Web Design and Social Media Marketing Services by Agency Couture

Hi, my name is Austin and I’m Agency Couture’s web design intern. It is my responsibility to cover what I have learned on a weekly basis as part of this blog series, so expect a new post either the close of the week or the beginning of the following week from here out. I’ll do my best to keep you posted with my progress throughout the next six months!

In my first week I’ve learned how to compose a professional blog, which is up on Agency Couture’s Staff page, take a look here. It’s a work in progress but a few tips that I’ve picked up along the way:

• Have someone read over your posts before going live.
• Make sure EVERY post has an interesting header.
• WordPress will add in the date and name of the blogger, so no need to add that into the title.
• The title of your post is VERY important to SEO so make sure it’s interesting, sums up your whole post, and has a keyword or two.
• Every post should have an image and a thumbnail. Ours are 72px X 72 pixels.
• Spell checking is important.
• Try to talk either in first person or third person but not both.
• Choose a category and post tag for each of your posts. This makes it easier for people to search for your posts.
• Avoid using “…” a bunch. It is distracting.
• Make sure any links that are OFF your site open in a new window.
• Add title tags to all links.
• Add alt tags to all images.
• Make sure all images have borders set at 0 with 20px padding so they are not touching text.

I’ve also been studying the art of programming and design techniques. Desarae, Agency Couture’s CEO, has offered me a few books and tips on design tools. I’m very excited to get my own portfolio up and running in the coming months. Over the weekend she gave me a few tutorials on Photoshop Splicing. It is a rather easy process, but initially can seem overwhelming. The objective behind splicing is to separate images from one main photo shop file. Essentially a developer will use these splices to create hyper linked buttons. You can assign URLs in Photoshop and Dreamweaver, whichever is your usability preference.

You can find me, Austin Deboer, on Twitter @adeboer7