Our ideal candidate will be a designer with knowledge of current design genres, web design techniques, layout and usability, comprehensive understanding of standards compliant HTML and CSS, ability to create and optimize graphics for maximum visual impact and minimal download time as well as some understanding of client and server-side scripting. Ability and desire to learn is a must.

Qualifying for this position relies almost entirely on examples of your work and applied experience (whether professional, freelance, school or hobby). Don’t worry about the size of your portfolio it’s quality that counts. Provide examples of your work along with how it could apply to this position.

If you want to work at a dynamic, growing web firm, on high-profile and cutting edge ideas while avoiding bureaucracy and mind-numbing meetings, this is the place for you.

Email your resume, salary expectations and examples of your work to Liquid.

Because We Care A Lot deals with individuals with disabilities it was very important that this new web site be accessible to everyone and meet the criteria of Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. We Care A Lot contracted Redding based Liquid Design to develop the site and ensure it meets Section 508 and current HTML standards.

The website can be viewed at www.wecarealot.org.

The website of the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Association at www.shastacascade.org, was launched in 1995. In the course of over 12 years this site has received millions of visitors from all over the world but the design remained relatively unchanged… until now. Their new website launched last week and it is a major upgrade that will no doubt benefit the organization and the entire Shasta Cascade Region as it encourages more visitors to this area.

The new ShastaCascade.org features, sections on every conceivable attraction and activity from golf to shopping to camping and everything in between. With easy, intuitive navigation and great looking design this new site will better represent the region and encourage visitors to explore more.

The new web design is the result of Liquid New Media. Liquid was tasked with capturing the beauty and excitement of this part of California in a website while keeping download times to a minimum and making sure it was viewable across the range of web browsers and operating systems.

Visit the new site at www.ShastaCascade.org

• Is your web designer offering you a custom design?

  Some web designers charge you like you’re getting a custom web design, then give you a template. There is a huge difference in price, if you are getting a template design the price should reflect that.

• Does your web designer create web standards compliant code?

  Designing your website to meet current web standards ensures that your site not only looks good on current web browsers, but will most likely continue to look great on future web browsers too.

• Will your web designer’s code be search engine friendly?

  Not the same as search engine optimization, but in some ways more important. Search engine friendly code means your website is built in such a way that search engines are able to easily index your site and can determine what it’s about.

• Will your web designer stand behind the website for the long term?

  Like any piece of software, many problems with a website may not crop up until after you take delivery. Will your web designer continue to provide support for any code they wrote? For how long afterwards?

We would be happy to talk with you about these or any other web design related questions, free of charge. We never charge for consultations or just friendly conversation about our industry and what you should expect.

While there are many business offering search engine optimization, you need to be careful because some are offering substandard service, either they don’t really know what they’re doing and taking peoples money, or they are engaged in “black hat” methods, that is those techniques that are considered unethical and could result in a site being banned by search engines.

So what goes into effective “white hat” search engine optimization? It used to be about meta tags a few years back, hidden tags in the header section of a page’s HTML that told a search engine what that page was about. Thanks to people abusing meta tags, they are not used by most search engines today, you will still want to have them, but the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) will not use them to determine your rank. The most important thing you can do to improve your search engine rank today is to develop inbound links. An inbound link is a link to your website from another site not in your domain. The number of links to your site tell search engines how relevant your website is, the higher the PageRank of the site linking to you, the more that link counts for. There are a lot of other things that will improve your site’s standing in the search engines like using carefully researched keywords and the use of those keywords in the headings, subheadings, title and body of your page, still the most important thing is having lots of inbound links.

How do you go about getting inbound links? There are lots of places online where you can buy links, be careful if you choose this option that the website you are buying the link on has a decent PageRank itself, otherwise it may not be worth what you’re paying for it. There are also opportunities for reciprocal links (you link to me and I’ll link to you), but some search engines are now recognizing reciprocal links and giving them less weight when determining a website’s relevance. The best way to develop lots of good inbound links is still the old fashioned way, develop great content on your website that will make people want to visit your site and link to it.

At this point it’s obvious there’s quite a bit of time and/or money involved in getting a website search engine optimized, researching keywords, building those keywords into the content and the meta tags, developing inbound links, not to mention making sure the code is clean and properly formatted so the search engines will not have any trouble reading it. What can you expect to see for all this? First of all let’s make some assumptions about your website’s conversion rate. A conversion rate is the ratio of the number of visitors who take a desired action (fill out a form, make a purchase, etc.) to the number of visitors who view the page. The average conversion rate for many websites is around 4%, if your website sells widgets and has a conversion rate of 4% you will get 4 new customers for every 100 visitors to your website. I can see that the search term “widget” got 23,867 searches last month (September 2006), If you could get in the top ten results for that term and capture even a tenth of those searchers you would have 2,387 visitors a month which would result in 95 widget sales. Obviously the cost of search engine optimization is minimal compared to its potential to make money.

With these kinds of returns you can see why SEO is something that should not be an afterthought for a website but something that is built in right from the start.

1. Fresh Content - The most obvious reason is that your website will be easier to keep up to date. It just takes a minute to add new content, if it’s easy you’re more likely to do it and your website benefits by staying fresh.
2. Lots of functionality is available to you at little cost. There are hundreds of free modules available that plug into existing content management systems adding complex programming features with very little effort. Meaning that the cost of adding certain features to your site drops significantly. Some of the modules available include:
   • Site search
   • Polls
   • Password secured content
   • Email newsletters
   • Blog
   • Discussion forums
   • Photo galleries
   • Much more.
3. Dynamic categories, not only can you add new pages easily, but new categories can be added and the site navigation will expand gracefully to match.
4. Extensibility, new modules are being written all the time and since modules are developed in common languages like PHP, almost anything can be custom tailored to work within the system.
5. User friendly interface, the technical features of a CMS may tend to intimidate, but fear not, the interface is user friendly and easy to learn. So while the your CMS may have lots of technical features available, your interface for adding new content is user friendly and easy to learn

The content management system used to be practical only for large companies, but with lower costs to implement and the advantages listed above any website can benefit and see a quick return on the investment. Contact Liquid Design for a free quote on a content management system and see how affordable it can be to add these advantages to your website.

iPhone Friendly

exploreREDDING.com has a section of the site specially optimized for viewing on iPhone. Browsing to www.exploreREDDING.com/iphone will allow you to browse the directory of Redding websites quickly and easily from your iPhone, this section has special features to take advantage of iPhone’s capabilities. Tapping on a phone number will place a call to that number and tapping on an address will map that location on the iPhone map application. As far as we can tell this is the first public website optimized for iPhone in the Redding area.

www.safepathproducts.com

If you are planning on paying for search engine optimization services you should get answers to the following 5 questions before choosing a company.

1. Are they eating their own dog food?

   Many businesses talk a lot about what they can do for your website through SEO, but the proof is in the pudding. Unlike web design where the results are more subjective, successful SEO is easily measured. If the company in question is so good at SEO they will apply it to their own website, how does their own website rank? Take some of our competition for example, some companes that offer SEO in my area, let’s see how they rate on Google.

   	Redding SEO	Redding Search Engine Optimization	Redding Web Design
   Company A	*	*	13
   Company B	*	3	*
   Liquid	8	1	1

   * Not found in first 5 pages

   These are just some examples to illustrate my point, you should do your own research. The point is that if a company can’t get their own site on the first page, do you want to trust them to get yours there?

2. Are they obeying the rules?

   There are certain sneaky practices used by some, not-so-respectable SEO firms, that can get your site banned from Google or other search engines. Once your site has been banned it can be very difficult to get reinstated and can take months or even years. Make sure whoever is working on your site is following the rules.

3. Are they hanging out in bad neighborhoods?

   Inbound links, that is links pointing to your site from other sites, are a major component of your website’s search ranking. One way these inbound links are developed is by trading links with other sites. There is one thing you need to be careful of however, if as a result of link trading, your website ends up with links to spam sites or other websites the search engines consider unsavory, it can be penalized. So it is very important that you trade links only with above-board, reputable websites to avoid being penalized.

4. Do they promise the moon?

   Nobody can guarantee you a certain search engine ranking. If somebody makes outrageous claims like promises to get you on the first page of Google this should be a red flag alerting you that this company is not reputable.

5. What century are they living in?

   The web is still rather new, and the way search engines work has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. At one time a few years ago, SEO was all about meta tags. Today meta tags are of very little importance, yet there are still companies out there selling search engine optimization based on meta tags. Make sure the firm you employ is using up to date SEO practices.

You need to be careful when choosing a business to perform your SEO work because the wrong choice can do very little for your website, or worse, even damage it’s reputation to search engines. These five questions are a good place to start when determining what company should be doing search engine optimization for your website.