Step in Refresh.  I was pleasantly surprised that Qatar has a growing open community of experts in web designing, development, e-marketing, content and a group of entrepreneurs, who work to refresh the creative, technical and professional culture of the internet.  Even more so that they come in all different shapes, sizes, cultures and ages. Refresh provides an opportunity for like-minded people to meet-up, discuss issues relating to business, design, development, online marketing, technology and increase the ICT networking community in Qatar all for free.

On 19 November, this group brought together four speakers to discuss reshaping the web with Multidisciplinary Design, Blogging & Social Networking, Starting a website and Global innovation within the local culture.  With the web having undergone a variety of transformations over the last few years, so has the front-end design, which has been influenced by a variety of design trends, the advancement of mobile devices and improvements to the scripting language used.  Trends which anyone in the business of designing, developing, marketing or owning an online business should be keeping abreast with.

Michael Hersrud kicked the presenter session off by discussing the influences of new creative trends and how they are responsible for visually reshaping the future of the web. He concentrated on the impact that new design has on how content can be presented in diverse visual styles, with twists in the tails of fonts and cleverly varied videos. His discussion on grid designing showed how creating a visual impact is key to attracting users, but how keeping them on the site with an easy accessible interface and solid content can make or break it. Taking the talk locally, he spoke about the potential of the Arabic font which can be created as a story in itself and one that has endless possibilities in the Middle East Arabic media environment. Interesting creatively grid and font designed sites mentioned include; Spacecollective.org Gallery, Leids Film Festival, Effect Games Demos, and The Wilderness Downtown.

Ammar Mohammed discussed how blogging and social media content can improve the visibility of a person, company or organization. It was interesting to note how many individuals and companies in Qatar have taken to Social Networking.  Individual’s social media usage has increased since 2008 due to the now familiar use of the medium to share experiences, open dialogue, and freedom of speech within the MENA region.  Some companies have developed a solid Marketing Strategy for their social media allowing them to make head way in ensuring continuous status updates with solid valuable information. Some companies however, have joined networks but have not updated their status’ once, this has a negative effect on their business, showing a lack of interest in their client’s requirements. ictQATAR’s Digital Media Landscape Report can give you more detailed statistics on Media Usage within Qatar.

Abraham Kararck brought me back to the basics of concrete web design start up requirements, to create a web presence that is sustainable. His basic presentation on design with a white screen and black text for the design impaired was original and amusing.  He emphasized how critical having a solid Design Strategy can be, from learning design lingo, setting up a storyboard and having a solid SEO strategy. Web design can make or break a new start-up and many make mistakes in the initial set up that can be detrimental to the success of the online business. His presentation concentrated on some main processes; creating a Storyboard, the initial Wireframe (buttons, fields, content, look and feel, etc), Design should initially be clean and simple before going elaborate and expensive, the Development (choosing a developer and language for the site to be written in) and finally Managing the site. It is important to make the correct decisions and use the correct tools to ensure a successful web business. He gave insightful short-cut cheats and processes to designing a site with great reference sites to use; Smashing Magazine, Elance, 99designs, Visual Mess, Capturely.com, Balsamiq, Icon Finder, Istockphoto, Aviary and don’t forget Google Analytics.

Olivier Auroy closed the workshop by discussing online businesses surviving in a globally branded village and how brands in Qatar and the Gulf can contribute to improving our daily lives. The audience was blown away by the brilliant bq sunglass concept developed from the Burqa and taking this idea into a more modern day conceptual design to cover the female face.  The design was inspirational and I could quite easily see Western women buying the product.

Overall nothing ground breaking in the concepts presented, but if you are a start up company or student it was insightful to be made aware of good business practices. For someone that has a website, it was a way to recap on lessons once learned and forgotten along the way, to take a moment to pause, step back and have a look at where we are as a site and repurpose where necessary.

These days, it’s all about how customers can find you and location specific domain names make it easier for search engines to surface the most relevant, Qatar specific information. Companies should think of their online presence as another “outlet.” .QA is just like a sign above the door that tells search engines and potential customers that you are in Qatar.

Doha-based Alsubaey Photography is one company taking advantage of the Qatar domain names through its www.alsubaey.qa website. Customers who are looking for Doha based photographers can easily find Abdulrahman Alsubaey’s landing page through organic search, yet companies with similar profile, but without .qa domain names don’t even pop up in searches and directories. This is just a quick example of how smart business people are embracing marketing on a shoestring budget.

There are twenty-something generic top-level domains, or those letters located to the right of the dot in a Web address, including .com, .gov, and geographically specific .qa. Most companies are well familiar with .com, but do not always take advantage of opportunities presented by country specific names like .qa. Unlike .com, there is no scarcity of names; it offers brand protection; and with appropriate marketing can reduce promotional costs. Rumor has it that both Apple and Google have already registered their .qa domain names, and these two players know a thing or two about marketing.

And the good news is Qatar-specific domain names are now available to the general public . If you are in the market for a personal website, you should grab your domain before anybody else does. You don’t want to be facing a situation where you build a personal site or a Web business only to find out later that you don’t own it. A fashion retailer, French Connection, faced this challenge a few years ago – they fought and lost a court case in the UK over one of their brand names. Trying to win the rights to a website name can be tedious and costly, and a lot of companies prefer taking a defensive registrations route.

It is common sense that your website domain name bears your personal name or the name of your business, but you shouldn’t stop there. Campaign or product specific URLs offer a unique way to direct customers to targeted online content. For example, if your business is Doha Bakery and your product is called Red Velvet Cupcakes, then get a domain name called www.dohabakery.qa and www.redvelvetcupcakes.qa. You can have both of these domain names pointing to different pages of your site. This way, your website will pop up in organic searches for both – customers who can only remember your product name, as well as those who recall your corporate name or location.

If your business’s name is hard to spell, you may also want to get a domain name with the incorrect spelling to capture the audience that otherwise wouldn’t be able to find you. You can also capitalize on your location by acquiring dohacars.qa, for example. Purchasing multiple domain names doesn’t mean that you have to have content on every single site – you can set up each domain name to redirect and feed traffic to your current home page.

While the core elements of marketing remain pretty much the same, it is no secret that customers’ behavior is shifting to the Web and as online activities become more of a standard, most companies now include a domain name on corporate materials, including business cards and advertising. Qatar specific domain name can provide powerful message about your business and heritage and is an opportunity not to be missed. Registering is easy – visit the Qatar Domains Registry website to first check the availability of the specific domain name, and if the name is available, you will be directed to a list of registrars to purchase from.

Being nice to Google...

Search engines play an increasingly important role in directing users to web sites. “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) refers to steps in web site design to improve indexing and ranking by search engines. This post describes the quickest and easiest ways to ensure optimal search engine results.

Google and other search engines keep their algorithms secret. That said, it is well understood that search engines rely heavily on two factors: “keywords” and “links”. In order to improve search engine results, your site should pay attention to these two factors:

Keywords

Search engines index all words on a site, and match search terms against those words. Site designers should decide appropriate keywords for every page on a site (“keyword” can also refer to two and three-word combinations), and make sure that those keywords are included periodically on the page (although not excessively) and that they are included in prominent places, especially the page “title” (words at the very top of browser, taken from the page <title> tag), and in initial, prominent headlines on the page. It is fine to focus on several keywords per page. You can use this keyword generator to find suggested keyword combinations.

Links

Search engines place great importance on the number of sites linking to your site (which are treated as “votes”), and the quality of the web sites linking to your site (if those sites themselves have many sites linking to them, they carry more weight). You want many other sites to link to you, and you especially want the most important sites in your sector to link to you. There are two ways to get sites to link to you. First, you can ask the site manager directly, potentially even suggesting where on their site they might put a link. Asking for links is much easier if you are aggressively linking to other sites, either from a “related resources” page or from text throughout your site. Second, there are a number of important third party sites where you can place links directly — online community sites, blogs, wikipedia, events sites, and many others.

You can see which sites currently link to you via a Google search using the format “link:www.mysite.com”.

Other SEO Factors

• Site structure: Search engines like text. Search engines generally don’t like flash, images, frames, non-standard URLs, or non-standard html.
• Dynamism: Search engines take note of sites that are updated frequently and visit those sites more often.
• Instructions: You can include a robots.txt file to instruct search engines as to which parts of the site can and can’t be indexed.
• Notification: You can submit your URL on the Google Add URL Page. Google also has a richer “sitemaps” service which facilitates full and frequent site indexing.
• Consistent URLs: You should use only one URL for your site.
• Monitoring: It is important to periodically monitor key search services to make sure they are appropriately indexing and displaying your site.

Other Resources

* Search Engine Optimization: Wikipedia article
* SearchEngineWatch: Extensive resources and advice
* PageRank: Wikipedia article on the principal web site ranking algorithm used by Google