Vitruvius Web

My website and my business is brand new and I only have a basic understanding of SEO concepts so at the moment my website has a low search engine ranking. I am following a few techniques to get things moving and one of the things I'm working on at the moment is creating a banner advertising program. Anybody know of any good resources to help me do this? Preferably for little or no cost. I am hoping to create a banner advertising program without having banners displayed on my homepage, I could settle for a links page but not the homepage. Anyone got any tips, ideas or advice? I'd vastly appreciate the help. Thankyou.

You could try using the major search engines and typing in whichever keywords represent your site, see who has the top ranking for those keywords and then type there name into google and have a sift through all the results which come up for them? This will give you an idea of which sites they have linked to in order to build up there back links.

I used something similar once called snippetmaster. Anyone ever heard of this? Very limited as well but can easily incorperate into an existing website coded by hand.

The more I look at some of the biggest web design competitors out there the more I see that nearly every website design package they offer is backed up with a content management system. Now I am very used to building web designs but when it comes to building websites for clients who want to update the content themselves in a user friendly manner I am completely lost. So I started looking into content management. I downloaded Joomla and gave myself a headache trying to figure out how to set up my own templates? does anyone have any advice how I can use this or another cms to actually make websites for and then use the cms to update afterwards?

I'm downloading joomla now for the first time. How possible would it be with joomla to be able to convert an existing website into a joomla cms managed website? And what are peoples thoughts on using joomla cms system for client websites?

I've been thinking a lot recently and researching the web design industry itself and found it is almost vital to research your competitors in order to provide a service which is worthy of stealing a little market share in order to keep your business a float. I thought a topic on industry tips may bring up some useful discussion and ideas for people to help them succeed, hopefully people will feel free to provide their ideas/tips and results here too. I started blogging recently for my web design company and thought it would be a great idea to use my blog to record all my methods for gaining success in my local market so then other people starting web design businesses themselves could learn a lot from my blogging and avoid mistakes. My blog can be found here Vitruvius Web Blog The first entry I wrote is a short step by step guide on how to analyse competitors in your local market with limited knowledge in order to gain an insite into where gaps in the market may be and avoid making mistakes which can cost you sales. I hope people find this information useful and I also urge people to join in and give there ten pence worth as im sure there are so many good ideas and experiences you can post to help other people in their struggle for recognition in the web design industry.

What would be a good question is what views does everybody have on the future of the web design industry? I think a career as a web designer who works on his own may be very difficult because of the competition and the increase in technology making it too easy for people to compete with littler and littler experience, what are everybodies thoughts here? Finding a niche in the market is the best policy when wanting to compete in web design.

Content Management is something I am just starting to think about I know very little so far. What exactly are the benefits as to maintening content by hand? And more importantly what are the disadvantages. Is there anyone on here who still does there content management without a system? if there is I'd love to here why?