Learn more about what can hurt your blog and how to do good link building.

Google Panda provides a huge incentive to produce good content

Google Panda Infographic

Via: Single Grain – A Digital Marketing Agency

Starting your own web design business can be exciting and rewarding. In a stagnent economy, entrepreneurial activity tends to increase. There is nothing better to use your talents and passions in order to create a lasting source of revenue. But starting a business takes effort, and careful planning. So, once you have established the talent and the idea, what is the next step?

Create a business plan

A business plan or model defines the core activities of the business and some basic strategies for deploying them. Businesses that can maximize their online practices and business dealings have much less overheads than traditional retail locations. Less overheads equals higher profit margins. Web design services can begin with some home office space, software, and online promotion.

As you develop your business model, you will want to define your ideal customer and develop a company slogan to be used in conjunction with your marketing efforts. Think about how you can reach potential clients in the most effective manner. Part of developing your business model should include research on potential competitors.

An important mantra in business is not to reinvent the wheel!

Take the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of another business, and to alternatively, piggyback on successful strategies.

A word of advice here (that comes after years of making mistakes): try to compete in terms of quality of service; don’t try to compete in terms of price.

Develop an online presence

Once you have your business plan, you need to open up shop. If you are going to be developing websites, you should be able to refer customers to your own website. Remember that your website serves two functions – promoting your business and presenting your product. Your website will show potential customers what type of product they can expect.

The overall look of your website is important as it showcases your abilities as a web designer.

The actual content of the website is important in order to maximize web searches. It is highly recommended that you research SEO (search engine optimization) as well as social media promotion as you design and build your website.

You should be working on your website every single day! Not only should it be constantly improved in terms of design, speed and usability, you also should be constantly writing quality articles for your blog and promoting them as the best way to attract clients is with content marketing and SEO.

Establish referral relationships

Simply putting up the “open” sign on your shop does not guarantee business. It is also a good idea to partner with existing businesses who have established customer bases. This can be accomplished with some creative negotiating and leveraging. Think about strategic business relationships, and move forward from there.

There are a lot of designers hanging around on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+. Spend a bit of time engaging with other people in your field in social media. If you build enough trust you will win referrals this way.

Once you build a website for a client, they will need that website hosted. Partner with an established web hosting company, and use that partnership to generate referrals back and forth. If done properly, these types of relationships can become mutually beneficial, and they can help a new business establish a customer pipeline. Remember that as you establish a customer base; add a page to your website highlighting testimonials, and links to completed websites.

It’s a good idea to ask past clients to write glowing testimonials and to recommend you to their friends and associates.

Sell, sell, sell

Now, it’s go time. Often in a business, the first few sales will have a snowball effect on operations. Think about promotions for the first 50 customers. Offer reductions for up-front payments. The goal is to get a small base of satisfied customers as quickly as possible. Remember that both good and bad products and services generate word of mouth advertising. Solicit referrals by offering discounts, and refer customers to your business partners as often as you can.

What do you think?

Are you running a design business or thinking about starting one? Was this advice useful to you? What barriers are there in your life or the marketplace that are stopping your success in this field? I would love to hear what you think in the comments below

The economy and our education may take a harder hit than anything other issue. This infographic by the Online IT Degree team shows us on Digital Learning Day, that this digital divide may impact us harder in the long run.

Created by: Online IT Degree

You are about to read my honest review of Thesis Theme framework. This is something I always wanted to do, and I really blame myself having not reviewed Thesis before now since I have been using it heavily on my blog. I also depend on it to run several other projects, especially here at FamousBloggers.net and my other design project that relies on Thesis Themes  100%

So, prepare yourself, this won’t be a short review. I have tons of things to talk about as I will take it from my personal prospective and two years of experience with Thesis, mostly as a developer. I don’t have any intention to offend or annoy anyone, and I apologize if I do by accident!

I will tell you why I give it this sort of low rating, which could be shocking for all Thesis fans!

I am reviewing Thesis Theme as I see it today, time plays a big role here and reviews have to reflect the recent condition. I could give it a higher rating if I reviewed it two years ago, but today I am not so sure about that! However, my point of view may change any time, and you should see an update in the future.

Anyway, I worked hard enough with this theme to form an honest opinion, especially that there are a lot of crappy reviews on the web that have been published just to sell you Thesis and make commissions without even taking it for a test drive.

Before you continue reading, I will show you how much money I’ve earned in only one year of working and developing my Skins for Thesis Themes.  As  proof that I really don’t hate Thesis, I launched the ThesisAwesome.com site. I just feel  uncomfortable with the way people think of it, so I want to make it clear to help you with your decision!

Report generated by aMember membership software

As you can see in the image above, I’ve managed to make sales of $30,000 last year from developing and selling Thesis Skins at ThesisAwesome.com. That is almost 50% of my online business income, and it’s clear that I wouldn’t be profiting if Thesis Theme didn’t exist!

However, this doesn’t mean I should rate it 5 out 5 just because I am making good money out of it. There are a few things that I don’t like about Thesis, and I will mention them in my review below!

So, read on…

Thesis Theme is my own Teacher!

I’ve learned tons of useful tricks being a Thesis Theme user, it helped me to enter the WordPress development world in a sweet way. Probably no other WordPress theme or framework would teach me all that and help me establish a design business, but there is always an issue. I didn’t buy this theme to learn how to design cool things, I also never thought that I would be so involved in it working day and night to get the look and feel I wanted for my blog.

I didn’t want a white page! I wanted something that really works out of the box!

To be honest, Thesis Theme actually works out of the box, exactly the way it was explained, and that’s why I ran and quickly bought it, I was convinced!

But…

1. No one told me that I need to hire a designer!
2. No one told me that I need to get a developer
3. No one told me that I will have to spend nights and days working my butt off to get a unique design!

I didn’t buy Thesis Theme to learn cool stuff and be a professional web designer, or an avid developer!

So, if you need to learn, and you have time, then Buy Thesis Theme, it will simply teach you!

There is a always a catch, and a lot more to do. Thesis Theme’s trick was actually in its marketing message! And, that’s another reason for me to rate it lower!

Why Thesis Theme is not getting any updates!

This is one of the most annoying things for anyone who becomes part of a membership site. They promise you will get updates, but no time line. That’s fine and accepted, but one year with no critical upgrades, that’s not good at all! I mean the world is changing!

People keep asking Chris Pearson every day when he will release Thesis 2.0, and Chris keeps telling them “Thesis 2.0 is coming soon”, 2011 ended, but 2.0 has not been released.

I thought maybe he doesn’t want to release 2.0 for the public, and prefers to keep it for his Best Damn Blog on the Planet.

At the beginning I thought those people are just silly, why do they need an update? What’s the point of getting a new update for Thesis? Are they having a problem or they are just asking because they paid for future upgrades?!

I really didn’t understand their point the whole time! I also didn’t understand Chris‘s strategy!

I learned a lot of things while giving support to my ThesisAwesome.com members. I realized some interesting stuff that are maybe facts, or maybe I am just imagining these are facts!

People all the time ask me for updates…..do you know why? Simply because they want “new features”!

They think if they pay $100 for a design, they will keep getting new awesome features forever, and to the end of days! I must say this is impossible, I can’t give you new feature updates for ever. I prefer to focus more on enhancing what I have and make it work better. I add new features only when there is a big demand. Then I make time and work on it, but if I see it’s unnecessary, why should I bother?!

You know what?

I just think that… Chris sees Thesis Theme as a perfect creation, why should someone come up with a new update for something is already perfect?! You won’t get another update any time soon!

But then, I think again, and again, and I remember the Headway 3.0 launch that was considered a big fail for Headway Themes by many of their members. Everybody says it was released earlier than it should be. I really don’t want to see this happen to Thesis, and I hope that Chris knows what he is doing, or it will be a big problem for everyone who depends on Thesis!

Anyway, what do you expect from the Thesis Theme next update?

SEO features, should I use a plugin?

That’s how Thesis could be sold to over 40,000 people. Thesis Theme has solid SEO features, so you don’t need to use any SEO plugin if you are running Thesis Theme on your blog. However, you may want to empower your blog SEO with some plugin So let me tell you this… You simply don’t have the choice!

I’ve tried WordPress SEO by Yoast, and it’s a really awesome plugin, and I see good potential in using it, especially if this gives you more control over SEO. However, it didn’t work well for me as I am using Thesis. SEO features conflict and duplicate in some areas, and I was about to mess things up by editing some part of the framework or disable its SEO functionality so I can use the plugin instead, but I changed my mind, I really don’t need more headaches.

I still see some people using the SEO plugin with Thesis, this is just not right!

Joost says that SEO has to be controlled by a plugin, not a theme. or at least give users the option to enable/disable SEO options. Themes has to focus more on design and layout, I personally agree 100% with him.

Who won’t agree on that anyway?

Yes…

P.S. that’s an old tweet, but nothing has been changed since that time. Chris won’t lose the marketing key and refused to respond while other frameworks like Genesis and Headway have responded nicely to Joost and to their members who simply asked to have the choice to decide which SEO feature to use.

That being said, it has just added another reason for me to rate Thesis Theme lower!

Another Story About Respect!

Ok, while it’s hot and I got your full attention, let me tell you what happened with me when I first launched ThesisAwesome.com

Actually this happened before I launched the site. I tried to get in touch with Chris, the person who I thought I will be working with and needed his advice, as my idea was actually to develop for Thesis, and only Thesis! So, I asked him to DM his email so I can email him privately because I had a very important question for him. I really really needed some business advice atthat time, and simply he was the only person I thought could help me out!

I got a reply from him on Twitter, he told me to send my email via the DiyThemes support email.

And, guess what?

One year passed and I never got an answer to my question! I never heard from him!

No matter what I say, it won’t express my feelings at that time. I was really upset, I mean how can someone contact you and ask for  business advice, and you don’t reply to him? I am a Thesis Theme user, and I am part of your affiliate program, my idea should drive more sales. Any professional would reply to such an email!

There was no respect! And I won’t forget that!

Add everything to function.php file, what’s the problem?

You see, I put a lot of effort into this blog, I spent hours and hours coding for FamousBloggers.net. After two years of coding I ended up with a freaking scary and stupid file. I realized that not everything should be included in the theme’s function.php file, it’s not really the best practice. I have a lot of functions in that file and it became confusing. I didn’t know where to start, and where to go anymore, totally lost!

The best way to do this is to create your own functionality plugin.

I got this idea from Ryan Imel of WPCandy.com, and it makes a lot of sense. However, I haven’t had a chance to create my own functionality plugin yet, but at least I started with extracting my function.php file into a few small size file, and restructuring the Thesis Theme /custom/ folder to contain more files and folders that are simple to read, follow and understand.

Child Theme or Skin?

Call it whatever, but Thesis Skins are not Child Themes!

A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme, and allows you to modify, or add to, the functionality of that parent theme.

I will stick with that because I trust what WordPress.org says!

Thesis Skins is far more than that, so I will stop calling it Child Themes.

Thesis Header Image

In my opinion, this is the worst Thesis option ever since 1.8, why? It says in the option page:

Based on your current layout settings, the optimal header image width is 949 pixels. If your image is wider than this, don’t worry—Thesis will automatically resize it for you!

It’s just silly to resize the header image and fix its width to 949px, and even worse, cropping a header image? Wow! This is amazing! But, what’s the point here?

P.S. don’t worry, I am the last person to worry about this feature because I will never have to use it!

The problem is this particular option gave me a lot of headaches. It forced me to code a new option to solve it for my best selling skin, the BlogSkin, simply because the page width I’ve chosen for the skin is 980px, which this amazing header option thing doesn’t support!

Theme Support

I really don’t have anything against the theme support, all people who are working at DiyThemes.com are cool and they respond quickly, and I appreciate all they do to solve problems and help members. I always appreciate support because it’s really a hard job, I am sure you will know what I mean if you have ever been supporting members in forums.

Let’s say they are doing their “job” perfectly!

DiyThemes Blog

If you are a Thesis member, then I am sure you’ve read some posts on their blog.

Maybe I am the only one, but I am sick of the same boring and repeated stuff that is published on the blog,  too much triggers!

I don’t recognize DiyThemes blog anymore, I don’t know whether it’s a design blog or just another blog of Derek Halpern.

Don’t get me wrong, I like strong opinions, and I like Derek‘s work and appreciate the good advice, but the blog needs to have more fresh design related articles and tutorials written by professionals, not only marketing and converting tips. Here is a couple of suggestions:

1.  Having another player will spice up the blog and make it more exciting!
2. Inviting more guests to write for the blog, add new blood!

I am sorry to say that, but this is by far the worst blog ever, I lost interest!

Seriously, Who Makes Thesis Theme Awesome

I think web designers and developers who work in Thesis Theme development are the ones who actually make it awesome, Thesis has never been awesome without their contributions.

You can see a post from the past where I got a few quotes from top niche web designers who develop for Thesis.

Final Thoughts about Thesis Theme

While Thesis Theme is very reliable, at least for me and my business, I make money by solving problems “Thesis problems”, and by developing skins that add additional functionality to Thesis, which makes it awesome, if Thesis was perfect, I wouldn’t be making $30,000 in only one year! Period!

My Thesis Skins are selling because I solve people’s problems.

Marketing Thesis Theme as the best SEO framework is an old idea, it’s not valid anymore, and it shouldn’t be your focus when buying a theme for WordPress.

I really want to see a huge change in 2.0, however I am not sure if there will be a 2.0!  I don’t want to jump off the train unless I really have to!

I don’t hate Thesis!

I’ve said what’s on my mind, and what I kept in my heart for a long time! And, as you can see, this review is quite different than any other review that has been published about Thesis Theme. I haven’t paid too much attention to the functionality or features, simply because Thesis Theme doesn’t offer something different than other frameworks in the market, so I won’t be talking about the same thing over and over. And, as I mentioned before, I will be updating this review if I see it’s necessary.

I hope this helps you to make a better decision for your business.

Now it’s back to you, I will be glad to discuss this with you even more in the comments section, really!

There are two ways to do this, the hard way and the easy way!

The hard way where you have to code and style to implement hreview in your WordPress theme, and the easy way where you simply install a plugin that gives you that power. So let me make things easy for you.

I’ve announced the under development product reviews plugin for Thesis Themes at ThesisAwesome.com blog, it’s a simple plugin that allow you to easily insert Google Rich Snippets for reviews and ratings to your posts and show rating stars in search results.

I call it the Thesis Theme Review Plugin.

Reviews examples

Here are a few examples of reviews I’ve made on the blog recently, and also some other reviews that I’ve updated from the past, you may look at them or search for them in Google and see how things looks like in the search results:

• Revenue Engine
• CommentLuv Premium
• PopUp Domination
• Engagement From Scratch
• Headway 3.0
• CurationSoft
• Market Samurai
• Gravity Forms

Also, notice the sidebar widget which has a list of recent reviews that I made especially for the plugin.

The future of Thesis Theme Review Plugin

As you can see from its name, the Thesis Theme Review Plugin works only with Thesis Themes, and it will be released as part of my ThesisAwesome.com membership site, this means if you are already a member and you did purchase any of my Thesis Child Themes, then you will have access to download the plugin for a very affordable price, plus the freedom to install it on any of your blogs. However, you also can purchase the plugin individually at a good low price.

Note: I don’t sell you a bunch of codes and files, I sell you my support, which means my time, so you are not actually paying me to download the plugin, but to get support and upgrades.

I will be updating you more on prices and when the plugin will be released for the public, this should’t take a lot of time. But for now I need beta testers, so keep reading.

Become a beta tester

I’ve already tested out the Thesis Theme Review Plugin here on the blog and some other blogs, I need to do more testing before releasing it, I need beta testers who are willing to provide feedback and help me out to test the plugin on different blogs with different layouts, this is great for the development process and your help should make it a better plugin.

I am going to accept only 5 -10 beta testers, so if you are willing to install and use the plugin on your blog help me test it out, and provide feedback, it might be yours for free.

Want to be a beta tester? contact me now.

One last thing, it’s a good idea to join my affiliate program before releasing the plugin, this may help you make extra money.

What do you need to do to make sure your blog looks up-to-date, fresh and modern?

The appearance of your blog is arguably the thing that is most important to get right. Content is king but appearance is the king’s mother – if the appearance has a big problem then nobody will discover the king has been born.

The appearance should not put visitors off. Neither should it be the reason they come to visit (that’s the contents job). The best appearance is one that the visitor does not really notice – it is an essential ingredient of a successful blog but should always remain in the background.

Here are five rules to follow to ensure a great appearance.

1. No Clutter

Avoid the “can’t see the wood for the trees” syndrome.

Too much content makes it hard for the surfer to find what they want. The impression of being cluttered can also come from using too many colors, fonts and sizes. Think of the standard ransom note in TV cop shows made up from newspaper clippings – yes, it can be read easily but would anyone want to read a whole article made that way?

2. No Distractions

A visitor coming to your blog to read something that interests them would more than likely prefer to read without having a whole load of moving objects all around the screen. You wouldn’t dream of using a reading lamp with a flashing light, so why expect your visitors to tolerate something similar?

3. Advertising

If you are carrying advertising, you may have no control over what is displayed. If your advertising provider uses animated ads consider putting these only at the tops or sides of your pages so that the visitor can scroll the annoyance out of sight.

4. Focused Content

If a visitor arriving at your blog is immediately presented with a load of links instead of some content, then there is a good chance that your blog has grown out of control. Consider breaking your blog into different sections. The best blogs are in focused sections, will have interesting content on the home page, and provide easy navigation to their sections.

5. Arouse Interest

It can be difficult to get this right, but it is very important. You need to present enough content to get the visitor interested while at the same time not overwhelming them with a mass of text. Condense information into fluff-free key points or good opening paragraphs that serve as appetizers. Long content should always be broken into smaller chunks. Ensure you use sub-headings to break up the text.

Now you know how to make a blog look good but you also want to make it look modern.

All of the appearance rules above were just as valid 10 years ago as they are today, and you can make your blog look modern by availing of the latest technological advances without breaking the rules.

Display size

Modern computer screens can display much more than their predecessors, but it is not good practice to fill the entire screen. This is because there is no longer a ‘standard’ screen size, so you want to aim at a happy medium. Modern practice is to leave margins of about 10%-30% on the left and right.

Backgrounds

It’s good to leave a margin but make sure you control the full background, preferably with a subtle, neutral color.

Layout

Most modern blogs use a two or three column structured layout. There is often a main column with text that flows around an image and one or two narrower columns with images or more text. Modern blog layout is very similar to a magazine layout where the blog’s smaller columns emulate the magazine’s sidebars.

Latest Themes

check frequently to make sure you are using the latest themes and plug-ins. This is a great way to keep up to date. If you are not using the latest themes then seriously consider moving to them. There will be a bit of a learning curve and a time overhead in changing themes but it will be well worth it.

Interactivity

It’s always good to allow surfers to take part in your blog either by publishing their content or allowing them to comment…easily. (If I have to login to comment…I don’t!)

Promptly moderate and reply to all comments. Long time gaps between comments and replies imply the blog owner is not interested, so you need to stay on top of this.

Social Networks

There are ever-increasing ways to allow visitors to spread the word about your blog at the click of a mouse and you should make sure your blog incorporates the most popular social media plugins. Right now, your blog should include at least Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 buttons.

You can help to keep your blog looking good by frequently visiting the most popular blogs to stay aware of modern trends. Leading newspapers, magazines and online companies invest a lot of time and thought in their blogs and provide a good way of staying in touch with what’s new.

We have had a look at best practices, but remember to bear in mind that judgements on your blog (or anyone else’s), whether by yourself or third parties, will always be subjective – what is pleasing to one person may appear grotesque to another.

As the blog owner, you need to strike a happy medium that will make your blog appeal to as many as possible of the type of visitors you are trying to attract. You will never achieve a 100% satisfaction rate so do not waste time trying to appeal to all.

You also need to keep in mind that the subject matter of your blog is what should determine its overall appearance. If your blog is about graffiti or heavy metal bands, then the surfer will probably expect to see a blaze of color, whereas a blog about prayer probably needs to be a lot less in your face.

When surfers arrive at your blog for the first time, for them it is like opening a door into a room or peeking through a curtain – they will have an instant first impression. If the reaction is one of revulsion (“yuck!!”), they are almost certainly going to move on immediately and won’t even see that you are offering free entry to a million dollar draw. No matter how interesting your content is, if people are too dazzled or confused by your blog’s appearance they are going to shut their eyes (and minds) and back out real quick.

What’s your view? How do you keep your blog fresh looking?

Please share your views in the comments below.

Andrew is a full-time Internet Marketing Specialist and blogger from the UK. At his blog he shares all his knowledge and experience on how to make a blog.

Only one infographic could come out on top;  SodaHead community selected Infographic World‘s “Farewell to a Genius: The Life and Times of Steve Jobs” to be the most popular infographic for 2011.

How SodaHeads voted on the best infographic

This is the interesting part, SodaHeads designed an infographic to show how their community voted on the best infographic! check it out below…

Best Infographic of 2011

That’s a very interesting infographic, and that’s why I am sharing it on the blog!

What you think?

Now, you could easily just make the last paragraph of your post be your call to action. However, just adding it in as plain text is kinda boring – a call to action that looks just like the content can easily be overlooked once a reader skims your article and finds the information they want. You need to make your call to action stand out. You need to make it interesting.

Let’s Make an Interesting Call-out.

Today I’m going to show you a simple CSS trick you can use to make your calls to action much more visually appealing. Once you’ve set this up, it’s a simple matter of adding the class to each post’s call – or, even better, hard-coding your call to action directly into your theme so it’s on every post. I’ll show you how to do both. First, though, let’s set up the CSS.

Basically, we’re going to create a CSS class that puts text in a “stitched” box, and also give it a drop shadow. When it’s done, it should look just this:

You can see the actual callout at the bottom of my recent business card tutorial.

To create this, open your theme editor and find your main stylesheet – it’ll probably be called style.css.

Add the following code to the bottom of the stylesheet:

.callout {
padding: 5px 10px;
margin: 0px;
background: #3333dd;
color: #fff;
font-weight: normal;
line-height: 1.3em;
border: 2px dashed #fff;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 0 4px #3333dd, 2px 1px 4px 4px rgba(10,10,0,.5);
-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 0 4px #ff0030, 2px 1px 4px 4px rgba(10,10,0,.5);
box-shadow: 0 0 0 4px #3333dd, 2px 1px 6px 4px rgba(10,10,0,.5);
text-shadow: -1px -1px #3300aa;
}

This code creates a CSS class that you can apply to any piece of text. Save your stylesheet, and you’re done!

Now whenever you want to create a call to action in your blog posts just create it like this:

<p class="callout">Your callout here</p>

If you want to embed a universal call to action that will be automatically applied to every blog post, all you need to do is embed that paragraph in your theme. Just open up single.php in your theme folder and insert the code directly below this line:

<?php the_content(); ?>

Once that’s embedded in your theme, it’ll show up on every post. Bonus: This method of embedding the callout gets rid of the need for a plugin, which will make your blog faster.

[photo courtesy of Flickr user Redwood 1. CC BY -ND 2.0]

RULE NO. 1: We don’t really care about how you blog. And yes, that’s a good thing.

If you’re a new blogger (or maybe just getting the hang of things), chances are you’re in dire need of attracting every bit of first time visitor that you possible can convert into a regular reader. And how do you exactly do that? Focusing on traffic generation? On writing really long value-laden posts? On being more interactive? Maybe. Possibly. But I doubt all this things individually would make such an impact

Designers however, believe in one powerful thing –impression.

Does it sound shallow to you? Well maybe it is. But in truth, every visitor, every human being, is instinctively ruled by their visual perception. The mind sees before it starts to process and understand. And because of that fact, we’ll look closely at the overall impact of your blog. Is it eye-friendly? Does it make it easy to do a quick scan of contents? Are the colors inviting? You get the gist.

RULE NO. 2: We look at your blog’s brand. You should be smart enough to develop one.

It’s quite odd that most bloggers don’t really think this is of any concern. Or even if it is, they don’t really pay much attention to it. Two words for that. Very wrong.

So everyone’s on the same page, let’s hear the basic concept. What’s a brand?

By definition a brand is “An identifying symbol , words, or mark that distinguishes a product or company from its competitors.” Source: InvestorWords

If you’re serious enough with your blogging and one of your aims (if not the main one) is to generate profits, then you have every responsibility to treat it like a business. And what does every business have? That’s right. A brand.

This is where we designers come in. We’re quite capable of identifying and creating one, and truth be told, it’s such a shame to see blogs have merely names in plain texts as their logos, or to see a design that is very poorly made and without much thought or conceptualization. It’s not that we’re bound to judge you because we’re inclined to do so, I guess it’s just that we know how big of a deal it really is not for our sake, but for yours.

RULE NO. 2:: The ability of recall. Wait, what???

Okay. This concept really is a little vague and subjective at the same time. Though of course, that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Quite the opposite actually. I bet you’ve heard about this before –recall simply means the ability of the blog to be remembered and revisited back. It goes hand in hand with impression and branding.

Okay. Since this really is hard to explain without becoming too confusing, how about a case study. For example, let’s look at a blog name, specifically, between blogs that have say a one word name versus a blog that has three. You might think this isn’t important, but actually, much depends on this. You have to realize that the ability of a blog to strike a recall to its first time viewers would be based on

1. How well the name can be remembered and;
2. The impression of the whole blog to connect to the name

This is where your logo (for example) would come in. Ever wondered why the logo color would always be the basis for the blog theme color? Most people just accept that it’s a rule or that’s how it’s supposed to look good. But the truth is you are actually trying to connect the two things together (the brand and the blog) to make a good recall. Does it make sense now?

THE CONCLUSION

I agree. We’re not really holistic on how we’ll see your blog. But the point is when it comes to blog improvement, there’s no one ultimate guru. SEO analysts would be the best go-to guys if you want to improve your traffic and SEO structure. Internet marketers would be the ones who can give you the most tips in improving your profit. Social media experts are the ones to be consulted when you want more online interaction with your readers.

As for us web and graphic designers, we’re your source if you want to maximize your first level of appeal to your readers. How they see you and better remember for future visits is an important thing in building your following. And that’s what we’re kinda good at

Let me know what you think!

If there are more web and graphic designers around, I’d love to hear your insights and experiences on this issue. Would also like to hear if you’ve had consultation experiences with us designers. How was it? Comment below! Thanks!

This infographic designed by MBA Online illustrates some of that hope.

According to the graphic, which was designed based upon a survey from Jobvite, over 50% of job seekers use Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to find jobs. More specifically, over 18 million American people said to have found jobs using Facebook.

While the infographic highlights the profiles of the male/female social job seekers, statistics on social network use for jobs and some applicable tips, the part toward the end of the infographic really stood out: “Moral of the story: being super social pays off. ” The saying ” It’s not what you know, but who you know” has never sounded so true.

Social media has brought to a tough job market a new light – using the very network we joined because it was the ‘in’ thing to do – and allowing another line of communication to evolve and become this powerful resource.

Created by: MBA Online