E-Commerce w/ SEO Package

Purchase a custom designed E-Commerce website from us and we’ll throw in free search engine optimization!

Once your website is complete, getting customers to find you online should be your next goal. Web Design, paired up with search engine optimization ensures that your website will be found by customers using the various search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing. Our search engine optimization services are second-to-none. This special only applies to customers located in Orange County, CA and only applies to brand new e-commerce web design. Call us today to take advantage of this great deal!

Orange County Web Design

If you are like so many people that need to make quick cash, and lots of it, try this new program. All you do is take as many online surveys as you are able, and you get paid to do them. Absolutely free!

Many large corporations use these surveys to find out what consumers are thinking about certain products. These companies pay millions of dollars per year to the people who take part in these surveys. You opinion matters, and they’re willing to pay you for it.

There are many types of programs out there. Some of legit, some are scams. This online survey program that I’m presenting to you is 100% legit. If it wasn’t legit, I would not be using my company’s website to promote it.

Moving on, this program will not make you a millionaire, like so many other claim. It will however put some money in your pocket. There are people taking online surveys using this program anywhere from 30 min per day on up to several hours per day. You can easily make $3000 + per month using this online survey program part time. If you don’t have 20 hours a week to put into this, you can do it just a few hours a week and still make a decent supplemental income. It’s a great way to make extra money online!

Just give it a shot. It’s risk free, its legit, and it works.

by: James Weir, Orange County Web Design

Top 11 Web Design / Development Forums

To kick of the new year of 2010, we decided to put together a list of the top web design forums that we feel could be a useful resource to those of you looking to join a community of designers and developers. As the web design industry continues to grow, the need for such communities grow. These forums were hand picked based on the quality of information available, level of community support by it’s members, and finally, the popularity of the forum. If you have any recommendations for other forums, please feel free to let us know in the comments.

by: James Weir, Web Design Orange County

Photo Retoucher

We at Xpirt Design would like to welcome RA Retouching as a new client for our SEO services. RA Retouching is owned and operated by Raichle Watt, who was a former model and currently is a photo retouching expert. RA Retouching bring years of photo retouching experience, as well as over 15 years of modeling experience. Raichle knows how to bring the photo’s potential to reality. She has worked with many high profile clients but keeps the prices for her professional photo retouching services affordable for any magazine, artist, photographer, or modeling agency. In fact, RA Retouching offers a 10% discount first time orders.

Any additional information you might need is located at her website: www.raretouching.com. Feel free to browse through her website, check out her portfolio, and maybe view some of the most common Q & A’s before you request a quote.

by: James Weir, Xpirt Design

Fixing the “Please Wait” problem in Magento’s Category Management

On behalf of Xpirt Web Design and SEO, I would like to provide the Magento open source developer community with a simple and straightforward solution in fixing the notorious problems with Magento’s category administration panel. If you get the dreaded “Please Wait” image that gets stuck or frozen when trying to add or modify categories on a fresh install, then this article is for you.

On a side note, this solution applies to Magento fresh installs on the latest stable version of 1.3.2.4, and also applies only to the problem of adding or modifying categories, as well as attempting to create, upload, or save a new product. This solution also applies to some users who are having trouble with the “Security” problem when trying to upload an image to a product. And lastly, this is a solution to the problem of saving configurations within the admin panel, such as editing and saving your company information, ect. This is “A” solution to these problems, not “THE” solution to these problems and I sincerely hope this solution works for you.

Problem:

Just recently, we were trying to install a fresh version of the latest stable version of Magento (as of today, 12/17/09) for a new web design client that required the robust and feature-packed e-commerce solution, Magento. After a flawless install at the hosting company “Blue Host”, we logged into the admin panel of Magento and proceeded to start adding categories and products. Of course, like so many of you, we ran into the “Please Wait” problem when trying to add new product categories. We also ran into the common problem of getting the “Please Wait” notification when trying to save or add a new product, as well as the common problem of the “Security Risk” when trying to upload a picture for a new product. We followed all the directions that both the Magento Community and Blue Host documentations provided. As you can imagine, we were stumped.

After several hours of searching through the Magento Community Forums, we were left with no other options than to plead with our hosting company to help out. The hosting company (Blue Host) refused to assist in this matter and basically told us to go back to Magento with the problem. I expected a response like that and wasn’t surprised.

Solution:

Just before we were going to give up, I thought to myself “why aren’t the updating information functions working either?” After thinking for a while, I decided to check out the .htaccess file in the public_html root to see if there are any 301 domain canonical redirects (in English, that’s the non-www. to www.). There was a 301 canonical redirect in the .htaccess file in the root, and another thing I noticed; If you use the “www redirect” in the C-Panel of your web host at the same time, it confuses the server and applications, such as Magento, will throw errors and won’t work correctly. So what I did was turn off the “www redirect” in the hosting C-Panel, then deleted the 301 canonical redirects (again, for those of you who still do not know what this is, this 301 redirect either adds or removes the “www” from your domain name, since search engines see the www. And non-www. As two separate websites and will penalize your SERPS or Rankings for duplicate content). Sure enough, the next time I logged into the Magento admin panel, the categories worked perfectly, the adding products functions worked perfectly, and uploading product images worked perfectly. No more “Please Wait” or “Security Risk” issues at all, whatsoever.

Lesson Learned:

Magento is extremely finicky. On a fresh install, check your .htaccess files for errors and temporarily turn off the www redirects in the C-Panel of your hosting account. Then take one step at a time in setting up your canonical 301 redirects, preferably, use the .htaccess file instead of the C-Panel www redirect function.

Conclusion:

I really hope this article will help some of you fix this problem. I can’t tell you how much of a headache this was, and how many hours of being frustrated, pissed off, and just plain irritated I was because of this problem. I mean, Magento is the Rolls Royce of e-commerce and it’s exciting to finally get to use the product, and then the nightmare begins when the darn thing wont just work. In any case, the problem is solved, and I would like to know if this solution helped some of you out there with the same problems. Please feel free to post comments about your experiences. These are DOFOLLOW comments for you SEO guys out there, but I do keep a close moderation on them so careful with the spam.

Also, for those of you who need any web design services, or need to design a template or theme for Magento, or any other E-commerce software, please visit our orange county web design section and find out how Xpirt Design can help you.

Build high PR, Do Follow links fast and easy!

By: James Weir, Xpirt Design, seach engine optimization los angeles

In this tutorial, I will show you how to effectively build one-way links by finding, analyzing, and commenting on blog sites. Commenting on blogs can yield a large amount of high quality links, but you need to make sure you are commenting on the right blogs, and your comments are worthy of the link. This link building technique has really come in handy for Xpirt Design’s SEO efforts and hopefully, it can be just as successful for you.

Plug-ins / Programs needed:

• You will need the No Do Follow extension for Firefox. When activated, this extension will highlight all links on the web page. The red highlights will be the links that are No Follow. The links that are blue will be the Do Follow links.Download the No Do Follow extension for Firefox
• You will need the SEO Quake extension for Firefox. When this is activated, you will see all stats for any website or web page that is of importance in SEO (Page Rank, Inbound Links, Outbound links, Alexa Rank, page age, and other stats).Download the SEO Quake extension for Firefox
• You will need to download the Back Link Analyzer tool from SEO Book.com. This tool will find the inbound links for a website.
  Download the Back Link Analyzer Tool
  • Set the option to Google (http)
  • Set the option to Yahoo (web service)
  • Set the option to “1000″ on result limit

Use the Back Link Analyzer tool to gather your competitor’s links

Basically, what you want to do here is analyze the back links of any given competitor. There are many back link analyzer tools out there, but the easiest one (and it’s free) is the back link analyzer tool at SEOBook.com. You can also use the link analyzer tool that is offered in the WEB CEO program. The WEB CEO program takes a very long time to search and update the results so for this tutorial, I’ll be using the back link analyzer tool from SEO Book.com.



Back Link Analyzer v2.0

Setup your options

You will need to setup the options for the Back Link Analyzer Tool.



Setup the options as shown

Run the tool. You will soon see a list of back links pointing to your competitor’s website. Here’s the trick on finding blogs. Most, if not all, blogs will use a certain URL structure, for instance, www.example.com/2009/11/9/title , or www.example.com/archives/web-design-stuff/ , or something similar to these. When you find a URL that you think might be a blog, click on it and it should open up your Fire Fox browser. Make sure your extensions are activated.



Find and recognize blog-type URLs

Take a quick look at your SEO Quake stats. Use these stats to determine whether or not this blog is worth commenting on. Try to find blogs with high page ranks on the actual article page itself. Usually, blogs with high page ranks on the domain will have articles that also have high page rank.



Analyze the blog posting according to PageRank, outbound links, ect.

How to know if your comment will be a Do Follow Comment

Take a look at the comments other people have posted. Most blogs will setup a link with the anchor text of the “name” text field. Make sure your No Do Follow extension is activated. If it’s not, go to “tools” and click on “No Do Follow”. So, if the link/name of the commenter is highlighted in blue, the link is a Do Follow link. Also look for the ability to insert a link within the actual comment. Sometimes blogs will allow these.




Make sure the comment links are DoFollow (the link that will be pointing to your site)

Make sure to leave good comments

Leaving good comments is the key to getting back links from blogs. Take the time to read the blog entry and leave a constructive and useful comment related to the subject of the entry. If you don’t leave a good comment, the moderator will simply just treat your comment as spam and you will not get the link. Time will be wasted. So make sure you read the entry and leave a good comment.
Some blogs will allow you to use keywords as your “name”. The blogs that don’t let you use keywords, just use your name or company name. A link is better than no link.




An example of a spammy blog comment



An example of an acceptable blog comment



Screenshot of the input fields for commenting

Conclusion

And that’s pretty much it! Keep doing this for your competitors and when you have run out of competitors to find blogs from, you can just do a Google search to find them. Good luck with your link building and feel free to comment on this post, Digg it, ect. And don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS Feed!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

General Web Design Guidelines

Written by: James Weir, Xpirt Design, web design orange county

The goal of a professional web design company is to create a website that is attractive, easily navigable, and accomplishes the motive of the site. Whether you are selling products, services, or just displaying information, the motive of the website must be accomplished. There are many ways to increase the success of websites; however this article will explain ways to improve your website’s usability, attractiveness, and browser compatibility, by using proven web design techniques.

Website Content

The objective here is to create useful, unique content. You want the user to view your company, or website as a reputable resource for whatever industry or niche you are a part of. Grammar and correct spelling is very important if you want users to view you as a reputable resource. Providing useful content that is unique and informative is a great way to increase your reputation as well as keeping the users interested in what you are offering. Creating useful and unique content is also important for search engine visibility, in other words, search engine optimization. You want to create new content regularly because the search engines will view your website as a valuable information resource and will tend to rank your website appropriately.

Cross Browser Compatibility

A web design’s cross browser compatibility is also important. If your website looks good in Internet Explorer, but looks misaligned or improper in Fire Fox, the people viewing your website with Fire Fox or Opera (which is about 30-40% these days) will click off of your website and move on to the next. This is why it is important to ensure your web design encoding for cross browser compatibility. This is a major problem with some of the older, outdated websites today. It is important to keep your web design’s coding up to date and bug-free.

Graphics, Pictures, and Photos

When using graphics and pictures in your web design, you want to compress the image, avoid using too many images per page, or resize the images appropriately. The reason is to keep the page loading time down. If your images are too large, your website’s load time will increase, and most users these days will immediately leave the website. Also, it is important to label your images by using the image’s “ALT” tag. Labeling the ALT tags will tell the users who have images turned off in their browsers what that image is supposed to be. For search engine optimization, since the search engines do not view images, these ALT tags notify the search engines what that image is about, and in turn, you will increase your credibility on the subject matter with the search engines.

Background Colors and Text

Avoid using background colors that blend with your text color. You want your text to stand out and be clearly readable to the users. It is true that sometimes, certain blending colors will look attractive in the web design, however, you are sacrificing the user’s ability to read the text for the design look and feel.

Website Navigation / Menus / Links

It is extremely important for users to be able to easily navigate through the website. A properly designed website will have an easy to use menu. You should always try to follow the three-click rule, which means the user should be able to reach any part of the website within three clicks or less. If you follow the three-click rule, you will have an easy to use navigation or menu system that is search engine friendly, as well as user friendly.
Use text links whenever possible. Search engines prefer the use of text links over image links or flash menus, ect. The text link should always describe the subject of the link and should be short and concise. If you find that you must use image links, remember to use the ALT tags and label the images according to its subject.

Make sure all links are working, point to the correct destination, and are labeled properly. It is bad for a user to click on a link and find that the link either leads to the wrong destination, or doesn’t work (broken link). The user will get turned off and move on to another web site. Search engines also use links to navigate through the website. If a link is broken, the search engine will have a hard time indexing the page where the link is pointing to. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to diagnose broken links. It is always good to create a sitemap, whether it be an HTML sitemap or an XML sitemap. Site maps are a good back up for search engines to easily navigate (as well as users) through the site. A sitemap is simply a list of pages on the website in the form of links. You may also use descriptions beside the links to inform the users further.

Frames

Frames are bad. Avoid using any kind of frames at all costs. A good web design will not use frames for the design structure. The only time frames should be needed is when displaying 3rd party content on the website.

Conclusion

Follow these general web design guidelines and you will find that your website will generate more results, look more attractive, and be easier to use. I can’t tell you how important a good, smart, and search engine friendly web design is to both the users and search engines. I’ve seen so many websites, that have great products or information, but end up failing because of a poorly designed website. Don’t let that happen to you!

If you are interested in using Xpirt Design for your next website design project, please visit us at web design orange county for more information.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to define the styled elements of a web page such as elements of the layout, colour and fonts, and then separate them from the content of the page (paragraphs/images).

There are advantages to be gained from using CSS while optimizing seo for Google.

CSS allows you to use greater or smaller font size.

It allows you more control of your page structure.

It allows you to keep the file sizes smaller, which decreases the load time of the page. Search engines prefer faster load times.

By using CSS, you can also increase the organization effectiveness of your coding. There much less code on the page, which makes things easier to find, edit, ect. This saves tons of time, and of course, the less code on the page means faster load time.

CSS allows greater, more advanced flexibility in creating the styles for your website design than using only HTML. You can get the look and feel you want without comprimising the structure of the website. Using tables for layout purposes is an example of outdated, and improper methods for layout design. Using Div Tags and CSS is the proper way to design a layout.

Google rewards the pages that have proper structure and it is wrong to assume that using the standard makes websites look bland and boring. If used properly, you can definately use CSS and Validated HTML to create stunning and functional websites, while benefiting from the rewards from search engines.

CSS and Cross-Browser Compatibility

Be aware that some browsers interpret CSS differently than others, and therefore will display differently. For instance, Fire Fox and Internet Explorer. Most web designers can agree that internet explorer is not the choice browser for web designing. It has too many bugs, and makes too much use of improper coding. Firefox on the otherhand adheres to the strict CSS standards. Because of this, these 2 browsers can cause many problems when trying to display the CSS, so you need to be careful and write a seperate code for each browser.

This concludes my short article on CSS and its benefits. Please go to web design and seo in orange county for more information on our services.

Web Design and SEO Tips:

A few important points to consider when starting an online business:

1. Reasearch, research, research. You absolutely must research your target niche market. Find out how competitive the market is. Find out how much of a demand there is.
2. Research your direct competitors. Knowing the direction your competitors are taking will help you plan out your own strategies.
3. Web design style: Again, look at your competitors, or related websites and try to get ideas.
• how you want your site to look.
• how you want it to function.
• how you want the navigation and layout structure.
4. Find out what types of services you require. Whether its ecommerce shopping carts, blog services, or whatever, it is always good to read up on the services before you jump into anything.
5. If you have no website design experience, call a professional web design and seo company (like Xpirt Design). They can help you properly build your online business and give you valuable suggestions and consultation.
6. Greatly consider search engine optimization services. It’s always a good idea to choose a web design company that also offers affordable, but effective SEO services. The reason is that the web designer himself knows how the website is built and it would be much easier, less time consuming, and more effective for the seo to take effect.
7. Consider paid advertising or pay per click/adwords type marketing. A new website will take time to develop natural search engine traffic (SEO). While you are waiting, it is always a good idea to give your website that jumpstart with traffic from paid advertising.
8. The first impression of your web design is everything! When a visitor comes to your website and sees that your website is not professionally designed, more than likely the visitor will leave and continue on his search engine journey.
9. The way your navigation is structured is also a major factor of a properly designed website. If the visitor has difficulties in finding what hes looking for, gets confused or lost within the website, or cannot go back to his previous page, chances are, the visitor will simply leave.

Though web design will take a little time to think about, its the internet marketing and search engine optimization that will no doubt end up taking more than 75% of your time or your hired professional’s time. You constantly have to keep yourself up to date on the market trends, new marketing opportunities, and new directions you can take your business into. Your website will definately determine your success, at least online. If your online marketing, combined with a professional web design, is all done properly, efficiently, and effectively, you can have an unlimited potential in online business growth.

If you are indeed looking for a professional with tons of web design and seo/pay per click experience, visit Xpirt Design or orange county web design for a free consultation.

Tips to make a good web design structure:

Here at Xpirt Design, we decided to give designers a few tips on making a web design structure in order to have a good flow and feel of the website. We follow these guidelines as much as possible and we are confident that if you follow these guidelines as well, you will see faster website load times, a better overall look and feel of the website, and a search engine friendly web design. Feel free to comment on this post with your ideas and suggestions. orange county web design

Web Design Text and Content

• Make sure the backgrounds don’t interrupt any of the text you want people to read.
• Be sure to allow the font size to be large enough for people to read, but not enormously large.
• Make sure to convey which information is most important in a heirarchy.
• Separate large paragraphs into smaller, easier to read paragraphs. Large paragraphs sway people away from reading the content.

Navigation

• The navigation buttons must be easy to find and use. Try to make all navigation buttons consistent in the web design and structure throughout the website.
• If possible, allow the visitor to know where they are at all times either by using titles, or depressed navigation buttons.
• If possible, avoid frames at all costs. Search engines have trouble crawling content within frames and therefore is bad for search engine optimization.
• Always include a sitemap in either .html or .xml format. Search engines use these to easily navigate and crawl through a site.

Links

• Try to make all link colors coordinate with the website colors.
• Either make links in the content underlined, a different color, or bold so they stand out to the visitor.

Web Design Graphics

• Try not to make buttons too large.
• Try to make buttons match with the look and feel of the web design.
• Always include ALT tags for search engine optimization.
• All graphic links should also be matched with a regular text link.
• Graphics and backgrounds should always use browser safe colors as much as possible.
• Try not to use too many animated graphics.
• Try not to use too large of graphics for layout structure or buttons. This slows down the website load time.

General Design

• If everything is done according to this article, page download time will be fast.
• Try to shoot for a 800 x 600 pixel resolution for the website.
• Balance the content of pictures, text, paragraphs, and links.
• Make every page identical to the rest of the web design.