Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

You only have seconds to grab the attention of scanners browsing your blog. Use keywords and catchy titles to draw readers in. Blog post titles can be bolded for emphasis and white space should be used to buffer the content.

I’d say 2 related things: one is employing those more empirical patterns— Points, and Levels, ranked and tracked on Leaderboards— in situations where they’re not appropriate. I feel like I’m belaboring the point, but… if your community values fun, and easy-going interactions with each other and helpfulness? Then don’t destroy that fantastic dynamic by comparing members, one to another. Don’t elevate certain members’ status at the expense of everyone else in the community—’cause resentment, factions and gaming are soon to follow.

And related to this is the mistake of rewarding the wrong types of behavior. Specifically, there’s a tendency to want to reward activity (how many times have I contributed, or how frequently) instead of the quality of those contributions. (Do people like this video? Have they watched it? Responded? Linked to it, or embedded it on their blog? Voted for it, or assigned a rating?) Of course, both are important: you want people who are actively engaged and prolific contributors: but you want those contributions to be quality ones: thoughtfully prepared, formatted along community norms, and above all useful or interesting to the community.

A relevant, and recent, example I could cite is Plurk. Now, I absolutely don’t mean to hate on Plurk. It looks like a fine product (it’s kind of a Twitter-like microblogging platform.) But they’re tracking and displaying some very “official-looking” Karma metrics, and even feature a Leaderboard of Interesting Plurkers. My response to this is two-fold: first is… “why”? What community goals does it further? My guess would be that it’s a desire to promote active, high-use Plurkers to the community, that others might find them and opt to follow them as well.

But the prominent Karma score, and a surface appraisal of how it’s generated, might lead one to believe that Plurk is a competition. And, specifically, a competition won by the amount of stuff you do! (Number of Plurks, number of friends, etc.) Most people can see how badly this could end: if someone really wants to make it onto that leaderboard? They’ll probably try mass-friending and spam-blasts first. (Even if Plurk’s system is smart enough to counter this, the overall effect is still negative.) There is a nod to quality—’Quality Plurking’, however that’s defined—but the emphasis appears to be on Activity. And I’d posit that a karma system for an app like this is somewhat extraneous. It kinda smacks of “wouldn’t it be cool if we…”

I also feel compelled to point out that the particular label they use—’Interesting’—is a loaded one: while very complimentary to those who receive it, it’s can also feel derogatory to those who’re left out. There’s a reason why Flickr has only ever applied the descriptor of interestingness to photos, and not the people that take them—and that reason is that the community folks over there have a wonderful awareness of community spirit, and are sensitive to the effects that labels can have.

Link building is a targeted way of building a web sites link popularity. You may ask why is link popularity important and why does my site need it? Good Question. And the answer is because search engines like Google put a lot of emphasis on inbound links that come into a web site. The anchor text that is used to point to that inbound web page should also match the optimized phrase for the page, but that’s a different topic. Link building will over time get you to place better with the major search engines.

You can start your link building efforts by doing a search for your desired keyword or keyphrase on Google for example and contact some of the top results to see if they would be interested in exchanging links with your site. Have the code that you would like them to use to point to your web site ready to give to them when you contact them. Make sure that you have an area of your web site that is devoted to posting your relevant link exchanges. That’s right you want to exchange links with sites that have relevancy to what they will be pointing to.

Building inbound links to your web site is very powerful and if done correctly it will:

Increase web traffic to your site

Save you advertising money and time

Make you more of an authority on your subject matter

Increase your visibility in the search engines