New trend: One page web design

 There is a tad of ground swell around the idea of having a one page web design. One page web designs take advantage of the oft-misunderstood user behavior of scrolling. Let's face it now squarely: users scroll. They know what the mouse is. In the drive for "less mouse clicks", why not just GET RID of them? A one page web design does this.

We recently redesigned our freelance graphic design site, www.bonfx.com, into a one page web design. Everything you need to know is right there. There is absolutely no navigation. The user gets there and can see quite clearly that the only thing to do is...scroll down. In three gentle, single-finger mouse wheel movements, or slider bar grabs, the user has read all they need to know about BonFX. Shortly, we'll have the link to the new blogs hooked up, but that is not what people are initially landing on our site for.

We got started on this idea recently. We found two articles on the same day regarding one page website designs, and how successful they had been for their respective objectives:

http://typesites.com/black-estate/

...and also...

http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/005396.html

We've gotten quite a bit of curious traffic back to www.bonfx.com after commenting on both articles. There is definitely an interest. I say the less clicks the better. The less mouse and hand movement the better. It allows users to focus all their intention on your message, not on where your message might be.

It doesn't solve the problem for every type of website of course, but I think for many, many websites, including your standard brochure style website, this might be a good idea. We'll see - but for now I'm going to have fun working on one page web design projects! I have a few lined up already!

Very high rank for "Freelance Graphic Design" at bonfx.com

I just learned something interesting today. My main domain, bonfx.com, is listed in Google around 50 or so for "freelance graphic design" and "freelance graphic designer" and very highly in a few others. What's interesting is that I have never done anything whatsoever to accomplish this. The site for the last 4 years was 4 pages with very little copy, but it did have the term "freelance graphic designer" on the top of each page. 

So, as I go collecting info about SEO lately, and pondering this fact of where I'm listed through no intentional effort of mine, I discover page rank. I installed the Google Toolbar and went to bonfx.com and discovered it is a 4. I think that's pretty high for a static website, no blog, very little if any content. But, again, the key words are on top. My recent site redesign was SEO friendly, but still no optimized towards the keyword in question.

Well, the answer seems to be that the domain is 8yrs and 3mths old at this writing, and for that whole time, has been a "freelance graphic design" site.

My guess is that if I make any effort whatsoever to "rank up" on these terms, I could get in the top 10, maybe 20. I could probably easily run a blog for freelancers off of bonfx, of which their are many, but leap towards the head of the pack in short order...

Thoughts - anyone?

SEO again

(NOTE: Great...tried to put some code examples in here and Blogger translates them all to actual working links and not examples that you can read. I'll have to read up on how to get Blogger to not "help" me format my posts!)

A new blog with 20+ articles, with analytics, adsense, and some Amazon product placements, took an hour to put together. The new blog is on white nose sleep machine products and info...but maybe I shouldn't be calling these blogs exactly. They are mini sites using a "shallow" technique to try and capture a search term that does not have a lot competition for it's specific phrase.

Now if I'm not mistaken, a high-quality link back to a blog has a good "A" tag name. The "A" tag is the "A" in the code:

My Link Name

So a quality link to, say, a freelance graphic designer might like this, in code:

Freelance Graphic Design

That code, when in a live site, looks like the "white noise" link above. It references the keywords of the destination site. Therefore, a high quality link to a Freelance Graphic Designer would look just like the link in this sentence. The search engines like this because it validates, from another domain, that the site being linked to has something to do with those terms.

Well, before we take the plunge and start paying for SEOBook service, we are determined to learn some stuff ourselves. So we are going to keep at it and learn the "old school" way of trial and error. At least for a while.

Yet another SEO experiment

We are probably going to post 100 of these in the next few months! We have become completely intrigued. There are LOTS of books and programs and whatnots that say they will teach you how to optimize your site for search engines. But, the fact that there are SO many of them available has me thinking that this can't be that hard to figure out. The basic methods are all very straightforward, but implementing strategies really depends on site goal and the nature of your material. Therefore, it seems the only right way to do this, if we are going to do it all, is to jump in and try ourselves. 

Our newest experiment is about...the humble cast iron skillet. Again, we don't have time to explain why we are choosing this term. The term itself is kind of arbitrary, but the numbers behind the term, as revealed by Google Analytics, is what is more interesting. It's a niche, for sure. In fact, more of the posts we make in the next few weeks or months regarding SEO will likely be about niches. Our clients are usually smaller businesses with a need for niche marketing. In fact, WE need niche marketing! 

So, if you are interested what a "cast iron skillet" blog might look like, click away!