San Diego, CA – May 5, 2008 San Diego’s fastest-growing marketing communications firm is set to be included in the upcoming reference title, Market Smart Design — not once, but twice. This volume, published by HarperCollins in New York, is set for worldwide distribution in early 2009. It highlights the best graphic designs created for specialized target markets, and two JTCG websites — active.com and teens.drugaubse.gov — were picked by the panel of experts.

“We’re excited to be included,” says JTCG owner/creative director Les Kollegian, “not only because it’s a prestigious industry-wide honor, but because very few companies see more than one of their websites featured.”

The criteria was tough: Sites had to offer attractive, engaging design . . . meaty content . . . breezy navigation . . . and a solid grasp of its niche target market. Nancy Heinonen, Publications Director for Crescent Hill Books, headed the search — and notes that “We received well over one thousand submissions,” yet the vast majority didn’t make the cut. “What appealed to us about these two sites were not only great design, but also how well they conveyed understanding the market.”

The 9-million-member active.com site helps fitness-focused people connect with other like-minded individuals and organizations. JTCG’s challenge was to make navigation simple and quick, considering the site covers so much for this audience — from sports to nutrition to equipment to events and more.

The teens.drugabuse.gov site faced numerous challenges; as a federal government program, its goal is to educate young people about the dangers of drugs.

“Teens are a tough market,” Nancy points out, explaining how JTCG’s challenge was so difficult. “For instance, there are lots of trends with colors . . . if you’re out of bounds, teens will know.” JTCG’s use of Web 2.0 provides ideal interactive options, Les adds.

“They’re two vastly different assignments,” Les says, “which is why I’m so proud of our entire team — everyone involved in these projects was able to focus on the unique needs of that specific audience, and speak their language effectively.”

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language that permits web designers to attach style like spacing, color, font, etc. to HTML documents. Cascading style sheets work similarly to a template; permitting web developers to label style for an HTML element and after that apply it to the number of web pages required. Thus, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are collections of formatting rules, which control the appearance of content in a web page. With CSS styles you have great flexibility and control of the exact page appearance; from precise positioning of layout to specific fonts and styles.

There are many benefits of using CSS. One of the major benefits of using CSS is the easy maintenance of the website. Maintenance of a website made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones which are table based. CSS splits the presentation style of documents from the content of documents and makes the maintenance of the site easier. Aside from being able to make site extensive changes with no trouble through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Webmasters can characterize the appearance of a site in one place, and change the whole site by changing just one file. With CSS, when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style, and that element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site. So, if you have to alter the color of all pages in your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you enormous amount of time, particularly if you have to edit each page independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to table based. This makes your code lighter and cleaner. Clean code makes a huge difference in maintaining your site.

Cascading Style Sheets Benefits and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes your website SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. The search engines spiders are actually very lethargic. They do not go through the bundles of HTML codes to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make the HTML code very cumbersome; thus, reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to design and determine the design attributes; the HTML code will be clean and it will result to better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS you will be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual layout. For instance, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your website; thus will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully CSS web sites. When I look at someone’s website that was built using old school HTML code with tags such as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I feel awkward and immediately convert that site to a fully table-less CSS layout. There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text ratio weight of your site. Do you know why? Because modern search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You practically externalize excessive code into external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Website Accessibility

CSS makes your website more accessible. The number of users browsing the web through hand held devices are continuously growing tremendously. It is estimated that by 2008, one third of the world’s population will be using hand held devices for accessing Internet. It is always important that your site is accessible to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation. By separating style from markup, webmasters can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents, making the documents more accessible.

Increases Download Speed of Your Website

CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice previous to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables. All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded into the screen. You have the control to make the content appear previous to the slow loading images, which is liked by most of the web users.

Cross Browser Compatibility

For all webmasters out there! CSS makes your website more professional. Taking the benefits of CSS like making your websites load faster and easy to maintain, you save a lot of time and labor. This in turn makes you lots of money. CSS makes links of the website look more attractive and dynamic. Using CSS, you can slot in rollovers easily and effectively, without having to use a single character of JavaScript. Thus, CSS gives your websites a professional look. It is wise to use CSS to jive with the current trends of the industry. All major browsers like Firefox, Explorer, and Netscape presently recognize CSS and it is definitely safe for web designers to use CSS now.

Building effective links is one of the most time consuming and challenging aspects of web site design. Ultimately, link building can spell the difference between a high search engine ranking web page and one that disappears in a sea of similar web sites, so it is best to take the time to do it right.

Search engine algorithms are changed often on Google and other popular search engines. Following algorithm changes are often left to the professionals, however effective linking continues to be the most decisive factor in search engine optimization and will likely be for several years more.

Links as the name implies, are the most basic connectors to all the pages on the Internet and is the easiest way for a given application to gauge the relevance and integrity of a web page.

People love lists; find a way to integrate a list into your site. This can be anything from a list of tips or things to avoid or a list suggested reading, for example. Lists give the impression of being a definitive source of information and many people will want to link to them.

Often people will link to a site if they feel that it is an authority on a given subject; they will then feel confident about recommending that site to other people. That is what link building is all about after all, a sort of digital referral or stamp of approval. Every web site should strive to have reliable and well-researched content. Try to keep content informative and simple to read; if no one can understand what your web site says they probably won’t want to link to it! Check your text for spelling or grammatical errors; a web site riddled with incorrect spelling and poor sentence construction doesn’t seem very professional or authoritative.

Online news sites are a good way to establish links. Some of the things you can do are: submit an article for online publication or syndicate an article with a news site. Reputable sites usually enjoy a high search engine rank for their articles and receive plenty of traffic. You may also send press releases or trade articles with other sites…or even write an article about another site and ask then to link back to your site; most will be happy to repay the favor.

Establish contacts with the Better Business Bureau or the Chamber of Commerce in your area or the relevant city and state government offices. You may even look around closer to home by submitting your link to the local library or exchanging links with local businesses in your area; even non-competing businesses in the same field.

Submit your site to directories that allow free submissions such as DMOZ or even paid directories. You can even take this a step further by creating your own directory of similar web sites. You can obviously link to your own site here and even include other important pages in addition to the home page. Quality listings are important here so if it is a useful directory to the most number of people, it will easily attract links.

You may want to post a link to your site in classifieds sites such as Craigslist or if you belong to user groups like Yahoo and Google groups it is often acceptable to post links to your site if you are asking or answering a question. Just make sure it is in the context of the discussion, as most people do NOT to be spammed.

Comments and reviews are also great ways to attract people to link back to your site. If you have a reputable looking site with informative, well-written reviews, there’s a good chance that the articles will receive high search engine rankings. Try to keep your reviews on-topic, informative and thorough, and be specific whenever possible.

Blogging has become an integral part of the Internet and is one of the most effective means of linking; you can either drop a few words of comment on someone’s blog or link to them from your own blog. Most blogs will be happy to link back to you. Try to update your blog regularly and post interesting content so people will want to link to you.

If your budget permits, explore the possibility of hiring a professional web-linking publicist (yes they do exist!) or consultant for your web site. If you choose carefully this will free you up to take care of other areas of your web site and leave the details of link building to the experts.

Those are a few things to do to create good links, what about things you should avoid? These methods will actually hurt your visibility on the web as it may cause search engines to ban your site or ignore it altogether!

Do not spam forums! Nobody likes a spammer and can usually tell if someone joins a discussion forum for the sole purpose of self-promotion. A sure way to annoy people is to post a non-relevant reply to a question and then include a link…or worse not even answer the question at all!

Choose carefully when submitting your site to directory services; a poor one won’t help increase your traffic at all and may carry out-of-date or off topic links.

When asking someone to link to your site, make sure that there is a good reason why he should; maybe your site is similar to his own in subject matter or your site showcases him, his products or his web site in a favorable light.

Take the time to compose a polite, well written personal request for linking. It doesn’t have to be long but the important thing is to make it seem like a genuine request as opposed to an impersonal, automated email. Do not pester a Webmaster with several, persistent emails; it is annoying and will not likely help your cause any. If you don’t get a reply, move on.