October already??

Well, it's already October. I didn't reach my goal last month of getting a new project. Life is a little crazy right now. I have a lot on my plate. But I'm not giving up! Here's what I want to do.

This month I will keep the goal of getting one new project. But I will really focus on getting more designs into my portfolio. That's what seems to be really important to potential clients. Having a strong portfolio might give me better luck.

I will also work on a third aspect. Wordpress and Joomla themes. Cheap, customizable, and prebuilt themes for your favorite CMS. I will start offering these at an incredibly low rate for this month, and I will even offer free customization (Free logo, different colors, etc...) So be sure to keep a look-out on those if you own a website that uses Wordpress or Joomla.

One more thing, if you already own a website, and want it tweaked or a complete makeover, e-mail me at MooretecDesigns@gmail.com I will do it for incredibly cheap since I'm getting started. If you know anyone that needs a website, tell them to shoot me an e-mail and we'll work something out.

As always, thanks for reading!

Second template added.

I designed another template today. This one is designed for portfolios. It's meant to be a little artsy. However, it is my first attempt at an art oriented site. Critique?

First design added to the portfolio!

Well, it's official. I've added the first design to the portfolio. It's a simple, bright design for personal or commercial use. Check it out.

Critique?

Content Management Systems

So to start off this post, I will just tell you all now that PhantasyGames is gone. It has been scrapped for a few reasons of the owner. But now we're working on an Aion fansite. At the start of PhantasyGames I started building a custom PHP framework for everything. It slowed down the development process exponentially. So I started looking into some prebuild Content Management Systems, or CMS.

Basically a CMS is an easy way to add in a bunch of features like article posting and a user system with prebuild modules. The appeal to this is that they can be skinned. You can still use your custom design, but paired with this back-end. It makes the development process go by much faster.

I would not use a CMS for any project, but for this one it seems to fit. I will definitely link to the new site once we have it up and running, and I am basically considering PhantasyGames to be a learning experience in general. It was fun while it lasted, and I learned a ton, but I'm ready to move on to bigger and better things.

Search Engine Optimization

This topic seems to be the center of a lot of confusion and mystery amongst a whole slew of beginner web designers. Including me. I'm barely figuring out some key aspects of SEO.

SEO can be your best friend. If you do it correctly, it can drive more traffic to your site, and give you higher results on search engines, like Google. I'd like to share some key things that I've learned the past couple of weeks.

Backlinks.
A backlink is when an external site, links to your site. This will drive your pagerank higher because in theory the more links you have to your site, the better it is.

Keywords.
Keywords are important. What's even more important is that you use relevant keywords. Search engine spiders, the things that index your site, don't like when you have keywords on your site that don't fit the content. It's important to have your company name in the keywords too.

It's also important to note that content in <h1> tags are seen as more important than ones in <h3> tags, and so on and so forth.

Well, that's about as much as I know about SEO for now...I hope I helped shed a little light on the subject!

Goals of September + what we're doing right now!

Hey everyone! I just wanted to outline the September goals and what Mooretec Designs is doing right now!

We have two projects currently. One you've all heard about, and one new one.

PhantasyGames.com

This one is getting a ton of a work. It features a custom CMS and a completely (and I mean completely) integrated forum! Right now we're doing most of our work behind the scenes, but definitely be sure to keep your eye on this one. It might start to look a lot different in the next couple of weeks. =)

And the other one is a secret for now. :D But I will unveil it soon enough.

For now, our major goal in September is to get one new client. Just one new project is our goal for the entire month. It's a lot of work, folks. A lot harder than it may seem. =)

Well, that's it for now. Happy Saturday! I hope you're all having a good weekend so far.

Mooretec Designs Logo

Well, I'm not sure if this is temporary or not, but I cooked this up a few minutes ago. :D