Just chatting here at New Designers to students, and one discussion caught my minds eye, so to speak.

One of the students, Andy Griggs, had come up with a great snowboard/ski waxer - and was showing this on the university stand.

It caught my eye because snowboarding is a passion for me, but it was our discussion that got me thinking.

We talked about how he got to the final design, why the more obvious 'iron' shape with handle had not been used, for instance. It transpired that what he described as his 'original' design may have been the best solution - although the end product still looked great.

But he was in education, and the project was supposed to take a year, so he continued working on it.

Perhaps it was this that made what was a hot idea not what it might have been.

In the design process, I have often found that the original ideas are often the best. Sometimes, working on more ideas is about fee building and massaging client egos rather than coming up with a solution - and perhaps this is 'embeded' in education.

Would our quality of life be better if we (and our clients) accepted less design collateral, but still got the original and best ideas?

Just think we could work for 20% of the time, earn 80% of the money and have LOADS more fun on the slopes.

Later on this week, we're at New Designers.

It's our second year at this event for Students and Graduates - and we'll be talking about our Student Portfolio Competition.

We're providing some free technology to students and graduates to help them move from education to employment, in the shape of free online Portfolios - and to help promote this we've come up with the competition, supported by Quark.

In fact, we hope this will be the start of a new student 'area' on our site with loads of content, services and support for new talent.

If you've a mind to, pop down to see us at the show...

G, o, o, g, l, e

Well - for those of us without a religous bone in their body, and who navigate the virtual landscape that is the internet.

Search, or more accurately, search engine optimisation (SEO) is top of our minds just about all of the time.

Portals like creativematch work hard to increase our own SEO and therefore traffic, and also increase the SEO of sites linked from them - like in a 'directory' - increasing visitors to their sites too.

SEO (and there is a vast amount of advice, some good some not good) out there both in terms of content and 'consultants', can be complex to get a grasp of. We're definitely still learning too.

There are currently 232,000,000 pages on Google about SEO (take a look).

But much of this is technical and can be regarded as the domain of web developers and SEO specialists.

Here's Wikipedia's definition. It's a succinct definition, but how does anyone who is not a professional increase thier SEO and traffic?

So, assuming you have content that your target audience want to browse...

What's the best way to get more traffic to your site?
Get links from high ranking, relevant sites.

It's the single most important part of any SEO strategy. Google says 'The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating.'

It makes sense to not only list your website in directory sites that rank highly and are relevant, but also publish relevant content in news, blogs and forums that links to you.

There are lots of other things you can do, but follow this basic tenet and you can take prayer out of the equation.

I was speaking last week with a very busy Design Company - we were talking about 'client relationships' and how they 'felt differently' recently.

What used to be very calm, professional but still demanding clients were turning into the 'clients from hell'. We've all experienced them...

Now, of course this may have been a factor of overtrading, or of client fatigue, maybe the design company just weren't cutting the mustard in terms of servicing - but in our conversation we came up with another possible scenario.

Perhaps the clients were stressed out. The individuals involved were seeing the value of their houses/flats drop (perhaps for the first time), interest rates are on the up, jobs cuts are looming and debt looks less manageable.

Are clients more stressed than say 12 months ago?

Are you seeing client relationships suffer through no fault in your control?