When it comes to internet marketing, there's no better way to reach your target audience than with a well targeted blog. When you offer news, content, or other useful tips that your readers can use, you're building trust and a relationship. People return to your blog to continue to get the quality information you're providing.

Think about the blogs you return to on a regular basis. They're filling a need, whether it's a humorous break, details on how to do something, or news on a topic you're interested in. The question becomes, what are you offering your readers? Consistency is an important factor when you're creating a blog. You need to know what your blog is about, offer consistent quality information, and know who your readers are.

Another way to make your blog stand out in a crowd is to offer a unique perspective on a topic. If you're interested in writing about racing, and 95% of the blogs in that field cover the race cars, you might consider covering race car drivers, or race car tracks. By taking a fresh look at a crowded topic can make you stand apart from the crowd. Give people something different, and they'll start to seek you out.

Do you have a voice? When you're building your blog, you need to find your own spin, and find your natural voice. People can see through you when you aren't being yourself. If you're trying to be offer reporter style writing, but you have a very casual tone, you need to learn to use that to your advantage. While many people say that copying someone is the sincerest form of flattery, when it comes to blogging, it's the quickest way to failure. You need to be your own person, have your own voice, and offer a fresh perspective to find success.

Twitter, you need to do a better job at communicating with the developer ecosystem that has been formed around your API for the past couple of years. At least, that’s the message the developers themselves seem to be sending out to the startup at an increasing rate. Jesse Stay from SocialToo wrote something about this earlier today on his blog, criticizing the startup over a change it made to its following limit policy without notifying anyone else prior to the tweak actually being implemented.

Now we’re getting more and more incoming from developers who have noticed that OAuth, an open authorization protocol that Twitter’s been testing in public beta for about a month now, has been “temporarily disabled”. Naturally, Twitter is abuzz with angry and confused third-party application developers, some of which started reporting the fact that oAuth stopped working as early as three days ago. That means some of them have been unable to let new users sign up for quite a while, and although some are saying that Twitter knows about the problem and is working on a fix, silence from the company seems to be the key trend here. Update: they did respond to a query (again from Jesse Stay) in this group, saying that the problem should be solved in 48 hours. (message from 12 AM, Apr 21) Meanwhile, Twitter’s lead API developer Alex Payne has admitted that the startup is coping with a ‘big support backlog’ and that they’re trying to hire more people to handle the load. Full Story On Tech Crunch

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell much because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design -- accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!

1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size
As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!