First Impressions of the Site
One of the things I like about browsing websites is when a site has a great design and is unique you can spend a good 10 minutes in awe looking at it, kindof wishing you’d come up with a great design like that. This is the first thing that struck me when I visited this site. Their web design portfolio is also something to be proud of.

Services
NVI have a great selection of services including E-Marketing, SEO & SEM, Web Design, E-Commerce, Content Management, Web Hosting, and Branding.

E-Marketing
NVI will create an E-Marketing plan for your website that will get you on the map. They will discuss and analyze your online goals with you to know what you’re aiming for. From this they will create innovative ways to make your company stand out from your competitors. An E-Marketing plan is must-have when it comes to getting your website noticed.

SEO & SEM
SEO & SEM (Search Engine Optimisation & Search Engine Marketing) should come hand in hand with E-Marketing. A website needs good SEO implemented into it to ever be found in the search engines. NVI offer a detailed step-by-step solution which they will implement into your website to make sure your site has good rankings in all the search engines.

Web Design
If you’re a company offering Web Design you must have a great design for your site to ever pull it off - and NVI do just that. NVI analyze key elements of what you want your website to do and who the target audience are before starting on any design. When they do start creating a design they design it to keep it SEO friendly and keep in with Accessibility standards.

E-Commerce
Usually all E-Commerce websites have the same sort of look and useability, but NVI knows that a generic E-Commerce site isn’t going to generate you any sales, so they up the ante on their designs to make your E-Commerce stand out from all the rest. With this E-Commerce solution comes a Content Management System which you can use to add content to pages, and add products you wish to sell.

Web Hosting
NVI offer secure web hosting which can host from the very basic of websites to the most advanced of websites. Their web hosting uses high quality bandwidth which is both fast and reliable, and they keep a good eye on your bandwidth use so they can give you the right price for your needs.

Branding
A corporate identidy needs branding, and if you don’t have one NVI can create a fantastic range of branding for your company including a Logo, Corporate stationery, Web Banners, Brochures etc. With the best logo’s you can always remember the company name just by looking at it - and NVI can create a logo for your company that will do just that.

I recently had some bad news concerning a family member and my head just isn’t in the right frame of mind to be blogging.

I’m not sure how long the break will be, but please know that I’m not abandoning the site. I value all my visitors and would like you all to still visit when I return.

Thank you.

What search term are you aiming for?
This should be the first thing you ask yourself. It’s better to get 100 links with your search term in the anchor text, rather than 100 links that say “my first website”. Search engines take into account what appears in your anchor text and decides whether it’s relevant or not to what people are searching for.

The term I’ve chosen for this site is “Web Design Blog”, and at the moment it is about 80th in Google for that search term. Although it isn’t great, it would’ve been a lot lower in the results had I had all my link anchor text say “my first website”.

Decide what search term you’re aiming for and then you’re good to go.

Where should you add links?
You should try and add links to sites that are similar in niche. If your site is about Web Design there isn’t much point adding your link to a site about Fishing Tackle. It just doesn’t make sense - it doesn’t go. Search engines take into account sites that are linking to you and whether or not there is any relevance in that link. You’re far more likely to rank higher if your link is on a page about your niche.

Also a good place to go for adding links is forums. Again, make sure it’s a forum similar to your niche. When you join a forum you have an option to add a signature with every post. If you add your link to your signature, then for every post you make on that forum another link is created to your site.

Where shouldn’t you add links?
A page with a PR of 5 is usually a great thing and I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to have a link there - but when it has 1000’s of links already there just isn’t any point. A PR5 page with a 1000’s of links is leaking page rank to every single link on that page, that’s a PR5 spread over 1000. It doesn’t mean that it’s passing a PR5 to every link, it means it’s sharing the PR5 with 1000 sites, which basically means it’s worth less than what a PR1 site would give you.

Another bad point about this is that the links on that site are about anything (adult related, fishing tackle, football) and it really isn’t beneficial to you to have your site associated with meaningless links and topics.

Any other pointers?
Make sure that when you’re adding links to other sites and forums to get your spelling correct. As I said earlier the term I’m aiming for with this site is “Web Design Blog” and if I keep pushing it it will get further in the search engines: but it won’t if I suddenly start adding links that say “Web Dsegin Blog”. Google and other search engines don’t spell check your links, nor are they capable of mind-reading what your word is supposed to say! So always make sure you double check your spelling before adding links to other sites.

I’m not going to list every single Plugin available as there are plenty of resources that already do that, I’m going to list the ones that this blog is using and how it is useful to me.

Let’s start!

Adman [ VISIT PAGE ]

Adman is a useful plugin that allows you to insert adsense into your posts. Usually with the standard Wordpress installation it won’t allow you to insert adsense code into posts, therefore losing any adsense revenue you could potentially earn from your post.

With Adman it’s easy. You choose if you want Adsense at the beginning, middle, or end of every post (you can have all three!) and it will automatically do it for you for each post you make. If you only want the Adsense to appear on certain posts there’s a tick box when creating a new post that lets you choose if you want to disable it for that post.

Akismet [ VISIT PAGE ]

This plugin comes with Wordpress but you can’t use it until you’ve registered an account at wordpress.com which will give you an API key you need to activate it. You don’t need to create a blogging account at wordpress.com, a simple non-blogging account will do. Once the plugin is activated you will notice its usefulness straight away.

When you’ve posted a blog, did you ever receive lots of spam comments?? Akismet will catch all the spam comments for you. Don’t worry though, you can check through the comments its caught to make sure no “real” comments went through. If any did, you can select it and tell Akismet that it isn’t spam, and it won’t catch any future comments from that poster. The same goes with normal comments, if any spam comments did get through, you can tick the spam tickbox and Akismet will remember that for the future!

All in One SEO Pack [ VISIT PAGE ]

Ahhh the SEO’s dream. This one allows you to create your own Title tags and Meta tags for each individual post. With the standard Wordpress installation you can’t do that - usually it would create the Title tag from the Title you gave your post, and the meta Description from the first few paragraphs of your post. With the SEO Pack you can create your own tags that will mean something in the search engines.

Code Markup [ VISIT PAGE ]

I don’t use this one often, but sometimes if I’m writing about HTML/PHP code and want to display the code in a post, with this plugin all I have to do is place the code in < code > tags, otherwise the code wouldn’t appear correctly, or wouldn’t appear at all! Very useful to have if you write about HTML/PHP, or any code, alot.

Comment Relish [ VISIT PAGE ]

I only found this one recently but I think it’s a great way to increase readership. This plugin will send a thankyou email to new commenters on their first comment. A quick “thank you for your comment, we hope to see you again soon” is always nice to receive in an email from someones blog. The email is customisable so you can put whatever you like in there.

Dofollow [ VISIT PAGE ]

I’m a firm believer in the “Do as you would be done by” method. I’d like to think that when I write comments on other peoples blogs the link to my site will be worth something. This plugin allows all the links in my comments to be worth something.

Standard wordpress installation applies the rel=”no-follow” tag on all links left in comments, which basically means it isn’t seen as a “proper” link, therefore Google disregards it. It’s worthless. Adding the Dofollow plugin removes all rel=”no-follow” tags on all links in my comments meaning if you post your link here it is worth something.

Google XML Sitemaps [ VISIT PAGE ]

If you have a Google Webmaster account you can submit a sitemap for your site, either in .txt or .xml format. Once the sitemap has been submitted Google will visit your sitemap regularly to see what’s new there.

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin automatically updates your .xml sitemap for you every time you create a post, a page, or even edit a post or page. This makes it a whole lot easier than having to do it manually.

Show Top Commentators [ VISIT PAGE ]

This plugin is useful to encourage commentators back to your site. It will list the Top Ten Commentators for the month with a link to their site. Obviously the more comments they leave the higher their chances of being in the top ten are, and with the plugin shown on all pages, if you have a blog with 100 posts that means they’ll have at least 100 links to their site. If that isn’t an incentive to comment I don’t know what is.

Subscribe Remind [ VISIT PAGE ]

If you have a RSS feed that you’d like people to subscribe to, sometimes having a nice RSS image at the top of your site isn’t enough. This plugin will create a line of text after every post reminding people to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Subscribe to Comments [ VISIT PAGE ]

This plugin is must-have in my opinion. If you’re leaving comments at different blogs, and some of them you may want feedback on, it can be difficult remembering which blog and which post you commented on to go back and look at a future date. If they had this plugin, however, you wouldn’t have to remember.

This plugin allows you to receive emails when someone else has made a comment at a certain blog or post you’ve commented at. This is not only good for the commenters, but it’s good for blog-owners as if people have subscribed to comments, they’re going to receive an email every time someone else comments which means those people are likely to visit again to see what else is new.

WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition [ VISIT PAGE ]

This is basically a script that allows you to insert a contact form into your blog. You will need to activate Akismet before it will work, but it’s a very useful plugin to have if you don’t know how to create a contact form. You’ll be amazed at how many people contact you if you have a contact form ready to hand.

For further plugins, check out 101 Wordpress Plugins you may not have known about.

Here is a selection of the ones that I’ve seen.

1. Colorful [ PREVIEW ] [ DOWNLOAD ]

2. Sweeny [ PREVIEW ] [ DOWNLOAD ]

3. myBlog [ PREVIEW ] [ DOWNLOAD ]

4. Pop Idol [ PREVIEW ] [ DOWNLOAD ]

You see, I recently moved house and at the moment we’re re-decorating the living room, and with that I went away for the weekend to London as a birthday present from my boyfriend. Added to that a full time job and a little time for myself, just where do I find the time to update this site?

Hopefully once the living room has been re-decorated I can concentrate a little bit more time on this site.

I am planning a good few articles including one about the basics of CSS, which has had quite a few votes on the Skribit widget (thank you!). Along with some wordpress related articles. I’ve also started writing an article on Meta Keywords and Description, and testing if they are infact important in the SEO world. So far, they are! But we will see at the end of the month when I can evaluate the results.

So, as you can see, even though I’ve not written anything for a week or so, I’m not planning on abandoning the site

So, last night I decided to sign up to Technorati to see what the fuss is all about and to see if I can do anything to improve my ranking.

In the whole half an hour of signing up I couldn’t actually complete the process. I filled in the register page and received an email with the confirmation link and clicked on that link - but apparantly the confirmation code was incorrect.

It took me three times before it realised that the code was infact, correct.

So then I start the process of claiming my blog. I filled in the first page but when I clicked submit it send me to the register page as if I were a new user.

I tried logging in with the username and password I’d just registered with but apparantly my password was wrong, so I did the whole “forgotten my password” and they sent me another email with a confirmation link. So I clicked the link and sent me back to the register page!

At this point I was getting annoyed, so I filled in the “forgotten my username” to see if that made a difference, to which I got another email and another confirmation link. I clicked the link and lo and behold - I got a page that told me the username I entered doesn’t exsist!

At this point I decided to try registering again with the username I’d registered with earlier, you know, the one that doesn’t exsist? Well, it wouldn’t let me register because apparantly that username does already exsist!

After that I ended up switching my computer off and now it’s 8am the next morning and I’m trying again, and yay! It’s let me login, and it’s letting me start the claim on my blog. Fingers crossed it works this time!

Apparantly, I have to post a link to my profile in a new post so Technorati knows it’s really me registering, so here it is: Technorati Profile - I’ll be sure to post again about Technorati to let you know if I do actually get any benefit out of it.

I thought this was a great idea as it is a way to show your business card to someone looking for Web Design blogs or Graphic Design blogs all in one place, and as a business card is a great way to illustrate your skills you can attract more visitors to your site with just one image.

This is the business card I created for Emz Design, what do you think?

To visit the full list of Business Cards already received go via here: Business Cards of Bloggers.

For example, if you’re having problems with a certain aspect of HTML you can use this widget to tell me to write an article about it.

The widget is by Skribit which you can see on the right hand side of the site. To submit a suggestion all you need to do is click on the text “Need Web Design Help? Suggest a topic for me to write about in my next article!”. This will generate a form for you type in your suggestion.

All you need to do is type in your suggestion and click submit. You don’t have to have an account with Skribit to do this so there’s no registration forms for you to fill in. Just type in your suggestion, click submit and it’s done!

A great thing about this is when a suggestion has been made, a Vote button is added to it so people can Vote for your suggestion as well. Obviously the suggestions with the most Votes I will concentrate on first, but all suggestions will get an article dedicated to it.

It doesn’t even have to be web design help, you can suggest anything web related for me to write about!

So don’t be shy! Submit a suggestion for me today!

Before we get onto that subject however, there is something you need to do before creating any posts or pages. This will help with the SEO of your blog.

Go to the Options page on the Word Press admin panel, and click on the sub-link “Permalinks”. You’ll see the Default set at “http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123″ which is something you definately don’t want it set at, otherwise there’ll be no keywords set in the URL of your page and will often discourage people to visit your site if it’s seen in Search Engines.

I have mine set at “Date and name based” like so: http://www.yoursite.com/2008/04/30/sample-post/. This way I can add keywords to the URL and also have it date based, so anyone who’s looking in the Search Engines can see exactly what date it was posted and know that you’re site is pretty much up-to-date.

I would however suggest if you want your URL to just be “http://www.youriste.com/sample-post” set the Permalink to Custom, and in the text box just have “/%postname%/”.

Now that is out of the way let’s take a look at creating and managing posts.

When you create a post you have four standard things:

• Title
• Post
• Categories
• Tags

The Title is used as the title of your post and although it’s a little useful to include keywords in it, it isn’t major to do so. In fact, most people write catchy Titles to attract readers rather than stuff it with Keywords. Keep this in mind when writing your titles.

The Post is obviously where you write the content of your post so I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining how to do that.

Categories & Tags are similar. In fact, there was a time where I would use the same words for the categories and tags. This isn’t useful though for people who are looking for something specific. The categories section should be used as a general categorization and tags to be used as something more specific.

For example, if I write a post about how to create a logo in photoshop, the Category I’d put it in would be “Design”, or “How To”, but the tags could explain it more specifically by using the words “logos”, “photoshop”, “creating” etc. You can use as many tags as you like for each post. The more specific, the better!

Now let’s take a look at the other sections of the Write Post page.

Post Slug

For me the Post Slug is the most important part of the Write Post page. If you leave this blank it will create the Post Name of your post automatically from your title.

For example, if your title was to read “What’s all this then?” and the Post was actually about what is Google Adsense, the URL of your page will end up being “http://www.yoursite.com/whats-all-this-then” which is pretty useless as it doesn’t explain what the page is about and will lose Search Engine rankings.

But, use the Post Slug and type in “what-is-google-adsense” the URL of your page will be “http://www.yoursite.com/what-is-google-adsense” and has more of a chance of being in Search Engine Results for someone searching for information about Google Adsense than if you left this blank.

And of course, this does leave the title of your page intact, so no need to worry about it being overwritten.

Upload Images

You can upload images to go into your post. Word Press automatically uploads it to a folder on your server and then inserts it into your Post. It will usually place it at the top of the Post so be sure to cut and paste the code it inserts into a place where you want the image to be.

Writing Pages

Writing a Page and Writing a Post are very similar. The only difference is that you can’t include Categories or Tags into a page.

There are a lot of useful plugins available that will help with the SEO of your blog, which I will discuss in the next part of this series. These include the All in One SEO Pack which allows you to create unique Title and Meta tags for each post and page which will help significantly with getting in Search Engines for your specific keywords and search terms.

Managing Posts and Pages

This is fairly straight forward so I won’t go into too much detail with it. Basically when managing posts and pages you can View, Edit or Delete each one. It will display what date you posted it, what categories you’ve placed it in, how many comments it has, and the author of the post (useful if you have more than one person creating posts and pages).

As I said earlier the next part in this series will discuss useful plugins for your blog and how to use them. I hope you’ve found this post useful and I hope you’ll look forward to the next in the series.