Working in web design and digital marketing isn't all about coming up with good ideas. To be the successful Guernsey web design and digital marketing agency we are, we at Indulge have to make things happen. With that being said, we are constantly on the look out for tools to help us do our jobs.
With the web full of resources it is often hard to know which ones will help you do the job, and which ones will distract you for a while but leave you with no end results. In this series of blog entries, we will be going through our favorite tools of the trade and showing you the best tools to use if you are either into web design, website development or digital marketing. To make things even more exciting, we are going to throw in some links to our favorite websites to show you where you can learn everything you need to know to make a success of your website.
This week we will be looking at the very basics for those starting out in web design and search engine optimization.
Learning web design and website development
So, you want to learn the tricks and skills of web design, or you want to code websites like a pro? Well, for me, there is really only one place to start. I love websites that offer excellent content for free, and with that in mind I am going to point you in the direction of Tutvid.
Tutvid.com is an amazing website. It is a one man show, run by a young American photographer and web designer called, Nathaniel. Tutvid is an absolute treasure chest of free videos and has an excellent blog that is kept up to date with links and information that is always helpful to web designers and developers alike.
Tutvid takes the 'teach yourself' approach to web design and development and will show visitors in simple, bitesize stages how the web design and development processes work. The real focus of the video content on this website looks at how to use the Adobe Creative Suite to its full potential.
With excellent, case led tutorials on Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash and more, you can do a lot worse than brush up on some skills with Tutvid. Even if you have never touched the likes of Photoshop before, Tutvid provides video basics, walking the visitor through each of the Photoshop tools, and moving them forward onto their first project all the way up to complex photo and graphic editing, HTML, CSS and much more. If you want to dabble in web design or just brush up some skills, Tutvid is an excellent resource that comes fully recommended.
It's All About Colour
When you are starting out on a new website design, one of the first places you should start is colour. Before any of the fancy graphics, the pictures and logos you must decide what colours you are going to use on your site and which colours don't go so well.
Sometimes it is quite hard to know where to begin with this decision making process and choosing the wrong colours can be negtive to web design. Luckily, Adobe have heard our calls for help and developed Adobe Kuler. Kuler is really cool, infact it is so cool even my friends who aren't even web designers enjoying playing away on it for hours on end, looking at all of the colours they can make with it.
There are a few different ways to use Adobe Kuler, but i like to go straight to the 'create' section of the website and play around with the colour selection options. The programme allows you to design a colour scheme, save it, share it or download it to use in your swatch panel in Photoshop. This is a real tool for inspiration and it can certainly help you decide on a suitable colour scheme for your website.
Search Engine Optimization - The First Stage
Search engine optimization is the talk of the town. Anyone who has anything to do with a website will have heard this phrase mentioned somewhere, and chances are they are scrambling to find all of the secrets of SEO to help improve the search ranking of their website.
Well, before you can begin to improve, or even judge your search ranking, you are going to need to decide what you want to be ranking for. Take this example, if you are a flower shop based in Slough, you don't want to be ranked highly in Google for the phrase 'Guitar Shop, New York', there would be a lot of unhappy rockers indeed.
So, that means you are going to have to decide on the correct keywords for your website. So, we have established that keywords are important, but where do they come from, and how do you know if you have picked the correct ones? Well, fear not my young digital marketeer, because help is at hand. The first place, and believed by many to be the daddy of the keyword tools is Google's very own keyword tool.
Now, Google have recently updated their keyword tool and made it more integrated with their AdWords platform. AdWords, in-case you are wondering, is Google's own advertising platform, and it is where the 'sponsored links' come from when you search on Google, but that is a story for another day. Back to the Keyword Tool. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a very powerful part of your SEO artillery. Not only is it free to use, like with most Google tools, but it can also give you some amazing insights to help your website up the rankings.
Before you use the keyword tool, it is advisable to write down a list of words you think could be useful for people trying to find your website. Let's say for our flower shop that could be 'gifts in slough', 'mothers day gifts in slough' and so on. Whatever you choose, then have a search using Google Adwords Tool and see what it says.
Don't be daunted by the volume of information that is set in-front of you, as a general rule you are looking for keywords that combine the winning combination; that is a low level of competition but a high level of search frequency. The higher the search and lower the competition, the more useful the keyword is to your site. But remember, only target keywords that are relevant to your site, we don't want a repeat of the New York Guitar Shop fiasco do we now?
So, that completes the first round up of our online tools and useful websites for now. Join us next week for more!
