devlounge – Page 12

Methods for Marketing Your Site

July 10, 2007 By Devlounge

Outside of content, site growth can be directly affected by when, how, and where you market your site. There are all types of forms in which this can achieved: banner advertisements, text link ads, and viral advertisements. Then of course, there are the alternative methods – the so called hit and SEO boosters, or even most recently, paid comment spam advertising. There are hundreds of additional methods out there, but we are only going to focus on each of these and what they mean for your site.

The Look of Marketing

When

Before even choosing an advertising method, you first have to consider when the best time to advertise is. If you were a store and you had something to sell, the choice would be easy one to make – when ever you are about to launch a new product or service. But for the traditional site who may not have anything to sell, when should you put your advertising army to work? The typical result most people would probably say is, “when traffic is low”. But is that really the best time? No.

When traffic dips, it usually has to do with other factors that simply increasing or beginning to advertise won’t necessarily fix. It may provide that quick-fix-for-effect type of deal, but the traffic is less likely to stay. You first need to address these issues and get traffic back to normality before considering any major advertising campaigns. The best time to advertise, in my own opinion, is actually when traffic is booming. Why would this be? If your traffic is doing hot, that generally means your site is performing well. Maybe you just published a new article that has caught fire in the blogosphere, or received your first “digg-effect”. Whatever the case, you want to build off recent traffic spikes, rather than trying to build back up to the normal line that would happen if you began advertising during slow traffic periods.

How

As I said, there are almost an unlimited amount of ways you can advertise. Hell, you could even drop mysterious boxes all around your city with your site logo and url on it if you aren’t afraid of possible jail time. Let’s quickly sum of some of the more major and conventional methods.

Banner / Graphical Advertisements:
Considered one of the more traditional methods, banner advertisers are simple and to the point. You get to display what you want in the form of a static or animated gif, jpg, or flash file. Sizes vary from site to site, but banner ads are generally very good performance wise because they are usually easily visible.

Text Link Ads:
The SEO wizards will say that text link ads are the most important and helpful in improving search engine rankings through advertising, because they are simple and direct links. While this may be true, text link ads can be a lot harder to spot, especially depending on the site you plan on advertising through. Some do an excellent job of making sure their visitors can tell what they are clicking on is an ad, and others hide their link ads all over the place, including in the footer, where they are much more likely to go unnoticed and un-clicked.

Viral Advertisements / Social Networks:
Is it possible to advertise on a social network? Yes. But it is very effective? Not usually. Posting every single one of your articles on digg may bring a few stray visitors here and there, but unless you have a lot of friends and a lot of diggers behind your back, these types of free self-promotion advertising methods will do little for you. If you don’t make the homepage, you are not going to see much return. Of course if you could shell out the amount of money it would take to directly advertise on any social networking site, such as Digg, the incoming traffic would be a totally different story.

SEO / Hit Boosters:
One of the biggest gimmicks I find in the industry, and something I totally do not recommend. There is no doubt you’ve seen these so called services plastered throughout the internet. Whether it is in forums, spam emails, or popup ads, you are sure to have been bombarded with this kind of stuff before. You know, services that offer you 10,000 unique hits in 10 minutes for $30, or whatever it may be. I have personally never tried any of these services and never plan to. Each of theme always looks extremely sketchy to me, and I’ve always wondered how the hell anyone would be able to send some couple thousand unique visitors to me site in so little time. And you can be sure that no matter what any of these services may claim, the traffic is not targeted and not worth a penny. (Anyone think otherwise?)

Page Holes / Tagging Services:
Page holes are another form of simple text link advertising that I’ve never quite understood. A quick browse around many “designer” forums such as Talkfreelance, and you’ll quickly discover that every want-to-be developer has their own page hole sites. Links for a dollar, what a deal! Regardless, what is one link, even if it is a PR6 site, really going to do for you when it’s smashed together with all other links? Not much. Page holes and link tagging sites seem all but useless and are all but sure to bring very little traffic your way, but if you don’t mind sparing a buck for fewer total visitors then a dollar is worth in pennies, then why not right?

Of the methods mentioned above, in my opinion the most effective and helpful ones are banner advertisements and text link ads. When targeted, they can quickly drive visitors to your site. Giving potential visitors a visual in the form of banner ads gives them something to connect to and draws them in much more than a standard text link would.

Where

Where you advertise is entirely up to you, but of course, effectiveness will only increase if you advertise on a targeted and similar interest site that will bring in quality visitors who will be interested in your content. No offense, but if I was to advertise on a baseball site, I don’t think many of the visitors would care too much for design and development news. You have to make sure you are reaching an audience that will care about what the hell you are saying in your posts. Just because Joe’s Computer Site may offer you skyscraper size ads on all pages for $20 doesn’t mean a thing if your site is about swimming. Get my drift?

Also, you always want to investigate your possible advertisement places before making a purchase and commitment. Don’t believe what you read, because not everyone can be trusted. Make sure that your banner will really be found on every page if it says it will, and make sure that PR6 website selling links for $5 really is a PR6 after all. Also, whether you plan on using banner or text ads, placement is extremely important. You want your ads placed high up on the page, but you also don’t want them to be too obtrusive, because if their placement causes someone to accidentally click on them, that will only piss the person off and get them to close their browser window or tab even quicker. Even more importantly, and something you can do on your own end, is make sure the design of a banner ad looks good. Sh*tty looking banner will do very little in attracting anyone to your site. If a banner is animated, keep the animations limited and do not make them pause too much. Ideally, you want the person to be able to read whatever the banner is going to say before they have time to move away from it. If you plan on writing a story and adding in 30 frames to an animated gif, you are soon going to find out that not many people have the time or want to be bothered reading a novel just to see what you are advertising.

How do you advertise your site. When do you believe is the ideal time to advertise? Please share in the comments, and your tips may be added to the end of this article.

Friday Focus #35

July 6, 2007 By Devlounge

Week 35, a little later than usually because I just got home. But without further delay, here is this weeks Friday Focus. Enjoy the upcoming weekend everyone.

Sites of the Week

My personal favorites from various css galleries over the past week.

Leading off this week is Mark Boulton Design. Simplicity wins in the case of this portfolio. I really dig the look of project and client pages – providing a summary of the project and what the client had to say. It is nothing mind blowing, but it gets the job done in an extremely clean manner.

Next up is down2night, a place to search for nightlife events and hot locations. The site uses lots of blues and rounded corners, but it is one of the better looking “night life activity finders” I have seen. They even have a pretty cool heatmap of party and event locations.

And rounding out this weeks three is Biola. An absolutely great looking site that will appeal perfectly to its intended audience. More college sites should take a route like this.

Digg Weekly

Picked from the most dugg articles over the past seven days.

Design – Art of the Business Card
A large gallery of design business cards to use as inspiration. There are over 400 of them.

Programming – Ultimate HTML hex code list
A large list of color hex codes from Colourlovers. Pretty useful if you want to quickly grab hex codes for a variety of colors.

Keep in mind…

A few days ago the Devlounge community went live. You don’t have to spend every living moment there, but feel free to occasionally stop by and participate in some threads, ask for help, or suggest new topic ideas. Also, if you haven’t noticed we now have multiple feed subscribing options. While of course we’d like to see you subscribe to the full feed containing all the Devlounge goodness, additional ones are up there which could be helpful in certain situations (putting a Devlounge feed on your site for example, because no one cares about our site news). Just give these things a look over if you get the chance.

The Redesign Process: Part Deux

July 5, 2007 By Devlounge

Start back at start

It was almost a year ago when the first Redesign Process article was published. At the time I had just finished wrapping up and releasing Devlounge 2, the theme that actually was just released for free to the WordPress community. It felt like such a refresher, such a change, and a step in an entirely “new” direction for Devlounge.

It would take me almost a year, along with a bunch more “little” steps before the site would actually change the “core” design – which had stuck the same since April of 2006. After redesigns and redesigns, Devlounge 8 was born in June 2007, (yes, we pulled that Winamp thing and skipped just a few numbers) and a new mindset finally hit me – one that should have occurred a long time ago.

Design, Design, Design – Waste of time, time time

Looking back, it is quite unbelievable to think I spent so much time and put so much focus into redesigning a site that never had to be redesigned. I guess it is just one of those learning curves you have to experience to understand. That is until someone else tells you otherwise, and I’m doing just that. Throughout 2006 and early 2007, Devlounge underwent three published renovations or redesigns. The first being the design Devlounge initially launched with, in April 2006. Shortly after in July 06, Devlounge 2 was born. Then in October, I followed everything up with another slight refresh.

Devlounge at a glance - V1

If you’ve been keeping count, that was three redesigns / refreshes in just about 7 months (April to October). That means in those 214 days, each design was up for about 71 days, or just about two months. Out of control? You bet. Luckily, with the release of Devlounge 3 in October, things finally began to stabilize. In fact, Devlounge 3 alone survived longer than any of the other designs, and thankfully slowed down the pace or else we would have gone through another three designs before Devlounge 8 was launched.

Devlounge at a glance - V2

As I write this, this is the first time I’m emerging myself in the statistics that were the very many Devlounge designs. It is amazing I spent so much time redoing things that had no need to be redone, especially when you consider that Devlounge was less than a year old and I had more important things I should have been paying attention to than design tweaks.

Setting Out with Something to Prove

When April hit us this year, I found myself constantly looking at the Devlounge homepage and being bored it with it. There were inconsistencies I spotted all over the place, and a lot of focus on all the wrong things. I wanted that to change – and quickly. As soon as I brought up the idea of a redesign, the outcry began. Everyone was telling me I spent way too much [expletive] time redesigning, and I should be focusing on content. And instead, off I went, ignoring their suggestions and moving on with plans for a new design.

So in April 2007, I held a redesign contest. I was game to see what I would get with an overflow of entries, but I was disappointed when the contest drew to a close with just one entry, from Greg Wood. The design was clean and white, and I planned to code it up and put it to use as soon as possible.

Devlounge at a glance - V8

As soon as the PSD was turned over to me and the contest winnings sent, I began playing around with things. Before long, I had rough ideas that were totally different then the contest winning entry, but they were somewhat loosely based upon it. Sketch after sketch, retry after retry. I worked on things for a month, and eventually settled upon something I liked.

There were things I set out to accomplish with the new design from the start. They were all issues that the previous “redesigns” hadn’t done anything to address, even though each time I said they did.

Focus on Articles – The first thing you saw when visiting Devlounge from October to just a few weeks ago was homepage news – site updates that had very little to do with anything. I could have said “I just got smashed, the site will be closed this week!”, and that would have been the very first thing an incoming audience would have seen. Articles, of course, were found under the homepage news blurb, but I felt they deserved to be higher up, and have more prominence on the page.
Fresh Sketches – I had been using the same illustrations for over a year, and people were getting tired of them. I knew I had to find an illustrator to put together some fresh work, because people really thought the “artistic touch” was something that made Devlounge stand out.
More on the homepage – At the same time, the homepage needed to be redone and stuffed with information. We needed things that would pull people in, and not drive them away. Whether they were first time visitors or daily readers, the homepage needed to stand out and make its mark when they first saw it. The layout also needed to go in a completely different direction, and break out of the mold it had been in for the past year.
Retain familiarity – The last thing I wanted to do was to keep the core inner pages the same or close to it. Long time readers didn’t want to visit the site and put on a lab coat to run experiments and figure out how new things worked. Maintaining some of the original, long-time appearance was important.

Stepping up, Stepping out and the Critics Reaction

With Devlounge “8”, I felt that I met many of these goals. The homepage did change – significantly – for the first time since launch. Articles were now moved to the top, with a last minute change to have one featured and titles of others underneath (after the original plan called for two rows of three, totaling six articles with excerpts). Other pages were redone and reorganized, including the articles and interviews index (with the Article index still needing work, but not right now). And, throughout all this, inner pages remained with the same basic layout, so long-time readers and visitors could still feel like nothing had ever changed.

With the new design also came the promised end of any more redesigns. The focus, as it should have been all along, is returning to the content. I put so much time and effort into useless and purposeless designs, that I had no time to write anything. I guess it is a good excuse for any time you have ever seen me make a typo in an article – I can just say I was busy redesigning a site that did not have to be redesigned (laughs). Of course, redesigning is appropriate and can be very helpful to site traffic, readership, and more – when used in moderation. When you over do it, and lose focus on what your site is supposed to be about, it can hurt rather than help. Looks are not everything, and that is something I forgot for too long.

So here we stand, with the newest Devlounge design, and the story of how and why it came about. The biggest issue most people have had with this design is the homepage; many saying that it is unbalanced because it gets busier and busier as you scroll down. Still, complaints have been wide spread, so I’m willing to sit back and walk this one off. I have other things to do then start hitting the canvas for any more redesigns. There is writing to be done.

Forums Now Open

July 4, 2007 By Devlounge

A lot of tweaks are still left to go, but the forums are now open. Expect more news and updates on them tomorrow. For now, make your way over there and get comfortable. To all of our readers in the U.S., happy Fourth of July.

Larissa Meek joins the team

July 3, 2007 By Devlounge

Larissa Meek, former interviewee, bikini model, and etc, has joined the Devlounge team. Watch for her first article sometime in August. If you are interested, she recently wrote an article for that other site (Vitamin) titled Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work. Be sure to give it a read if you haven’t yet. We’re excited to have her as part of team, and it is just another addition in many we hope to continue to make throughout the summer to improve content and content flow.

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