I often assist or have conversations with people who want to sell their inventions, products or collectables online and too be perfectly honest, a lot of the time I am underwhelmed at the images we use on those websites. When I receive them and ask if they have any others the general reaction is similar to the one I have when I step bare footed into a cat hairball. Unpleasant.

There seems to be three main reasons, but let's be honest they are really just excuses, for shoddy images and I wanted to go over them individually and debunk each one of them here today. You spent some decent money on that website so let's make sure it can do its job properly by looking its best.

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Last week Expedia was hit with a 25% drop in search results for some of their most prominent keywords on Google. This was because of what Google deemed unnatural links. Similar to what happened to Rap Genius in December of 2013.

Unnatural links are artificial links such as purchased links or links in a bad neighborhood of the internet that point to your site. Examples of bad neighborhood sites include scraper sites (sites that copy all of its content from other websites), link farms (a group of sites that all link to one another) , sites with large amounts of spam, malware or illegal or pornographic material.

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When I first started to dabble with responsive design I looked at a lot of CSS frameworks. I was looking for something basic, lightweight, and easy to use in my CMS. I found that a lot of them required JavaScript or a CSS compiler to make the site work well on smaller devices and I wanted something that was mostly pure CSS.

By chance, I came across One Percent CSS by Matt Imling and it was exactly what I was looking for... almost. It didn't quite suit all of my needs for Pixel Works so I made some minor modifications and added a few new things. I'm sure I will add more in the future, like padded boxes as an example.

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A good portion of the time when I'm contacted to look at a website that's performing poorly the owner will have a tendency to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start from scratch.

There are a lot sites that come across my screen with their fair share of issues; code that doesn’t follow web standards, JavaScript drop-down menus, unorganized content and more but I rarely, if ever throw everything away. Even with the worst search rankings, unless you're not listed at all, it's easier to lift up poor performing pages than it is to rank new ones without some help from existing content.

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Facebook launched to everyone in 2006. It has become the commercial image of what we think of social media today. Yet here we are seven years later and there are still organizations that fear social media like the Black Death of the mid 1300's. Why?

What is Social Media?

The thing that separates social media from other forms of marketing is that it is used in the context of a conversation. While traditional marketing, from this consumers perspective, like radio and television advertising, is pushing out a message and hoping people care and pay attention. Social media allows brands to connect with their customers before and after the sale not only for the sake of good customer service, but the opportunity to make that customer loyal to that brand and make it harder for someone else to change their mind. So why all the fear?

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When I create a website home page I use it as a mapping tool. It should have just enough information to tell you what the page is about with links to other pages of the site for more information.

With so many pages indexed by search engines it stands to reason that any page can become the landing page and my projects are designed with that in mind. So to a degree the home page, while still important, caries much less weight alone than all the other pages as a whole.

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When people find out I am a web developer, one of the first things website owners will ask me is if I have some time to  look at their site and see if it's any good. My follow up question to them is usually, "What do you mean?".

Most of the time when someone asks me to look at their site it's because it's not performing as well as they had hoped, for one reason or another and are trying to find a solution.

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I recently had a conversation several different clients that felt that social media was a mysterious complicated thing that they were not prepared for. While it does take a bit of time along with all the other things busy website and business owners have to deal with daily it's not rocket science and there's no magic involved. You can start using social media today by following a few basic steps.

Start With Facebook

If you're thinking about dipping your toes into social media my suggestion would be to start with Facebook. It's the most straightforward with the highest user base. Additionally, I bet most of the people you'd like to reach are already using the site to catch up with friends and their favorite brands.

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In October I downloaded my update from Windows 7 to Windows 8. For forty dollars it seemed like a good deal. I had read about how Internet Explorer 10 was not going to be available immediately for Windows 7 and I had made up my mind that I needed it to test websites. I was silently applauding Microsoft for going away with the expensive upgrades on minimal OS (Operating System) improvements. I should have known better.

Once the process was completed, I was given a tutorial on how to use the system. A tutorial. I've been using Windows since 3.0. Why am watching a tutorial. The reason is that Windows 8 is radically different than any OS before it. And that's not a good thing. The tutorial dealt with swipes, gestures, and how to find the start button they completely removed from the UI (user interface) and that's part of the problem.

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Blogging is one the greatest ways to gain links, page rank, and relevancy in search engine results. Google and Bing, heck, all search engines, like sites that have fresh content. And as an added bonus by creating consistent content for your site you also have a reason for the search engines to revisit as will as more pages to crawl which leads to more keywords that your site could show up for.

So in the spirit of content marketing we're going to go over some basics of how to get your content out in front of as many people as possible.

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