There’s a phenomenal focus on generating traffic in the online marketing world. Businesses fight for clicks, stage immensely competitive bidding wars and spend thousands of hours pushing their websites to the top of search pages.

Top-ranking websites and prominent ads, often on auto-pilot, generate thousands of dollars a day.

But is this the most profitable way to secure clients online? The amount of traffic running through a website isn’t directly tied to the amount of income that the website generates.

A more apt measure of success might be the number of conversions that the website produces from its pool of traffic. More conversions means a quantifiable increase in sales and even an increase in the number quotes you provide to potential clients. It’s not just a measure of traffic.

The eight tips below won’t exponentially increase clicks to your website or push it to the top of search results. However, they will help make the most of traffic that comes your way, which is often more important than quantity. These eight tactics will help turn visitors into customers, drastically increasing your website’s conversion rate.

The semantic web has brought on a new generation of Internet technology. As designers and developers work together to redefine the rules of the web, the number of open-source projects and third-party APIs continues to grow.

The opinions of web scholars differ on the use of grid systems. Many argue that setting grid points limits the creativity of designers. Others contend that a grid provides a scientific basis for a design to be perfected.

Both sides provide interesting arguments. These ideas have become part of a unique web culture characterized by influential design rules and open-source projects.

The grid isn’t a master key to perfect design. However, math has proven that certain design specifications provide the best ratios for page elements and layouts. If you’ve heard about any of this before, you may be familiar with the many options that grid-based layouts offer designers.

Fuzzy, sketchy, bubbly, viscous, sleek, shiny, retro, futuristic: you can do it all in Adobe Illustrator.

In this showcase, we have collected 40 tutorials that show you how to create awesome typographic effects in Illustrator, step by step. Some of these tutorials require the use of Photoshop for finer details.

With these tutorials, you’ll learn how to create these typographic masterpieces and develop the skills to apply them to your own personal creations.

If you know of any other great tutorials for text effects in Illustrator, please share them with us in the comments at the end of the article.

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot