If you are in the process of trying to promote your website you will have no doubt read about submitting your articles to directories. It is one of the most important things you can do to promote your site and its one of the first things you are told to do by search engine optimisation gurus. By submitting your site to as many directories as possible you will gain more links to your site, a key factor with the search engines.

But which directories do you submit to and how can you possibly submit your site to hundreds of directories, it would take forever!

Thats where www.usefulsubmit.com can help. For $14.95 they will manually submit your site to 100 free directories. You can even get a report at the end showing all of the directories your site has been submitted to. In our experience it has been an efficient and professional service and worth considering if you are trying to promote you website.

Another useful website is www.internet-directories.com. It lists the most prominent web directories to submit your site to based on their pagerank and price. It also tells you which free directories are worth your time based on pagerank and time taken to approve your site. Although this site seems relatively new, it is a useful resource.

Here is a great article on how google works from buzzle.com. Apparently, Google recently filed a patent, revealing some of its methods. This is something all designers want to know and finally we can get a insight into what is really going on with Google. The conclusion in this article was that we should be growing ours sites as organically as possible, something most of us already knew but its interesting and worth a read anyway. Here is the link:

Google article

We now have a new section with useful web design resources including articles, templates and useful links. The idea is not to list as many resources as possible but to include only good quality material. We will be adding to the resources section periodically so keep checking back. We hope you find them useful.

We are currently working very hard on promoting this site and the number of visitors is increasing day by day and we are receiving lots of positive feedback. Thanks for all of your emails.

So far we have optimized the site, submitted to the directories, written and re-written our content, posted in forums, created free templates, participated in link exchanges and more. Then, we had a bright idea and decided to look at other web design directories and email some suitable web designers directly. Whilst this was a good idea in practice the shortcomings of our plan became apparent when we started to click on the links to some of the web designers sites.

After clicking on the first 20 links on the first page of a well known web design directory we found only three that we felt would meet the criteria to be listed on Real Design Network. Almost every site was a mess of table based layout, horrible graphics and inaccessible coding. The majority of sites did not even work properly on the browser we were using (Mozilla Firefox). We are not looking for perfection to be listed here, only competent, standards compliant design. Are we really asking too much? It would appear so. Why these web design directories exist I don’t know. I thought the whole point of them was to list web designers that would be of some use to a client!

We know that there are plenty of quality web designers out there and we are going to continue the search and keep building up the directory bit by bit. We are also beginning a PPC advertising campaign shortly so hopefully we will have more success with that.

The submissions keep on coming and on the whole they have been great, loads of top quality web designers coming in all the time. We have also had some quite amusing submissions from web designers who seem to think its still 1996 and manage to ignore the whole message behind this site.

Dont get me wrong, I appreciate all interest in the site but our number 1 priority is to provide a list of top web designers committed to designing their sites to web standards. If you design using tables or frames and your images look they have been downloaded from a clipart gallery, you’re not going to be approved.

Real Design Network is growing at a healthy rate and we are currently trying our best to promote the site and build up the directory. Once we have a good amount of web designers in the directory we will promote it to potential clients as much as possible. Hopefully, this will provide a good source of traffic to the web designers we have listed. Many of our designers have already reported a flow of traffic from Real Design Network in the few weeks the site has been live!