Good Website Design – Finding the right look and feel

Unlike writing good copy or utilizing quality programming principles, developing the “look and feel” of your site is highly subjective matter.   Consequently, a one size fits all approach isn’t possible – or advisable.  Rather, the graphics, font, menus, and other visually appealing characteristics of your site should be specific to your business, industry, and the goals you’ve set for the site.  As such, it’s impossible to provide highly specific advice on the best graphics or other visual aspects of your site.  However, I can offer some generally accepted design concepts and guidelines that you can use to base your design efforts upon…

·         People read websites like they read anything else – from left to right and from top to bottom.  Consequently, you want to keep this in mind as you plan the layout of your site.  Functionality, navigation, and menus are generally best placed on the left or across the top.  Important information is subject to the same considerations.

·         Of course colors are a big part of your site design.  The use of color is highly subjective, however, the best advice I can give you here is to use good ol’ fashioned common sense.  For example, red text on a black background is almost never visually appealing.  If you’re an environmental company, you probably want to consider using some green in your site.  If you’re a bakery you may want to consider using warmer brown and tan tones.  And so on. 

·         Font.  The font you use on your site is critically important to developing a quality website.  You’ll find varying opinions on which font is the best, but as long as it is easily readable, sized appropriately, and consistent across your site, you should be in good shape.  

·         Whitespace isn’t bad.  As is the case with printed materials, just because you have space on the page doesn’t mean that you should fill it all up.  Doing so will give your site a cluttered, claustrophobic feel.  Just ask Google.

·         Easy on the flash and other special effects.  These “effects” can be visually appealing, sure, but what about the 7^th time someone visits your site?  At that point they could probably do without the effects.    

Keep in mind that all the points above are general guidelines.  Ultimately, there’s bound to be a website somewhere that breaks the rules and still successfully performs its desired functions.  Yet, if you start with the ideas above in mind, you stand a good chance of ending up with a website the “feels” good to the viewer. 

Next post…good stuff about website copy.  Stay tuned.

Good Website Design – The Cornerstone to Your Online Markeing Efforts

The first and arguably most important aspect of your online marketing efforts is the design of your website. From an online marketing perspective, your site is the base of all your efforts. It is what you want to drive people to in order to learn about your business or, even better, encourage them to act upon what they see and call you. Without a well designed site, marketing the site will be far more difficult and, worse yet, people that do get to the site won’t be encouraged to contact you or purchase your products and/or services. The good news is the elements of quality design aren’t difficult to recognize and can be achieved by employing some basic principles. In essence, these quality site design principles can be broken down into 3 parts:
• The look and feel of the sight (graphics, functionality, colors, etc.)
• The information provided on the site (copy, videos, etc.)
• The “programming” of the site
Over the next few days, I’ll cover each aspect of good site design in more detail. Stay tuned.

How to Market Your Business Online

So it’s pretty obvious these days that advertising in the Yellow Pages and similar books is not the quality investment it once was. Equally obvious is the reason why…the Internet, of course. But marketing your business online is a very different game than simply deciding whether you want a quarter, half, or full page ad in the Yellow Pages. Numerous different variables play a role in the effectiveness of your efforts. Even more challenging, unlike the days of advertising in a book, the online market changes daily – sometimes even hourly. So exactly how do businesses effectively market themselves in this new, technology-driven world? In short, effective online marketing is a combination of website design, paid advertising activities (such as pay-per-click), directory management, social media marketing and others. Sounds confusing, right? In all fairness I suppose it is rather confusing. But the good news is it isn’t really that complicated once you understand the basics. Really. The other good news? Demystifying the online market is the subject for an upcoming series of posts I’m going to be doing over the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

First Social Media Round Table Video is Live!

Watch the first episode of the Social Media Forum discussion on social media issues. The first episode covers why businesses engage in social media and what some of the challeneges and drawbacks people face. Watch for more episodes as we cover the issues facing your social media campaigns.

http://smf.bz/ep1

Can you bid on your competitors name? Habush and Rottier v. Cannon & Dunphy

Let me start by saying this is not new news. Companies have been bidding using Google Adwords on competitors names and keywords for years now. My favorite is still when the Pontiac G6 first came out someone in marketing thought it would be hip 3 years ago to say don’t go to www.”pontiac G6″.com but say “Google G6″ well someone smarter in Mazda’s marketing decided to big on that term essentially flipping their TV ads to their competitors.

But my question to you is do you have a problem if McDonalds says it has more beef than Burger King or when Verizon says it has more coverage than AT&T, woops bad example thats a lawsuit too.

I would suggest to you thats all Cannon & Dunphy was doing. Would you like to hire X? Consider hiring Y? This is the competitive nature of our world. This is in fact Cannon’s argument. Habush is trying something slightly different than the usual complaint citing privacy grounds instead of trademark infringement.

I will leave the legal analysis to the attorneys in our office. What I will remind people is that sometimes you need to go online to protect your brand and defend your position. Keep in mind Google policy specifically allows the use of Adwords of trademarked terms to show competitive information as long as it’s not deceptive. Read the fill google adwords trademark policies here.