Welcome to part 2 of the series! Before starting this tutorial, please complete “Designing a Professional Website from Scratch – Part 1”.

For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to go over slicing images. You may download my sliced images in order to follow along, but please note that I am not including the social networking icons or the photo. I don’t believe that I have the right to redistribute these. I included the link the photo in the last article, and you can download the social networking icons from the original creator.

Also, remember to download the 960 Grid CSS Framework. This will give us a big step in the right direction.

With that out of the way, we’re ready to begin.

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Many SEO experts have gotten their professions down to a science (or maybe more of an art-form). You should not give up trying to compete with the major players. SEO can be achieved through the use of well-written and compelling content.

On the web, content is king. I know that you’ve heard it many times before, but it’s the truest expression for getting visitors to your website, and converting those visitors into buyers. Many businesses decide to redesign their websites without considering the fact that their content is old and dated.

When redesigning your website, take the opportunity to evaluate every single piece of content on your site. Here are some steps toward making your content stronger, thus improving the rank of your site in search engines.

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Yesterday Google announced the launch of "Google Caffeine". Caffeine is a new search index that enables Google to serve searchers with the freshest possible results. The way that Google currently works is that it indexes pages in its directory at a rate of about once in about two weeks, depending on the content source (more regular and notable content producers get indexed more frequently). Caffeine indexes small parts of the web at the rate of  hundreds of thousands of pages per second.

What this means for you is that the more regular that you produce content, the higher in search results that you will appear in your given industry. What better way of producing content is there than a business blog? Not only blogs, but what about social networking sites? Now is the time to boost your SERPs, and hop on the social networking bandwagon!

Some companies are taking the next step with social-networking sites. These retailers are selling direct to consumers.

Large retailers have taken advantage of their social media presence in the past with special promotions. Hallmark ran a special twist on the Mother's Day card as a tribute to Moms on Facebook with the Hallmark Mother's page. Since April 19, over 1000 users have sent tributes to their moms, with Hallmark Facebook fans now totaling over 68,000. This is up from just 250 fans last November!

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There are a number of unsavory ways in which criminals can conduct attacks against you and your colleagues. Do not let yourself or your users become victims of an attack.

One mechanism is malware embedded within websites that can penetrate your antivirus software defenses to steal sensitive personal information. It used to be the case that having a strong anti-virus package would do the trick. However, these days, this malware software can all too often pass these defenses undetected.

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