CodeMyConcept is a very well established code conversion company that has been providing awesome PSD to HTML conversion services as well as CMS implementations for a couple of years now, quickly becoming one of the web designers best friends.

CodeMyConcept has been kind enough to offer to give away one of their awesome $150 gift cards to one lucky winner. These are the details of this giveaway:

One lucky winner will receive a $150 CodeMyConcept Gift Card that they can use in ANY of the great PSD to HTML services provided by these guys.
The winner will have 90 days to use the Gift Card.
Anyone can participate no matter his or her location or age.

TO ENTER: Post a comment stating why =you think this Giveaway can be useful for you and why you think you should win. Please use a real email address; otherwise we won’t be able to contact you.

Contest starts today August 30th, 2010 and will end in 1 week on September 6th, 2010 at noon EST.

We will notify the winner via email.

I also know for a fact that you use Twitter to make connections with customers and learn web design tricks and techniques.

What if I told you that every one of your tweets is promoting other people’s business?

Here’s proof:

I just sent out 2 tweets promoting my web design articles using 2 different Twitter clients – MarketMeTweet and SocialOomph.

One of those tweets was branded with the Twitter client I used to send out that tweet, and one wasn’t. Why was my MarketMeTweet tweet branded with my own website url and how in the world did I do that?

I bet you didn’t know that “SocialOomph” and “WebDesignDev” are actually hyperlinks pointing to the urls.

So every time you send out a tweet you are advertising someone’s product with a link to their site.

You are promoting them absolutely free. They get a great free advertisement, don’t they?

Unless you change that.

Now wouldn’t you want to use this valuable Twitter real estate by

• branding your own tweets with your business’s name
• including a link back to your portfolio website or blog with every tweet you make
• getting a link back to your portfolio website every time someone retweets your tweet?

Just like this:

You see how my tweets through SocialOomph were branded with SocialOomph’s website, both on my direct tweets and retweets by others, and how my other tweets were branded with my own website? Well, you can do the same like I do, and I will show you how.

MarketMeTweet

PieDog Media just released an update to their already extremely powerful and featured packed social media management tool called MarketMeTweet.

At this time, MarketMeTweet is the only fully featured twitter client that brands your tweets.

The video below provides a nice overview of MarketMeTweet v2.0:

Check Out MarketMeTweet!

Now that Google and Bing are displaying real-time Twitter and Facebook search results, it’s very, very important to have a presence on social media.

With access to real-time information becoming the norm, and soon possibly affecting rankings of your website, can your web design business afford not to be using social media?

MarketMeTweet is for businesses (small and large), such as web design, as well as power-users, bloggers and even newbies.

If you use social media to promote yourself as web designers, then MarketMeTweet is for you.

MarketMeTweet lets you easily promote your web design business online, get new customers and make more money.

Brand Management

My favorite feature in MarketMeTweet is the ability to brand your tweets. This means every tweet you send is branded with a link back to your website.

See the video below to see how easy it is to set up and configure your brand:

After you set up branding, every single one of your tweets will be be branded with your own URL:

This is an awesome feature that will give your web design business that competitive edge over your competitors, and create additional brand awareness.

Unlimited Accounts

MarketMeTweet lets you add unlimited Twitter accounts. This is especially useful if your business has multiple departments or if you have multiple web sites or blogs with a specific Twitter account for each (i.e. you have a business and personal twitter account). MarketMeTweet lets you add a new Twitter account with a click of a button. You can manage all of your accounts from the one interface.

Scheduled Tweets

MarketMeTweet offers tweet scheduling.

They offer 2 ways to do this: 1) the standard method where you can schedule your tweets to be sent out at a future date and time; 2) a feature that is unique to MarketMeTweet, is the ability to schedule tweets using Google calendar.  In order to schedule tweets using Google Calendar you first must enable Google Calendar.

The beauty of MarketMeTweet is that it also lets you schedule bulk tweets at once. Here’s how it’s done:

Click on Schedule:

Next, click on Import Tweets:

Then copy/paste your scheduled tweets into the box. Make sure they are in the format %T% This is my tweet %D% – they must start with %T% and end with %D%.

Then, select Use Override Interval. If you don’t, all your tweets will go out at once instead of being scheduled 1 by 1. Drag that little circle right below Overide Interval to set the interval at which you want each tweet to go out. For instance, I set it at 30 so that my tweets go out every 30 minutes:

Next click on Import pasted text:

Now click on Save Tweets:

And watch the progress bar:

Now you’ve scheduled 244 tweets for this week (so in less than 2 minutes I scheduled tweets to go out every 30 minutes for 5 days in a row, what a time saver!):

Twitter Management

No other Twitter business software has a comprehensive management side.

You are able to see your friend’s time lines, replies, mentions, retweets, search, customize panes, easily manage and delete direct messages, groups, expand the interface and much more.

Facebook Integration

You can set your tweets to be posted and scheduled to your Facebook profile and AND unlimited Facebook fan pages!

MarketMeTweet lets you to view your Facebook activity in a gorgeous interface (I like it much better than any other interface) and makes keeping up with friends and contacts a breeze.

Location Targeted Following

Matches for new followers can be in the same place as you, making the quality so much higher.  You can input your location and MarketMeTweet will automatically find followers. This feature is insane for you web designers – imagine how easy you can find local clients!

Reply Campaigns

MarketMeTweet’s reply campaigns lets you to find users in your niche and start conversations. The best part is that it’s completely user controlled to maintain the highest quality.

Language Targeted Tweeting

Grow a mass following of users who are relevant.

Build a following of users who speak the same language as you!

Automatic RSS Tweeting

For maximum exposure import your blog’s RSS feed directly into MarketMeTweet.

Every time your RSS feed is updated you can have it post automatically or have it scheduled.

You can tweet your posts to all accounts at the same time.

MarketMeTweet makes sending RSS feeds to Twitter and Facebook a breeze, all within the one application.

Free Updates

MarketMeTweet is continually being upgraded and all users get FREE updates.

Multiple Computers

This is epic: MarketMeTweet software engineers have found a way for you to take your marketing data anywhere you go, and access it from whatever computer you wish to access it from.

Price

MarketMeTweet has four different pricing options to give as many people as possible access to this tool.

So getting started with this application a no-brainer, and there is a money-back guarantee.

Twitter Search

With MarketMeTweet’s search feature you can easily keep up to date with all the latest tweets from Twitter.

You can stay up to date on who is searching you and your web design business, and respond with deadly accuracy.

Ping.fm Integration

Ping.fm is a service that lets you to update many different social networks at once. You can update all, or just a few of your favorite social networks.

Updates can be made from your email, browser, SMS… and now MarketMeTweet.

Smart Following & Unfollowing Algorithm (user controlled)

MarketMeTweet lets you to stay in control of your account by finding highly targeted followers, and unfollow those who aren’t adding value to your account.

Unlimited Twitter Accounts

You can use as many Twitter accounts as you want from this app, making your life easier and more concise.

OAuth Secure

The new requirement from Twitter is OAuth security encryption, and MarketMeTweet has it. This means that your Twitter username or password is NEVER stored. Now are you sure your other Twitter tools do this…

Group Management

Groups in Twitter is an easy way for you to filter your friends’ tweets and keep up to date.

Post To All

Do you have more than one Twitter Account? Facebook Profile? Fan Page?

You can post to all of them with one click.

Forum

MarketMeTweet also has a fully supported forum where you can:

• ask for support
• make feature requests
• read tips and tricks

This certainly provides a peace of mind for your investment.

Finally…

MarketMeTweet is a tool I personally use with my Twitter account with 28,500 followers. I highly recommend it.

If you are serious about social media marketing, social networking and your web design business, get yourself a copy now.

Click Here to Get MarketMeTweet

The Setup

First, we need to decide how we are going to use the gradient. I suggest using the gradient as an enhancement. Keep in mind that some browsers will not display the gradient well or at all. So you will want it to degrade gracefully. If the browser doesn’t display the gradient the design should still be excellent and not require the gradient in order to function.

Gradients can be applied to block elements such as DIV tags. We will be using a simple DIV tag in this example.

A simple class will be set up to build the DIV we will display the gradient in. The DIV will be 300px wide by 200px tall. Here is the CSS to build the DIV.
.sample-box {
border:1px solid #999;
width:300px;
height:200px;
padding:5px;
color:#ccc;}
Rendering a box as follows:

Applying the Gradient

The Excellent – webkit

Now, let’s add our gradient. We will start by looking at the webkit method. Using browser specific CSS isn’t the best solution since it only covers a single rendering engine. However, as you will see, the major rendering engines offer the ability to render CSS gradients in their own way.

Webkit, namely Safari and Chrome, use the following CSS to render a linear gradient.
-webkit-gradient(type,start point, endpoint, from(start color), to(end color)
Type is either radial or linear. For this example we will be using linear. Point is a paired, comma separated value that gives a start point and finish point to the linear gradient. For our first example we will be creating a simple dark blue to light blue linear gradient that starts at the top and moves to the bottom. Here is the CSS we will use:
.gradient {-webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#354bb8), to(#1a3366));}
For the HTML to display the DIV use the following code:
<div class="sample-box gradient">Cool Gradient applied</div>
Now, viewing this in your webkit browser will render a box that looks like the following screen shot.

Excellent! Now we have a fully functioning gradient. However, this is only visible in webkit. We now need to create CSS to display this gradient in other rendering engines.

The good

Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine. The CSS is simple and follows this general format:
-moz-linear-gradient(start location, start color, end color)
The start location in this case is top, right, bottom or left. The start and end colors are typically the hexadecimal values of your colors. The CSS needed for displaying gradients is as follows:
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #354bb8, #1a3366);
The code renders the following screen shot in FireFox 3.6.

This gives us great results as well.

The Tolerable

Internet Explorer is the bane of web standards as most of us know. But, believe it or not IE 7 & 8 CAN render a gradient without an image. Now this isn’t true CSS. This takes a filter call within the CSS. Here is the code:
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#354bb8', endColorstr='#1a3366');
That is all you need! Here is what Internet Explorer 8 renders with that code.

Now you know how to add a gradient to an entity. There are other advanced features such as radial gradients and stop points that can be added to enhance gradients. These are more difficult to get to be visible across all browsers. For a great online gradient CSS maker that will give you the code needed for Mozilla and Webkit head on over to the Western Civ CSS maker app. You can find the CSS and HTML for this tutorial here.

First, lets take a look at an image with the icons we will be using. I have chose these grunge icons for this example. You can find icons on just about any stock photography site or if you are adventurous make your own.

Icons we will use for displaying via CSS

The setup

First, we need to figure out the grid of the icons on this image. The image dimensions are 204 pixels wide by 136 pixels high. Simple math tells us the height of each icon is 68 (136 ÷ 2). The width of each image is also 68 (204 ÷ 3). Nice!

Using CSS, we will display each icon in it’s own DIV tag. To do this, we will use the left and top values of the background-position property. The background-position property defines the initial position of a background-image. You can find specifics of the background-image property at w3c.org. I prefer to map out each of the icons top and left coordinates before I write the CSS. It makes it much easier. Here is the image with the coordinates mapped out for you.

This shows the top,left coordinates for the image to be displayed using CSS.

Those aren’t coordinates! Well, no. They are not Cartesian or polar coordinates. They are a special type of coordinate that defines the leftmost and topmost margin of the given image. Negative margins shift the image up and left. So the coordinates (-136,-68) when used in the CSS property of background-position:-136px -68px would render the margin to start at the top left corner of the shopping cart icon in this image. So with that in mind, we can now build our containers for the icons.

When I’m developing I like to break out my CSS into logical functions. In this case I want to create a class for the container that will contain the icon. Something like this should do just fine.
.icon {
height:68px;
width:68px;
background-image:url('images/web_icons.png'); /*your location of the image may differ*/
}

A base class now exists that pulls the proper image that contains the sprites as well as defines the height and width of the container. Next, we need to create a
class that will display the given icon from the image. I like to break this out by icon type. Here are the classes I set up for this image.

.person {background-position:0px 0px;}
.info {background-position:-68px 0px;}
.upload {background-position:-136px 0px;}
.document {background-position:0px -68px;}
.check {background-position:-68px -68px;}
.cart {background-position:-136px -68px;}

The final step to get these to display is to create the containers. We need to create six separate containers and add the proper classes. Here are the divs we will use to display the icons.
<div class="icon person">
</div>
<div class="icon info">
</div>
<div class="icon upload">
</div>
<div class="icon document">
</div>
<div class="icon check">
</div>
<div class="icon cart">
</div>

In the above example, I have taken the class .icon and the class representing that icon and put them together in the class attribute. Using multiple classes is a great way to apply styles without having to repeat code in your CSS.
The following screenshot shows you how the code to this point should render in a web browser:

You can see a working copy of this page and source code here.

Conclusion

With a single image and some CSS styling you can easily display various parts of the image on your page. The options are limitless. Using floats and absolute positioning you could place the containers anywhere on the page. You can easily apply the :hover pseudo-class to the appropriate element and have the image shift when the cursor is over that element. We will address this in another tutorial. Do keep in mind that there are some browsers that don’t support the :hover pseudo-class, namely IE (big surprise!).

There are sites that use CSS sprites extensively. I came across one just the other day. Kaleidoscope essentially uses one large image for many of the graphics on their home page. You can see the full image here. While keeping server requests down may seem minor it is the kind of foresight and good coding that can help a site become scalable in the long run.

Happy designing!

Update: thanks to your support, my to-do list has received an astonishing 900 tweets! This inspires me even more to keep giving you quality articles and tutorials : )

1. Get a Domain

Tool needed: GoDaddy

I am always creating websites and it is extremely important to choose a good domain. Very often, I see domains like RandySullivanBestWebDesigner.com. It’s a really long, boring domain that nobody is going to remember or even finish typing in their browser. The great thing about domains is that they’re really cheap. But good names get sold fast, so if you thought of a good domain it’s generally a good idea to snatch it as quickly as possible. What I do is I put a twist on my domains. For instance WebDesignDev.com is really short and to the point – it tells the world I am a web designer and is a really catchy name – catchy enough for you to come to my website and read my articles and tutorials. I can bet that next time you want to read a fresh article or tutorial you will remember “WebDesignDev” because it’s so short and to the point and you may just type the name directly in the browser. As a matter of fact, almost 25% of my thousands of visitors are direct type-ins.

For all of my domains, I use GoDaddy, it is the largest domain registrar in the world and that is for a reason. I think they may be running a promotion now for .com domains at $7.49.

Use this discount link to get .com domains from them for only $7.49.

2. Host your domain

Tool needed:
HostGator’s Hosting Account

The most important thing about running an Internet Business is to have a reliable host. If you don’t have one, you are wasting your time. I recommend to everyone to always use HostGator. It’s cheap, reliable and I have never heard a bad word about them. They answer any questions I have in less than 1 hour. If you do decide to try to find a better host, please do your research before you get hosting with them. If you absolutely don’t like HostGator for one reason or another (I still can’t see why you wouldn’t), there are 2 other great hosts out there: 1) Register now and get FatCow (they are actually powered by wind energy and give you a free domain for life, use this link to get their hosting at 50% off.) and  2) iPage (amazingly, they are also powered by wind energy and give you a free domain for life, use this link to get their hosting at 50% off). The worst thing in the world is to find your website is down, your host’s support is “unavailable”, and once it becomes available you find out they don’t have a recent back-up of your website. Ouch! I have had this happen to me more than once with a different host, and I would hate to see that happen to you. If you do decide to use HostGator, you will never run into that problem. Again, if you run into any trouble getting the hosting, feel free to post a comment and I will guide you through.

3. Connect your domain and hosting

Tools needed: 1) Domain from GoDaddy; 2) HostGator Hosting Account.

It’s really simple to host your domain. Log in to your GoDaddy account, on the left side you will find Domains > Domain Manager, click on Domain Manager and then click on your domain. You will see the tab Nameservers, click on that and change the name servers to the ones that HostGator sent you in the welcome e-mail. Make sure the option “I have specific nameservers for my domains” is selected before you update. The name servers will be something like:

NS1.HOSTGATOR.COM and NS2.HOSTGATOR.COM, only the 1 and 2 will be replaced by your server number. If you ever lose your welcome email, just send HostGator a support request and they will send you a back-up of the email most likely within 1 hour. Once all of this is done, you will be able to create and upload your website.

4. Create a blog

Tools needed: 1) Domain from GoDaddy; 2) HostGator Hosting Account; 3) Premium Wordpress Theme.

Every web designer must have a blog. There is NO excuse not to have one.  I have one – webdesigndev.com, and you should have one too. Whether you are going to blog about web design articles and tutorials and help other web designers, like I do, or about your web design work, or about something completely unrelated, you should still have a blog.

Install your blog. This is super easy, and I will show you how to do this in under 1 minute using Fantastico. Not all hosts have Fantastico, but if you took my advice and hosted with HostGator, you will have it. To begin, go to http://www.YourDomain.com/cpanel and log in with the cpanel login and password your host provided. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and locate the Software/Services section, under which you will see Fantastico. Click on Fantastico. Once you are in, on the left side you will see “Wordpress” under the Blogs section, click on that, then click on New Installation link. Fantastico will then ask you to specify the details such as your domain, the location of the blog (you can just type “Blog” in there to have it on http://www.YourDomain.com/blog), your admin user name and password, admin nick name, e-mail, site name and Description. Once you fill in the details, click “Install Wordpress”. You will then be asked to confirm everything by clicking “Finish Installation”. Click Finish Installation and you’ve just created your first blog!

Add posts to your blog. After you install your blog and go to it, on the right side you will see a link called Login (YourDomain.com/wp-login.php – this is the link  you will use from now on to log in to your blog’s admin panel).  Click on the link and log in with the admin username and pass you created in Fantastico while installing Wordpress. Now you are inside the WordPress Dashboard, which is where I am right now as I am writing this To-Do list : ) On the left side you will see Posts section, and under it “Add New”. Click on Add New and you will be able to create your first blog post.

Get a theme for your blog. When you just came to my blog you probably thought to yourself “I wish I could have a blog like that.” Well, I have to be honest, I paid $70 for my Wordpress theme which I got from WooThemes and the great thing about it is you can personalize it! It’s really a huge benefit not to spend 100’s of hours making it from scratch. Once you have purchased your theme, it is really simple to upload it.  I personally use FileZilla for uploading, which is 100% free and works like a charm. Once you download FileZilla, open it, and it’ll ask you for the Host, User Name and Password. For Host put the name of your website, for user name and password use your *Cpanel* user name and password, not Wordpress. Once you are in, you will need to upload the theme to Public_html/Wp-Content/Themes folder (first find the public_html folder, then click on Wp-Content folder, then click on the Themes folder). Once you are in, simply drag the unzipped Theme from wherever you saved it on your computer to the Themes folder. Another way to upload is through your hosting cpanel. Log in to your cpanel, click on File Manager, then go to the Public_html/Wp-Content/Themes folder and click on Upload which is in the top navigation. Upload the zip file of your theme and then unzip it.

Customize your theme as you like. Once you have finished uploading your theme, log in to your Wordpress admin (YourSite.com/wp-login.php) and click Appearance on the left side, you will see your theme there. Click on it and a preview will open up. In the top right corner you will see Activate, click on that and your theme is now live! If you bought your theme from WooThemes you can play around with all the fun features and settings.

5. Get Twitter followers

Tools needed: 1) MarketMeTweet; 2) Tweet Adder.

Twitter is a huge source of my traffic. After I write a new article or tutorial and tweet it I often get hundreds of tweets and retweets. Twitter allows me to dominate the web design niche. I see my Twitter followers as the people who I value and who value me and my work in return. What I did to get over 27,000 followers on my WebDesignDev account was I went to one of the biggest names in Web Design industry, PSDTUTS and every day manually added their most recent 500 followers (yes, it took a LONG time to do this). Those people would then come to my website, check out what great content I have, and follow me. Not only did they follow me on Twitter, but they became regular readers! I also noticed that Twitter followers are the loyal readers – they will stay on my website longer than someone who just came from Google or Yahoo.  So over night you can start driving hundreds of targeted visitors to your website who are really interested in your website! P.S. I now have only 400 less followers than PSDTUTS, 28,000 and growing!

Tool #1: I currently use MarketMeTweet as my Twitter management software. The features I love the most are:  1) I can set a feed of my scheduled tweets and bulk upload hundreds of tweets at once and 2) I can easily find the right people to follow with MarketMeTweet’s Friend Finder feature and auto-follow them; 3) Twitter Branding. So I can set my Twitter account to update every 30 minutes for me, or for any other 10 minute interval I choose and Tweet my most popular articles. I let MarketMeTweet concentrate on my Twitter while I concentrate on my business and blog.

Tool #2: Tweet Adder was made with one purpose in mind – to help you get Twitter Followers. This is a great program I use to supplement MarketMeTweet.

6. Learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Tool needed: Underground Traffic Blueprints.

SEO is one of the most important things you need to learn to have a successful Internet business. Writing everything I know about SEO will likely take at least several hundred pages, but I will give you the most important things below. I have studied SEO for the past 5 years and have put in countless hours learning it. I can say it has paid off – my blog webdesigndev.com for example, gets around 50% of its traffic from search engines.

Titles. Your <title> tag is your most important tag on the page, which is why you have to know how to set this tag properly. Before you set a title of your pages, you need to ask yourself: ”What do I want people to find on my website/blog?” Most people think that they can set titles intuitively, but this is not always the case. You want to make sure you target the keywords that: 1) best describe your web design business/blog and 2)bring you the most traffic. I will discuss how to research titles shortly, but let me first discuss the <title> tag in more detail. You can see that the home page of WebDesignDev has <title>
Web Design Tutorials | Creating a Website | Learn Adobe Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver&nbsp;|&nbsp;</title>. I am targeting 5 different keywords in a single title: 1) Web Design Tutorials; 2) Creating a website; 3) Learn Adobe Flash; 4) Learn Photoshop; 5) Learn Dreamweaver. It is generally a good idea not to put too many keywords in the title since search engines will look at where in the title the targetted keyword is to see its important. So the keyword that appears say 50 characters after the beginning, is not nearly given as much weight as the keyword that appears first. I am targetting 5 keywords in my title,  which is about as high as you want to go. It is of utmost importance to know which keywords will bring you the most traffic and which keywords to put first. If you just put “Web Design” for example, as the only thing in your title, you will probably not get much traffic. You must be thinking “but you just said the first keyword is the most important!” Yes, but “web design” is such a competitive term that you will need to do a LOT of SEO to get any kind of ranking there. Put a much more targeted keyword, such as “web design” followed by the name of your city, like “web design toronto” for example and follow it with several other keywords. Why is this a good title? And why is the title of WebDesignDev good? Look at the first 2 words – they are the same “web design” keyword that’s so hard to rank for, but they are followed with the word “tutorials” which is exactly what I am trying to target. I rank top 5 on Google, by the way, for that keyword : ) I am still giving my blog a chance to rank for “Web Design” by putting those 2 words first.

Keyword research. This is super important. If you don’t know what keywords to target, you can’t possibly bring many organic (search engine) visitors/customers to your web design website/blog. Google has a terrific keyword research tool. I always use this tool before I create a title for any of my new articles to make sure that I choose the title that both describes what my articles are about and can bring me the highest number of visitors. In the box type the keyword that you think you want to use. Make sure to keep “use synonyms” checked so that you get all kinds of variations for the keyword. Once you get the results, to the top right of the first keyword you see in the list, right above it, you will see a drop down box that says “Broad”.  Make sure to click it and select “Exact”. “Broad” simply tells you the total searches for that keyword including any search in which that keyword is just part of the search. This won’t give you an accurate idea of how much traffic you can expect from the keyword, so select “Exact” to see exactly how much traffic the keywords bring.

H tags. H tags vary from H1 to H6, which H1 being the most important. You MUST have an H1 tag. This tag should come as early after your <body> tag as possible. Your H1 tag must contain your most important keywords. It is also the biggest tag visually, so use css styling to make it smaller.  I won’t go into detail on how to use CSS in this article. Somewhere lower on the page you should use H2 tags for parts of your page that are second in importance. For example, my H1 tag is the same as my title: Web Designer TO-DO list (MUST-HAVE resources for Web Designers), and my H2 tags are the sections of my article, i.e. “Get a Domain”, “Host Your Domain” etc. This gives search engines a structured layout of what my page is about.

Meta tags. These tags are not as important as they once used to be, but you should still not neglect them. The meta tags go inside your <head>  </head> tags. Search engines may refer to your meta tags if they don’t find the search keyword anywhere else in your article. Make sure your meta description tag is not too short, and not too long, since that can affect your rankings adversely. Also, make sure you have a reasonable number of meta keywords. A sample of meta description and keywords tags would be the following:
<meta name=”description” content=”Web Designer TO-DO list (MUST-HAVE resources for Web Designers) brought to you by WebDesignDev.com” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Web designer to do list, must have research for web designers, web design, resources” />

Page Speed. This is VERY important. If your blog/web design site loads slowly, you will not rank as well as other websites. I have personally seen an increase of 200% in traffic simply by switching hosting. Make sure to use only the fastest hosting: HostGator, FatCow or iPage. Even if you already have hosting, shared hosting is very cheap and I would strongly encourage you to switch to the hosts that are known to be the fastest on the net.

Keyword density on page. This is another very important part of SEO. Search engines will look at how many times a certain keyword is repeated on the page to judge how relevant your page is in comparison to others. Make sure not to abuse this: intentionally “stuffing” the page with numerous keywords is considered “black hat” and is frowned upon by search engines. They will give you a penalty if you put too many keywords. And while it is impossible to know the “perfect” keyword density, strive for somewhere in the range of 5-10%.

Internal links. Many people don’t realize that the anchor text of your internal links, if used properly, can give a HUGE boost to your rankings. And the best part of it is that these links are free! Use the same Google keyword research tool to see how to set the anchor text of your internal links, such as your navigation links. Always have a link either in your footer or your top navigation with your most important keyword pointing to your home page.  This means every internal page you have will give your main page a boost for that keyword!

External links. These are harder to get than internal links, since someone else has to link to you. But these links are considered extremely valuable by search engines. Every external link is a “vote” for your website, and the text for that link tells search engines the subject of that vote. Try to get as many external links as possible.

Content is king. If you have quality content, not only will people find it interesting to read, but other websites and blogs will link to you too. By writing this web designer to-do list, I am hoping I have provided you with something that you found extremely useful that will help you in your web design career.

This is all the time I have today to devote to this to-do list, but I will add more as soon as I can! Check back often for updates!

If you love my Web Designer To-Do list and resources page, make sure to follow me on Twitter@WebDesignDev. Also, if you haven’t done so already, I strongly encourage you to read my guide on How To Make Money Online Doing Web Design.

This style is becoming a cool web design trends for 2010 ’cause it is one of those effects you can call ’simple and cool’.

Surfing the web you can find websites which are already using these effects.

Resources and useful links

• Web Design Trend Showcase: Rockets & Spaceships @Line25.com
• Create a Realistic Space Scene from Scratch with Photoshop @SixRevision.com
• Space Explosion Photoshop Tutorial @SmashingMagazine
• Tutorial: Create A Retro Cosmic Design in Photoshop @FudgeGraphics
• 31 Breathtaking Planet & Space Tutorials For Photoshop @DesignRiver
• Create a Trendy Galactic Poster Design in Photoshop @SpoonGraphics
• Easy Space Scene in Pixelmator @Abduzeedo.com
• Fiery Photoshop Space Explosion Tutorial @PSDTutsPlus
• Deep in Space Portfolio Layout Design in Photoshop @DeviseFunction

About the Author

WebDesignDev.com welcomes our newest blogger, Andrea Pelizzardi, an Italian web/graphic designer who is the author of this article and many more to come. You can follow Andrea on TheGoldenFlux.com or @TheGoldenFlux.
The list of his articles on WebDesignDev.com is available here.

As you may have noticed, we have been pressed for time lately and unable to provide you with as many new and exciting articles and tutorials as we wanted. This is why we’re asking you to help us! Are you interested in getting a free link to your website from WebDesignDev.com? Give us top notch articles, and we’ll let you include a link to your website for free. If you don’t want to include a link, that’s fine too – feature your work on one of the top web design websites for free by giving us quality articles and tutorials! Your work will likely also be tweeted to more than 27,000 WebDesignDev Twitter followers

Guidelines: the article or tutorial has to be web design related. You are welcome to choose any topic you like, i.e. Photoshop tutorial, top 20 flash sites, etc., just as long as it’s related to web design. Please note that all articles/tutorials must be unique – you can not copy or even paraphrase from other websites.

We will limit posting articles to no more than 1 per day (but you can submit multiple ones at a time). If you are interested please email us at advertising (at) webdesigndev.com. Let us know how much experience you’ve had writing articles and/or tutorials. Thank you all for your interest.

You can follow us on Twitter if you aren’t already: @WebdesignDev

So What Is Market Me Tweet?

See More About MarketMeTweet

Market Me Tweet is a new revolutionary Twitter app available for anyone who uses Twitter.  Twitter is a huge social network, and sends tens of thousands of clicks to WebDesignDev each month. You can have the same too, with the new revolutionary MarketMeTweet client.

What Features Does Market Me Tweet Have?

Market Me Tweet has a whole load of features. These include…

• Add Unlimited Twitter Accounts
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• Pre Schedule Tweets Up To 1 Year In Advance and Bulk Tweets Upload (these features alone are worth using MarketMeTweet – this is a feature we take full advantage of due to our large volume of articles and tutorials)
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• Target Only Users From Specific Countries / Languages
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Where Can I Buy This Unique MarketMeTweet Twitter App?

I strongly, strongly urge you to use MarketMeTweet. I know there is free Twitter software out there, but it comes nowhere close to MarketMeTweet. If you are serious about your Twitter account, use this software. Trust me, I’ve used others like SocialOomph but nothing comes close to MarketMeTweet. You can see all of my tweets on Twitter use this software and I have nearly 30,000 Twitter followers in the web design niche so I know what I am talking about : ) Market Me Tweet is available for a yearly fee of only $79 (dirt cheap compared to other Twitter software at $30 monthly fees). You can also buy MarketMeTweet for a one time fee of $119.

See Market Me Tweet In Action

What is your favorite feature that will come in handy when using MarketMeTweet? Please post a comment.