2012 is the 16th annual Webby Award Competition. What are the Webby Awards? If you have an online website then you want to know about the Webby Awards.

The Webby Awards was established back in 1996 – this was when the internet was still young and “up and coming.” Today, the webby Awards is “the leading international award honoring excellence on the internet.” This is such a big organization that last year’s Webby Awardsrecieved almost 10,000 entries. These entries came from all of the 50 states and over 60 countries.

This Award giving group includes a group of 1,000 members who are leading web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative visionaries, internet professionals, and associate members who have won a previous Webby Award or an award from another company.

Members

Musicians Beck and David Bowie
Internet inventor Vint Cerf
President & Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post Media Group Arianna Huffington
Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone
“The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening
foursquare Co-founder Dennis Crowely
Chairman and Founder of R/GA Bob Greenber
Founder of Flipboard Mike McCue
Actress Lisa Kudrow
Co-founder of Thrillist Ben Lere
Actor Adrian Grenier
Writers and editors from The New York Times, Wired, Details, Fast Company, Elle, and The Los Angeles Times to name a few

Awards

Each category gets two different awards. They are The Webby Award and The Webby People’s Voice Award. There are four categories to enter into: websites, interactive advertising and media, online film and video, and mobile apps.

Each year the public votes for the people’s voice award and the members of the Webby Awards group vote for the Webby Award.

If you are looking for some publicity, this would be a great competition to enter. Even if you don’t win, there will be hundreds of thousands of people looking at your submission.

When creating a website, it is important that your site looks appealing to people coming to look at your site, easy to navigate, and easy to read. A lot of people judge a company or a website within just seconds of opening the web browser.

I know that I do. It the site doesn’t look professionally done and isn’t easy to navigate around I, along with many other people I know, will leave the page and look for business elsewhere. If you feel that you are struggling with making your site look professional, here are a few tips that may be helpful when posting to your webpage.

Keep the Bolding to a Minimum

When looking at a webpage, your eyes are drawn to anything that sticks out. For example if you have sentences or phrases bolded, your reader’s eyes will go directly to those words. This is a good thing if you don’t want your reader to miss something.

Having too much bolding on your page can be a distraction though. Bolding everything can have the opposite effect. If too many things are bolded, they no longer seem important and your reader can get lost.

The “F” Shape

When looking at a webpage, your readers will almost always browse over your page in the shape of an “F”. They will first look across the top, then they will look down the left side of the page, and lastly they will look for something right across the middle of the page.

If you want your readers to notice something right away, place it in any of these three places and they will be sure to see it. Make sure that is something that catches their attention though. If it doesn’t, they will probably leave your site without looking at anything else.

Keep These in Mind

Keep these two tips in mind when creating your webpage. These two tips may be what keeps your readers on your page and interested. Ignore these tips, and you may lose traffic quickly.

Blogging is a great way to get your opinions heard and your business advertised. Blogging does take a little work though. You can’t just create a blog and expect people to come visit it. You need to work to keep the traffic coming.

Just as there are things that you must do in order to upkeep your blog, there are some things that you should not do as well. Here is a list of some simple mistakes that bloggers often make.

No Goal or Theme

In order to get traffic to your blog, you need to have a theme or goal in mind when creating your blog. There are two questions you can ask yourself: What is the point of your blog? And what benefits does it provide to you and your readers?

If you can’t answer either of these two questions, your blog may need a little tweaking.

Poor Formatting

It can be very annoying and distracting to read a blog with poor formatting. Most visitors won’t stay to read what you have to say if they get a headache trying to look for your latest post. Try writing shorter paragraphs, using bold text, and headings to help readers navigate through your post and site.

Posting Sporadically

You will have a difficult time building a following if you post every day for a few weeks and then nothing for months. There is no set rule on how often you should post on your blog, but try not to go too long without an update – you may lose some blog traffic.

Change It Up

If you find that you are making any of these errors with your blog, it is not too late to change. You don’t necessarily have to go back and change every post that you have ever made, but just start with your next post. You may be surprised how much difference a little change can make.

Blogs are a great way to share information. With all of the programs and websites out there, your possibilities are endless.

Creating the blog, in most computer savvy people’s opinion is not the hard part. The hard part is picking your topic.

You can pretty much blog about anything, but if you want people to actually read it you may want to put a little thought into picking your topic. Here are a few things to think about.

Think About Your Competition

Chances are that if you think a topic is worth writing about, someone else does too. The problem with writing about topics that are extremely popular is that there are most likely a million other blogs out there about the same thing.

You want people to read your blog, so the topic must be something people want to read about, but maybe a less common blog topic may be a better choice. Your chances of making money off of your blog are greatly increases with less competition.

Does the Topic Interest You?

Readers can be very perceptive. If you chose a topic that you are not passionate about, they will most likely be able to tell. If you chose a topic that you don’t really care about, it will be very difficult to make it grow. Maybe you won’t be motivated to put in the extra work to get the blog up and going. Your writing may also become dry and boring. This is good for nobody.

Not only do you want to keep your readers interested in your blog, YOU need to stay interested in your blog. Most blogs take a lot of time to get up and going. If you can’t see yourself writing on that topic in six months from now, that may not be the best topic choice.

Go Ahead, Pick Already!

Writing a blog should be fun and interesting. Don’t just pick a topic because it’s the new trend. Be sure you will enjoy writing and others will enjoy reading about it. Once you have your topic in mind, keep at it. Chances are it won’t become popular overnight.

Congratulations! You have information that other people may find useful. Now the question is how you share your information. Creating a website is a great way to share information.

Designing your own webpage can be difficult. Everyone has their own opinion on what looks good and what will catch people’s attention. There are some tips that most people in general will agree upon though. Here is a short list of some things to avoid when creating your own website.

• Avoid distractions. People are easily distracted. If you have things flashing and flying around all over your website, odds are that your readers will not stay on your site. Most readers will click on anything just to stop the headache that all of the moving things on your page are creating.

• Avoid scrolling text. Ever tried to read scrolling text that scrolls at too fast of a pace? Odds are you gave up trying to read whatever it was. It can also be frustrating when you are in a hurry and the text is scrolling too slowly.

• Make your text easy to read. People are impatient. If your home page is one huge page long paragraph with no breaks or headings, most people will leave your site. People want a site that’s easy to read where they can skip to the important information and move on.

• Make navigation easy. Ever been to a website and you can’t seem to find what you are looking for? Nothing will drive your customers away faster than not being able to find the “checkout” button for instance.

• Use spellcheck. Nothing will lessen the credibility of your site faster that misspelled words. The majority of people will notice your spelling errors.

Content marketing can be one of the best ways to get people to buy into your product or service. With content marketing many times you are selling to consumers without them being fully aware of what you are doing.

You are not actually asking them to buy or use your services, you are simply giving them information to create web traffic and attention and then letting them decide for themselves. The more intriguing and relative the content, the more you will stand out among competitors.

Here are a few content ideas that may help you get the ball rolling:
blogs
videos
podcasts
newsletters
white papers
articles

With each one of these techniques you are not only informing consumers of important and relative information, you are also building up a trusting relationship with them so that they will feel comfortable returning to your website to look for additional information about the same, or similar topics.

However, you should seek professional help when deciding on a content marketing strategy, because there are many pathways out there that simply don’t produce results.

Other tips you should be familiar with when considering content marketing are: frequency, cost and control.

In order to keep your website up to date and current with the latest trends, you must be constantly updating with new, fresh content. This will also keep the Google spyders busy searching your website and help rank it highly.

Additionally, you must consider how much you are willing to spend to get your name out there. It will not be cheap to generate unique content frequently to hundreds of sources in order to establish credibility. You should decide now how much you are planning to budget towards this endeavor.

Thirdly is control. This can be a benefit and a downfall of content marketing. On one hand, you are constantly in control of what is posted and where, however, you may become too controlling and not allow helpful links and content to be used. You will have to create and maintain balance in this area.

These are just some of the many tips that can help you get the most out of your content marketing services.

Blogs have quickly become the newest and coolest way to get information out to an audience, while giving an insight into the everyday lives of everyday people.

We’ve already talked about how to start a blog, but we want to give you some additional tips to help get your blog to the people who are interested in hearing what you have to say.

Eight Tips for Good Blogging

1. Offer Help- Write about something people need help with. Homemaking, gardening, technology, car and photography tip entries are among some of the most sought after and read blogs.

2. Brevity is Best – You don’t want your readers to get bored when reading your entry. Tell them what you want to tell them, but be simple and keep it a quick and easy read.

3. Stories Sell – Telling a story will get the readers’ attention and help them relate to you.

4. Share – Share your site with others often. This will get your readers up and keep people interested if they know you are constantly updating.

5. Don’t Over Think but be Thoughtful – In order to get people to become interested in what you say you not only have to say something interesting, but it should be well thought out and clearly understood. If you are over thinking it may come out as confusing and quite frankly, boring.

6. Don’t Be Mean – Insulting your readers is one of the top ways to lose them, and fast. Of course if you have a political commentary blog you may upset some readers with your opinions but don’t personally attack any one person or group of people.

7. Update – Keep your blog updated. Never posting to a blog is a sure-fire way to lose reader’s attention. The longer you take to update a blog, the less people will check back for updates and eventually you will lose your readers all together.

8. Be Aware of your Readers’ Lives – Understand that even though you may be able to update daily, you can’t expect all of your readers to devote as much time to your blog as you do. Be considerate of the time they have to devote to reading your blog.

These are just some ways to get readers to become interested and stay interested in your blogging efforts. There are plenty of other great resources to keep readers coming back for more.

When designing a website, hyperlinking may become one of the most important aspects, especially if your site is made to sell products or services.

First of all, testing should be done often to ensure that links are working properly. If for some reason a “purchase now” or “add to cart” link doesn’t work, this may not only slow down business for the moment, but may cause you to lose multiple customers.

Action Links

According to studies, consumers like to see action links such as “Add to Cart”, “Go to Checkout”, or “Check Email”. This tells them exactly what they are doing when clicking on the provided link. Other important action links include, “View Shopping Cart”, “Sign In”, and “Make a Comment.”

Cross Links

Cross-linking pages that are relevant to each other will help users to more easily find what they are looking for. One great example of cross-linking is including a link to your FAQ page on your Contact Us page. This will minimize the number of questions you have to answer that are already up on your website.

Additionally, it will help users to feel more at ease with your company because of the easy access they have to answers they need.

You could also include on your “Checkout Page” a link to your “Policies Page” to let users know if you have any special guarantees, etc.

When and Where to Link

Linking within text is often ineffective and will confuse users more than help them. The best place to link is with an icon or text at the bottom of the page.

However, when using an icon link, be sure that the icon either includes additional text next to it explaining what it links to or is obvious enough that users understand without further explanation.

These are just a few tips that will help users become familiar with and able to navigate your website with ease. The more comfortable users feel when using your website, the more often they will visit it and you will be able to profit from them.

When designing a website there are a number of things you should take into consideration. One of those things that is become more popular, and ever more useful in creating buzz about your company is the social media networking campaigns. These platforms come with widgets that you can place on your website that allow visitors to jump to your profile on that specific platform. They allow users to like, share and even post comments and questions about your business. In fact, according to a study done at the University of Maryland:

• Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the US.

• Twitter processed more than one billion tweets in December 2009 and averages almost 40 million tweets per day.

• Over 25% of U.S. internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up from 13.8% a year before.

• The number of social media users age 65 and older grew 100 percent throughout 2010, so that one in four people in that age group are now part of a social networking site.

• As of June 2011 Facebook has 750 Million users.

• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.

• iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months.

• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest.

• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.

• In four minutes and 26 seconds 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube.

Among these campaigns are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google and Apple applications. Let’s take a closer look at some of these platforms and see what they have to offer your company.

According to studies “consumers are as likely – or more likely – to make buying decisions based on what they read and see in platforms we call ‘social’ but only if presented by someone they have come to trust.”

This means your marketer must convince people that you are genuinely interested in their well-being and not just trying to sell them a product. You must become someone they trust and want to do business with. You can do this by making your company widely known by publishing content, creating social networking groups and profiles, where former and current consumers can comment on your products and customer service and recommend you to their friends.

Doing this may really help to propel your business to the next level. For more information on social networking and media sources, you can look at each of the individual websites. Each offers additional information on how they can help you increase your business opportunities.

One of the best ways to attract people to your blog or website is by adding compelling pictures. Many people underestimate the power of a well-placed beautifully descriptive picture.

The truth of the matter is, like the old saying goes “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Here are some tips for adding relevant and informative pictures to your blog or website.

Pictures First

When adding pictures to your website, be sure to put them first. This will stand out and draw the reader into your article or website. This will help the reader visualize what you are about to tell them and get them thinking about the topic at hand.

Pictures Trigger Memory

When the viewer sees the picture they will connect it with the idea that follows. Using this kind of connection can help the reader recall the information later, even if they are only allowed to see the image. Pictures are excellent tools for fact recall.

Once is Enough

Even though you are using words to describe the actual points you are trying to get across, adding a relevant picture may draw in extra readers, by giving them a reason to investigate the topic.

Before you start complaining about the cost of hiring a photographer or purchasing photos through stock websites, let us offer you some alternatives.

There are plenty of free stock photo websites that allow users to share photos for free. Some of the most widely used free stock photo sites are:
• Stock.xchng
• Photol.com
• Photos.com
• Stockvault.net
• Inmagine.com
• Deviantart.com
These are just a few of the many free stock photo sites available to you.

Never underestimate the power of a well-placed picture or icon.

Don’t Forget Keywords

To make your pictures even more effective, make sure to name them using relevant keywords. For instance, instead of naming a picture of a puppy, image 3, name it German Sheppard puppy. This will allow it to come up on the image search engine and bring even more traffic to your page.

No matter how savvy you may be at web design, there are 5 things that are essential to remember when it comes to designing for a client.  These 5 tips should always be fresh in the mind of every web designer to ensure the happiness and success of clients.

1. Forget the Flash

Flash based web designs may be cool looking and give sites a little extra, flash (pun intended), however search engines such as Google and Yahoo cannot see any of it. Therefore, if your entire site is flash or flash-based, the search engine crawlers will not be able to rank any of your content.

2. Overdo Optimization

It may sound silly, but be sure that you know the stats. Users are only willing to wait a few seconds for a site to load before moving on to something else. If the site is bogged down with oversized images or weighed down with designer fonts and takes longer than a few seconds to begin loading, you will lose many potential clients.

3. Always think Accessibility

Place your information strategically throughout the website. Users rarely read all of the content. They skim. Also keep in mind that the more people your website is accessible to, the more chances you have for new customers and happy clients. This includes making the site compatible with phones, voice readers and various web browsers.

4. Killer Keywords

To optimize SEO you should include relevant and killer keywords. Research will be necessary to find what these killer keywords are. When you find the perfect set of keywords, stick to it. Keep in mind, however, that things are constantly changing. Stay up to date.

5. Strict Standards

There are new standards coming out for website compliance regarding HTML vs XHTML. Tableless CSS Markups are also something you may want to look into since HTML will soon be phased out of almost all web design.

It is also important that your website be compatible with at least two of the most used web browsers. Which two you choose for compatibility is up to you. Each browser reads HTML, XHTML and CSS slightly differently. Make sure your site works and looks good with each browser.

Whether you are in it for the business or simply to creating a blog for yourself there are new trends that have surfaced when it comes to web design. This goes for the blogging world as well as business web design and even social networking personal pages.

The trends that you choose to follow, or not to follow could be possible breaking points in your success as a business or blogger.

Simple Color Schemes

(Note: All Photographs are of actual websites and the Copyright belongs to that site)

Creating an honest message on a simple site is something that customers appreciate. Give them the specs, the facts and then let them decide for themselves, minus the flashy, “funtastic,” chaotic backdrop.

Use a Photograph

Use a photograph as the background. Whether it be a picture of you, something you love, or even something abstract, people are drawn to this because they always have an opinion to share. Of course, your image should be relevant to what you are selling to the audience.

Hand-Sketched Everything

Hand-sketched or the appearance of hand-sketches seems to be the new theme when it comes to blogs and even sometimes business websites. If things don’t have the hand-sketched appearance they often feature various fonts of all shapes and sizes to give the site a funky, fresh look.

Create the 3-D Effect

Dimensions, dimensions, dimensions. Adding depth to your website gives the audience something to occupy their mind and keep them on the site. Adding depth can be tricky because you don’t want your site to become too cluttered and confusing.

Use shadows and layering to enhance this effect.

Design for Mobility

This is perhaps he most important of the web designs tips we could hand out. Everything is going mobile. It is important to design your site to be used on a mobile device or “apps” to go with the site that will allow users to have access to you anywhere and everywhere they go.

With so much competition on both on and off the internet, being accessible should be on the top of your to-do list.

If you’re ready to join the blogging community and see what all the fuss is about, there’s no better time to get started. Learning what the steps are might seem overwhelming, but we’ve come up with an easy list for getting your name out in the cyber community.

1. Figure Out Your Topic
The most important thing about blogs is the topic. If you have really cool looking pictures, great design, and perfect coding, it won’t mean much if the content doesn’t keep your visitors reading and coming back.

The old saying goes, “write what you know.” Figure out what your passion is, and what you can successfully think of things to write well-written topics. If you’re serious about it, the more you like your subject, the better the blog will be.

2. Pick a Host
There are several free blogging services available to choose from that can help you get started. However, free blog sites have complete control of the site, so should you change your mind and want a specialized domain instead of thisismyblog.blogspot.com, you’re out of luck. How will your followers know where to find you?

Another option to consider is hosting the blog yourself. No, this isn’t free, but you have more options and freedoms. Plus, you get to pick your domain name.

For a cheap solution, try WordPress. You’ll get your own domain name and the rates are relatively cheap.

3. Choose Your Domain Name
You’ve already picked out a theme, so find a relevant topic. This part is one of the most fun parts, and can sometimes feel daunting. Don’t think too much about it. Just pick a name that seems related to your topic.

4. Select a Web Host
There are many choices that offer “1 click installs” for Blogging software. These types of companies make it easy to get your content up quickly, even if you don’t have experience.

5. Install WordPress
This part of the process is probably the most difficult part (but it’s very simple—don’t worry). WordPress walks you through the setup process. Click here to get started on your very own WordPress account.

6. Get Started!
Make your first post count by picking a great topic that will not only interest you, but interest the people you’re looking to attract to your site.

And Voila! There you have it, your very own blogging website. See for yourself how much fun blogging can be.

Design issues, site traffic, SEO words. There are many different things to consider when you try to make a website or a blog successful. However, none of these issues matter if you don’t have the content to support the traffic. Poor design and insufficient links won’t matter if the content is worthless.

So focus more on the content and let everything else fall into place. When writing content you’ve got several things to consider.

1-Focus on your audience. Remember who you’re trying to get to read your blog and keep these people in mind when you’re writing. They are the main goal and focus and keeping them happy will keep your website or blog successfully traffic-worthy.

Once you’ve got your readers fully in mind, figure out what you want to say to them. Pick a topic that will help your readers achieve something, or do something successfully. Give them resources and tools to do so. Be specific. Give them good juicy details.

2- Be Original. If you’re struggling for ideas, don’t just add something to your blog to say you’ve added something to your blog. If you’re just simply saying what everyone else is, what’s the benefit of looking through your website? Create new ideas that intrigue your readers.

3-Think Headlines. People are busy. They’re in a rush and mostly just scan through a bunch of information at once to find relevant information. If you don’t have a good headline, even if your content is great, you’ll miss out.

4- Bring Out the Useful Points. Again, our busy lifestyles. People only look at a web page for a few seconds. If they like what they see, they might stay longer. If not, they’ll simply move on to another site.

Bring out your main points so your readers know where you’re going and can see that it’s something that would be useful to them. Make it easier to scan so that when readers glance over your page/blog, they see that your page would benefit them, so they stop and read more.

Try bolding certain points, making lists, and making the flow pleasing to the eye.

5-Watch the spelling and punctuation. Nothing says unprofessional and ignorant like misspelled words and glaring typos throughout your page. Just remember, your readers don’t know you; they’re judging you simply on the content and writing you give them.

Think about how you’d feel if your wife or husband just had emergency surgery and the doctor comes out and says, “We was nervous he wouldn’t make it and we knew there wasn’t nothing we could’ve done more.” Wouldn’t that make you want to run screaming for a new doctor and a new hospital?

Don’t put your readers in the same scenario. Look and sound smart and like you know what you’re talking about.

Design and colors can only go so far on a web page. Content is the meat, and the meat needs to be juicy.

So What is C.R.A.P.?

Anyone who has ever taken some sort of design class is probably familiar with C.R.A.P., a great acronym that is very helpful in producing beautiful documents, pieces of art, newspapers, magazines, and websites.

Contrast

The C in C.R.A.P. stands for contrast. Well designed works have contrast in them. This can refer to color, or font styles. any many other things. If you want your headings to be big and bold, GO BIG AND BOLD! You want people to be able to see the difference between the headings and the main text. Don’t make the text too close to the same color a your background. It’s boring, and hard to see. You want to be able to draw attention to all the right things in your work.

Repitition

R is for repetition. Repetition is very important in design. Repetition is very important in design. If you want your headings or your text to look a certain way, keep it that way on the entire page. Your website background should be the same on every page. Repetition not only looks better, but it gives you more credibility and trust from those who will see your work.

Alignment

A stands for alignment. This concept of C.R.A.P. is a little harder to explain than the others. But basically, always remember that things should line up with one another. Once you start looking for alignment in your website or whatever you’re working on improving (because C.R.A.P. can apply to anything). Ask yourself these questions: Are the line in a paragraph all equidistant from the edges? Does the picture that goes with the words line up with the top, or any of the sides that touch text?

Proximity

P is for Proximity. Basically, do are all the things that go together near each other? Avoid large gaps and spaces, because these can confuse people as to which article goes where, and what picture belongs to what. Are there any words that are appearing near each other repetitively and noticeably? Re work your sentence structures, and have good flow.

Conclusion

If you use these methods, the look of your website will improve. Trust me. C.R.A.P. will save you from ugliness and unprofessional looking websites.