate will help more people interact with your site while making sure that you’re fully optimised to achieve a high search engine ranking. Some of the best ways to reduce your WordPress bounce rate include:

Make sure you post well formatted content:

According to SEO Sydney Pro, perfectly formatted content is one of the keys to making sure that you maintain a low bounce rate. If people find poor quality content that’s badly formatted and full of mistakes when they arrive on your website, then they simply won’t stick around.

On the other hand, attractive content that’s visually appealing and obviously fine tuned will encourage people to explore your site further. Make sure that your colour schemes are well thought out, that you choose engaging fonts, and that everything flows and sits nicely within your site.

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High Authority Links
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How Can I Get High Authority Links To My Law Firm Website?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing. If you own or manage a law firm, you need to ensure you’re paying enough attention to your SEO efforts. Otherwise, you might find that your lawyers aren’t receiving the online referrals they should be.

One of the most important aspects of SEO for law firms is link building, both external backlinks and internal linking. Link building refers to the practice of acquiring backlinks to your website from other high-authority sites. This will increase your own website’s authority score and will lead to much better search engine rankings.

But Why Are Backlinks So Important?

Basically, the idea is that if a high authority website is linking to your content then it must be decent quality. This may occur without any pushing from you, but generally you need to get a decent search engine ranking before people can even find your content, let alone link back to it.

Unfortunately, SEO for lawyers is very competitive. This means that you will probably have to pay for backlinks in some form or another if you’re really serious about reaching top rankings for any keywords with even a little competition.

How Can I Get Decent Backlinks?

As mentioned above, the most common way to get other sites to link back to your website is to pay them. Note that you shouldn’t pay a link farm or someone who is simply going to post a link to your website – these ‘black hat’ practices are frowned upon by Google.

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SEO Mistakes
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3 Common SEO Mistakes

Making sure that you are optimizing your online presence for SEO is an essential part of the digital marketing strategy by all digital marketing companies. The content of your website is going to matter a lot when it comes to how it ranks in SEO.

The most challenging thing about SEO is that it is constantly evolving so that the user experience of browsing the internet gets better and better with time. A lot of businesses tend to forget the fact that good SEO practices right now are much different from what they used to be a couple of years ago – or even a year ago at that.

In order to help you avoid making the same mistakes, Slinky Digital have provided a list of the most common SEO mistakes that you should stay away from in 2018.

Keyword Stuffing
Gone are the days when you could fool search engine algorithms by capitalizing on keyword stuffing. A lot of businesses used to insert keywords after every other sentence so that it would boost the SEO ranking for the content and for the website. This strategy is still being applied by many and they need to know that keyword stuffing is a thing of the past.

The focus now is more on relevant content that is natural and easily readable. Keywords are important but without meaningful content, they are going to adversely affect your website’s SEO ranking.

Wrong Keywords
If there is anything worse than keyword stuffing, it is using the wrong keywords. A lot of people make the mistake of using the wrong keywords to optimize their content. There should be a preference to use long tail key phrases rather than just keywords. Instead using the terms you think are correctly defining the products that you have to offer, you have to use the terminology that customers will be using. Search engines are going to emphasize on the conversational aspect of the user search queries rather than specific keywords.

It is best to do your research and find the relevant keywords for the content you’re producing rather diving head first into optimizing your content for SEO without preparation.

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Brighton Web Design Comments Off on Top 5 Ways To Make Your Website Faster

Top 5 Ways To Make Your Website Faster

When it comes to creating a new WordPress website, a lot of inexperienced webmasters do things which make their new site slow and unresponsive. Having a slow site can be harmful for a number of reasons. It can reduce visitor number, can increase your bounce rate, and worst of all, it can decrease your search engine rankings.

Slinky Web Design advise that if you are really serious about having a decent WordPress website which brings in a bit of money, then you need to do everything that you can to make your pages load faster. Anything over a couple of seconds is considered slow by many internet users, and websites with slow load speeds will simply be abandoned by impatient users who would rather move onto the next website instead of waiting for yours to load.

With this in mind, here are our top five tips for making your website load faster:

1. Get rid of old plugins!
Old plugins are one of the worst things possible for your website. They use up valuable server resources without doing anything useful, and they are almost definitely slowing your site down. Getting rid of these will help speed your website up straight away.

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Social Media
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Using Social Media

Using Social Media to promote local business is ‘word of mouth’ for the 21st Century!

Almost everyone is familiar with social media these days, many use them in their personal lives, over 800 Million people use Facebook & Twitter alone!

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a very effective way of; interacting with your current customers, community & industry; promoting your business and even advertising across the social networks.

Customer Interaction

Customer Interaction is hugely beneficial to local businesses – Social Media Marketing encourages your existing client base to be followers of your company and become more interactive with your business much more often, more effectively and cheaper than ever before! You can keep your customers up to date with offers, news, competitions etc.. Customers enjoy this experience and when they enjoy it they share it. How valuable is that? Personal recommendations to potentially hundreds of local people who have never considered using your business before!

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Website Visibility
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Is Your Website Visible?

Is Your Website Visible? Is A Question Most Business Owner’s Do Not Know The Answer To! Yet this is one of the most important questions the owner of a local business should ask regarding their website.

Many business’ have a website these day’s, a lot of thought a preparation goes into the website itself, but all too often the question “is your website visible?” is over-looked. If it is not being seen by those looking online for the products or services you offer, a massive opportunity is being missed.

The majority of business owner’s have no idea how visible their website is or how many visitor’s a month it receives. Often the website address (the URL) is the company name ie: www.yourcompany.co.uk. A common mis-understanding is to type in your company name or URL into the Search Engine and there is your new website, right at the top (or very near) of the Search Engine Results Page. This creates a false impression as this does not represent your online visibility. You have searched your company name, as a result you will be at the top of the results. Your potential customer will not search for a company name, they will search for the product or service they require, in the region they require it.

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Internet Marketing Terminology
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Intro to Internet Marketing Terminology

Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Keywords, etc
If you have your own business website you may have become aware of Internet Marketing. You may also have heard a lot of terms being used to explain the different aspects involved in Internet Marketing.

The terminology used within Internet Marketing can often experience cross-overs, resulting in certain terms being used incorrectly. This is easily done as some of the terminology does overlap to a certain extent, couple this with a basic understanding and the subtle differences in the definitions of certain terms can become diluted when discussed.

So we thought we would make life a bit simpler for those of you interested in or considering Internet Marketing to promote your business website, by providing a brief explanation of some of the main terms used when referring to Internet Marketing.

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Importance of A Website
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The Importance of A Website to a Local Business

Most SME’s have a website these days, which is good, but what is the importance of a good website to a Local Business? It’s easy to imagine that the importance of a website would be defined by the business. That is not strictly true, these days there is hardly a product or service that is not searched for online in great numbers daily, meaning every type of business can benefit from having a website. So, if there are people searching online for what your company offer, it makes sense that having a website is important, otherwise those customers will not find your business. This is as true for local business as it is for the major corporations.

That’s not the only reason a website is hugely important to the success of any local business, besides the increased potential discover-ability, a website provides a local company with the opportunity to market & promote their business using both paid for and free advertising streams. Perhaps most important of all, a website will also make it easier for your customers to contact you, to ask questions and of course to make reservations or purchases. So having a website built for your business is undoubtedly a good idea.

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Web Design
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Welcome to Web Design Brighton

We have totally revamped our website, we felt the old one was a little ‘busy’ and wanted to address that.

As a result we have been able to focus more on the Search Engine Marketing side of the business. Our hope is that we have been able to provide and insight into Search Engine Marketing as well as the benefits to local business.

We have also simplified our pricing structure, whilst having flexibility for bespoke campaigns, we feel it offers a better insight into ball-park budgets required for certain services.

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Brighton Web Design Comments Off on F.Lux – Better Lighting For Your Computer

F.Lux – Better Lighting For Your Computer

Using Your Computer Late At Night? I spend a lot of time on my computer, both day and night! I have found this software which automatically changes the hue of your computer screen depending on the time of day you are on your computer.

The idea is that working on your computer late at night with the daytime settings can disrupt your sleep, I can’t say I can confirm or deny this yet, but I do enjoy my new hue at night and it does make the screen less intrusive.

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