7 Tips for Designing Websites
 

1. Web design is not print design

2. Consistency is key

3. Web users read in an F shaped pattern.

4. Keep your website layout clean and easy to navigate

5. Use CSS not tables

6. Remember the fold

7. Look at web design galleries for inspiration. Some of the best galleries are CSS Beauty, CSS Container, and my favorite - Design Meltdown.

 
3 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tips
 
8. Google PageRank considers the quality of your website’s content and relevancy to search terms

9. Search engines analyze the quality of your site by the number of links to your site and how strong the PageRank of sites that link to you are.

10. Relevancy is determined by how dedicated you are to a search term. Prime ways to show strong relevancy are your domain name, how often keywords are included in your content, and title tags.

Helpful Resources for web design beginners:
Web Style Guide - Detailed intro to designing professional layouts
Programming Tutorials - Useful beginner tutorials on HTML, CSS, and a number of other
Best Practices for Title Tags -  Discusses how to brainstorm title tags

On Monday, I launched The Intelligent Investor, a blog dedicated to the value investing techniques invented by Benjamin Graham decades ago.

The Layout

The layout is clean, with shades of gray and an intended focus on the blog’s text.

Content

The recurring content of the blog will be: tips on value investing, biographies of great value investors (like Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffet), in-depth value analysis of stocks, and op-ed articles on current events in the financial community.

Promotion

I will be promoting the blog on technorati, the largest blogging community on the internet. I hope that the excessive time I take to write quality content on value investing will pay dividends with link backs down the road.

In Conclusion..

I am an avid investor and I follow the markets in detail on a daily basis. The psychology of the financial markets fascinates me and I read the Wall Street Journal like 13 year old gossip queens read People Magazine.

I will keep you posted on the progress of the blog and improvements to the SEO and overall design of the site.

For SEO purposes, title tags clearly cannot be neglected.

Among a number of factors, search engines work to gauge how dedicated your website and your web pages are to search terms. Your title tag (along with related content of course) is a highly weight variable in your keyword relevance.

A few tips on choosing the best title tags:

 
1. Use relevant keywords

2. Brainstorm the word or phrase someone would use to search for your page. This may be very different than how you would search, and it may be useful to ask some friends how they would search for your topic.

3. The first words in the title tag command more weight than latter words.

4. Unless you have a famous brand name (i.e. amazon, johnson & johnson), place your company name at the end of the title tag

5. Keep title tag under 10 words

6. For dynamic pages that draw from a database, make sure to put a dynamic tag in the title. For instance, DBI Staffing is a staffing agency in New York City. Their website has a database that handles the list of jobs they are offering. Initially, I gave the job description page a static title, but what happened is that Google indexed all their job postings with the same title. I change the title tag so that it included a PHP tag for the name of the position and the city. This drastically improved relevancy and traffic. Visit their job listing page, click on any of the positions, and check out the title to see what I mean.

For a post I wrote on a PHP script for forms, I used the title “How To Make a Validated PHP Email Form“. A solid number of people search for the information this way, and I have received positive organic google traffic from the identical search term.