According to a poll conducted by Webdesignerwall, just over 1 out of 10 people don’t think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is mandatory as a designer; and what really is surprising, is that about 24% don’t even know what SEO is!

If you’re among the quarter of people who don’t know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read this article.

They write a SEO guide for designers who want to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. They explain the common mistakes made by designers and developers and provide some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines.

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Denise Wilton, designer at Moo.com talks in a session for Future of Web Design London, about how to build web apps that not only work well, but have their own special character and personality.

As well as sharing tips from her design experience, Denise discusses the important role that copy plays in building a credible, web app too. She delivers some advice on making your web app seem more human, confident.

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and search bots doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since search bots doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while search bots can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

So what’s an honest web designer to do? Here are few practical suggestions:

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IE 6 actually had the best CSS support of any browser when it first came out… SEVEN YEARS AGO. The little bugs in it’s CSS support still haunt us to this day. I still get comments from people who roundly reject any technique that doesn’t work in IE 6. While I generally refuse to pander to IE 6’s limitations, I still feel it is important to make things look right in it whenever possible. Here are that major bugs in IE that’ll get you every time:

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