By now everyone has seen the badges, which are sometimes called seals, all over the web. There’s a really simple way to do this using Macromedia Adobe Fireworks.

For this tutorial, we’re going to replicate the badge seen on Crucial Web Hosting. We’re going to duplicate the curved text by using the Text On A Path feature, and the actual badge is nothing more than a star with a lot of points, or rays, since a typical star has about three to five points.

Alright, let’s start by opening up Fireworks. We’re going to create a new image with a width of 200 pixels, a height of 200 pixels, and a white background. Now we can create our base shape, which is the star. Now we need to select the Star Tool.

And draw a star that’s 130 pixels wide.

Select and hold the Points handle and increase it to 22 points. Now we have a star with 22 points, but they are too long to be a badge.

Select the Radius 2, or inner radius, handle, and drag it until you have a shorter, more triangular point. Now it’s starting to look like a badge!

Time to give it some color though, since it’s quite bland. Select the Fill Category and change the fill type to a Gradient that is Linear.

Our badge will look something like this, depending on what color you had originally chosen for the star.

That’s not the colors we want to use though, so click on background color and change the color on the left to #66AA00 and the color on the right to #CCDD77.

You should now have a badge that looks like this:

That’s not the direction of the badge we’re trying to duplicate though, so let’s move the lighter color to the top, and the darker one to the bottom.

Much better! If you notice on the original badge, there is a slight drop-shadow. With the badge selected, click on Filters → Shadow and Glow → Drop Shadow.

You’ll be given the option to adjust the shadow. For this badge, we’re going to give it a Distance of 2, 65% Opacity, 3 Softness, and 300° Angle.

So far, so good. Of course, now we need to add some text to this badge. We will start off with the text in the center. Select the Text Tool and change the font to Georgia, and the font size to 35. We want the color to be a little bit darker than the darkest color of the gradient on the badge, so we’re going to change the font color to #559900.

I should point out that on the original badge, the dollar sign is much smaller, but for the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to keep it the same size as the rest of the text. With the Text Tool still selected, click in the center of the badge and write $4.99. With the text still selected, hold down Shift and select the badge, so both the badge and the text are selected. We need to center this both horizontally and vertically. Click on Modify → Align → Center Vertical and then repeat that and select Modify → Align → Center Horizontal. Although, it’s much easier and faster to use the shortcuts, so just hold Ctrl + Alt + 1 and then Ctrl + Alt + 2.

Now the text should be perfectly centered in the middle of the badge.

You will notice that on the original badge, it looks like the $4.99 text has an inner bevel. To create this effect, select just the text, and hit Ctrl + C to copy it, and then Ctrl + V to paste it. Don’t touch anything after you do this. Now we need to move the duplicated text up one pixel, so click ↑ on the arrow keys, then hold down Ctrl + ↓. The second step moved the duplicated text layer below the original text. With our duplicated text still selected, we’re going to change the color to #000000, and adjust the Opacity to 50.

Now we need to repeat the above process, but this time change the color to #FFFFFF, and move the layer down by one pixel by clicking ↓ on the arrow keys. You should now have three instances of the $4.99 text, one being the original green, the second black that is moved up by one pixel, and the third being white moved down one pixel.

We’re almost done, and this last part is probably the trickiest, just because you have to play around with the size of the two circles to get the text exactly where you want it. With more practice, you’ll be able to gauge this with more accuracy. Go ahead and select the Ellipse Tool.

And create the inner circle, which is going to hold the text on the top of the badge, and give it a width and height of 80 pixels. Center the circle just like we did with the text.

Now select the Text Tool and change the font to Verdana with a size of 12 and a color of #FFFFFF. Write out HOSTING FROM and position it the best you can just below the the top of the circle, vertically centered. With the text still selected, hold down Shift and select the circle, so both items are highlighted. Use the keyboard shortcuts to align the text to the top of the circle by holding down Ctrl + Alt + 4.

With both the text and circle still selected, click on Text → Attach to Path, or use the shortcut key and hold down Ctrl + Shift + Y. Now the text is attached to the circle, but we need to adjust the offset. With our new attached path selected, change the Text Offset to 15.

You should have something that looks like this:

The text on the bottom follows the same process as the text on the top, with some slight variations. Go ahead and make another circle with a width and height of 95 pixels. Using the same font face, size, and color, write out PER MONTH, but this time center it just above the very bottom of the circle, and as best as you can vertically centered. With both the text and the circle selected, hold down Ctrl + Alt + 6.

Attach the text to the circle just like we did before, but this time, before we set the text offset, we need to reverse the direction of the text by going to Text → Reverse Direction. Now set the text offset to -47.

It won’t look right yet, because we need to increase the Kerning of the font to 22.

And we end up with something like this:

You could save this as is right now, or you can adjust the text offset and kerning a little more, and move the inner and outter circles up or down. I went ahead and made the dollar sign smaller and tweaked some of the offset and kerning, and this is what we end up with:

And that’s it, we’re done! You can download the finished Fireworks PNG file to play around with if you’d like.

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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The following is from a post from Webmaster World. I think it’s a great article and a good read for anyone starting up a website.

I know this system works 100% of the time with Google to attain rankings across a wide range of keywords. This is what I do with clients to build a successful site and it has worked every time. The level of success will depend largely on the subject matter, its potential audience, and its level of competition on the net.

The following will build a successful site in one years time via Google alone. It can be done faster if you are a real go getter, or everyone’s favorite, a self starter.

1. Prep Work & Begin Building Content

Long before the domain name is settled on, start putting together notes to build at least a one hundred page site. That’s just for openers. That’s one
hundred pages of real content, as opposed to fluff pages like copyright information and about us pages.

2. Domain Name

Easily brandable. You want Google.com and not MyKeyword.com. Keyword domains are out—branding and name recognition are in—big time in. The value of keywords in a domain name has never been less to search engines.

Learn the lesson of Goto.com becomes Overture.com and why they did it. It’s one of the most powerful gut check calls I’ve ever seen on the internet. That took serious resolve and nerve to blow away several years of branding.

3. Site Design

The simpler the better. A general rule of thumb to follow is that text content should outweigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in everything from Lynx to leading edge browsers. Keep the HTML clean and
structurally sound, it makes it easier for spiders to eat up your content.

Stay away from heavy things like Flash, Document Object Model (DOM), Java, and JavaScript. Go external with scripting languages if you must have them—there is little reason to have them that I can see—they will rarely help a site and actually stand to hurt it greatly due to the many factors most people don’t appreciate, such as search engines’ distaste for JavaScript being just one of them.

Arrange the site in a logical manner with directory names hitting the top keywords you wish to hit. You can also go the other route and just throw everything in root. This is a rather controversial method, but it has been producing good long-term results across many search engines.

Don’t clutter and don’t spam your site with frivolous links. Keep it clean and professional to the best of your ability. Learn the lesson of Google itself. Simple is retro cool. Simple is what surfers want.

Speed isn’t everything, it’s almost the only thing. Your site should respond almost instantly to a request. If you get into even three to four seconds delay until “something happens” in the browser, you are in trouble.

Those few seconds may vary for someone living in a country other than your native one. The site should respond locally within three to four seconds tops! Any longer than that, and you’ll lose ten percent of your audience for every second. That ten percent could be the difference between success and failure.

4. Page Size

The smaller the better. Keep it under 15k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 12k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 10k if you can. I trust you are getting the idea here. Over 5k and under 10k. Yeah, it sucks, and it’s tough to do, but it works. It works for search engines, and it works for surfers.

5. Content

Build one page of content with 250 to 500 words per day. If you aren’t sure what you need for content, start with the Overture keyword selector tool and find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters.

6. Keyword Density & Position

Simple old fashioned search engine optimization from the ground up. Use the keyword once in the title, once in the description tag, once in a heading, once in the url, once in bold, once in italics, and once high on the page. Try to hit a keyword density of five to twenty percent.

Use good sentences and speel check it. Spell checking is becoming increasingly important as search engines use auto-correction during searches. There is no longer a reason to look like you can’t spell—unless, of course, you really are phonetically challenged.

7. External Links

From every page, link to one or two high-ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text, as this is ultra important.

8. Internal Links

Link to on-topic, quality content across your site. If a page is about food, then make sure it links to the fruits and veggies page.

Specifically with Google, on-topic internal linking is very important for sharing your PageRank value across your site. You do not want one “all-star” page that out performs the rest of your site. You want fifty pages that produce one referral each a day, not one page that produces fifty referrals a day.

If you do find one page that drastically out performs the rest of the site with Google, you need to balance some of that PageRank value by moving it to other pages. It’s the old share the wealth thing.

9. Put It Online

Don’t go with virtual hosting. Stick with a hosting plan that offers a static IP address. Make sure the site is “crawlable” by a spider. All pages should be linked to more than one other page on your site, and not more than two levels deep from the root. Link the topic vertically as much as possible back to the root. A menu that is present on every page should link to your site’s main “topic index” pages.

Don’t put it online before you have a quality site. It’s worse to put a “nothing” site online, than no site at all. You want it flushed out from the start.

Go for a listing in the Open Directory Project (ODP). If you have the budget, then submit to Looksmart and Yahoo. If you don’t have the budget, then try for a freebie on Yahoo—but don’t hold your breath.

10. Submit It

Submit the root to Google, Fast, AltaVista, WiseNut, DirectHit, and HotBot. Now comes the hard part: forget about submissions for the next six months. That’s right. Submit it and forget about it.

11. Logging & Tracking

Get a quality tracker that can do justice to inbound referrals based on log files. Don’t use a lame graphic counter, you need the real deal here. If your host doesn’t support referrers, then back up and get a new host. You can’t run a modern site without full referrals available all day, every day, and in real time.

12. Spiderlings

Watch for spiders from search engines. Make sure those that are crawling the full site can do so easily. If not, double check your linking system to make sure the spiders find their way through the site. Don’t fret if it takes two spiderlings to get your whole site done by Google or Fast. Other search engines are pot luck and it is doubtful that you will be added at all, if not within six months.

13. Topic Directories

Almost every keyword sector has an authority hub on its topic. Go submit within the guidelines.

14. Links

Look around your keyword sector in Google’s version of the Open Directory Project (ODP). This is best done after getting an ODP listing. Find sites that have a links page or that freely exchange links. Simply request a swap. Put a page of relevant content and links up for yourself as a collection spot.

Don’t freak out if you can’t get people to swap links. Just move on. Try to swap links with one fresh site a day. A simple personal email is enough. Stay low key about it and don’t worry if a site won’t link with you. Eventually they will.

15. Content

One page of quality content per day. Timely, topical articles are always the best. Try to stay away from to much personal, blogging type stuff, and look more for article topics that a general audience will like. Hone your writing skills and read up on the right style of “web speak” that tends to work with the fast and furious web crowd.

Lots of text breaks. Short sentences—lots of dashes—something that reads quickly.

Most web users don’t actually read, they scan. This is why it is so important to keep low key pages today. People see a huge overblown page, and a portion of them will hit the back button before even trying to decipher it. They’ve got better things to do than waste 15 seconds trying to understand your whiz bang flash menu system. Just because some big support site can run flashed out motorhead pages, that is no indication that you can. You don’t have to do what they do.

Use headers and bold text liberally on your pages as logical separators. I call them scanner stoppers, where the eye will logically come to rest on the page.

16. Gimmicks

Stay far away from “fads of the day” or anything that appears spammy, unethical, or tricky. Plant yourself firmly on the high ground in the middle of the road.

17. Link Backs

When you receive requests for links, check the site out before linking back with them. Check them through Google and their PageRank value. Look for directory listings. Don’t link back to junk just because they asked. Make sure it is a site similar to yours and on topic.

18. Rounding Out The Offerings

Use options such as email a friend, forums, and mailing lists to round out your site’s offerings. Hit the top forums in your market and read, read, read until your eyes hurt because you read so much. Stay away from “affiliate fads” that insert content on to your site.

19. Beware Of Flyer & Brochure Syndrome

If you have an e-commerce site or online version of bricks and mortar, be careful not to turn your site into a brochure. These don’t work at all. Think about what people want. They aren’t coming to your site to view “your content,” they are coming to your site looking for “their content.” Talk as little about your products and yourself as possible in articles.

20. Build One Page Of Content Per Day

Head back to the Overture keyword selector tool to get ideas for fresh pages.

21. Study Those Logs

After 30-60 days you will start to see a few referrals from places you’ve been listed. Look for the keywords people are using. See any bizarre combinations? Why are people using those to find your site? If there is something you have over looked, then build a page around that topic. Retro engineer your site to feed the search engine what it wants.

If your site is about “oranges,” but your referrals are all about “orange citrus fruit,” then you can get busy building articles around “citrus” and “fruit” instead of the generic “oranges.”

The search engines will tell you exactly what they want to be fed—listen closely, there is gold in referral logs, it’s just a matter of panning for it.

22. Timely Topics

Nothing breeds success like success. Stay abreast of developments in your keyword sector. If big site is coming out with a new product at the end of the year, then build a page and have it ready in October so that search engines get it by December, e.g. go look at all the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii sites in Google right now. Those are sites that were on the ball last summer.

23. Friends & Family

Networking is critical to the success of a site. This is where all that time you spend in forums will pay off. Here’s the Catch-22 about forums: lurking is almost useless. The value of a forum is in the interaction with your fellow colleagues and cohorts. You learn long-term by the interaction—not by just reading.

Networking will pay off in link backs, tips, email exchanges, and it will put you “in the loop” of your keyword sector.

24. Be Social

Social bookmarking and networking sites can be used to your advantage if the content is right. Places like Digg, Delicious, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and so on, can really expose your site to those that truly are interested. Expect some great backlinks and traffic if you use this to your advantage.

25. Notes, Notes, Notes

If you build one page per day, you will find that a brainstorm like inspiration will hit you in the head at some magic point. Whether it is in the shower (dry off first), driving down the road (please pull over), or just parked at your desk, write it down! Ten minutes later and you will have forgotten all about that great idea you just had. Write it down, and get detailed about what you are thinking. When the inspirational juices are no longer flowing, come back to those content ideas. It sounds simple, but it’s a life saver when the ideas stop coming.

26. Submission Check At Six Months

Walk back through your submissions and see if you are listed in all the search engines you submitted to after six months. If not, then resubmit and forget it again. Try those freebie directories again too.

27. Build One Page Of Quality Content Per Day

Starting to see a theme here? Google loves content. Lots of quality content. Broad based over a wide range of keywords. At the end of a years time, you should have around four hundred pages of content. That will get you good placement under a wide range of keywords, generate
reciprocal links, and overall position your site to stand on its own two feet.

Do those twenty-seven things, and I guarantee you that in ones years time you will call your site a success. It will be drawing between 500 and 2000 referrals a day from search engines.

If you build a good site with an average of four to five pages per user, you should be in the ten to fifteen thousand page views per day range in one years time. What you do with that traffic is up to you, but that is more than enough to “do something” with.

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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How many times did you scratch your head over the result your friends are getting on Google search? You did your homework diligently to get your new website into the world largest search engine but 6 month had passed and nothing happened. And you wanted to give up at this instant. But the back of your head is telling you there got to be an easier way to do this.

Well, you are right. I am just like you trying method after method with disappointment. I am writing this article to share with you or short cut your pain to getting top 10 positions in Google. Yes, if your website is not even rank in google you can never get traffic from natural search and ouch it hurts your motivation as an internet marketers or an online business owner. Are you ready?

My method of getting my websites ranked in google fast is simply following the steps I show you here. No tweaking is need unless you wanted lousy result.

Step 1: Knowing. If you are doing site on Adsense or promoting affiliate products, please do your homework. Know what products you are actually promoting. Did you personally use it? What are the key benefits and features?

Step 2: Picking. Once you list down your product or website benefits, identify key phase people which are popular. How? Go to google and do a search with quotes, “”, around your key phase. Those key phases which have resulted pages between 1000 to 5000, pick those. You are actually mining golden key phase. This is an important step.

Step 3: Writing. How many times you are being reminded to market your website via article marketing? Yes, if you wanted to start making some decent money online, you got to write about your website or products you are promoting. Else who will know?

Step 4: Submitting. You got articles written in Step 3 and the next natural step to do is to submit it to article directory. Which article directory to submit to? Aren’t the answer staring at you. For completeness submit to ezinearticles and goarticles. There is simply no need to submit your articles all over the Internet. Why? Google loves big article directory site.

Step 5: Waiting. If you have did step 1 to step 4 correctly, you should be waiting for your articles to be reviewed and approved. Once approved by article directories, your articles should be appearing on Google page 1, which is the top 10 position, in a few days.

You might be thinking should article be search engine optimised. Well, the fact you just did optimised your article title in step 2. I guess by now you have gotten the extra advantage from the usual article writer in getting your article listed and driving natural search visitors to your website.

Adwin Ang is a ezine author, affiliate marketer and adsense publisher. He has been actively helping newbie Internet marketing both online and offline to make their first buck. Did you find those tips on getting top 10 positions useful? If you are interested to learn about how your site can be listed in top 10 Google using laser targeted keywords, visit http://affiliateslittleguy.com/GetTraffic.html

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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First let us start off by apologizing to our readers for the short abscense of blog.designcreatology.com. The database at which our information was stored at suddenly decided not to exist any longer. Thank you very much to the worst hosting company in the world host department. We do not and I repeat DO NOT recommend this company to anyone at all. If you are being hosted by this company due yourself a favor and drop them.

We will begin to rebuild our entire blog, so please bear with us as the “construction” is taking place. With all of that said Welcome Back!

This is an article I came across justa few days back about a very agressive way to get traffic flocking to your site by way of “Agressive Link Building”. Extremley important information, check it out…

Agressive to say the Least

The best way to do this is by example. I’ve picked one lucky website – EvoGear.com (based here in Seattle) and one of their primary keyword phrases “snowboard equipment” (which they should really put in their title tag) to illustrate how you should perform searches that will result in high quality link acquisition targets.

A Few Basic Rules:

1. You should perform all of these searches at each of the major engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask – yes, even Ask, as they often link to some very valuable and achievable link sources). I’m illustrating using Google for simplicity and brevity.
2. At Google and others, it often helps to show 100 results per page and have the maximum “grouping” of results from the same site. That way, you can find all of the most relevant pages on a particular domain with ease.
3. This process is only half the battle – the other half is identifying the sites inside the SERPs that would make good targets; I’ll try to cover that next week.

The Obvious
Basically, we’re seeking every possible permutation of the term/phrase – links from any of the top ranking sites (#1-100, depending on competitiveness) will provide high value. As you go down the list, you can also use these modified terms/phrases to get extra results from the other sources.

• snowboard equipment
• “snowboard equipment”
• snow board equipment
• “snow board equipment”
• snowboard
• “snow board”
• snowboards
• “snow boards”

Advanced Operators
Then use the engines’ advanced query parameters with the basic phrase. As we refine in this manner, the number of pages that still provide value shrinks – I’d probably look at the top 30-50 results maximum.

• allintitle:snowboard equipment
• allinanchor:snowboard equipment
• allinurl:snowboard equipment
• allintext:snowboard equipment

Alternative Search Sources
The main indices are great ways to define value, but adding in some alternate sources for link searches can help to diversify. The engines might not always consider these sources as important (which is why I’d stick to only the highest profile sites/pages in these results), but they can often be great sources for traffic.

• Google News – snowboard equipment
• Google News Archive – snowboard equipment
• Yahoo! News – snowboard equipment
• Technorati – snowboard equipment (sort by authority, too)
• Del.icio.us – snowboard equipment + del.icio.us/tag/snowboard and del.icio.us/tag/snowboarding, too
• Ask.com Blog Search – snowboard equipment
• Google Blog Search – snowboard equipment
• Wikipedia Search – snowboard equipment
• DMOZ Search – snowboard equipment (check the categories, the sites and the sites listed in the relevant categories)

Directory Search Terms
Appending the word “directory” and other similar terms can help to dig up valuable hubs where you can submit your site for inclusion. Note that many of these use advanced operators and will generally have a short list (top 10-25) of valuable targets.

• snowboard equipment directory
• intitle:directory “snowboard equipment”
• inurl:directory “snowboard equipment”
• snowboard directory
• snowboard * directory
• directory * snowboard
• snowboard catalog (this term ranges in value and may not have much here)
• snowboard equipment catalog
• “list of snowboarding sites”
• “list * snowboard”
• “list * snowboard * sites”
• snowboard websites
• snowboard sites
• “snowboard sites”
• “snowboard websites”
• “recommended links” snowboard equipment
• “recommended sites” snowboard equipment
• “favorite links” snowboard equipment
• “favorite sites” snowboard equipment

Blog & Forum Searches
The goal here is to find places you can participate. You don’t want to spam, but a quick link drop to highly relevant content once you’re already an accepted member is perfectly reasonable. Having a presence in the UGC sphere also means you can quickly step in and manage reputation, save face or recognize trends to leverage.

• snowboard forum
• snowboarding forum
• “snowboarding forum”
• intitle:forum snowboarding
• inurl:forum snowboarding
• snowboarding blog
• intitle:blog snowboarding
• inurl:blog snowboarding
• “add comment” snowboarding
• “post comment” snowboarding
• snowboarding members
• snowboarding join
• snowboarding tag
• intitle:tag snowboarding
• intitle:post snowboarding
• snowboarding group
• intitle:group snowboarding

Submit-Type Searches

These are often the most valuable searches (thus I’ve saved them for last). The idea is to search for sites/pages that are accepting submissions or additions. I tend to run pretty far down these SERPs just because it can be so easy to obtain the links.

• snowboard equipment “add url”
• snowboard equipment “add site”
• snowboard equipment “add website”
• snowboard equipment “add your site”
• snowboard equipment “add a url”
• snowboard equipment “add * url”
• snowboard equipment “add * site”
• snowboard equipment “add * website”
• snowboard equipment “submit url”
• snowboard equipment “submit site”
• snowboard equipment “submit website”
• snowboard equipment “submit your site”
• snowboard equipment “submit a url”
• snowboard equipment “submit * url”
• snowboard equipment “submit * site”
• snowboard equipment “submit * website”
• snowboard equipment “suggest url”
• snowboard equipment “suggest site”
• snowboard equipment “suggest website”
• snowboard equipment “suggest your site”
• snowboard equipment “suggest a url”
• snowboard equipment “suggest * url”
• snowboard equipment “suggest * site”
• snowboard equipment “suggest * website”

And now, I hope to get your secrets – if you’ve got more to add, please don’t be shy. You can use my example or create your own.

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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