TEST TEST and TEST some more!!!

Throughout the years I have seen numerous people create websites, make them live and realize a few days later that there are numerous issues with the site. Thus they have to take the entire site down and fix there issues. To solve this problem there are many things you can do. The main thing that is most important for any website build is to set up a local server to host your site on. This allows you to test the site for any errors or issues before it goes live to the world wide web. Try and use every tool possible before taking a site live. you always have to remember that it takes years to build a positive reputation and seconds to ruin it. This being said make sure you overly test your website before posting live. People will notice problems and will avoid your site if the see or find them. Please feel free to contact me with any question at bkcustomdezign@gmail.com

Christmas time email newsletter

It's that time of year again when you start to put together your Christmas time email campaigns. Weather it's B2B or B2C there are some things you should try and provide to your customers so that your email stands out in the crowd. There are three main things that you should bring to your customers with a Christmas time email news letter, a special offer, a reason to think of your business, and a positive message.

To start make the email worth while to open and give them a reason to visit your store or site. With your offer make sure it is a product that most of your customers will purchase. Also make sure that your offer is too good to pass up for any customer. This will get them into your store or onto your website to make a purchase and hopefully buy something else.


Next give them a reason to remember our company and remember that they received an offer from you. In today's day and age there are so many emails that come into an inbox on a daily basis that you have to make sure yours stands out. You can do this by creating a unique, well designed email that looks like nothing they have ever seen or provide a unique game for them to play in the email, nothing large short and sweet is the best.


Lastly provide the customer with a positive message. Most people look at there email first thing in the morning or right before they go to bed. Either way providing them a positive message will brighten there day and could possible cause them to talk about the email throughout the day or the following day. Thus you will receive free word of mouth advertising from it.


Keep these three principles in mind when you are creating this years Christmas time email and you will notice a drastic increase in success.

SEO Must Haves

There are five must have SEO features for every site.

#1 Page Titles

Make sure each and every page on your site has a unique page title. Keep your page title under 75 characters in length but make sure to include as many keywords as possible.


#2 Robots.txt & Sitemap

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Make sure before you upload your website onto the world wide web that you have a robots.txt file in the root directory of your website so that Google and other search engines are able to index each page of your site. Also make sure that our site contains a sitemap. This site map will make sure that every page of your website is properly indexed and recognized by search engines.

#3 Alt Tags

Alt tags are extremely important for every website to have. An alt tag is text that is embedded into an image on a website. Since images cannot be read by the search engines, the alternate text is used so that the image is not ignored. Thus if you do not capitalize on using alt tags in every image on your site you are losing out on numerous keyword opportunities throughout your site.

#4 Content

Content is king online. Make sure your site has as much relevant keyword filled content that you can possibly think of. A site is never done so continually add content to your site to make it larger, but be careful don't just add content to add it make sure the content you add is relevant and make sense to put it on your website.

These are the top 4 things that i believe each site has to have before it is ready to go live. There are many things that can be done on a site in order to make it SEO better but if you focus on these four things to begin you will have a good foundation to build off of.

If you have any questions on SEO feel free to contact me at bkcustomdezign@gmail.com or leave a comment below.

2012 Web Design Trends

I stumbled upon an article on http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/web-design-trend-2012/ about the web trends to watch out for in 2012. Now that the year is almost over I wanted to take a look at these trends and see which ones actually came to be. All 15 of these trends have come to be in the web design world in my opinion although there were a few that stood out to me.

The first trend that stood out in my mind was touch screen mobile device. If you look around the room your in or just in society in general there are very few people who don't have a touch screen phone. Thus each site has had to innovate and make there site work with touchscreen mobile devices. If your site is unable to work with these devices you will loose a large number of potential customers.


The second trend that came to be was CSS3 and HTML5 standards. More and more sites in 2012 have migrated to using CSS only for creating there site top to bottom. This had made sites run quicker, SEO better, and has allowed easier and faster editing. HTML 5 is still gaining headway and the coding language is become better and more know to the web development world. All in all CSS has taken off in 2012 and HTML5 has gained headway but will most likely pull ahead in 2013.




All in all there were many trends that happened in 2012 in the web design world but I think these are the two largest trends for 2012. What trends have you guys seen? leave a comment below and let me know what you think of these two trends or any other trends you have noticed.

#webtrends #webdesgin #webdevelopment #CSS3 #HTML5 #mobileweb

Projection technology

While I was in Vegas at the convention I met a company that sold video projectors. Now I know what's the big deal about a video projector right? Well this company had software that was developed especially for there projector that allowed you to preamble any image you desired for any location and project it onto that location. So for example you are the head of PR for the White House and you want the front of the White House look like the America flag for the fourth if July. You can't paint the White House red white and blue, you can't convert the White House in a vinyl wrap so this projector and software is your solution. You first take the image you want and import it into the program, then you import and image of the building you want to project it on. After that you press a few keys and the computer is now showing a simulations of what it will look like projected on that building. You can change numerous things I side the program to get the desired look. On of these options is eliminating shadows that would be naturally there on the building. This would give the illusion that the image is laid flat across the building. All I. All I thought that this technology was amazing and a true innovation to the marketing and graphic design world

#graphicdesign #technology

Las Vegas Lighting Convention

This week I headed to Vegas for a convention. While I was there I was able to see many various types of graphic design. The convention was a lighting show for nightclubs bars and concerts. Each booth had its own look and feel that was created through lights and printed artwork. It was amazing to see how people used light in order to create shadows or eliminate them on different areas of the booth. Most of the printed artwork was company names and logos. But when it came to what was being shown on tv's, LED walls and light projectors there were no limits. Below are a few pictures of the booths that were at the show, it's amazing how creative each company was. Where was the coolest place that anyone else has went and seen amazing graphic art??

#graphicdesign #tradeshows #artwork

CSS Navigation

I just recently have become extremely comfortable with the CSS coding language and am now ready to try new innovative ideas with this language. I started off by creating a full functioning CSS template and website layout. after i had this finished I started looking into what was trending in the world of CSS and web development and found that more and more developers were using CSS for website navigation. I began to research how to create this type of a navigation and quickly found a site that showed me step by step how to create it (click here to view the instructions) you will need some knowledge on how CSS and HTML work together in order to make this navigation work properly. After i got this CSS navigation to work properly i started to edit and change things and add more pieces to it and finally got what i wanted for the end result. Below is an image with a link to the site that I created with the CSS navigation.
Click here to go to the site

If you need any help with creating a CSS navigation or have any web development related questions please Email me at bkcustomdezign@gmail.com or comment on my blog, or shoot me a tweet @bkcustomdezign. and dont forget to like me on facebook http://www.facebook.com/BKCustomDzn