Many businesses don’t realize what marketing is and how a great marketing plan can elevate your business. Some think of marketing as just one more thing to put their time and energy into, but that’s incorrect. If you don’t create a plan and think about your marketing strategy, you’re setting yourself up for failure. It’s a necessity for each and every business, no matter how small or new you are. It’s also important for older businesses to re-evaluate your plans and see what changes you might make to elevate your business for the future. We’ll go over some marketing basics in this article, to help you understand what you can do to integrate a marketing plan in your business today. read more

I’m a big fan of photography and I absolutely love black and white photos. Photography is another art form that I draw inspiration from, it’s very different from the type of design work that I do, but yet similar in some aspects. Good photos exhibit great lighting, composition, layout and style. These photos showcase these qualities and much more. read more

My most recent post, covering common HTML and CSS mistakes, has come out at the Web Designer Ledger today.

Beginners through advanced coders make mistakes in their HTML and CSS files, either through carelessness or lack of experience. Clean code is very important though and will help further your skills as a developer, as well as save you time in editing later on! It never hurts to review if you’re a skilled developer, many mistakes are caused by going too quickly and not practicing good coding skills from the beginning. Here’s a helpful list of common mistakes and missteps that I’ve encountered through my own work, as well as working with others.

Read the full article at the Web Designer Ledger.

Green Field Paper offers fun and unique paper products, including handmade paper, machine made hemp paper, and seed embedded paper. Using their products is a great way to be more environmentally-friendly as a designer, but also a neat way to spice up your projects! We did an interview with Rick Smith, President of Green Field Paper, to give you an idea of what this unique company is all about.

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In today’s world we are bombarded with so many distractions that only perpetuate procrastination during working hours: cell phones, social media, friends and family, etc. But as working professionals we need to be aware of these distractions and fight them in order to get work done efficiently and productively. Check out my post on Smashing Share with helpful tips to help you fight those procrastination-prone tendencies.

See the full post on Smashing Share

A bit of a fun article, my latest article for Six Revisions talks about some common myths about web designers: working with clients, socializing with others, etc. Some great conversation is going on in the comments as well, join in on the fun!

See the full article at Six Revisions.

This concludes our SEO series, but keep an eye out for more SEO articles in the future. It’s a hot topic right now and there’s always more to learn and reminders like these help us all keep our sites sharp and search engine friendly. As a review, we’ve covered the basics in Part 1, Google Analytics in Part 2, and some helpful tools to analyze your site in Part 3. These articles are a good place to start to learn about SEO and the basics for the web. But how does it directly relate to your site? Today, we’ll go over 5 quick and easy steps to get you started on the path to SEO bliss.

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In Part 3 of our SEO Series, we’ll discuss some tools and techniques to assist you in analyzing your site. In Part 1 of the series, we started off by looking at the basics of search engine ranking and search engine optimization. In Part 2, we talked about my favorite tool to help analyze user statistics on your site, Google Analytics. Today, we’ll cover more tools to analyze your site data, but they will analyze the content on your site, not the visitors like Google Analytics does. Taking a good look at your site’s backend structure to see what search engines see is a good way to fully optimize your site, and there are tons of helpful resources out there to help you.

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