TIMMGuru » Web Design

Why use ready-made Web Design Templates?

TIMMGuru — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:55:50 +0000

Did you know when you engage a cheap web designer to build your website, it is very likely that the design is not original, but modified from existing ready-made web design templates. Yes, for cheap website design, you get what you pay for – not very original artwork and unique website design.

However, ready-made web design templates are not poor quality works. And, there is nothing wrong with using web design templates to build your new websites. You just need to customize it to suit your taste or corporate identity.

In fact, I find myself using web design templates from TemplateWorld.com more often lately. It is definitely cheaper than hiring a web designer.

Reduce Cost, Save Time and Increase Productivity

Usually, it will take between 1 to 2 weeks to get the web design and layout ready. With ready-made web design templates and armed with some basic Photoshop skills, I am able to customize a template to my expectation within 3 days. The time saved for the design stage can be spent on content creation and search engine optimization. Consequently, the cost of the website development project is further reduced.

If you have not used a web design template before, go try it now. WordPress templates start from as little as US$40 at TemplateMonster.com.

And if you have to create new websites every month, you may want to subscribe to TemplateWorld.com for US$49.95 with 6 months access to over 15,000 templates.

Safra, Hitachi & Mapletree Websites Screwed up by Active8

TIMMGuru — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:40:55 +0000

I can’t help it but to use very very strong words to show my anger with such ~~unscrupulous, deceitful and devious~~ Singapore web design company in the pursuit of search engine ranking for the keywords web design and content management system using black-hat SEO tricks.

Such unethical practice will damage the web design industry in Singapore.

The Singapore brand is at stake and could be tarnished by such an errant web design company.

The Japanese MNC Hitachi in Singapore would be jumping mad when they discovered the hidden links planted in many of their websites across Asia by their web designer, Active8.

Even Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd, a $5.6 billion company, and Singapore Armed Forces’ SAFRA fell prey to the ploy by Active8, so there could be many more victims which we didn’t know.

SAFRA.SG

The web design company added a hidden link to point back to their own website using to hide the link so that it will not display when you view it with a browser such as Internet Explorer. In order to see the offending link, you have use the view source function.

Here’s is a screenshot of the HTML source code of SAFRA homepage.

If your client did not give you the permission to insert your “Web Design and Content Management System (CMS) powered by Active8″ then you should not use hidden link to trick your client.

Here’s a screen shot of Google’s cache text only version of the web page.

And this web design company added the hidden links not only the main landing page but into many other pages of Safra.sg site.

Hitachi Consumer – Hitach Singapore, Hitachi Philippines & Hitachi Vietnam

Do you think Hitachi will ever allow a H2 link with anchor text such as “Web Design and Content Management System” placed right at the top of the HTML source page next to the tag!?

Here’s the screen shot of the HTML source of www.hitachiconsumer.com

And Active8.com.sg also added their links to

Hitachi Singapore – www.hitachiconsumer.com/sg/
Hitachi Philippines – www.hitachiconsumer.com/ph/
Hitachi Vietnam – www.hitachiconsumer.com/vn/

HTML Source Codes Screen Shots

Again, the web design company added their own links to many other pages of Hitachi Home Electronics website.

Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd

With Mapletree Singapore website, Active8 got even more audacious – link to their own website with achor text “Web Design” and “Content Management System (CMS)” in H1 tag.

And here’s the screen shot of Google’s cache text only version.

But for Mapletree Singapore website, Active8 made a typo in all their client’s pages – they forgot to use the “http://” in the anchor link.

I guess the thief was in a hurry!

Do you know of any other websites being screwed by their web designer?

Expose them! Leave a comment below.

Why Not Use CMS – Drupal or Joomla?

TIMMGuru — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 05:40:56 +0000

What’s CMS?

CMS is Content Management System. If you have not heard about it, then it’s time.

I think one of the biggest advantage of using a CMS is the ease of updating your pages and creating new one.

So I am already using a CMS if you consider WordPress to be one. However, I mean CMS CMS e.g. Drupal or Joomla.

Joomla

I am familiar with Joomla – not as a developer but an user.

One of my business partner build Web sites with Joomla and he has a couple of programmers doing just that.

My brother, who is a product designer turned Web designer, specialized in managing Web development team using Joomla with one of the bigger Web design and development company in Singapore. So I understand from him the practical challenges of building large portals with Joomla engine.

However, personally I have not use Joomla to publish any site because I find then technically challenging.

I will need a developer to help me customize the CMS so that I can focus on the content building, usability and SEO. And if I do get a good programmer to take care of the technical stuff, I will want to try out Drupal.

New Version Drupal 6.0

I want to use Drupal to build a recipes site, a business directory and a Web marketing discussion forum using Drupal. And the time can’t be better with new release of Drupal 6.0.

There are some nice new features in Drupal 6.0:

Quicker and easier set up
Drag-and-drop admin
Multi-lingua support

I believe the biggest advantage that Drupal has over it’s competitor is it’s extensibility. You can do a lot of customization with modules. And with the right modules, I will be able to do all those 3 very different type of Web sites.

Ok, I will not bore you with the features list.

You can find out more from the video on Implementing Drupal:

Royal Plaza Hotel Wins Web Marketing Award

TIMMGuru — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:33:02 +0000

Royal Plaza on Scotts, a Singapore hotel in Orchard Road area, won a silver award in Web marketing as reported by The Straits Times on 12 Feb 2008.

In-House SEO Training Workshops

Back in December 2006, I was engaged by Royal Plaza on Scotts to conduct a 2-day SEO Workshop. We had about 10 participants: the CFO, Revenue Director, Revenue Manager and marketing executives. They wanted to understand how search engine optimization and search marketing could help them to increase visitors to their Web site and to ensure that their Web designers and developers were doing the right things.

Here’s some of the photos taken during the workshop on 10 Dec 2006.

At that time, Royal Plaza on Scotts was one of the first independent hotel, maybe even the first hotel in Singapore, to have engaged a professional SEO consultant to train their management and marketing staff in search engine optimization and search marketing.

Congratulation to Royal Plaza on Scotts

It is no wonder that this Singapore hotel wins the silver in the Adrian Awards organised by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International(HSMAI). As an independent hotel, I think it is quite a big deal to win such an international award among top hotels from around the world.

Well done and congratulation to the management at Royal Plaza at Scotts.

Btw, the buffet at the Royal Plaza at Scotts’ Carousel is one of the best in Singapore.

I highly recommend it if you are looking for place to enjoy your lunch/dinner or entertain your clients in Orchard area. Make sure you book in advance because it is usually full-house during lunch.

If you are looking for professional SEO training for your company, visit www.finggle.com now.

SEO Workshop by Finggle Appraised by Search Marketing Analyst

TIMMGuru — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:30:53 +0000

I got a couple of good testimonials from Mark Vozzo, a Search Marketing Analyst with Fairfax Digital based in Australia and Kala Nehete, Practice Specialist with McKinsey & Company working from Singapore.

The 2 days SEO Workshop covers beyond basic SEO guidelines and good practice. It is no longer good enough to be ranked top in search engines e.g. Google and Yahoo. The objectives of the SEO Workshop organized by Finggle includes driving targeted traffic and converting visitors to customers.

Watch the following videos and hear what the marketing professional and management consultant said about the SEO Workshop.

Mark Vozzo, Search Marketing Analyst, Fairfax -
the largest newspaper publisher in Australia

Kala Nehete learnt SEO to promote e-commerce site
and Spa facility to be set up in Bangalore, India

Small & Medium sized Companies are Turning to Search Marketing

Many Internet savvy business owners are turning to online marketing to generate leads. Search marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote products and services.

As far as marketing is concerned, I believe SEO skills should be core competence for marketing professionals. Web designers should not be allowed to come up with a dysfunctional or broken Web site.

Companies are Suffering from Dysfunctional Web Site

As we can see time and again, established companies(public-listed) and government agencies have Web sites that are not SEO-friendly and are not concerned with search engine marketing. Many of these sites have been around for a long time, even before Google was founded in 1998, and are regarded as authority sites. Their listings are guaranteed in the major search engines.

However, small and medium sized companies with newer Web sites have to struggle and complied with the rules set up by the search engines. Otherwise, they will not be included in the search engines’ database and can never be found by their potential customers in the cyberspace.

Three Possible Solutions to Effective Search Marketing

For companies which have crippled Web sites, you can either pay thousands of dollars to hire SEO consultants to fix your site or buy Sponsored Links from Google and Yahoo.

There is one more option, learn SEO and Search Marketing.

To summarise, the 3 possible solutions are:

1. Hire SEO Consultants to fix Web site

2. Pay Google and Yahoo for Sponsored Links

3. Learn SEO and Search Marketing

Go find out more about the SEO Training Courses at Finggle.

Star Challenge 2008 Website Broken?

TIMMGuru — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 05:23:06 +0000

As an SEO practitioner, I read with interest the front page article on Today newspaper (Friday, 18 Jan 2008) about the Search Engine Competition – Star Challenge 2008.

Wanted: The ultimate search engine
Reward: US$100,000
A*Star seeks to emulate Google, Yahoo

First of all, let me make it very clear that I think what A*Star is doing is good for Singapore. I want to support such an initiative and that’s the reason why I am writing about it. I believe the Star Challenge 2008 is not about building the ultimate search engine. The aim behind this search engine competition is marketing-driven – to be visible on the world stage so that search engine technology experts and researchers will take note of this small little island, Singapore, and probably come here to work at Fusionpolis.

Star Challenge 2008: A Cheapskate Marketing Campaign?

Star Challenge. Is this the same as President Star Challenge or something to do with the Star Awards by Mediacorp, isn’t it? Huh! Maybe Zoe and Fann can now contest again?!

And it’s a cheapskate marketing campaign to offer US$100,000 for the ultimate search engine. It “cheapens” the value of search engine technology and possible made a mockery of Microsoft’s announcement to pay US$1.23 billion for Fast Search and Transfer! So it is definitely certain that you can’t get the ultimate search engine for US$100,000 – maybe you’ll get only some good ideas.

Advanced Search Engine: Critical Technology for Singapore Economic Growth

Yes. I think the Singapore Government is prepared to invest many millions or even billions of dollar to make Fusionpolis a success. And the top brains at EDB have identified that Advanced Search Engine Technology is critical to Singapore economic growth. So how does the government decision to attract top search engine talent to Fusionpolis affects the man in the street like you and me. Not very much, initially. We don’t invent search engine, we just use it. Hopefully, very soon, we can have a more intelligent search engine and user interface for NLB. Speaking about User Interface, I think the Web design and development industry in Singapore really has to buck up on Web Usability.

Another Example of Poor Web Usability

You can see poor Web usability everywhere – even on the Singapore Star Challenge 2008 website.

A well designed Web page does not need to provide instructions to the visitors, right? Also, what’s “rollover building”? Did the Web designer asked who is the Web page designed for? The geeky and the brainy PhD, right? You mean these people need instructions to use your Web site? I say, go spend some dollars and get a Web usability expert to fix the problem before showing this to the whole world, please!

Is the Star Challenge 2008 Web site Broken?

I also realized that the www.thestarchallenge.sg home page caused my Firefox to freeze momentarily. Same problem with IE 7 too but OK with Safari.

I was unable to click at other tab when the the Star Challenge home page was loading up in Firefox and IE 7. Do you encounter such problem?

I hope A*Star will fix the problem real quick before the whole world finds out about it. Here’s some blogs already talking about the Star Challenge:

Star Challenge 2008 Result

[Updated 14 December 2008]
Five teams from China, France, Japan, Singapore and USA qualified for the final.

The winner was “Team NUS from the National University of Singapore wins US $100,000 top prize in Singapore’s Star Challenge@Fusionopolis”

Congratulation Team Singapore!

We do have the best brains in Singapore.

Flash Web Designer Using Sneaky SEO Trick

TIMMGuru — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:12:18 +0000

I was angry, very angry when my ex-colleague asked me to take a look at his revamped website(www.ottegroup.com) done by some Flash web designers in Singapore.

Here’s snippets of what he said to me:

“I have finally received my new web pages but feel that it is really a bad choice with the web designer. He is using Flash and I cannot refer to any link or pages.”

“It looks good but not very functional.”

“Can you help me take a look and see how bad is the website?”

So, I looked at his website and got angry because it was beyond bad.

The Singapore web designer was so bad that I had to write this post to warn others from falling victim to such a bunch of sneaky & unethical Flash web designers.

Here’s a screen shot of the homepage of my ex-colleague’s web site:

I think, aesthetically, it looks good. However, look can be deceiving!

When I studied the HTML source of the web site, I discovered that it was a SEO nightmare.

Anyway, I usually give the web designers the benefits of doubt when it comes to SEO. And I thought, in this case, the web designer may be just ignorant of SEO. But, on further investigation, I realized that I was so wrong.

Web Designer Hijacked Client’s Site

The web designers at The Pinnacles Interactive – www.thepinnacles.com – did something really sneaky to my ex-colleague’s homepage. Instead of adding text about Ottegroup.com and the services it offers, they wrote copy to advertise and promote The Pinnacles Interactive web design services and added a link to their other website:

Ochre Pictures Singapore - Media Production

Here’s a screen shot of the HTML source of Ottegroup.com:

So, the web designer actually knew SEO and the importance of anchor text link (which in this case, his targeted keywords would be media production). It is quite apparent that the web designer at The Pinnacles Interactive has hijacked their client(my ex-colleague) web page for their own benefits.

Unethical Practice by The Pinnacle Interactive, Singapore

It was bad enough to use the client’s web page to promote own web design business; it would be totally and outright unethical for the web designer to mask all his client’s links using frame and only place their own link in the body of the client’s homepage for the search engine robots.

Are Singapore Web Designers All So Bad?

Such unethical practice will tarnish other legitimate Singapore web designers and affect reputation of the entire Web design industry in Singapore. The Pinnacles Interactive may be just one of the many black sheep.

If you have encountered with such unethical web designers in Singapore, please make a comment here so that unsuspecting Web site owners may be warned.

SEO Consultants Rectify Web Site Stupidities

TIMMGuru — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:27:35 +0000

I thought I was overly harsh when I commented that the rollover navigation box was a stupid idea. However, I am not alone using the “stupid” word.

Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert, commented in the special report published at ZDNet that “Web sites need SEO consultants to save themselves from their own stupidities”.

After 10 years of telling people what not to do with their web sites, Jakob is still facing an uphill task. Most web site owners don’t listen.

Just Follow SEO Guidelines – It’s That Simple

And I agree with Jakob that “the basics of search engine optimization are fairly simple and ought to be to part of the core competency of anybody who makes a living in Web design, Internet marketing, or writing for the Web”.

However, until that happens, 99% of all web site owners are clueless about SEO, PPC, web page copy-writing, web usability, backlinks, link baits, web analytics and etc.

So you will still need to hire SEO consultants to get your web site right. And, probably more, also a couple of experts in PPC and web usability will really get your web site to the mark.

Or, you can enroll to attend the SEO Workshop and learn to DIY SEO.

To learn more about web usability, visit Jakob Nielsen’s Website: UseIt.com or get this highly recommended book by Steve Krug, “Don’t Make Me Think“.

Experts’ Advice On Search Engine Optimization

TIMMGuru — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 03:54:29 +0000

In order to outrank your competition in search engines, you need to study and analyze them. Typically, you need to analyze the top 30 search results for your targeted keywords.

If you are in a hurry, study and analyze the top 10 search listing results. The secrets to rank your web page #1 in the search engines lie in these 10 pages!

Analyze the Top 10 Results of Your Targeted Keywords

Both on-page factors and off-page factors must be analyzed.

There are many SEO tools available for you to do these. I used a combination of tools to help me analyze my competitions and I recommend WebCEO – a program which I have been using since 2004. You can download the free version WebCEO to test it out before you invest in this very powerful professional SEO toolkit.

From the Google search results of seo expert, I noticed that a page from sg.ambatch.com (by Kelvin Hui, HK’s SEO expert) was ranked #6 despite the fact that it was only created on Jun 8, 2007 – about a week ago. You will agree with me that this shattered the myth that you’ll need a high PageRank(PR) to be ranked among the top 10 in the Google search results.

Another important observation was that these top ranking websites have lots of content related to search engine optimization, search marketing and internet marketing.

Also, the incoming text links to these websites have words that are related to SEO, search engines and search marketing.

Optimized Your HTML and Textual Content

You will want to optimize your page content – both the HTML and the visible textual content.

HTML Optimization

The tag and the <meta name=”description”> tag are important tags that you need to optimize for high ranking. Here’s two very useful articles by top SEO expert Jill Whalen: <ul> <li><a href="http://www.highrankings.com/allabouttitles.htm">All about the Title Tag for Search Engine Optimization</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.highrankings.com/metadescription.htm">How to Create a Meta Description Tag for Search Engine Optimization</a></li> </ul> Content Optimization aka SEO Copywriting You should not just optimize your page for search engine spiders, it is more important to write for your human visitors. In fact, search engine algorithms try to mimic human interpretation and “read” the content like a human being. Content optimization and SEO copywriting are more important than tweaking your HTML and meta tags. Read this blog post by SEO expert and author of the book SEOBook, Aaron Wall. <ul> <li><a href="http://www.seobook.com/archives/001668.shtml">Search Engine Friendly Copywriting</a></li> </ul> Once you’ve top ranking and traffic to your website, you want to pre-sell to your visitors. You need to write in a way that will get your readers ready to buy. Learn how to write to presell from the master and expert in pre-selling , Dr Ken Envoy. Go download this complementary ebook now – <a href="http://mycps.sitesell.com/mwc.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Make Your Content Presell</a> </article> <article> <h1>Time to Move On to WordPress</h1> TIMMGuru — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 16:23:00 +0000 This is probably the last post for 2006. Also, the last time I use Blogger to publish to this blog. The first thing I’m going to do in the new year is to migrate to WordPress. I will probably migrate my web hosting server too. And will delete other none blog pages. Yes, I have many pages in this website. Over the next few days, maybe weeks, I will need to come up with a new design suitable for me to customize with my limited knowledge of WordPress template commands. I could have use it as is. But, I am the SEO expert, right? So I need to tweak the template so that it is as search engine friendly as possible. I have done some work on <a href="http://shihengcheong.com/blog/">Shi Hengcheong’s Blog</a> and learned how to have individualized title tag, description and keywords meta tags. However, with this blog I may need to do a bit more. As you can see this blog is more complicated. The layout of the main page is different from the post item pages and archive pages. Anyway, I’ll have to figure it out. Wish me luck! Happy New Year! </article> </main></body></html>