The website industry moves so fast, that keeping your website aesthetically and technologically fresh is a no-brainer. There are also personal and branding reasons that could force a re-design, but making good design choices with good SEO in mind can be a challenge.
Union Street Media Web Developer Evan Briggs comments:
“The web is constantly evolving, so it’s important that your website is evolving with it. When contemplating an redesign, consider the rewards: it establishes your web presence, keeps your brand fresh, and most importantly, your users engaged. “
Web users are savvier and search engines have helped drive up improvements, which is their M.O. For website owners, paying attention to how to keep visitors engaged on their site and finding a way to rank well is symbiotic.
We’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new real estate websites.
www.byselrealty.com
New England Land Company has been a long time Union Street Media client. Being one of the top producing offices in Vermont, they draw a lot of attention. They wanted to update their website after recently being purchased by a larger office not native to VT. The website needed to reflect the new brand but still show their Vermont roots and let clients know they haven’t changed.
www.lisameyer.net
Lisa Meyer, a Century 21 Jack Agent is tech savvy and understands how the Internet has effected the real estate industry. She needed a website that had easy to use search tools so site visitors could find what they were looking for quickly and efficiently. Through an easy to use content management system, she is able to reveal her expertise and success in Vermont real estate while showcasing her specific market of Waterbury. The site design reflects Lisa’s connection to Vermont with photos of scenery and biking.
www.c21baribeau.com
Having an arsenal of quality fonts is essential for web and graphic designers. In this post we’ll feature 30 serif fonts that are free to download. Browse through the fonts that are featured and when you see something that you would like to use, click on the links to be led to the source where the font can be downloaded. As always when you are using freebies, be sure to check the terms and conditions to verify on what types of projects it can be used.
You may also be interested in: Vintage Fonts Thin Fonts Script Fonts
Droid Serif
Freelancers are always looking for new ways to attract clients and to land new projects. There are any number of ways to find new work, but the ideal situation involves not dedicating a lot of time or money in the search for projects. If you’ve been freelancing for a little while you should have a number of clients that you have done some work for in the past, and they can be a great source of new projects. Maybe they need a full website re-design, or maybe they need some related services that you could also provide.
An effective approach to client follow up will help you to stay in touch with those past clients, to keep them aware of the range of services that you offer, and to secure their business when their need arises for some type of work. And best of all, with an organized approach it doesn’t have to be time consuming or costly.
If you haven’t been making the most of follow up opportunities with past clients here are a few tips that will help you.
In order to be effective with your client follow up you will need a method to keep track of clients’ contact info and to record the dates and details of follow up. You could use a customer relationship management app like Highrise or Zoho CRM, which will help to organize your contacts and all relevant data. For freelancers or independent designers simply keeping an organized spreadsheet could do the trick.
In the last few weeks, we’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new websites. The Lynn Jackson Group, a Century 21 Jack office, located in Vergennes, VT, was looking for a new website provider that would be able to help them expand their market. Union Street Media had the right tools to do the job. The system allowed them to update listings and syndicate with Social Media sites with the added ability to create additional content pages on their website; a task that had previously taken up a lot of their time. The new website also allowed them to segment their MLS data, providing site visitors with recommended searches and more SEO authority.
Doing a search online you want quality results, not webpages full of duplicate content and advertisements. Google wants quality results also and takes action to improve them via updates. In fact, the recent Panda Update continues to try to improve search results by getting rid of low quality, thin content. It is important to find pages that contain thin content to prevent damaging the health of your website overall.
From a human perspective, thin content is a webpage that doesn’t effectively answer a question or get someone to take action. From a search engine perspective, thin content is duplicate content, where a high percentage of content is the same as other content on the site (read more on this from the SEO Moz blog) or other websites out on the internet.
Image via Wikipedia, Have Solid Content to Be Found
Thin content gives consistent signals to search engines that the content on the website is poor quality. Some usual indicators for this include low time on a webpage combined with a high bounce rate. There are some pages where this combination is ok. This includes pages similar to the contact page where visitors come for a specific purpose, get what they need (such as a phone number or address) and then leave. Most other pages are not like the contact page so a low time on a page and high bounce rate are indicators that a visitor didn’t find what they wanted.
In this post I wanted to turn my attention to an oft-misunderstood basic SEO practice—and one that I get a lot of questions about: the title tag.
The title tag is one of if not THE most important piece of text information that search engines look at as a signal of relevance on a web page. These innocuous words and phrases appear at the top of your browser. They also appear in search results and sometimes as link anchor text, from external links.
Title tag at top of browser
By HTML and XHTML law, a title tag is required on every web page document. Title tags are located in the source code within the Head section. For anyone not familiar with code, you don’t necessarily need to know that but it helps if you want to ask the right questions. It looks something like this:
In the last few weeks, we’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new websites.
HKS Associates Inc. is located in New Hampshire’s beautiful Monadnock region. As an office that wears many hats in the industry, they needed a website company that specifically understood real estate. HKS was looking for a vendor who would create a website that represented their markets lifestyle and also took advantage of real estate tools available to help home-buyers learn more about their listed properties. The website needed to be easy to updated without the need for a developer or HTML knowledge. HKS wanted a company who would help them to understand the tech jargon and work with them to implement these new technologies and help grow their business.
A product’s Unique Selling Proposition (also known as Unique Selling Point or USP) is what makes it different from competing products, and more importantly, what leads customers to buy it.
For those in marketing, USPs are extremely important because in order to sell more of a product you need to know what will motivate customers to buy your product instead of the competition’s product, and then you need to effectively communicate that USP.
A large percentage of freelance designers struggle to land as much business as they would like. If this is the case for you, have you taken time to think about what makes you unique in comparison to other designers out there? Why will clients want to hire you instead of another designer? It’s critical that you identify what it is that separates you from other designers, and you must be able to communicate that or make it apparent to potential clients.
Knowing your Unique Selling Proposition is an important step for freelance designers for a few reasons.
Every now and again, we always need to be proactive with our skill set and check we are up to speed with best practices. From a 30,000 feet level, we try to make sure everyone is on the same page without reinventing the wheel. At the end of the day, if we can think outside of the box, throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks, it’s a win-win.
Well, it was all cliche. But did any of it make sense?
Google's Cliche Whiteboard
Cliches are fascinating, since there very existence is born out of an axiom or self-evident truth. In SEO, I find myself repeating the same terms, often out of habit, but also because from an understanding perspective they do provide structure.
Search Engine Optimization
