Headsetoptions.org Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetera

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Finding web design clients online has been a breeze for us, thanks to Google organic searches. Now we would like to also like to tap the local Richmond VA Web Design market for small businesses. So here are a few things we would do which you could do if you wanted to start up your own web designing company locally!

1. Volunteer web designing services to local, reputed organizations, high traffic businesses. It’s not easy to spend time giving away freebies, but patience pays. Try it and trust me you will gradually start establishing a nice network for yourself.
2. Advertise in all free spaces available, Craigslist.org, your city website, freelance designer websites. If you can afford to pay for advertising, find a high traffic site that could redirect potential clients to your own website. Place your ad in yellow pages as well and Google Local Businesses Listings.
3. Talk a lot whenever you get a chance to anyone you meet and introduce yourself, your business. Always carry your business card to give away whenever required. Small business owners sometimes do not know how a website could help them, so be prepared to educate and motivate them to have a website.
4. Please your existing client and help them with a little extra that they do not ask for. For example, we provide free support to a lot of our clients, although it takes away a lot of our productive time. You will earn their goodwill and word of mouth advertising without having to ask for it.
5. Network, network, network with anyone and everyone. Network with local internet marketing and SEO companies.
6. Contact local web design companies that are already successful and pitch yourself as a designer who they could sub-contract their work for a cheaper, quicker and a decent alternative.
7. Create one page flyers advertising your web design services that you can mail potential clients.
8. Always maintain good relationships with your neighbors, friends, family. Help others whenever you can, it will come back positively to you!

If you thought only web design had strict standards, think again. Graphic design covers interesting style guidelines such as topography, use of white space, size of fonts, color combinations, gradients, etc. Web design style focuses on visual as well as technical components of design. So, not just imagery, but coding skills, content writing and creative writing skills, all come into play simultaneously.

Whether you are writing an e-book, a novel, a resume, or a thesis, presentation is key to building that first impression. Research engineers like me constantly work on research papers, and for those wanting to go for the PhD programs, it’s so imperative that you have some dissertation help. What we may not know is that dissertation involves a set of standards for design and writing of documents and you need to learn and understand dissertation methodology and dissertation research methods in order to make a great dissertation presentation.

Design documentation has presentation requirements include pagination, layout, type of paper- acid free for permanence or regular, color, texture of paper, paper size, sequence or order of components, table of contents, citation style, Roman numerals text criteria, and so on. Of course a lot depends on the field you are in and what your university or organization accept. Some have strict in-house requirements, some may accommodate changes or new ideas depending on how conventional your industry or institute is. If you are doing a technical writing project undertaken by a team, it is important that the finished documentation does not delineate any one individual’s personal style, keep it more neutral and objective. These are just the basics, for more you may check dissertation blogs.

We broke the 800px barrier this evening when we switched to Aligned- a theme originally designed by Thomas - The Undersigned for the Habari Project. We ported over the theme to WordPress to skin our own site. This nifty grid based theme is in beta and as you may notice, it can use a bit more styling to handle the various forms we have on this site and of course the IE bugs. We also went to a center aligned design, which was long over due as most visitors did not particularly like the left aligned design we sported earlier. Here are two screenshots of the old and new designs for those of you reading our feeds, visit us to get a better look.

Old The Studio Theme Based Design

New Aligned for Habari Based Design

Among other things, the design has a rotating header (on page refresh); a JavaScript based slider for the “About & Contact” tab in certain pages; the polls now show only in single pages which have “poll relevant” content and numerous conditional tags that make the usability of the site much more interactive, logical and hopefully fun. Please do let us know what you think, and if you find a “real” bug (not the “not aligned in IE 5″ bug) we will mention you in this blog post along with a link to your site.

Watch This! is a full-function advanced WordPress theme with built-in “touchless CSS edit” functionality. This theme has practically no set up and works as is.

Just like our other free premium advanced WordPress themes like Deep Blue , this theme does the job as is and works with all versions of WordPress up to 2.5.x.

Here are some features of this new theme:

• Touchless CSS edit.
• Able to change all major and some minor styles from the WordPress admin panel
• Posts and Sidebar are Adsense styled - easily add your Google Adsense code each located in separate files.
• Adding a category called Featured (with a capital F) activates the featured post option.
• Sidebar is widget ready.
• Search engine optimized - use without worry of duplicate posts or rearranging title tags.
• CSS/XHTML validated.

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Video embeds like the ones from YouTube can be valuable to tell a story. Though the built-in options for such videos allow the user to resize the video, it is not dynamic and is more than often a manual (irreversible) process. Say you would like to keep the video at it’s full size in the single post page but display a thumbnail in your sidebar, you can. A simple CSS and Javascript fix for IE would do the trick, here’s how:
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Currently, we have two clients requiring a health based website. One is a redesign and one is to be done from scratch. I like the orange and white combination for the cookie diet site, it gives a fresh and positive feel to it. Often I see most health and fitness websites in blue or pink and white, I wonder why? Anyway, while reading the contents on one of them I found some valuable information, which I thought I will share with you all.

Weight loss programs such as NutriSystem, Jenny Craig, Atkins, e-Diets are not very easy to follow nor inexpensive. With the fast-paced life today, we need results quick and the cookie diet program by “Smart for Life” seems like something the average consumer would actually like. What I like is that it involves no weight loss pills, which I would personally never try, and no unnatural methods for quick weight loss like eating only one food group or the other! This diet is actually certified by ABC and Fox as a special cookie diet program that is entirely unique and promising as compared to the rest, does that make it better? Can you think of one other diet that is certified by national broadcasters? The interesting features of this program are natural organic ingredients, “no hunger” cookie squares, muffins, soups, shakes and desserts that are healthy and will help you keep you slim, an educational and motivational program that helps improve will-power and self-control, and a one-on-one physician supervision customized as per case basis.

I am not even going to mention success stories, but 12-15 pounds loss of weight per month seems to be the minimum the cookie diet program has been able to achieve so far. Of course, more in some cases. It is rapidly growing across the Canada and United States too, you can choose a location that is convenient to you. So why wait, be a smart cookie and check them out.