I’m also in the process of networking and making connections with agencies, design shops, web shops, graphic designers, web designers, copywriters, photographers and social media strategists.

If you’d like to find out a bit more about me and discuss what opportunities we may have to network together drop me a line at kenny@keytheory.

I’m focusing on:

• Web Design
• Digital Strategy
• FaceBook Development

Also if you haven’t liked http://facebook.com/keytheory do it. It’s going to be getting a major update as well.

And THANK YOU, for all those who’ve supported me and help me get to this step in my career.

One of the first things you should do be for setting out to find a job in graphic design or web design is figure out:

• your strengths, weaknesses, interests and talents
• what separates you from everybody else
• what type of work you’re looking for
• what’s available in your area / industry

Defining who you are and where you want to go will help you take the right steps towards getting there. You shouldn’t apply to all the possible jobs around, focus on the ones you’d really want first and let them know why they should hire you.

Where would you like to work?

Identify the design offices, corporations, or individuals with whom you’d like to interview with. Contact some of these shops that you’d really would like to work at and make plans to visit them. See if you can intern or volunteer your services for a tester project.

Do your homework on work on the shop before visiting and perhaps even pitch an idea or solution that would serve one of their clients. If you go above and beyond it WILL get noticed OR you wouldn’t want to work for a place like that anyway.

Network, Socialize and be Vocal

Networking and getting involved in different organizations AIGA / JAMA will definitely increase your contacts. There are groups you could get involved with in your area, a quick search on Meetup.com or Google could point you to groups in your area. Don’t be shy there are a lot of talented people out there that no one knows about.

Create a great portfolio

In your portfolio only show your strongest work and make sure you practice presenting it. Employers don’t want to see everything you ever done and if you aren’t excited about your work they wont be either.

Résumé

You should create a resume that lists out your education, skill sets and experience. You can create a hard copy and feature a digital copy online and on sites like Linked In. If you don’t think you have experience enough for a resume, dig further as you must have gained some experience getting the skills to apply for a graphic design or web design job.

Be real & be professional

Be yourself but also make sure to follow professional protocols when getting an interview or a job offer. Be sure to research any offers you get to make sure what you’ve been offered before accepting.

Be persistent

It may take some time to get your foot in the door but persistence will pay off.

When first getting into SEO I had the wrong idea of what keywords were, I thought you just took words similar to the topic that you were talking about and wanted to rank high for. It’s actually a bit more involved, below are ten tips for coming up with good KeyWords, thanks to Michelle Chance-Sangthong from Red Hawk Strategies for putting together a great SEO MeetUp and sharing some good SEO practices for creating SEO keywords. Here are some pointers from my experience and the SEO Meetup 5/11/10.

Keyword: is word or group of words that help search engines determine what a page’s content is about. Optimizing for particular keywords will help your page get a better rank in search engines when someone searches a site.

Ten tips for creating successful SEO keywords

1. Define your users goals when viewing the site
   What is your user coming to the site for? Are they looking to find out information? Looking for services? Or looking for a product. These things make a large difference when crafting your keyword list and creating your page content. You may need to create several pages to optimize for several different SEO terms. If your selling MP3 players you may want to have different pages for models, repair, brands, replacement parts and optimize them accordingly.
2. Define your goals when users view the site
   What are you trying to get the user to do? Visit the site, click around, purchase an item submit their e-mail. Defining this will not only help you think of what key terms to use but will also help you ensure you put thought into getting the user to take action or complete a conversion. If you get a good rank but don’t get the result you want, then it’s missing the whole point.
3. Define your target audience
   Think about the type of people are going to come to your site and cater to them. You’re better off catering to a majority than trying to be very general. Is your audience male or female?, how old are they?, what’s the income level?, what’s their ethnic background?, thinking about your audience and catering to them will help you create better keywords and better content.
4. Key word tools
   There are many keyword tools online, some are free some cost money. These tools can help you think of keyword ideas and help see what keywords your competitors or using. If you’re new you can probably start off using a free tool, if you get good you may want to upgrade to tool that costs money.
   Google’s SKTool, Keyword Spy, Word Tracker, Spy Foo, Mozilla
5. Organize your efforts
   With all these keywords and efforts it’s bound to get confusing. Using a program such as Excel or another spread sheet program you can organize your keywords and define patterns to use for creating content. Sporadically creating pages with keywords with no overall strategy is like playing a football game with no game plans.
6. Check your competitors
   If your competitors are ranking well you may want to look and see what they are doing. You wouldn’t want to try to copy them but they may give you some ideas for some terms that you can use for your own. A little research goes a long way.
7. Write for users not just search engines
   Don’t cram your keywords into your copy and make it really obnoxious to read. After all the content is for the user. Getting a good page rank is great but if you’ve comprised your message in the process it may defeat the purpose. Write clear descriptive copy paying attention for the keywords your targeting and call it a day.
8. Keep it simple – One term per page
   Don’t try to rank high for ten terms on one page, your home page doesn’t need to carry your site. Instead use landing pages to optimize for new seo search terms. Focusing on one term per page will help search engines clarify what you’re trying to rank for. This will give you more pages and expand your site as well which also helps with SEO.
9. Different words equal different search terms
   If you’re trying to rank for a certain term, ex: “Jacksonville SEO”, don’t just optimize for that term. SEO Jacksonville, Jax SEO, Search Engine Optimization Jacksonville etc… are also key terms to optimize for. Word order, compound words and plurals can all be taken into consideration. Mix it up.
10. Keyword density
    You need to aim for the write keyword density. Wikipedia “Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1 to 3 percent. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam. A quick search on Google can provide many tools for checking this.

If you’re currently not a fan of my facebook page facebook.com/keytheory, drop by and fan me if you’d like to keep up on new info and findings.

The point is the web is constantly spinning and it’s good to take self assessments at times to figure out what is working for you and prioritize. Consistency is crucial online, you don’t want to go stagnant for long or you will dry up. As busy as I am I need to schedule a small block of time to continue with my on-line efforts or hire someone to keep them up if I’m busy with client work. If one puts all their time into working and stops promoting themselves eventually work may run out.

Now some people out there could make time but it may not be in there best interest to use their own time, perhaps they should hire a professional to help with their on-line efforts. A professional could probably do it quicker and get better results. This is why I have my car serviced, I could service my own car but it would take more time and effort than it costs to get it done professionally.

Bottom line, reassess your goals and make efforts to improve your efforts. If you do fall behind, get back on track and put forth efforts to avoid getting off track in the future.

Well I am going to participate in Jacksonville’s JDRF walk 2010 held April 10th.

Key Theory has sponsored group “Endure for the Cure”. Proceeds will go to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

For more information about JDRF walks visit http://walk.jdrf.org/.

Special thanks to the people who sponsored me in no order:

From On Ideas:

• Claire Jackson
• Justin Dennis
• Patricia Dipietro
• Tommy Hobin
• Judy Long
• Chris Claxton
• Deonna Carver
• Judi Herring

And other charitable contributors:

• Hank Champion – PajamaMonsters.com
• Daniel Darty – DanDarty.com
• Susann Marino – ShugarShack.com
• Michelle Chance – CoolShoppingIdeas.com
• Annette Hernandez
• John Lashbrook

I’d also like to thank

• my wife Kathy Harper for her love and support
• my sister Sarah Harper for her efforts in putting the team together
• TshirtBordello for donating shirts to the cause

Enough talkin’ let’s get walkin. Show your support by a Re-tweet or FaceBook Share.

Ok so if you’ve followed along with part one you should be familiar with HTML tags and the basics of an HTML page. If you’re not go back and read part 1, download the code and watch the videos http://keytheory.com/crash-course-in-web-design-part-1-basic-html-tags/.

There are three things I want you to take away from Part 2.

1. Absolute vs Relative Links
2. Linking pages to each other pages, files or sites
3. Bringing in images from other directories, or sites

Absolute vs. Relative Links

Absolute URL

An absolute URL is a full path in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to a exact destination or file. examples:

• http://domain-name.com
• http://domain-name.com/directory/
• http://domain-name.com/directory/sub-directory/file.extention

You’d use absolute links if you were:

• linking to web site
• linking to a file on web site
• theming a CMS that requires absolute links

Relative URL

A relative URL is a path to a destination or file relative to the location that the link is being called from. examples:

• /directory/
• /directory/file.extention
• /images/logo.gif

You’d use a relative link if you were:

• linking to files with in your site
• linking to pages with in your site

Linking pages to each other pages, files or sites

Okay so now you’ve got the difference between absolute and relative you just need to apply it with HTML to get it working in action.

If you recall the tag for links <a href=”destination-here”>Text Here</a>

What this is doing is opening an anchor tag <a></a>, giving it a destination href=, and telling what the anchor text will be. Anchor text is the actual text making up the link, it can be an image as well. For SEO purposes use keywords when creating anchor text.

Examples using HTML Links:

Link to the another site:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/kennywharper”>View my Twitter</a>

Link to a file located in the same directory:
<a href=”myfile.doc”>Check out this document</a>

Link to another site and open another tab/window:
<a href=”http://youtube.com/keytheory/” target=”_blank”>My YouTube Page</a>

Link to another page in a directory (named chocolates) on the same site:
<a href=”chocolates/myfile.htm”>My YouTube Page</a>

“/” will take you to the root directory:
<a href=”/”>Go to index</a>

“../” will take you to a directory higher.
<a href=”../”>Go to directory above</a>

Check out the source code for more examples.

Bringing in images from other directories or sites.

At this point you should get how to link to other files but what about getting images into your document?

Recall the image tag: <img src=”mypicture.jpg” />

Img stands for image, src for source, you can also put other attributes such as an alt tag or size dimensions:
<img src=”mypicture.jpg” alt=”Description of image for seo & vision impaired” border=”0″ />

This technique is used code images into your HTML page, different mark up is used for embedding Flash, Videos or Scripts and will be looked at later. * Note you can also use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to bring images into your web design. Using CSS is best practice when building a site, this will be covered later.

Examples coding images into HTML pages:

Now to get an image into your page from somewhere else you just need to determine the source.

Code in image from another site: (absolute)
<img src=”http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/3066/ss35450qf7.jpg” />

Code in image from the directory named “images” located in the same directory: (relative)
<img src=”images/myimage.jpg” />

Assignment 2:

• Download the source files
• There are two folders in the zip: “cc-2-start” & “cc-2-finish”
• Open the file “index.htm” within “cc-2-start” in a text editor and follow the instructions
• Check your code against the index file located in “cc-2-finish”
• Open up both files in a browser to see how they render

First to tackle, a better break down of the assignments for those who are really in the dark on the web and HTML. So below is a new assignment if you couldn’t follow assignment 1.

Assignment 1.5:

1. Download Source Files
2. Open cc1-5-start.htm in a text editor and format the page as noted in the document
3. Search the internet and find three new tags to use
4. Check your code against cc1-5-finish.htm & Test in a browser

Assignment 1.5 Breakdown:

1) Download Source files
In the last assignment the goal was to create an HTML page named “index.htm”. You can use a editing program like Notepad or TextEdit to create a text document. And if you save the document with a “.htm” or “.html” it will be rendered as HTML in a browser.

For our purposes you can  download Download Source 1.5 Files and use cc1-5-start.htm.

2) Format the page as noted in the document
If you download the zip file you will find cc1-5-start.htm which contains the text content to be formatted. And a file cc1-5-finish.htm that contains the finished document.

You can open the HTML documents in a text editing program such as Notepad or TextEdit.

Note, the start document has pieces of text wrapped in <p> paragraph tags. Look to the cc1-5-finish.htm to see how different things are handled and be sure to understand how they work.

3) Search the internet and find three new tags to use
After reading the first post you should know what HTML tags are. Here we want to use a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo, to find new HTML tags that weren’t mentioned in the first post. For example, I did a quick search and after looking at a few sites I found the “small” tag.

<small>Small Tags makes text small</small> = Small Tags makes text small

4) Test your document by opening it in a browser
Open a browser such as Firefox or Safari and click “File > Open” or Open File (depending on the browser), find the document you want to preview in the browser and click open. This should open the document in the browser and render it as HTML.

Download Source 1.5 Files

Moving forward I aim to make the assignments more thorough with source files to follow. Feel free to provide feedback on this post and let me know if there are any things that still need addressing.

Download Source Files: 1-html-basics.zip

The following YouTube video goes over some of the things mentioned in the blog below in regards to HTML tags.

Understanding the basics of HTML tags.

To get a browser to render HTML properly HTML text needs to be wrapped in HTML tags.

An an HTML document, HTML elements are tags, as well as text, which act as indicators to a web browser as to how the document is to be interpreted. An example of a tag is: <p></p>

which is a tag for a “paragraph”.

For example to make a word in HTML bold, wrap the text in a “strong” tag like below:
<strong>Text here</strong> // – - >>  Text here

For italic words we’d use “em” for embellish.
<em>Text here</em> // – - >> Text here

If you want to use multiple tags use make sure they are opened and then closed in enclosing method such as:
<tag1><tag2>My words</tag2></tag1>
<strong><em>My words</em></strong> // – - >> My words

Common HTML Tags used in web design

HTML tags commonly have and opening tag and a closing tag such as: <strong></strong>

Tags that have open and closing tags.

Bold - <strong><strong>
Italic – <em></em>
Underline – <u></u>
Paragraph – <p></p>
Text Link – <a href=”http://mysite.com”>Text Link Here</a>
Heading 1 – <h1></h1>
Heading 2 – <h2></h2>
Heading 3 – <h3></h3>

Self closing tags.

The following tags are self closing, meaning they do not have an associated closing tag. Instead they close themselves with “/>”.

Image – <img src=”http://mysite.com/images/image.jpg” />
Line Break - <br />
Horizontal Rule – <hr />

Bulleted List: Lists are an important part of web design. They are commonly used for navigation once they are stylized. Notice first the Unordered List tag “ul” is opened, then List items “li” are added.

<ul>
<li>bullet 1</li>
<li>bullet 2</li>
<li>bullet 3</li>
</ul>

Assignment 1:

• Create a text doc and save it as index.htm
• Code out the tags above to create a page of content
• Search the internet and find three new tags to use
• Test your document by opening it in a browser

Download Source Files: 1-html-basics.zip

Other HTML Resources

There are quite a few other HTML tags that can be used in web design. Just a quick search in Google and you can find quite a few resources.

• http://net.tutsplus.com/
• http://websitetips.com/articles/html/basictags/
• http://addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/download/html-cheat-sheet-v1.pdf
• http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/html_cheatsheet/

Browsers for Web Design

I prefer Firefox as a browser, or Chrome, however when building for web you should test your pages in various browsers as the HTML may render differently in different browsers including Safari, Explorer. Different platforms like Mac, PC, Mobile all render things a bit differently.

I suggest try using Firefox and add the following plugins.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 – Web Developer
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 – FireBug

The Basics of an HTML page

This is a supplementary video that shows the basics of an HTML web page.

Well, that’s it for now, next post in the series will focus on file structure and linking files.

Please help me promote my beta-course by tweeting, Facebooking or sharing with friends. Thanks for your support! – kh

Well among all the other things I manage to get myself into, I’m starting a web design crash course that is aimed teach those interested in learning the basics about web design. There are a lot of other web design tutorials out there but most are geared for people who want to be web designers and are very detailed which can be overwhelming to someone who wants to learn how to get up and rolling in a short time. That’s what I aim to do.

What is this crash course in web design?

• A web design course for those  looking to gain the basics of web design in a speedy crash course fashion

What web skills will you learn?

• XHTML & CSS Basics
• SEO Basics
• Social Media Techniques
• Resources

What does it cost?
This course is free.  The only thing I ask is help me promote it.

• Post it on FaceBook
• Tweet it
• E-mail it to a friend

Making it interesting:

To make it interesting I’ve gathered up a group of graphic designers that will help me test out this course and promote this crash course.

I also have arranged for a few other professional web designers to contribute some additional lessons.

Feel free to participate and submit your feedback and suggestions.

To follow the course, become a fan of Key Theory at Facebook.com/keytheory or follow my RSS feed.

I’m in the process of gearing up for a web design course that I’m offering to fellow graphic designers from here in Jacksonville, Florida to out in Los Angeles, Califorinia. They are looking to learn the basics of web design and I am looking to help them out. By using the syntax highlighter I’ll be able to share snippets of code with others. Stay tuned, more to come in the upcoming days.

Test of Syntax Highlighter

/**
* SyntaxHighlighter
*/
function foo()
{
if (counter & lt;= 10)
   return;
  // it works!
}