Sydney Web Design, Development, SEO & Web Marketing Blog | Elastique Web Design Blog Sydney

Robots.txt file: The good, the bad, The Whitehouse

After being in web design for so long it still amazes us that there are web-savvy developers (and designers) who don’t realise the importance of a robots.txt file.  Whilst it isn’t the be all and end all of a web design strategy, a clean, correctly-formatted robots file can help search engine robots, affectionately known as bots to weed through the information on your site quicker; and more importantly, not weed through the places you don’t want them looking – for example, your ‘/cgi-bin’ folder or that folder where you store all your secret CIA-level documentation; ‘/c14-files’, naturally : )

In essence, the gist behind a robots.txt file is simple: Also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt protocol, the file is a standard, nothing-special text file which has a certain format to it and is used to prevent (willing) web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which would otherwise be open to the general public. Continue reading »

Your website design sucks because… users can’t find crap!

I know ayh! A great title to start of another year of C2.0 Web Design Blog! : -)

To kick off the new year in Web Design, I thought it would be best to go through a couple of my tell-tale signs that can help you gauge if and when your website’s design sucks. Obviously, “Website design” in this concept does not only include the graphical elements of the page, but of course the Information architecture, usability, accessibility, etc. So without further ado– Let’s get going with round one of “Your website design sucks because…” with Your website design sucks because users can’t find crap! Continue reading »

Web design inspiration: Top 10 ways to get your groove back!

Hello hello…
It’s been a long time and  boy have I missed blogging. There have been a couple of endeavours I have been working on for the past couple of months which have kept me busy — enough that as much as I’d love to, I just don’t have any hours left over to blog. Hopefully a change is on the way and we see a bit more blogs going up!

We are  going to start this week by tackling the issue web designers (and developers) for that matter always face at some stage in their careers; a loss of creative juices. Sometimes losing your creative juices can’t come at a worst time; i.e. you have an appointment to go through a concept with your boss in 1 hour and you haven’t started! Oh Oh!

So let’s get going and look at a couple of ways which have helped me get my creative juices flowing in the past. Continue reading »

Project management: What is it? Part 1

Hey 2.0′ers!

I’m back and it’s time to blog again. Today we are going to kick things off by talking about Project Management; What is it, methodologies involved and breaking down the life cycle. In this, part 1, we will be dissecting the first two phases: Project Initiation and Project Planning. Hang around for part 2, which will finalise the phases with Project execution and control, and Project closure.

So without further ado, let’s kick things off.

What is Project Management?

Put simply, project management is the discipline of planning, leading, monitoring and organizing a team and resources in order to effectively bring about the successful completion of a project based on predefined budget, time, quality, scope and resources allocated. Continue reading »

Web design inspiration: classic online advertising

Hey guys,

Thank you all for the lovely comments and feedback I have been receiving! I thought I’d take a bit of a change from the normal tutorials and/or reference articles for one post and go through just some online (as well as offline) advertising I really like.
I hope that these ads will inspire you to create great designs or inspire you to think a little bit outside the box; because that is what makes them impressive to me. Not only that – but great web designers achieve design inspiration from the world around them, and more importantly, other great design; whether it’s a web page or billboard.

Online advertising as well as other forms are great for igniting that creative spark you may need to get you through those rough times! Continue reading »

Really wicked Photoshop glow lighting effect and Pen tool introduction

Hey guys,

I’ve been playing with glow effects lately for an upcoming website redesign, and I’ve been noticing quite a bit of work being done with Photoshop’s pen tool and cool lighting effects, so I figured I’d share some introduction to the pen tool itself as well as a glow/lighting technique which can be used in many, many ways with you guys. Sit back, relax, and enjoy another Photoshop tutorial.

Just as a sneak peak, this is what we are going to be creating… Continue reading »

What makes a great website?

We all know how important it is to have a website be able to communicate with the world. A good website just ‘does the job’ – a great website exceeds all expectations and thus has a far better return! The million dollar question is however; what makes a great website?

No, really – What makes a great website?

That really is the million dollar question. Many people have tried to tie this down to mitigating factors – but at the end of the day, in my opinion – a great website is one which meets the following rules:

Content

Content is easy to find

It’s simple – if a user can’t find information they are looking for, they have no reason to be on your site. You need to make sure content is easy to find; and in a variety of ways. For example, on Cheb 2.0, you can search the site for any keyword which will return a list of matching articles/posts, or you can click on ‘Archives‘ menu here on Elastique’s blog to show every article posted sorted by date. Further to that, there is a tag cloud to search by keyword or a direct link to each month with the number of posts that were published during that month.

You might be wondering why I have left that as a way to search for posts? Well, in essence it was a really easy decision. Not only does it just add another form of search – but there are times when monthly archives make sense. For example, if a website regular was to go on holidays for 2 weeks in one month and then come back to your website next month, all they want to see is what they missed out on – and this is where monthly-archiving achieves a sense of purpose. Continue reading »

Content is king: SEO-driven blog writing techniques

Hello 2.0′ers! Today we are going to look at ways you could improve your website, as well as your outlook on your site in general through SEO-driven blog writing techniques and more importantly linking techniques with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.

Content Is King

We’ve all heard the saying before – but how many of us actually believe it? 9/10 times, the reason visitors come back is good content. It could mean the difference between a one-time viewer and a subscriber to your blog. Make sure your content is clear, and well written. More importantly, find out which writing style you want to tackle and stick with it – whether it be informative, educative, personal, or friendly – you will find your writing style can and does bring visitors back time after time. Well written content adds credibility to your list of ‘reasons to come back to this blog/site’. The most important thing that I find most people forget is the whole notion of target audience. In most circumstances, you should try to make sure your content is accessible to search engines – i.e. internal linking, well-structured blog posts (header, section, content, etc) and sure, sometimes you may change your writing style to ‘help push’ the search engine result up; but the main thing to remember is to write your content for people first, search engines second! Continue reading »