There are hundreds, if not thousands of companies out there –some legitimate, some preying on a general lack of knowledge — who make a living off getting your site noticed. And if you run a large ecommerce site where getting noticed can be the difference between a successful bottom line or a Going Out of Business fire sale, these services can be a huge boon. Beware the unscrupulous ones, however, who promise to land you on the first page of Google. It takes a lot of time, hard work, web savvy, and more than a little luck to manage that feat. Magic wands and promises aren’t going to cut it, regardless of how many keywords they stuff in your meta info.

But for the average person with the small business site or personal portfolio, arming yourself with a little common sense and some free, readily available tools, can go a long way in getting you the attention you seek. And the best of these tools comes right from the search engine masters themselves, Google.

If you’re designing or developing websites and you don’t use Google Webmaster Tools, I have two words for you — why not? This is like the coach of the opposing team telling you how to beat them.

Love them or hate them, no one can deny that Google rules when it comes to searching the web. And the fine folks at Google have put together an impressive array of tools to help those of us who design the things they search get the attention we crave. You can even download a copy of their Search Engine Optimization manifesto to keep handy on your desktop while you’re designing your site.

And that’s where SEO should begin — in the design phase. To use Google’s own design guidelines:

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your TITLE elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Learn to Hand-code

The life of a web designer/developer can sometimes be hectic, and tools like Dreamweaver can be huge time and effort savers. But bear in mind that’s all they are — tools. They should never replace a good eye and sound knowledge. I’ve known more than a few designer/developers who have never written a line of their own code, and that’s sad.

Personally, I have always hand-coded all my sites and blogs. I’ve used Dreamweaver in the past, but I prefer to write things out in Notepad++. It helps to keep me organized and maintain control over the code. I liken relying on development programs to people with radar detectors. You figure since you have the protection of that little electronic warning system, you can get away with breaking the rules. I had a boyfriend like that once. He got six speeding tickets within the first year of buying a radar detector. Prior to that, when he relied on his own wits and common sense, he’d had two tickets in ten years of driving. I’m just saying …

Tools are there to help — not replace. If you can’t hand-code a page, you have no way of knowing what’s really going on. And troubleshooting and debugging becomes even more of a nightmare, especially when you have to come back to it six months or a year down the road.

What does all this have to do with SEO? Well, pages with lean code load faster than pages with the kind of bloated, proprietary code many editing apps produce. And with thousands of new websites cropping up every day, search engines like Google are starting to give more weight to faster-loading pages. A benchmark is to keep your page size below 100kb — including any embedded scripts and css. Personally, I’ve always shot for half that amount.

It Doesn’t End with the Upload

Okay, so you’ve stripped down your code, optimized your keywords, h-tags, links, alt tags, etc., and uploaded the site. If you think you’re done, think again. Sure, any new site that shows up on the internet will eventually get crawled, but why make this more of a crap-shoot than it has to be? Three things you can do right away that will help search engines find you are:

• Create a sitemap
• Customize your robots.txt file
• Include a Google verify code on your index page

Step-by-step directions to these and more development and SEO tips can be found on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines page.

These are tools every designer/developer should have in their toolbox. However, having them and not using them is no different than not having them at all. By taking advantage of the free services of companies like Google, you can avoid having to pay someone else to optimize your site.

I don’t know how many times I’ve complained about these same things the author talks about. Since becoming a freelancer, I work an average of 12 to 16 hours a day, usually 7 days a week. When I do take the occasional day off, I not only feel guilty, but I have clients calling me (usually while they’re out doing something fun with friends or family) wondering why I’m not chained to my desk working on their project.

I had one client whose site I maintain who had a habit of calling me during dinner with updates. On the rare occasion when I had decided to turn off the computer for the day, I would tell her I’d get to her updates first thing in the morning, only to get a call later that evening wondering why the updates hadn’t been implemented. And heaven forbid I’d take an entire day or (gasp!) weekend off.

Now I know this is an extreme case, but I’m sure every freelancer has run into similar problems. Just because I don’t work 9-to-5, doesn’t mean I’m available 24/7. In my experience, there’s no such thing as a web emergency. “But it will only take you a minute,” is the common response. Sometimes I’m tempted to ask them how much they would appreciate their boss calling them back to the office to do something that will “only take a minute.”

The point is, along with the perks of setting your own hours, comes the perceived responsibility of full-time availability. You work at home, so why aren’t you always working? After all, you’re there. And even when I know it’s wrong, I feel guilty for telling a client “I’ll get to it in the morning.”

It’s this inability to divorce life from work, more than anything, that has driven me to the decision to leave behind a full-time freelance career and return to a corporate 9-to-5 job. I looked at my last two projects, factoring in the hours I worked vs. the pay I received, and was shocked to discover just how little I was actually making per hour. And it’s not a matter of underbidding the job. There are intangibles to a project that can’t be factored in — such as long-winded phone calls from clients at all hours of the day (and sometimes night), chasing down clients to get content that was promised and never delivered, etc., etc.

Sure, I could bill phone time or factor the possibility of client ineptitude into my project bid, but I suspect I wouldn’t get many jobs that way. Lawyers can get away with that, and maybe large design firms, but your average freelancer, unless he or she is an absolute rock star, isn’t quite that far up on the food chain.

And there’s the almost total absence of quality free time. Even when you do manage to take some time off, you feel guilty about it and half your mind is still back on the work you’re not doing. When I worked a corporate job, I never had that problem. I learned years ago the dangers of “bringing the office home with me” when I nearly suffered a nervous breakdown because I didn’t exercise my right to say no (to overtime, additional work, etc.). As a result, I became adept at turning off the work side of my brain the minute I left the office. Thus I was able to relax and enjoy my non-working hours, and come back to the job refreshed and recharged. I worked 40 hours a week, and the rest of the time was my own, guilt-free.

I’m not saying freelancing is all bad, or that a 9-to-5 job is the only way to preserve your sanity. Heck, sometimes the only thing that would get me through a particularly bad week at work was the dream of working for myself someday. But just as the grass is not always greener on the other side of the proverbial fence, sometimes the things we see as bad aren’t really so bad at all.

I guess it all comes down to a matter of preference and life geography. For myself, at this stage of my life (and ten years of freelancing), I’ve come to realize I’m ready to turn over some of the perceived freedom of a freelancer for a little of the actual downtime a 9-to-5 job would provide. Then again, maybe I’m just getting tired of my own company. There’s something to be said for having others (no matter how annoying they may get) around to bounce ideas off or even just raise a spirit of contention.

I’ll leave you with a line from Only You, a Marissa Tomei/Robert Downey Jr. movie from 1994. In it, Giovanni (Joaquim de Almeida) tells Faith (Tomei), “You Americans work too much. You never take time to enjoy life.”

Amen.

Today I happened across a very timely blog post — timely in that I had just left a meeting where we were talking about this very thing — on over and undercharging as a designer.

Designers walk a fine line when it comes to charging for their services. Charge too little, and you either get people who think your services are as cheap as your prices, or the nightmare client who tries to abuse your talents.  Charge too much, and you run the risk of having potential clients take their business to your competitors.

It sounds like an endless catch-22, but what it ultimately comes down to is this: a person’s willingness to pay for something is directly related to the value they see in it. So if you want to attract the client willing to pay top dollar, you need to offer them a service they perceive as worthy of their money.

That sounds easier than it actually is. When I was just starting out as a freelancer, I made the same mistake a lot of inexperienced designers make in that I undercharged. I needed the work and was afraid if I charged too much, the client would take his business elsewhere. As a result, I ended up with a lot of clients who undervalued my services and abused my talent. They either didn’t pay or constantly demanded unreasonable changes in the design (without, I might add, suitable compensation). In the end, were they even worth it?

Now let me just say, there is a time and a place for undercharging. If you’re a newbie trying to build your portfolio, you may have to be willing to take on a few cut-rate or even pro-bono jobs. Personally, I would recommend the latter simply because it’s easier to say no to unreasonable demands when the client is getting your services for free.  And if you’re lucky, these first clients will be friends or family who already think you’re a rock star.

If, however, you’ve already established yourself as a designer and don’t feel confident enough in either your abilities or your value and you’re still undercharging, you run the risk of alienating the entire design community. They may see your lack of confidence as an attempt to undercut them, and thus, undervalue the industry itself. After all, if Bob Client can get a website done from Cheap Designer for $300, why should he pay Rock Star Designer $1000 for the same thing?

This practice of over and undercharging is especially costly for growing businesses. A good example is a design firm that charges for a project based on billable hours only. If a project requires 30 days of their senior designer, they may charge the client $30,000. Most businesses would be satisfied, or even thrilled with that. But what if the client is looking for more than just a website? What if they want to brand a whole  new business? They may have a large amount of capital ready to put to work to break into a very competitive but lucrative market, where the user experience of the site could make or break that business. In that case, they may value that ground-breaking user experience at $50,000, which means the agency charging for a set number of days of a designer and whatever he comes up with in that time has just left $20,000 on the table.

By the same token, there are freelancers and design firms who overvalue their services. Say you pitch a website with all the latest HTML5 and CSS3 bells and whistles, and your client (and his customers) only needs a simple who-what-where space on the web. They really don’t care about fancy flash banners and jQuery slideshows and non-standard fonts.  In these cases, it is important to listen to what the client wants and offer–and price–your services accordingly.

The bottom line is this: think about who and what you really are and what you should be charging for, then purposely price your services on a project-by-project basis. Leave the one-size-fits-all mentality for raincoats and rubber boots.

For freelancers, this means that nine times out of ten, your clients value only your availability, flexibility and malleability, not your sweet javascript skills. Price downwards accordingly.

And for established agencies, nine times out of ten, your clients value your professionalism, reliability and prestige, not just the hours you bill. Price upwards accordingly.

View the whole tutorial.

But design is everywhere: billboards, magazines, department store and window displays … you get the idea. If you happen to live in a city that has a merchandise mart (where store buyers go to order their new lines), find a vendor who belongs to it and beg them to let you tag along sometime. Just remember to keep the camera phone handy (and hidden).

One place I can always count on for inspiration is television, especially commercials. And some consistently stand out above the others for innovation and pure eye candy. Like Target.

Hometown (Minneapolis) Peterson Milla Hooks has handled Target’s advertising for more than a decade. In cooperation with Catalyst Studios, who, along with production whizzes DigitalKitchen (who also handled Showtime’s True Blood campaign), have done a marvelous job with Target’s “Arts for All” campaign. As such, Target is currently responsible for some of the tastiest eye candy on the small screen. Like one of their latest offerings (from the aforementioned Catalyst Studios), “Art Imagines.”

As far as live action, who can forget the Frugalista ad with that catchy little tune that just burrows into your head?

But there are currently two animated ads, aired throughout Discovery Channel’s Life series, that have really stuck with me. The first, shown at the first c-break in the show, features an unfolding box with a strange little off-key background tune. Unfortunately, I have yet to find the ad anywhere online, though if anyone else knows what I’m talking about and has seen it, please send me a link.

The second is their Better is in the Bag ad:

Simple, and yet, elegant. Obviously Target has practically franchised the color red, which makes one of the strongest branding statements in the industry right now and says a lot about the braintrust at Peterson Milla Hooks.

Another company churning out inspirational advertising is the Chicago boutique agency, The Escape Pod, as witnessed by their “Life is Beautiful” ad for Office Max:

The next time you think there’s nothing good on TV, head on over to one of the more “artsy” networks like Discovery, NatGeo, or even FineLiving or HGTV, and check out the commercials.

Adobe's CS5 launch

What a great week to launch my new Nytpad blog. Starting it off with a bang on Monday with the launch of  Adobe’s new CS5 applications.Of course, my main interest is in Creative Suite 5 Web Premium. After watching the launch video on Monday, I can’t wait to get my hands on this. If you haven’t had a chance to check out some of the new features yet, head on over to Adobe.com to so.

Not much else to say right now, being burned out on getting this new site redesign and blog up and running, but I’ll hit it fresh tomorrow.