Anyone who works in graphic design or web development knows the importance of starting with good, clean images.  The amount of time it takes to clean bad images is costly.  The brain-numbing drudgery of erasing, copying and stamping parts of an image, 3 pixels at a time, is enough to make grown men cry. (OK I’m exaggerating a bit) The point is Photoshop CS5 is going to make the process of cleaning up images faster, better and happier.

Here is Adobe’s leaked preview from the CS5 blog.

If you’re pressed for time skip to 2:47

The official release date for Adobe CS5 is April 12th, 2010.  For more Photoshop CS5 goodness http://cs5.org/?cat=3

Let these truly awful images stick in your mind, make you smile and feel better about yourself and your place in the world. Let’s celebrate the ugliness of the past, and in doing so we will feel good about the present and look forward to a new decade of hope.

(This post  made possible by the Way Back Machine at web.archive.org.)

Click on an image to see more.

ThomasNet  Mar. 2000

"Man this internet thing is easy."

GlobalSpec Jan. 2000

So much to blue.

Alford Services Jan. 2000

"This company was a fall back plan, our true passion is in science book art."

Capital Process Equipment Jan 2000

This site also available in 4 x 6 flash card.

Knighthawk Engineering

You know you want to hit "Print Screen." The right side is for taking notes.

Macaulay Controls

They could print new business cards with their new web address but really whats the point?

Jogler

You'd be amazed at how much time people spent on this site

If you have an ugly industrial website from the past decade worth including in our list write it in the comments section.

The possible SEO options are endless. Don't be a fool doing things without good reason.

SEO - the art of being googled by the most relevant googlers, bingos, and yahoos.

The world of SEO is often clouded with arguments of what the best practice is for various technical tactics.  It is made more confusing by arguments of what constitutes white-hat (good) and black-hat (evil) tactics. In this post I will not get into complex or controversial SEO. There are a million things you can do for SEO, many that YOU shouldn’t attempt and many that NOBODY should attempt.  I’m going to skip all that and give you the most basic and long-lasting SEO tactics that exist.  These are the tactics you will want to use as a foundation for all your SEO efforts, whether you decide to soldier on into more advanced SEO, or find a trustworthy SEO company worth outsourcing to.

1. Unique & Useful Content
   Every webpage has information on it. To have a page win in search engines, it must first win in content.  The information you provide should be useful, organized, unique, and entertaining (at least give it a goofy picture).
2. Internal Linking Structure
   The desired content should be easy to get to from anywhere on a site.  This means your linking structure should be tight, always link to other related content that a user may be interested in.  (Ex: Basic components of an SEO’d blog post)  You should also have an internal search function.  If you don’t have the means of developing a search algorithm in house, you can use Google Custom Search.
3. Sitemaps
   Every site needs a sitemap.  Actually that’s not true.  Every site needs 2 sitemaps.  An XML site map for search engines so they can index your site, and an html sitemap that can help both users and search engines navigate your site. A good free sitemap generator is available at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. Enter your site’s url and download the xml file and ftp it up to your site.  If you have a google webmaster account you can submit your new sitemap.PetroPages real-life experience:  When we submitted our first free sitemap, it helped google to index 18,000 new pages.Note: At PetroPages we have a large site with 80,000 pages.  If you have a large site and the free sitemap generator worked you may want to pay the $20-30 to generate a sitemap that can handle an unlimited number of pages.
4. Nice Clean URLs
   The sooner you do this the better. The theme for all the major networking sites (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.) is vanity URLs.  People choose the URL for their personal or company profile.  So why does Facebook want me to have the option of having the webaddress facebook.com/adrianisawesome?  The reason is Facebook, myspace, linkedin, all want to come up on search-engines for searches on people and brands.  If you search “petropages” on google, right after our main page, our blog, one of our clients main page, and an aboutus wiki, you’ll see PetroPages’ Twitter page, then Facebook page, and then LinkedIn page. Results #6, #7 and #8.Take a lesson from these giants of the web and whenever you make a page, give the page the actual keyword you want to come up under.
   Also: keep it as simple as possible. No numbers. No parameters. No ugly www.sitethatwontcomeup.com/jk9t9/5rhujs/huh/?col=5#panel63 URLS.

Hope this gives you some direction on where to start your common sense SEO efforts.  You can check back for more uncommon sense SEO tips in the future.

1. Great Looks

So fresh and so clean

We are all suckers for good looks. A great looking site is easy to promote and likely to get users to keep coming back.  The looks of your website reflects your brand’s style and attention to detail. Petropages.com blends sharp industry specific images with a clean design that makes for a rich user experience.

2. Intuitive Site Navigation

Simple, fluid navigation

A problem with many sites is having a high bounce rate.  This is when users come across a site and quickly leave the site.  If a search engine returns your site, its because your site is relevant to the user’s query.  If someone remembers your site URL or guesses it, they are coming because they think your site will have what they’re looking for. So the problem of having a high bounce rate is rarely that the site is off topic. The two most common causes for users quickly leaving your site is that your site is either: a.) ugly or b.) confusing. It does not matter if a site looks great, if users get confused on where they are supposed to go to get what they are looking for, they will leave.

3. Full of Useful Content

Knighthawk provides its published material for free

No matter what you are trying to accomplish with your website, you should make every effort to fill it up with useful content.  If you are selling products, include information on the products.  Add a blog to your site, and give away information relevant to your industry.  Giving away information does 3 things:
1. Improves your brand’s image. (If you are giving away information for free, you look good for helping people out)
2. Gives you “expert” status.
3. Exposes your site to more users.

4. Search-Engine Friendly

After you have considered the looks, navigation, and content for your site, making the experience as rich as possible for users, you will want to make sure your site is easy find for search engines.  You want your pages to be indexed fast and come up on relevant queries. This can be done by editing the underlying code of every page to include all of the relevant information that search engines pick up on as they crawl your site.

5. Cross Browser Compatibility

Sneak peek at PetroPages new site

Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera.. the list of internet browsers continues to grow every year.  When you make a website you must code it in such a way that it looks good on all browsers for most, if not all different computer sizes. You should write your code in HTML and CSS, and so separate the content from its appearance.  Then you can  edit the appearance, without tampering with the functionality of the site, until the appearance looks great in all different browsers.

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1. High-Impact Messages
2. Organized, Easy-to-search, Easy-to-digest, Information

High-impact messages:

• Informative—provide our audience with information that will benefit them.  Feel free to get technical if you need to.
• Relevant—ask yourself, “How wide of an audience can I reach out to without becoming vague or irrelevant?”
• Interesting—hold their attention. Make such a strong impression that they remember you as being helpful, knowledgeable, and desirable to do business with.
• Aesthetically pleasing—a picture is worth 1,000 words.  What do the pictures and layout of your post say about your company?

Organized Content:

• Relevant Title
  Your reader should already know what information they are going to find within your blog post. Whether someone is on the blog or doing a search on Google, only the title of your post can let the reader know that you have what they may be looking for.
• Relevant Quality Image
  After someone has read your title and decided to read your post the first thing they should see is a quality image that is relevant to your topic.  In combination with the title, the image will make an immediate impression on the reader. You want to make a good first impression so they will read what you have to say.
• Preview, Body, Conclusion
  “Tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.”
• Outlines, Divisions, Etc.
  Spewing a drawn-out page long paragraph of technical information is unacceptable.  While it may be useful, no one will read it.  Most people scroll up and down on a blog and scan it first to decide if it is worthwhile to read.  Divisions and bolded paragraph headings make your information easier to digest and remember.
• Concise, Useful Content
  Clear, concise and useful content can take someone from being interested in your business or industry, to becoming a customer, promoter, or maybe even a stalker.