Not the case. For his project he needed three pages designed. Only two artists submitted three pages and a couple others submitted one page. It makes sense that they would only submit one page because there’s no guarantee they will win the job. So why put it in a ton of effort for no pay? His options were limited.

In the end he settled for one of the two who put in more effort, but he still wasn’t that happy with what he got. The designs were somewhat amateur and the code was pathetic. He could have hired me for the same price, had three top notch (and different) designs to choose from, and would have had pristine code delivered to him.

This probably goes without saying, but I think he will be hiring me next time!

I’m not a database expert, so my first step was to do a search for some type of script that would assist me in this daunting task. I found several helpful resources, but they were all just a little off (they were for earlier versions of WordPress). To solve this issue, I just installed an earlier version of WordPress, made the migration and then updated WordPress. (This is the script I used)

It wasn’t really that simple and straightforward though, I had to make quite a few changes to the scripts (with the help of my husband) and after many passes and many hours looking at the two databases, I was able to move the Drupal content into WordPress.

Even after moving everything over there were still a lot of things missing, or misplaced. I had to massage some of the items in the WordPress database to fit properly. The client was using an events module in Drupal, and that didn’t transfer over at all. In the end, the client had to move the events over manually.

This was not an easy project, but given the chance I would probably do it again. Here is the new web site using WordPress, which the client loves by the way!

Link Sharing Sites

When I began freelancing I sent http://smackhappydesign.com/wp-admin/edit.phplinks to friends and family asking them to promote my site on Delicious, Digg, Reddit and Technorati. I went to each site and created the appropriate links to include the email, which made it easy for them to help out (my original links are listed below). Here’s the message I sent:

I’m trying to generate a little buzz for my new company. If you have an account with any of these sites, please bookmark, fan or digg me, I can use all the help I can get!

• Digg http://digg.com/design/Smack_Happy_Design
• Delicious http://www.delicious.com/search?p=smack+happy+design
• Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7y7vs/smack_happy_design/?already_submitted=true
• Technorati http://technorati.com/blogs/smackhappydesign.com

Write a Press Release

Another somewhat easy thing to do is write a press release. I’m not the best writer in the world, so I hired this copywriter. Once we finished the press release, I submitted it to a distribution service. Here is the one I used, plus the others I considered:

• www.prlog.org (free – this is the one I used)
• www.pressrelease365.com ($25-$100)
• www.prleap.com ($50-$150 – this is the one I plan on trying next time. It includes Google News.)

Use Twitter

If you don’t already have one for your business or web site, create a twitter account and tweet about your content or field as often as you can, but make it personal — don’t just try to sell to your audience or it will sound spammy. Read this article (and the ones it links to) about finding freelance work. Even though it is geared towards a specific industry, I think the overall message still applies.

Create an Email Signature

Add a signature to your email that includes a link to your site, along with your tagline or a brief description of your business. That way every time you communicate with someone they’ll see that you have a web site and they might even forward it on.

Seek Out Blogs and Forums

I mentioned doing a “Link Exchange” in part one, but I think its worth reiterating here. Look for blogs or forums that are related to your industry. Try to comment on them and include a link to your site. Set aside some time to do this at least once every week. Try to answer questions, or post questions and get your name (web site) out there. As you write on these other sites, you build yourself up as an expert in your field, and consequently, you also build up a great link network that will help you with SEO.

Think About Keywords

Google provides a useful keyword generator. Use the tool to make sure the right keywords are highlighted throughout your site. Here’s step by step guide on using the tool.

Link Exchange

This is probably the most important (and sometimes most difficult) thing you can do. Look for other web sites that are related to your site and try to exchange links. Or, if they have a blog or forum leave a relevant comment and make sure you link to your site. You can’t just add some gibberish though, leave a thoughtful or helpful comment. Try to answer a question, which well help build your reputation as an expert in your field.

SEO Services

Use a service that evaluates your site and makes recommendations. Here are a few to check out:

• www.seomoz.org (free and paid tools)
• websitegrader.com (free – simple suggestions)
• www.alexa.com/siteaudit ($199 – for in-depth suggestions)

Be wary of services that claim to give you links all over the place and claim to guarantee placement in the top of Google searches. Research such services before using them, as they can damage your web site’s image.

Create a Sitemap

Connect to Google Webmasters and create a sitemap.xml file to ensure that all your content is indexed in Google. The tool also offers other useful features, like Site Configuration (crawler access, sitelinks, change of address) and Diagnostics (malware, crawler errors, crawl stats).

Getting Into Google News

First of all, you need to be a news source if you want to appear regularly. Here’s a good article about how to get listed in on a regular basis. If you just want to appear as a news snippet, you might want to write a press release (I’ll talk about that more in Part 2).

More SEO Resources

Lunarpages has put together this great list of SEO links, they include guides, tools and more articles.

Getting a little informal
Using twitter for businesses rarely works if you are overly intent on marketing alone. People rarely read tweets that so blatantly aim to advertise or promote something or someone. While it is unavoidable to get into tweeting good things about yourself or your company, it helps to blunt such an obvious method by getting a little personal in your tweets. If you want to tweet about something, hang back a bit and read it all over again. If you come across as gimmicky or something a salesman would say, drop the whole tweet and rewrite it from scratch.

Tweet something useful
While getting a little informal helps to draw readership, posting about useless personal stuff will turn off the readers. Nobody will read anything that they consider a waste of time, so make sure your tweets are relevant, informative or helpful to the readers who follow you on Twitter.

Balancing responses
Replying to comments is a double edged sword. You can either strike up a very interesting conversation and use social media for business, or you can rile up your readers against you and use twitter for arguments. Think carefully before you respond to a comment if you do not want to end up damaging the reputation of your business.

Keeping track
Internet search tools keep track of what people say about your company, and these are powerful tools to help you gauge just where your business stands in the wider world. www.search.twitter.com is a good place to start if you want to keep track of your company’s reputation around the world. There are other sites and applications that let you check your company’s standing, just look and ask around for them.

Indirect tweeting
Indirect tweeting, or having others tweet for your company, is another double edged sword when you use Twitter for business. They can paint a pretty picture of your company, or they can blast your reputation to bits if left unchecked. This is particularly true of employees, whose posts about their company could not only affect reputation but internal security as well.

Be careful
The last but definitely not the least tip is to be very, very careful when making an official post on any social media site like Twitter. Most everybody can follow you on your Twitter profile, including competitors, and can use the information you provide in ways you would not like it to be used.

Keep these hints and tips in mind, and you’ll be able to use Twitter for business marketing that is cheap, effective and fun as well. Just try not to get addicted to tweeting, okay? So go get tweeting now!

There are certain cases where a liquid layout may be appropriate. One example would be Google Analytics with their large, scalable graphs. When you have something that scales that well and can take up the whole page, you may as well do it.

However, most sites do not need all that space. Here are a few arguments against the liquid layout.

• Readability Its difficult to read text any wider than 40-60 characters. It becomes very hard to follow the lines and wrap around to continue reading.
• Awkwardness Another negative effect of the liquid layout is the unnecessary sparseness it creates. On very large screens the page elements end up miles apart. As a designer, I don’t think that looks very pretty and it can feel very awkward.
• Creativity A fixed width allows designers more freedom to get creative without worrying about stretching their design. This can sometimes result in less coding and more interesting layouts.

The only argument I can come up with for a liquid design is that it fills the whole screen. But like I mentioned above, if you don’t have enough content filling the space, that might not look so great.

There are cases where a liquid layout is appropriate, but in general I vote for a fixed width.

View the animated card

• Search engines don’t like meta tag redirects. If you set up a page to attract search engines and it redirects to some other page 4 seconds later, the search engine will not be fooled. It will disregard the original page.
• Listing all of your keywords at the bottom of the page is a big no-no. You need to write a few paragraphs of text and mix your keywords in. The people who make search engines know about those word blobs and so they make the engines avoid pages that have them.
• A blog is good if you can fill one up. Blogs give you a reason to update your site, and the fresher the content the more often a search engine will crawl your site.

These little things aren’t much, but they will definitely make an improvement.