web design news blog

The web design article feature is now operational, although, at present there is only one article in our database, so if you would like to contribute, and in return have a link back to you, then visit the Web Design Article page for instructions on how to submit an article. The article should naturally be related to web design in some way.

Congratulations to our first web-design award winner who qualifies for free exposure on our site for a month in the form of a thumbnail on the web design award page. Since we launched the awards, we have received a deluge of web design award nominations that we are slowly but surely working through. At this point, we have recognised atleast 5 other websites that have scored 80% or higher, qualifing them for web awards. Everyone that has nominated a site for an award will be notified in due course as to the status of their nomination, but please be patient as we are working in order of the date nominated.

Further Reading…
Web Design Award Page
Nominate your site for an award

The web design award feature is now available to anyone who would like to nominate a website. Thank you to José Lapa of .COZA Web Design for designing the great looking web design award buttons. The buttons can be proudly displayed on the websites that win an award from web-design.co.za. The winners will also be displayed for a time on the site…a bit of free advertising never hurt anyone!

The web design company list is now operational and if you have a web design company in South Africa or if you are a freelance South African web designer, you can go ahead and add a listing. This is a free service and will always be a free service, the only catch is that we require a link back to us. This is a new site and needs marketing to become effective. So if you advertise us, we will advertise you. It will do you no good to have a link on a page that nobody visits, so let’s do each other a favour!

A user of this website complained a while ago about the fact that the web design companies are listed alphabetically. He asked us “How can I get on top, don’t you have an advertising option?”. We didn’t, and quite honestly hadn’t thought of it up and till then. Since then we have put together a “priority listing option” which involves displaying either your logo or a screenshot of your website. The thumbnails will display above the Google Ads on the left, and regarding whose thumbnail is on top…first come first serve. To check out a demo, visit the web design company listings page

Further Reading
Web Design Company Listing Page

Today we modified the skin/theme of our news blog to fit more in line with the rest of the web design. There are still some minor skin issues to be resolved but as a whole, it seems to be working quite well. If you come across any bugs, then please leave a comment on this post so we can be made aware of it and fix it. The design for the theme was based on an existing theme by headsetoptions and then modified by our web design company.

On a slightly different topic, I’d also llike to thank Northie, Mutilated1, Steven_A_S, DMX and griffinsbridge from sitereference for their useful information regarding HTTP headers to fix the problem we had with content being cached.

The domain web-design.co.za was purchased on the 1st of February, 2007 for a cool 435 US$ and today the transfer was completed and our very competent webhost “host4africa.com” had already sent us the FTP details beforehand. So www.web-design.co.za was officially launched yesterday. Not all aspects of the site are fully operational yet, but give us a break…it’s only been live for a few hours. The basic shell has been launched and all the web pages are ready for content. This is the first blog post of which many are to follow. That reminds me…we also need to do something about the blog interface…

Well so far, we have submitted our sitemap.xml for Google, our urllist.txt for yahoo and we are listed on Ananzi. Time to start the big search engine submission campaign. Does anyone know of any good, SEO friendly, free directories? Also, web design industry-specific directories are always a big plus. We need to get as many web design firms as we can listed so that this site becomes a useful reference for clients looking for designers. And the more web designers contributing to articles, the more useful this site is going to be to fellow web designers.