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the gift & the curse |
Craigslist.org can be a wonderful place to find a lot of items and services you need in your local area. When looking for creative services there are no shortages of that either. Craigslist.org can also be a place to find cheap services, but cheap doesn’t always equate to quality.
There is nothing wrong with using persons who are self educated or near graduation, but a lot of people get burned by using these supplemental resources without conducting research. The old addage “If it sounds too good to be true…” should jog your memory and move you to be a bit precautious. A lot of people who look for creative services on Craigslist.org want what they want in a hurry and haste can make waste. Sometimes agreements are made with nothing in writing and this is dangerous because you never know if a person will keep his/her word or not.
To remedy this, simply take the time to draft a contract to be signed by you and the potential designer. Whether the design costs you $50 or $50,000, it’s money you worked hard for and you should get what you ask for and be protected. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, lots of questions. Would you spend $27,000 on a car that you know NOTHING about? Then why spend on a creative service if you don’t understand it?
No matter how you obtain an artist, take the time to draft and sign contracts (a trip to small claims court might be an inconvenience but your chances of being awarded are greater if you have documentation). Ask for references and don’t hesitate to call and speak to others for a testimonial.
Remember these tips and you can have quality work done at a reasonable price without getting burned!
by Kody M.
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pros & cons of flash sites |
Flash movies are a great way to add multimedia elements to a web site. Unfortunately, Flash cannot be indexed by most search engines. For that reason, it is very difficult to get high search engine rankings for Flash sites. Even Google officially tells webmasters that it is difficult to get ranked with Flash sites. It is very difficult to optimize Flash pages for high search engine rankings. Your web developer/designer can use tricks behind the code to add keywords and text to your Flash elements. However, this doesn't allow you to create enough content so that search engines consider your web pages relevant to a special keyword. Although it is very difficult to get high rankings with Flash sites, it is not impossible. The trick is that you don't have to optimize your web page content. You have to optimize the links to your site. That means that you can get top rankings on Google without optimizing your web pages. The problem is that you have to get many incoming links that contain the keyword for which you want to get high rankings in the link text. To get your web site to the top of Google's search results, search for web sites that are related to your site. Ask the webmasters of these web sites to link to your web site and ask them to include your search term in the link to your site. The more links you get, the higher your rankings will be.
If you cannot change the contents of your web pages then it is very important that you get many inbound links to your web site. If you have many good inbound links, then you can get high rankings without optimizing your web pages. Of course, it is much easier to get high rankings if you have many inbound links and optimized web page content. by A. Curtis
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web templates, not always good |
If you purchase a cheap content management system with no upgrade facility, you will limit how much you can optimize your website. If you are having a dynamic website built or are looking to buy an off-the-shelf package, be sure to ask the following questions to ensure the package will give you every chance of being able to optimize your website fully:
Will I be able to choose and change my own page names?
Will I be able to change the Meta information on each page?
Will my pages validate and conform to the W3C rules?
Will I be able to input Alt tags for my images?
Will I be able to input heading tags?
Ensuring that your new dynamic site conforms to the above will save you time now and problems in the future.
by A. Curtis
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Dads, Grads and all those who wish they had would truly appreciate this gift.
Do you know a special someone who would love to show off the personal, lighter side of his/her personality in a creative way?
The 'Curteous' Gift Card is the perfect gift for Birthdays, Christmas, the New Entrepreneur, Soon to be Married, Expecting Mother, etc.!
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