FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Graphic Design

What is the client's involvement in the design process?

- At Atomic Design we thoroughly discuss the project at hand with our client from the beginning. To help us understand what the client is looking for, we encourage them to bring in any samples, color combinations/swatches, reference websites, and any other ideas they may have. During the design process, the client is asked to submit their approval at certain milestones before the work continues.

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Search Engine Marketing

What is SEO?

- SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the active practice of optimizing a website by improving on-page and off-page factors that influence website's search engine rankings. The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines - Google, Yahoo! and MSN. If your website cannot be found by search engines you will miss out on qualified visitors who are looking for your products or services.

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Why should I optimize my website?

- Proper website optimization can make a huge difference in terms of the number of visitors to your site and can increase revenue or leads generated from the site. Since the visitors find you by typing in search terms, they are already qualified leads who will be more likely to buy than if you had found the leads by cold calling.

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How do I measure search engine optimization success?

- There are many ways to measure search engine optimization success. It is important that each SEO campaign has clear goals and objectives. Once the goals are established the proper tools/statistics should be used to measure the results. Some of the most commonly used methods include: position in search engine rankings, conversion tracking, website traffic and number of page views, actual revenue generated and ROI.

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What online marketing services do you offer?

- Atomic Design is a one-stop shop for all of your online marketing needs, but we don't provide cookie cutter solutions. We understand that each situation is different so we develop customized online marketing plans for every client. To make sure our clients achieve and exceed their goals we provide the following services: search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, online marketing strategy development and more.

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Singular vs. Plural Keywords in Search Results

- Many of our SEO clients often ask us if Google and other SEs differentiate between singular and plural versions of keywords in search engine results. They also wonder if they target a singular keyword would their page show up for plural keyword searches as well.

- To answer the questions, most major search engines (Google, Yahoo!) do consider the plural keyword to be different from the singular keyword. If you want to check a specific search engine type in the singular and plural version of the keyword in a search bar and see if the results produced are the same or different.

- For example, Google uses stemming technology to return search results. Stemming finds alternate forms of a word, such as singular or plural variations. So if someone searches for "trade show model", it will also match "trade show models" and "trade show modeling". This means that if you create a page targeting the word "trade show model", you'd also be targeting the word "trade show models." However, you'll still find that generally it is the exact term someone sought that gets preference. In other words, if you didn't use the word "trade show model" but instead "trade show models", you might come up in the listings but have a different rankings that you have for the singular form.

- If both the singular and the plural form of a phrase get a lot of conversions and targeted traffic to your site, we usually recommend optimizing for both. Take for example our www.TradeShowModels.net website, we've optimized it to show up #1 in Google both for singular "Trade Show Model" and plural "Trade Show Models" phrases because these are the keywords that get the most conversions.

- If you want more information about Google search visit their Web Search Help Center.

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Website Development

Coding for Website Performance

- Some web developers may think coding for performance is a superfluous feature and they may often leave it for the last phase of development (if there is any extra time). When you begin building medium and large websites, the last thing you'd want is an angry phone call from your client because the site is not scaling well. And what would be even worse is to find out that the site is performing horribly, not because you need to upgrade your hosting, but rather because you were lazy in your coding and did not take the necessary steps to ensure the site runs as efficiently as possible and now you have to go back and recode your DAL and god knows what else!

- The truth is, coding for performance should be built into the site from day one. Not only does it help make your clients happy but it also goes hand-in-hand with good coding practices.

- Let's take a simple example using the presentation layer of a website. On the front-end, I always do my utmost to use semantic HTML and CSS for my layouts. This makes my web pages load faster because most of the presentational markup has been stripped out and now the pages are smaller in file size. Once the user downloads the CSS file it's cached so he only needs to download each new web page, which are much smaller in size than if I had a bunch of nested tables or other unnecessary presentation elements. For further proof, checkout the now famous and somewhat comical article "The problem with using tables".

- So I've stated why CSS is good for performance, but how does this coincide with my other point that coding for performance goes hand-in-hand with good coding practices? If you use CSS for layouts not only will your sites load faster, but you will have increased maintainability, better cross-browser compliance, better accessibility, and even have better Search Engine Optimization. This article was not intended to be entirely written about CSS, but I felt it was a great topic to reinforce my point.

- For back-end coding, the steps you need to take to ensure good performance are numerous and most of which also enforce good coding practices. Here at Atomic Design, we generally do all of our back-end work in ASP.NET 2.0. Here is a great article that outlines the steps you need to take to ensure high performance when making ASP.NET 2.0 websites. And here is another informative article on Writing High-Performance Web Applications. from MSDN.

- In addition to the items mentioned in the above articles, there are many other steps that you can take, such as using asynchronous pages, only using https when necessary, using gzip compression, using css compression tools, and much, much more.

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