Web Design & Interactive Media

[StonedStupid]

Anyone one else delve into this stuff? I currently am working on a degree in Web Design and would love to connect with some members from the site who have similar interests in this area. I also would love to learn more about SEO as well as getting into developing smart phone applications.

 

[ganzuul]

Yeah, a few tips:

Don't work for anyone else. Freelancing takes a bit more work, but anyone who would employ you as a web designer means to exploit you and their customers.

Customers are a precious commodity and google ads work. You probably need a budget to spend on ads to get the customers you need in the beginning, but good work gets you good pay and repeat business.

The customers aren't right. They are paying you because you have a superior sense for design, and you need some severe people skills to get this across and make it sound like a good thing. Don't sign your name on a design you hate, at least don't put it in your portfolio.

Don't pursuit debt; sell it and move on.

If your skill is code, you probably need a graphical designer.

BTW, I do graphical design, and a bit of code.

 

[tr1ck_]

Don't work for anyone else. Freelancing takes a bit more work, but anyone who would employ you as a web designer means to exploit you and their customers.

+1, unless you wanna work for me

I do SEO for a living, and the main thing to realize is off-site seo is 90-95% of the battle, some people will tell you to spend all your time optimizing your code with proper tags, keywords etc. The only thing that matters very much is the H1 tag, nearly everything else is off-site

 

[StonedStupid]

I hope to figure things out so that I can work for myself. That is the main reason that I wanted to get into this line of study. I started out in a graphic design major and about a year ago I switched nto web design so I know both the visual side of things as well as the scripting though I have more skills with the scripting at the moment.

 

[StonedStupid]

+1, unless you wanna work for me

I do SEO for a living, and the main thing to realize is off-site seo is 90-95% of the battle, some people will tell you to spend all your time optimizing your code with proper tags, keywords etc. The only thing that matters very much is the H1 tag, nearly everything else is off-site

I need to learn more abotu SEO. Any suggestions for good resources to learn more about it?

 

[Zowie]

I been doing this since the 90's, which makes me an old schooler. I'd love to help you, but then you'd owe me all your future earnings. lol. jk.

SEO is one of those things you can't really "learn" from books or online, but just by having experience.. it kinda "comes" to you, you don't really "go learn" it, if that's how you start it's a bad sign you won't have much success. Best bet is give yourself a challenge. Build a site, and then try to get it to appear on google. Pick a site that is pretty common, but not too common. Maybe.. say a site with articles about strawberry cough lol. Then, see if you can get your search results to show up on the 10th google page. Then the 8th. Then the 5th.

Once you figure out how to get it on the first 3 pages ... now you know SEO.

That means, you understand 'popularity'. For example, if nobody reads your strawberry cough page, it's not popular. So, you can start posting on blogs, getting them to somehow link to your page more often (and do it the 'right' way, which is actually getting to know them, not sneaking your links onto their site and flooding it) and soon, as more people link to your strawberry cough page, it's popularity goes up and page rank increases.

But, lot of people do it the "cheap" way which is sneaking it onto other sites (like for example they post a link to their blog on the comment sections of other more popular blogs, trying to hitch a free ride to page ranking) but that's a cheap sketchy tactic and cheapens the net.

Learn to do SEO without cheapening yourself. That's the key... good luck!

 

[El Toker]

I've been in the industry since 95. My advice is to forget SEO altogether and to sit down and build a site that people will actually want to visit. My business site and my sandbox site have PR of 3 and get pretty good listings. I've seen people spend thousands on SEO and still have a PR1 and a place so far down the listings that nobody will ever find them.

Google are constantly refining and changing their ranking algorithm always with an aim to get people to sites that they want to see, not sites that they've been tricked into visiting by SEO wizardry. That means that what can be an effective SEO technique today could get your site seriously demoted or kicked out of the results completely tomorrow. But if you just stick with giving the visitor what they want you should be safe. If you spend a few hours writing an article with original and interesting content you'll fare a lot better than if you spend twice that time in seedy attempts to spam other sites with your link.

There's also the issue that if someone is tricked into visiting your site, then you are actually creating antipathy toward your brand name.
My approach has always been to tell the client to find a web site that they like, then all I need to do is modify just enough, there's no point in reinventing the wheel every time you create a new site. Get a good grasp of HTML, PHP, and CSS with some photoshop skills. CSS Zen garden is always a good place to start looking for design ideas And W3 schools for implementing code.

Using Joomla I can set-up a web site for a client rich in functionality in less than an hour, they can add content just as easily as they update their Facebook pages. Another thirty minutes and they can have a Pay Pal shopping cart. None of it is rocket science, any regular person could learn how to do all of this stuff in just a few weeks. The fact is that there are way too many people out there looking to make a killing in web design and there simply isn't the market to support them and that's a situation that is only going to get worse. I'm glad it's not a part of my business that I rely on.