The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius has made it to its first showcase gallery over the web. After the last HTML 5 redesign of the Web Design Bureau, the WordPress theme running this blog has been submitted to the HTML5Gallery, the premier HTML 5 showcase and it has been listed. There’s still a lot to be done to improve the Bureau but the Mauritian reference site is making its place in the sun.

You can view the entry here and vote for it. Make sure you give it the stars you think it deserves. Just to brag a bit about it, even Jeffrey Zeldman himself commended the HTML 5 Gallery.

Some months ago I was promoting this entry on the major presence of typography in web design: 95% of web design is typography. It is true and proven that typography is what builds layout. The major problem with typography is that the average visitor is used to the stock fonts found on the Windows. Now the average Web 2.0 amateur web designer will try to use those stock fonts as default on their website. This will eventually end up bringing down the user experience.

The best solution for the professional web designer is to be aware of the limitations of the web in terms of use of fonts and optimise one’s knowledge of typography. Mark Boulton states in his book Five Simple Steps to Web Design that his education in typography and his unique grasp of layouting (based on typography) is what his clients searched for when they came to him. Conclusion, having the best knowledge in typography will get boost your web designing.

How can you do that? By following typography sites worldwide or by getting into a typography course which seems to be a rare thing (believe me, I’ve been trying to find a crash course near me for the past 3 years). The web has a lot to offer in this field. Here are the two fresh sites I’ve been following recently.

The first one, just because it allows me to follow the other sites without having to actually skim through all their RSS feeds. Type Daily. A great type oriented news aggregator.

The second one is really font oriented. It will help you reach new heights in terms of typography mastering and design skills in general. This one is a real must. FontShop Education.

So, here is a humoristic approach to the trends making the day on the web. You have surely understood that we are talking about the lists trend. It seems like every site and especially blogs has a type of list in its branch. A list of shops, a list of tools, a list of inspirational sites. Most of the time the list is driven with mindblowing adjectives boasting about the best experience you’ll ever have reading these lists. You can have a look at my archives, these usually make their way in the miniblogging section of this site.

The CSS guy has made a nice article on this trend. Just reading the title will make you at least smile. For the rest, catch it up here:

59+ Amazing (and jaw-dropping) web design-related lists with titles that will rip your face off, blow your mama’s mind, and make you cry under the crushing pain of their inspiration

It seems that people are not really active over the giveaways so I think that we’ll open the boundaries. The contest goes public and worldwide now. The rules stay the same but the contest will remain open for some more time. Closing date is now the 17th of September. Head over to this post to get in the contest : Win Rs 6000 (Mauritian), $200, worth of design stuff by Designious.

If you were one of our lucky participants, you might use your winner packs to try this superb tutorial on how to create a richly ornate typographic illustration. What about that? Dive in the contest then.

I received a private message concerning the Web Design Bureau asking me one simple, yet to the point, question. The question in itself could have a lot of meanings but this is how things work. To summarize it, the question stated that the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius gives out a lot of information apart from web design. The “lot of information” meant, as this post’s title has already hinted: SEO, search engine optimisation. So here’s the long and the short of it.

Personal experience and interest.

Even if my core skills are in web designing, CSS integration and development, my first job wasn’t anywhere in these fields. The only opportunity a young unexperienced content savvy person could find in a city known as the “French Silicon Valley” was in the content management field. I was enrolled in a web design company having core working groups in special fields: some 20 web developers; 15 system, network and server administrators; and 15 search engine optimisers. As good as it gets, this company could build, host and make a site rank really high in all terms.

So I learned SEO the “real” way… Actually, I learned SEO on the field. It wasn’t taught in schools and I needed people to open the doors of the SEO world to me. Being rather open minded I started seeing SEO from a developer’s point of view while doing the job. This helped me understand the use of SEO and its conflicts with development. The worse thing is that SEO is practically never taken into consideration when a project is launched and this was not the case in that company. This is where I learned what benefits an SEO compliant project could have.

Thinking out of the box.

Any web project can end up being a wonderful feat, a killer app, or just a beautiful site. There is, nevertheless, one important basic and selfish notion to take into consideration. 90% of websites you will come to build has a final objective of being beneficial. Beneficial might be in terms of profits, of number of views, of number of contacts or just in terms of comments. In any case, a website is here to get something out. The only way to reach this objective is to get the SEO in there.

SEO consulting does not necessarily mean messing up with the web developer’s code. For example, the main use of the H1 tag on a site is to put the site logo. A SEO consultant might explain that if the H1 tag reflects the page title, the keywords included will be optimised, the way of writing the code will change. It will not be a hindering element but a bettering one. The web developer will be writing the same code, in the same way but this code will in itself add 50% optimisation to the site without having to do anything.

Selling it.

Finally, knowing and doing SEO directly in the web coding might be a winning bet on calls. Proving to your client that when you’re building his/her site, the latter is already armed to face its competitors even before it is launched is a winning bet. An SEO learned web designer means that the code will already be optimised and the SEO will only have to concentrate on the content. In the end, this turns out to be a great saving in time and money and the company is working on a win-win project.

EDIT (17th of August 2009): Due to the lack of contestants, this contest is now open to everybody. We are therefore giving away $200 worth of design stuff by Designious. The rules remain the same and closing date is the 17th of September 2009.

Mauritians rejoice, here is a great giveaway contest for Mauritius only People rejoice. If you are into design and web design, this will be one of the greatest giveaways to have ever been done in this field. The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius is happy to announce that the great folks at Designious are offering 10 vector packs and 10 photoshop brushes packs to you Mauritians. Each pack has multiple elements in it and cost $100 (Rs 320) each. There will be 10 winners to this giveaway, each will win a vector pack and a photoshop brushes pack. How’s that for you? Designious, drop dead designs, will let you chose your prize among the large number of packs available in their online shop.

Above are some samples of Designious packs. You can see more of them on their website.

So, are you feeling lucky ? Here’s how the contest will be going on.

1. Leave a comment to this post stating your place of residence and tell us about “how the Internet changes your life”.
2. The contest is open till the 17th of September 2009. So take your time.
3. The winners will be drawn randomly and be informed by email, so be sure you are using a valid email address.
4. Only Mauritians (and citizens as well as those of Rodrigues) are allowed to participate.
5. Retweet this contest as much as you can and talk about it on Facebook.
6. You can follow Designious on Twitter also.
7. You can follow me on twitter as well.

OK people, give these guys a big cheers and get in the ring.

Web designers aiming for high end contacts and freelance work need something really important: visibility. Not any kind of visibility but some core HTML/CSS/Design reviews of their work to be able to get the possible clients to come to their sites. This is usually done through showcase websites. These websites are showrooms where the best designs and code are shown. They are very popular all over the Internet and not only do they drive traffic and prospects to the web designer’s site but they also help in SEO. These sites are usually well quoted in Google’s index and have much authority in terms of content and PR. They, thus shed some link juice to the designer.

How to do this?

Now, submitting your work to these sites is quite a hefty load of work but it does bring back something. My former portfolio got into a dozen plus showcases but I did have to manually submit the whole thing to more that 30 of them. I would have appreciated the existence of this new tool at the time: MeeCSS. So what does this do? MeeCSS automatically submits your site/portfolio to more than a hundred showcase galleries. It also gives you info on each gallery’s page rank to be sure you get the best link juice to your site.

What type of site?

Based on my personal experience, the sites that usually get accepted in such galleries are more visual ones than really well coded ones. On some of them, the code doesn’t matter while on others, the code quality is a major element. Don’t forget that viewers can also vote for your site, giving you authority or taking it away, and some of them are really demanding in terms of quality work. Anyway, visually astounding work usually gets the best result. You also have niche sites that might be really interesting such as One Page Love or We Love WordPress. These might just give you the visibility needed if you’re specialising in niche site development.

So why not jump in and give your work a boost in terms of prospects and traffic?

So, here we are. As I was saying only 10 days after the launch of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing was catching up on Yahoo!’s market. This has been the final blow to the 18 months of love-hate affair between these two companies. Yahoo! yields and has accepted the partnership with Microsoft. Why is that so? One answer might be “Google Wave” the new communication tool by Google. The other might be the Android OS. In any case, Google is showing that it is aiming quite far and has the strong intention to succeed. This therefore incited this partnership but what does it hold.

Death Note.

Yahoo! is known to have a long trail of search engine deaths behind it. AltaVista, FastSearch, Inktomi, Alltheweb are all well known dead search engines acquired by Yahoo! Let’s not forget that by the end of the 90s, AltaVista was even more popular than Google and in 1996 I was somewhat jealous that other youngsters were “Yahooligans” and not me. The terms of this partnership are quite clear, signing this seals the fate of the Yahoo! Search Engine. As from now on, all Yahoo! sites will be using Bing. This thrusts Microsoft to 30+ of the search market share!

Money, Money.

However, Microsoft’s Adcenter will merge with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! ads will be published on all Bing (and other Microsoft?) sites. The question that is still ringing in my head is : “How much will Yahoo! make out of this?”. According to Carol Bartz, Yahoo! will actually be saving more than $200 million by not having to maintain the Yahoo! Engine. This is great news for them… and bad news for developers at the same time. It seems that, according to the terms, Yahoo! will still remain a competitor to Bing in terms of traditional banner marketing.

SEO tools.

What about the Yahoo! Explorer, it was a great tool for SEOs especially in terms of backlink analysis and site indexation. Will it be shut down? And what about the Yahoo! Directory? One of the world’s oldest and human based directory might also go down the drain with all this.

Conclusion

This seems to be the opening of a new era in the search market. New trends in web design are here, new search engines, new standards, new OSes, new browsers… This is a turning point in the history of the Web and I think that we’re still in for more surprises.