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Today’s post is the first in a series of three where we’ll look at how to get started with creating your web design layout. If you’re new to web design, a blank screen or piece of paper can sometimes be a scary thing if you have no idea where to start. So, the idea of these posts is to help you develop a process for creating your designs.

So what’s the first step in a typical design process? As a designer you will be rarin’ to go but what do you do? Jump into Photoshop? Start picking out fonts you like? Fire up Notepad or Dreamweaver? No, you need to drop the keyboard and step away from the computer, buddy. The very first step you need to take is to find out what your client wants and/or needs (not always the same thing). If you’re making a web site for yourself, then YOU are the client and you need to figure out what you want and/or need.

Read more about the Web design process…

If I am ever asked to simplify what it takes to be successful in search engine optimization, I come back to two simple rules…quality, unique and resourceful content, and gaining quality links, pointing to appropriate pages of your website.

If I am allowed to go a little deeper in my explanation, I’ll get into proper site architecture, coding, internal linking, and all the other fun stuff that we get to consider on a daily basis.

There are some bloggers out there who will argue that “all you need is a bunch of links” and others, still, who say that “all you need to do is set up a WordPress website and generate a bunch of content.”

My argument is probably somewhere in the middle of this crowd.

With as complicated as search engine optimization can be at times, I believe it’s important to maintain one of the most important factors in search engine optimization…a bit of common sense.

Read more about SEO…

Affiliates have a lot to worry about these days. Advertisers themselves are busy divying up affiliates’ commissions among themselves. The The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division issued a ruling on the so-called Amazon Tax that wasn’t the most positive for the industry. But there’s another burning issue that the industry should be watching which deserves an update: How Google is crowding out AdWords advertisers, as well as advertisers from other affiliate networks, by swapping cost-per-click ads with cost-per-action image ads from Google Affiliate Network (GAN) advertisers.

By placing cost-per-action (affiliate) image ads in the space where AdWords ads traditionally appear, Google is elevating it’s Google Affiliate Network.  And it’s tapping into a new revenue stream.  As I see it, ValueClick’s (VCLK) Commission Junction unit is suffering, so is Rakuten’s LinkShare.  As are retail advertisers who choose to not work with Google’s GAN.  In fact, I feel, they’re under increasing pressure to make a switch.

Read more about affiliate marketing…

I knew that I had to build trust and communicate a benefit quickly. My approach involved placing the headline under the site’s logo, which was heavily stylized, giving it a branded feel. The headline, “Be good to your baby,” appealed to every mother’s need to raise her child well. Pictures of happy babies pointed to two content boxes. One box featured the baby products and used the call to action, “Get a baby product, FREE (with completion of program requirements).”

Below the call to action was an additional statement. The purpose of the statement was to reinforce every mother’s need to keep her baby happy. This statement read, “Be a good parent. Pick a product.” In a content box to the right of this ad copy was the email submission form that would route site visitors into a registration path.

Each visitor would then have to opt-in to several offers to qualify for the chosen baby product. Traffic was driven to the landing page through various publishers, as well as with a radio spot running in our target markets. The publishers were very enthusiastic about the baby offer. They pushed quite a bit of traffic to it and made money on it. The landing page can be viewed here.

Almost exactly a year ago, Google (Google) started testing its new AdSense interface with a select group of AdSense publishers. The new design is a reflection on both the feedback from that group and requests for features from the existing userbase.

Read more about Google AdSense…

Succeeding in a single PPC campaign is quite an accomplishment, but delivering results time and time again is something else entirely. Being able to consistently produce campaigns that achieve results is the difference between an amateur and a professional search engine marketer.

In order to achieve consistent results, you need to follow a systematic process covering the same three core processes of research, implementation, and optimization.

Before you even worry about who your target audience is or what keywords you want to target, you need to understand what the business hopes to achieve through running a PPC campaign.

Without an underlying business goal to measure success against, a PPC campaign is useless. Some important questions you should ask yourself and the key stakeholders involved in the business are:

• What goal should the PPC campaign fulfill?
• What are the target actions users should take on the website?
• How much is each action worth to the business?

Understanding a few standard business goals such as the ones above allows you to start developing a campaign that’s meaningful to the business and delivers measurable results.

Read more about PPC…

Let’s take a small scenario. What if I promised you that if you spent 8 hours a day promoting Billy’s Shoes, and I’d pay you a commission for all the shoe sales you sent me? If you did the promoting and I paid the commission in a timely manner, we would theoretically be good partners.

Now what if I also owned Billy’s Auctions, Billy’s Games and a dozen other companies – and as soon as you sent me your hard earned shoe visitor, I’d try to steer them to my other sites instead; earning myself money and not having to pay you a commission. That could hardly be called a “partnership”.

Well welcome to Affiliate Marketing 2011.

This trend has been building steadily, and has finally reached the ridiculous level of “you don’t stand a chance” of earning a commission with some merchants.

Read more about commissions…

Recently, I received an e-mail from a reader who was wondering…”At $2,500 per month budget, is there a rule of thumb for parameters on a dollar return for a retail product site? For example, should the $2,500 generate 10 times that amount on sales? Say, $23,000 to $27,000? Or, 15 times?”

Seems like a reasonable question. And, as with many things related to search engine optimization, the answer is simply not that easy.

Trust me when I say that every single search engine optimizer out there would love to be able to provide you with this kind of information. If we could be as precise as to the return that you might receive from search engine optimization as you might otherwise be with your paid search initiatives, based upon budget and expected return, SEO would have completely matured and – without a doubt – would be in everyone’s marketing budgets.

Sadly, that day has not yet come. And, I suspect that it will never come. There are simply too many variables in play. It’s really not a cop-out. And, this may be a reason why 29 percent of the largest companies (who participated in SEMPO’s 2010 Survey) spent absolutely nothing on search engine optimization in 2009. See my previous column on SEO versus PPC for additional detail.

Read more about SEO…

It seems that new resources and articles for teaching and promoting HTML5 are popping up almost daily. We’ve been given HTML5 templates in the form of the HTML5 boilerplate and HTML5 Reset (although they both go beyond just HTML5 stuff). We’ve got a plethora of books to choose from that cover HTML5 and its related technologies. We’ve got shivs, galleries, and a physician to help heal your HTML5 maladies. And don’t forget the official spec.

From my own vantage point — aside from a few disputes about what the term “HTML5″ should and shouldn’t mean — the web design and development community has for the most part embraced all the new technologies and semantics with a positive attitude.

While it’s certainly true that HTML5 has the potential to change the web for the better, the reality is that these kinds of major changes can be difficult to grasp and embrace. I’m personally in the process of gaining a better understanding of the subtleties of HTML5′s various new features, so I thought I would discuss some things associated with HTML5 that appear to be somewhat confusing, and maybe this will help us all understand certain aspects of the language a little better, enabling us to use the new features in the most practical and appropriate manner possible.

Read more about HTML5…