My SEO Secret Sauce

I was emailed recently by someone asking how my site does so well in Google. They probably noticed that I don’t use meta-tags, I sometimes forget to put alt text on images and I’m not jamming every page with keywords. If you study up on SEO tactics you’ll see that I ignore most of them. Here is what They wrote:

Okay, so you seem to be an SEO mastermind. I see you have the first hit for Independent Web Designer. We REALLY need SEO help. While we are a web design company, we are not an independent which we both know are two different beasts. Care to tell your secrets.

So I did. Here is what I wrote back.

Sure, here is my secret.
Create content for people not search engines. Content that makes them laugh. Content that makes them cry. Content that makes their lives a little better. Content that they have to share with their friends. Content that other sites want to link to. Content that you are proud to point to and say that you created.
Then keep doing that over and over. In a couple years you’ll be kicking ass.

I say this to anyone who ever asks and usually people are disappointed.

Some Cool Swag

Got some cool swag from Dave Mott including hand drawn bear sketch. He recently went out on his own, better book him for some illustration and design work before his plate fills up: davemottcreative.com/

My Site Redesigned

In July after leaving my full time job at Sideways I decided that I was going to redesign my portfolio site. I gave myself one week. I would start at 8am on Monday morning and launch whatever I had done by 5pm on Friday of that week. Three months later the site is live.

Within the first day I had a hunch that it was going to take more than a week. As I started to sketch out some ideas the one that really stuck required a lot of illustration work. 

For years I’m been trying to capture the essence of my hometown of Cleveland in a design. One of the coolest things about Cleveland is its architecture. While many cities tear down their old buildings to put up new glass skyscrapers Cleveland still retains a lot of old structures from its glory days. These beautifully ornate old building were the inspiration for the design.

After the content and inspiration were in place I knew that the design had to be responsive. Since it’s a pretty new design mentality for me I knew the learning curve would kill my initial deadline. There was a lot to learn. To start with my old way of designing a Photoshop mockup and then marking it up was incredibly inefficient. I also had no desire to mockup 4+ different layout sizes to accommodate for different screen resolutions. 

At the end of this process I’ve come to love designing responsively for its challenges. I’ve also started to wonder when (if ever) it will take hold among mainstream web designers. The change in workflow that it requires from designers is as big of a shift as we’ve seen in our industry.  Techniques like designing in the browser and requiring designers to code are going to have to become more mainstream before we see everyone designing this way, but that’s a subject of another blog post.

When @happycog asked designers:

workersoftheweb:

“What are the adjectives designers should *stop* using when describing a web design?” [link]

You said:

• web 2.0
• cutting-edge
• user-friendly
• usable
• wow factor
• it pops
• modern
• slick
• 37signals-ish
• clean
• html5 design
• fresh
• clean
• professional
• minimalist
• sublime
• awesome
• gorgeous
• delicious
• edgy
• simple
• contemporary
• innovative