Good design can drive traffic

While designing We Are not Freelancers we had one goal in mind. Our goal was to get featured on as many web galleries as possible.

This isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, we had never achieved it before so why would we do it now? From start to finish this blog took about 8 days to create but I think of those 8 days I must have spent every hour of them on the design.

Why did we want to be featured on galleries?

Was it ego? Was it recognition?

A little bit and A little bit.

But. The main reason was traffic and the spin offs of that. I strongly believe that if you are a start up blogger and you have a bit of a budget/time to play with you should really put a lot of focus into your design.

We managed to get featured on quite a few CSS galleries and the result was 2000 visitors per day for the first 5 days. That is a lot of visitors for a new blog.

But that was only the start.

With that comes features on other blogs, We Are not Freelancers has been featured on many blogs for ‘Best Footers’, Best Headers’, ‘Best Tweet Birds’, Top this and Top that.

SEO

So getting featured is awesome, your ego gets stroked, your get recognition, you get traffic. But the most important thing is still to come:

SEO rankings… with all the sites we have been featured on, We Are not Freelancers has gained some serious back link horse power. We have put literally no effort into our SEO but, due to the amount of sites we have been mentioned on, our SEO rankings have been impressively boosted purely off back linking.

Get creative and then refine your design

So I highly recommend that you spend a bit more time on either getting creative or finding someone who is creative. We spent hours looking around, analyzing trends etc. We noticed that one popular trend which is under used is hand drawn designs. So we tackled it head on.

This isn’t the only trend out there which is under used. There are many, you just have to dig deep, discover a cool style get inspired, execute good padding, establish a grid structure and then refine, refine, refine, refine, refine.

If you are struggling a little then ask someone in the design world to have a look before you release it, people like Liam McKay are seriously friendly and helpful, Adelle Charles is another. Hell you can even ask me

By doing so you will kick start your viewership in a big way which can only be a good thing for the future. Spend the time now and reap the rewards later, we spent many hours on this design but it not even close to the amount we would have had to spend on SEO’ing and hustling.

Below are some of the sites we have been featured on:

1. Best Web Gallery
2. Web Creme
3. CSS Mania
4. Fave Up
5. Abduzeedo – Web Design: Illustration
6. Vandelaydesign – 25 Impressive Blog Footers
7. Vandelaydesign – 25 More Incredibly Artistic Website Designs (Part 3)
8. Vandelaydesign – Avatars in Blog Comment Design
9. Design Shack
10. wefunction – 33 New Design Blogs with Great Content & Resources
11. Dezinerfolio – Rainbow based designs: A new trend?
12. HONGKIAT – 100 Beautiful Blog Design
13. HONGKIAT – 50 Excellent Blog Footers
14. DesignM.ag – 100+ Resources & Inspiration for Hand Drawn Design
15. BLOG.spoongraphics – 30 Stylish Examples of Doodles in Web Design
16. most inspired
17. Pro Blog Design – 40 Creative Blog Footer Designs
18. Blogsessive – 10 RSS Subscription Box Designs Dissected