Affordable blog Design fresh from Bristol, UK

We’ve just finished off the redesign of Business Pundit for Seawaves Technology. With a simple brief of “don’t want it to look like a blog” and “big bold headers” Chris had plenty of creative freedom and responded with this fantastic magazine-esque design which Indranil then coded in record breaking time.

This was a fun project to manage and I think the whole team learnt a lot in the process. We’re looking forward to some more projects like this

The guys over at Performancing have just released Simplicity, a premium quality Wordpress theme designed and built by us.

It’s clean and easy-to-use layout harnesses effective typography, subtle stylisations and balanced proportions to make for a beautiful Wordpress theme. Features include native Tagging, Gravatar and Widget support.

The Performancing team think the theme “would do very well as a financial blog as well as tech and web 2.0. It would also work well for any environmental or “green” themed blog”. We agree!

Check out Simplicity over at Performancing now »

My friends, it gives me great pleasure to announce SpringLoaded, the 449’s very first free theme! With support for Widgets, Gravatars and a handful of other nifty plugins, SpringLoaded is one sexy little number designed and built by the 449!

Chris (Rowe, visually gifted) worked his magic on the design and Indranil brought code excellence to the table once more (despite a very challenging layout) to ensure a fantastic and highly functional theme.

Check out the full demo or download it and give your blog a spring kick!

We’ve got many more themes in the pipeline, including some awesome premium ones which will be both amazingly good and highly affordable, so stay tuned!

Hopefully everyone had a great Christmas and New Year break, everyone on the 449 team certainly did And wow, what a long break it was! But now we’re back to the grindstone and what better way to kick off the new year than with some updates to the portfolio?

First of all we’ve got the Sensational Color blog network, currently consisting of , and . New blogs are being added at a rapid pace, giving you everything you need to know about colour in the home, the workplace and anywhere else you can think of! Working with Kate Smith, a leading colour expert, was a fantastic experience and we wish her a very prosperous new year!

Secondly, we’ve got Nate Ritter. Nate’s tagline for his blog is “community, entrepreneurship and business strategy”, he definitely knows his stuff and is a top bloke to work with! Since the redesign he’s written a fantastic post on using Twitter (via several other social platforms) to help communities in crisis, it’s a fantastic read (especially for geeks) and is reflective of the sort of content you can expect from his blog. All the best for 2008 to Nate too!

There’s heaps more work in the pipelines, aswell as some exciting new posts on the blog and a few tweaks to the 449 site. We’re hoping to release a few self-initiated projects in the first half of 2008 aswell, so stay tuned!

This is the second part of my series of articles examining how to practically and ethically improve the search engine rankings of your blog. In this installment, I’m going to look at how links of an external and internal nature can help your blog climb the dizzy heights of .

Everybody knows that back links to your sites, from other sites, are the major factor in determining a sites page rank. Google’s philosophy is that the more links you have coming from other sites the more reliable yours is. The problems with this method are innumerable, but the one that applies most in our case is the question of how new sites accumulate back links and make the most of them.

There are so many ways to establish link backs that I could write for months on the topic, but there are certain methods which really stand out in the context of blogging, the foremost being Social Bookmarking. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have long been the staple of traffic for a mass of techy blogs, but recently they’ve been diversifying their models to include topics which suit a much broader audience.

Submitting new posts to these sort of sites should be the first thing you do once hitting publish. They provide you with ample room to include a keyword rich title and description which Googlebot can harvest and dine out on and also provide a healthy traffic boost themselves. The key thing about this method is that it pivots on the strength of the community, if you submit an article to Digg and it makes it onto the front page, it’s much more likely to be indexed and assigned a higher Pagerank than if it lingers in the ass of nowhere without getting noticed, so make sure you’re promoting your best content to ensure it’s liked. It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of social bookmarking sites don’t appreciate you submitting your own content, so try to get your friends, or better still readers, to do it for you

Another method often used that hangs on the idea of reaching communities is commenting on blogs. This has been a favourite method for ages, blog spam is rife these days, but guess what… It’s absolutely pointless and just plain annoying. The majority of blogs now use nofollow links, so while you may get a bit of traffic from people reading your comment, it will have no SEO benefit as Google has been instructed to ignore the link. I still recommend leaving genuine comments on blogs though as it’s a great way to establish a bridge between your blog and someone else’s, leveraging their blog to extend the audience of your own.

Something else I’d advise against is paying for text links. Google has recently by dropping their PageRank and have publicly announced a vendetta against PayPerPost. Rather than buying blog posts, why not send out press releases when you do something notable, you can load the press releases up with relevant keywords and back links, making it prime for Google to crawl through and index and get in front of the eyes of hundreds of journalists and bloggers looking for something to write about. Mashable has a fantastic round up of Press Release tools, free and paid, that allow you to distribute your own Press Releases to numerous online resources.

When you’re including links to your website, it’s good to include a description of the site, rather than the name, inside the link, for example: Affordable blog design by the449. This helps Google establish what the website is about and can rank you higher for the terms your website is most commonly linked with.

When you’re writing blog posts, try and link to as many other blog posts as you can as you can establish trackbacks this way. While these are often nofollow links, just like comments, it gives you a chance to get your websites name out there and a few keywords indexed by Google. If you’re adding something notable to the conversation, you may also receive a link from the author of the post in later follow up posts. If you’re selling a service, the majority of your potential clients/customers are going to Google your name, so if the leading results are good reviews and intelligent comments it’s going to help them make that leap from potential lead to signed client.

If you don’t get a mention as the result of a trackback, sending a short email to the author to let him know what your doing may persuade him to link you up, likewise emailing blogs in your niche may get you a few linkbacks and at the very least help you establish a few useful connections.

Whenever possible, try to link to your own blog posts aswell. Googlebot uses links to discover content, so by linking to posts in your archive you’re helping Google find something it may have previously missed (especially if you have a fast paced blog). Linking around your website also helps Google level out the page rank of your internal pages, meaning you can get your individual articles better rankings and achieve much higher traffic from the long tail.

The bottom line is that you need to be proactive in obtaining back links and the ultimate way to ensure success is to network and make friends. As I’ve told numerous potential clients in the past, you’re likely not going to find yourself at the top of the Google in less than 6 months, unless you’re doing something highly unethical (in the eyes of Google) in which case you’ll probably be banned from Google within 6 months