Ecommerce is a tough business. There are alot of fly-by-night web design and seo companies out there who take money and run. They show little or no results and usually offer no customer service so that the customer is the one that suffers in the end.

The good companies who have lasting power must fight against each other, as well as the scammers in order to make a decent profit and put food on the table.

In the end, the fact that you show excellent work and have word of mouth marketing is what decides your fate. But if you do not want to make that your only way of making a living then you have to learn how to expand your business to a larger market.

Your realistic goal should be of partnering with various advertisers, and powerful companies with like-interests to come up with a major marketing campaign. A joint campaign should benefit both companies by fattening the pocketbook in the end, and making a household name for themselves with consumers.

Keep in mind when marketing that you have to think major and you have to have a gimick. An example of a gimick is the new Subway campaign that has a sandwich for every day of the week. I actually decided to write this post last oven roasted chicken breast, but I had some design work to finish. But back to my point… Every major company that is a household name has a gimick. I called Geico only because I thought the way the Gecko batted his eyes was funny. I stopped subscribing to Verizon Wireless and switched to T-Mobile because the “can you hear me now?” ad annoyed me. As you can see, some gimicks are simply annoying even though they hold a household name. My advice is to stick to funny.

Web Design Taxi is inviting solicitation by major companies to create a cooperative marketing campaign as we speak. Remember our post in May about having a company theme? Think Donald Trump. He lives for the brand that his name carries. He bases his reputation on it and we respect that. We believe in that way of branding and we mention Web Design Taxi every chance we get.

When in doubt, put your thinking cap on and sit at the drawing board. The business that thinks together makes expansion easier.

I have been active in various forums and blog dicussions about web design and marketing. A common issue that seems to come up with inexperienced designers is how do you align your page container using nothing more than css.

With tables it is very easy. You would simply use a <table align=”center”>. With css it can be very simple as well. You would still float your DIV left, but in the body class you would set the body-margin left to between 200-250. This will make your main container appear in the middle of the browser. The value would depend on the width of the main container. This obviously is a non-issue with a fluid design that uses a width of 100%.

If any experienced designers would like to add on this with a separate solution, feel free to leave a comment below.

We started out with Dreamweaver way back in the day. Back then it was iffy because some bugs needed to be worked out. Later when they released CS2 most of the bugs have been fixed. It no longer created any invalid code.

While we create websites using mostly the code view option, we occasionally use the design view to speed up certain aspects of the work. We are able to produce valid xhtml every single time.

CS3 has made the design process much easier. It is worth spending the money and avoiding crap software like Frontpage.

Most people who own a service based website have static pages. These are pages that have to be edited in the html code in order to display changes. Because of this it makes it hard for non-designers to update their website with new content.

If you notice, this content you are reading right now is posted in a blog. Our website has static pages so we decided to integrate a blog. The blog allows us to write new content using a simple administration interface and post it instantly for you to see.

When you install a blog for a static website it goes in a new directory. A standard blog installation is pretty ugly though. They will not automatically match your existing design. Because of this, it is necessary to incorporate your existing design from your static pages into a blog template. That way the entire website looks the same no matter where your visitor goes on your site.

Incorporating the design into the blog theme is rather simple. You just create a new theme directory and copy an existing theme into it. Then you insert your design into theme pages, and insert the blog code into the right places where you want items displayed. It may seem intimidating when you first have a go at it, but with patience and some general knowledge of css, php, and html you can get it done pretty quickly.

We are inviting outside graphic designers, and developers to join Web Design Taxi as a tutorial author. As an author you will be provided with a profile where you can include a short bio along with a link to your website.

To qualify:

1. You must be able to show examples of tutorials you have written in the past.
2. You must have example portfolio for the tutorial subject you are writing about.
3. You must be able to write at least 1 tutorial every 2 weeks.
4. Tutorials must be well written and checked for grammatical errors and typos.
5. Tutorials must not have links in them. Readers will be able to access your URL by clicking on your username.
6. Tutorials must be up to date for the latest software in the industry.
7. Tutorial images must be no bigger than 452 pixels wide.

If you are interested in becoming a tutorial author and gaining exposure simply fill out our contact form with your information and any relevant work samples that we can view online.

When I first started out in web design I used tables. Not because it was the only thing available, but because the software I used and interacted with helped me learn tables.

As an SEO expert I knew that the less code in a design the better because it brings the content higher up to the top of the code, and text content is what get’s ranked high in search engines.

I learned DIV layouts in a matter of 3 days or so. I simply opened up my dreamweaver app and played with the CSS file and a blank html file. I made a fake website to see which css settings placed the content where I wanted and made it look how I wanted it to look.

Now I create all my websites using css for layout. I occasionally use tables for contact forms and some other organized content depending on the project.

I also learned how to produce valid xhtml code. It was very easy, and definately worth it in the end. If you currently do not design valid xhtml/css layouts then you are missing out.