Keeping Up With Web Design Trends

It’s difficult to be a full service web design agency in this day in age. Design is one of those things that you have to constantly stay on top of. It changes all the time. If you don’t love it, you’ll fall into your old ways and do the same thing, over and over again.

When I talk to other web designers and see what they are working on, more often than not, I am horrified at the low quality of their work. How can you call your self a web designer and crank out websites that come out of the womb looking 15 years old. I know I’m not the Van Gogh of web designers, but I do try to keep abreast of trends in the industry. I try to set the bar high.

When designing a website I usually do a lot of research surfing around the web looking at what other top designers are doing. When I see their sites and how great they look, I aim for that. I know I can design something as good or better than the best in the industry. So that’s where I set the bar. I don’t look at their site and think to myself, I can’t do that, or that’s out of my league. But their is always a but.

Budget Restrictions Suck
I haven’t been in this industry long enough to command the attention of big time clients like some others. Often, I am highly restricted by the budget of my client. Web design is like any other job, you have to have the right tools for the job, and for design, other than a computer and photoshop, you need time. So if your client can’t afford to pay you for spending some quality time designing a site, they will get sub par results. It’s as simple as that. Sure, you can use a template, or go off somebody else’s work (which is unethical), but if you want an original site with high end design, the designer is going to have to spend some time on it.

My Current Favorite WordPress Plugin

The beautiful thing about WordPress is the plugins. And my current favourite is “Advanced Most Recent Posts Mod”. If you remember from my home page, at the very bottom is an area that displays my most recent post. Shown here ↓

This area is actually a widget (I created a fifth footer widget area that allowed me to do this).

WordPress already has a most recent posts widget, but it is very limited in it’s functionality. What advanced most recent posts mod allows you to do is specify EXACTLY what you want displayed. I am able to choose how many words you need, or even how many letters. The customization is fantastic. Take a look at the developers website for more info: http://kaileylampert.com/

What I am also excited about is the fact that this plugin allows me to put more text on my home page and have it automatically updated every time I write a new post. So, for example, if I write a post about WordPress and Raleigh and want those key words on the home page, this plugin allows me to do that. In this case, it will help with WordPress, not necessarily Raleigh

Durham Web Design, I am owning you

My work on getting ranked for Durham Web Design is going splendidly. I’m #1 for Durham web design on Bing, #3 on Yahoo, and I’m at the top of page 3 on Google. That’s a pretty big leap in 3 weeks. I started out on page 18 of Google three weeks ago. So I’m pretty excited about this. I’ve changed a lot of the structure of my site and placed key words in strategic places. I’ve worked on my incoming links and removed all errors from my code and optimized it for all the search engines. I’ve done xml sitemaps, registered with all the search engines, registered for maps and local searches and done a million other things. It’s all paying off, literally (I got a phone call today with a new customer in Raleigh, NC).

Need to rank for a keyword? I suppose now, I can tell people I really know what I’m doing. Do a search for “Durham Web Design”, and see where I come. Then do a search for what your customers are searching for, and see where you come up. If you’re not happy with that result, give me a call and I’ll help you out.