Web & Graphic Design Made Easy

Corporate ID - Logo Design – Branding – different but related.

2008-08-07T12:35:00.001-07:00

BIG 3

Corporate ID - Logo Design – Branding – different but related.

Corporate identity logos provide an idea about the company. It typically comprises the colors of the company logo, the company name, sometimes the logo itself is incorporated and maybe a tagline. Corporations often have more than one logo designs. They will be similar in color and style but can be utilized for a range of functions and be used autonomously of one another.

The corporate identity logo should be designed analogous to the company logo that is used in advertisement. It should be a crisp form of the logo with supplementary components that make it of function in business matters exclusive of advertisement. If the business advertisement logo is just an image, the corporate identity logo can include the name of the company and/or a tagline as an identifier.

The Logo design is one of the most fundamental features of the visual identity of a business. Business logos must be properly designed and attractive to improve the flow of business by catching the attention of your clients. Most of the business owners undervalue the importance of a business logo design and fail to have one designed for their business. It is however crucial to note that all of the distinguished international businesses have a logo that consumers recognize upon first glimpse. This fact emphasizes on the significance of business logo design.

Logo in relation with Marketing and Advertising

Business logos are used as groundwork for the marketing and advertising struct
ure of a business in the industry. Without an identifiable face for the company it is not easy to advertise a business to prospective clients. Business logos serve as this face. Consumer recognition is one of the most important segments in advertising a product and a unique logo design serves this purpose.

Stationery and Business Cards

The business logo design is present on every piece of internal and outgoing marketing material for a business. The business cards, stationery, letterhead, brochures and mailing supplies are all colored with the emblem of the business. It performs as an advertising tool on stationery and a non-marketing based source for marketing.

Corporate Identity and Brand Recognition

Business logos are also a fundamental element of the corporate identity and brand recognition of a business. Once the logo has been demonstrated it can be utilized to put together the general identity of the business.

The addition of a character presenting the company and a tagline create a well-built corporate identity that will represent the business in the more across-the-board marketplace.

As with an advertisement logo, the corporate logo design should be serviceable on a variety of forms of print, media and internet canvases. It should be as clear and understandable in black and white as it is in color, and should not lose resolution when regarded in different computer programs. The extra components should be evaluated and trialed prior to the design is finalized to guarantee the quality of the design. The corporate logo design should develop upon the basic logo of that company.

The Importance of a Logo and Marketing Materials

The initial lack of customers and cash flow often causes new small business owners to put off designing a logo and marketing materials professionally "until they get a few clients" or "until they get started." Unfortunately, designing their own marketing materials when they launch their businesses instead of having them professionally created will make getting those initial clients more difficult and may result in a business that will not succeed.

Many entrepreneurs choose to design their own marketing materials when they launch their businesses, especially by creating their first business card. Or sometimes they will have an amateur designer, friend, or relative create the design.

Your business will not look established. It will appear to be more likely to fold or to fail. Clients will not have confidence in doing business with you. Would you do business with someone who seems to be on unstable footing and who might not be in business by the end of your project or after you have purchased an item?

You will look like a very small business. Large, successful businesses would never consider doing business without professional, originally designed marketing materials. Using materials that are not professionally designed makes, your business appear even smaller and can possibly indicate that you cannot perform to or meet the standards required

You will look unpolished and rough. Not having a professional "look and feel" can make it appear as though your business does not matter to you. Customers may get the impression that you do not care about the way your business presents itself, which might indicate that you would not care about the quality of your work or the way that your work reflects upon their business.

Template Logos and Business Cards You will look unfocused. Templates or uncoordinated logo will make your business look generic or nonspecific that doesn’t last long. This creates a confused and forgettable look and feel for your business. This can also cause an identity crisis for a small business.

About half of all businesses fail within their first few years. One source of failure that is commonly cited by experts is sloppy or ineffective visual identity. If your logo do not stand out from those of your competitors, your sales will suffer.

When you start a business, you need to create the quickest possible route to business success. A logo helps to create this by contributing to your business's visibility, credibility, and memorability -- three factors that will help your business to grow and achieve success. So, while putting off your logo development may seem like a prudent idea from a cash-flow point of view, it could result in your business never getting off the ground. It can also lead to your business folding when it would otherwise succeed.

If you think that you can't afford to design a logo when starting your business, consider the outcomes -- how can you afford not to?

Branding

Branding is bigger than just a logo. The brand is the company's promise. The process of branding is built over time by the company supporting its Brand Strategy in everything it does.

Think about it like you think about yourself as a person. Your personal "brand" is all that makes up the uniqueness of YOU. It is not just your clothes (your logo, colors, imagery, fonts), which can change with the styles of the decade. It is your character or personality (your brand traits) and the core of who you are (your promise). Your logo, your "look-and-feel," and other such branding elements are important to reflecting your "brand" to the world, but they are not the brand itself.

To successfully build a brand, all employees must work together as ambassadors of the brand-this means being consistent in how they present the brand to each other, as well as to customers and partners. By representing your organization in a consistent and meaningful way, you establish a promise and an expectation of your products and services in the marketplace that helps build awareness, loyalty, and equity.

Understanding this concept BEFORE you spend money on marketing activities is imperative to your success. The key to building a strong brand is:

Starting with a strong strategy

A solid Brand Strategy defines your company identity and provides mechanisms for enhancing and measuring the impact of that identity on your market, customers, partners, and employees. Your Brand Strategy should include:

Defining and documenting the brand position and promise

Arriving at brand traits and values

Creating your brand story

Designing your brand elements such as a logo, letterhead, business cards, and other corporate identity materials

Outlining your brand plan, summarizing how all the defined elements will be used and strengthened through your interactions with customers and employees

Web Design

2008-02-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

So:

What to know about designing web site

The Web is a visual medium.

An effectively designed Web site must wow, tease, and compel your audience to step in and explore what you have to offer.

Once inside, they must be informed, entertained and convinced of your products or services.

The design must allow them to travel from page to page with the greatest of ease. More importantly, your site must enroll them that coming back will be beneficial and rewarding as well.

These are the rules that I play by;

Rule 1: The Web is About Content.

My goal in designing your Web site is primarily to convey information. Whether your business deals with fishing, web hosting, online calendar or Java scripts, your Web site must be clear in conveying what you have to say or offer. This entails having content that is useful to your visitors, and ensuring that your visitors can find the information you have to offer.

a. Visitors must know what your site contains. Content should clearly come up on every single page. Remember, first time visitors of your web site do not know what you have in store for them. It is important to bring up content to your front page - to let visitors know what they can find from your site. Do not make them plow through four levels of buttons to discover on the fifth page that your site contains links and resources pages. They may not have the patience to discover information that might be essential to them and could pull them back to your site repeatedly.

b. Provide quality and relevant content. Use quality content relevant to your business. Be original as much as possible, although it is also good to have content from contributing authors who wish to promote their works at your web site. This count on your popularity and can generate more visitors while you also help giving traffic to the web site of your contributors. Remember, in the Internet, "No Man is an Island;" it is "Live and Let Live."

Rule 2: The Web is About Skim and Surf

People will only read what catches their attention. You are kidding yourself if you think that your visitors will read every single word on your Web site. Here is the reality: nobody reads everything on the Web. Either people are too busy or they simply have limited attention span. Some studies show that it only takes nine seconds for a visitor to click away from your site. When they come across a Web site, they want to get something - and fast! If you do not give them something quickly, they absorb nothing. They don't really care about your groovy images. They visit a site to get something out of it. If they don't find what they want in an instant (even though you swear that the information is there buried 10 layers below your front page), they are gone! Many interactive Web designers still deny this cardinal truth.

a. Guide your visitors well. Navigation bars are a must-have of every Web site. The nav bars serves as a "guide" or "direction tool" for your visitors, helping them finds your content easily. In addition to nav bars, other sites place drop-down menus for more specific listing of the topics and a site map. These tools are meant to help your visitors find the information they need from your site. Use these tools to organize your site in a clear and simple way.

The story changes, however, when you have 300 pages or more. Navigation then becomes a challenge. You simply cannot put a button in your front page for each of your 300 pages. In this case, you will have to make some editorial decisions as to the hierarchies of information. Your goal in designing your main page will be to balance the fact that your site is not easy to digest (your site oozes with tons of useful information) but which looks appealing enough to begin.

One word of caution: never assume that your navigation structure is clear to your users. What for you may be an organized way of arranging information and content, may appear as a maze to some users. Pre-testing your site is crucial to give you some objective feedback needed to further improve your Web site.

b. Don't make your visitors wait. Fast loading web pages should be the goal of every web site creator. Usually, too much graphics can hamper the downloading speed of your site. If you can avoid it, try to limit the use of graphics, especially in your front page. As @Home's Richard Gingras said, "the only acceptable delay is no delay." People will not wait 3 minutes for your flash pages to load - no matter how cool it is. Make people wait, and say goodbye to them forever.

c. Make your pages concise and short. Web visitors love to surf, but hate to scroll. Keep your paragraphs and web pages shorter. Most people do not have the patience to scroll all the way dowwnnnn. Avoid punishing your visitors with information overload. The less work you make them do, the greater the chances they will come back to you often. Shorter pages break-up the content into easier bite-size pieces.

Rule 3: The Web is about Contrast.

The Web is a novel visual medium, but it does not mean that it changes the tried-and-tested rules of design. Different colors elicit different reactions from people, a fact that Web creators should understand.

a. Make your pages easy on the eyes. Catching your visitor's attention does not mean using all the colors of the rainbow. The rule in design is to use colors with the highest contrast from each other. Understand the elements of design. Avoid the trap of "design before legibility." Study your color combinations and try to avoid funny mixing up of colors. Can you imagine your reaction to a site using red text on a dark blue background? Or, bright green text on a bright yellow background? Not only is it difficult on the eyes, but it also doesn't make sense to struggle reading something that is simply not readable.

b. Your pages must look cohesive and readable. Web pages are pulled together by one or two elements. No need to run amuck with every available font invented. Using two kinds of fonts is ideal. Like colors, you can develop contrast by using the thin and bold combination of your fonts. Also, do not use one set of colors and fonts in one page, and use a totally different set in another page. You will lose the continuity and look of your site, leaving your visitors feeling lost and confused.

c. Big is better. What use is your highbrow content if your fonts are microscopic? Reading text on a computer screen is hard in itself; do not compound the problem by using tiny letters. Leave space between the lines, make your lines short, and do not use typefaces that are hard to read. If you want your content to be read, make it easy to read.

If you are curious to see more of my work, please visit my site: www.geldesigns.net

Thank you and see you tomorrow

Gel Smith

(484) 351-8267

Geldesigns Group

A Realistic Search Engine Marketing Results Time Frame

2007-04-27T05:56:00.000-07:00

BtoBOnline Search Engine Strategy Q&A with Aaron Kahlow, Managing Partner of BusinessOnLineQuestion

How long should it take a vendor to implement an SEM strategy and start seeing results?

Answer
A sound search engine marketing strategy will incorporate one or both of the following approaches: organic search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC). Each activity has a different time line for implementation and results.

Usually, b-to-b companies' most visible results from SEM will be an increase in qualified traffic. Leads and sales are a secondary result of the increase in the right type of traffic. Here's a breakdown of what to expect:

Organic SEO - To provide the maximum value from your SEO efforts, your vendor should have a short-term and long-term SEO strategy.

Short-term - Immediately, your SEO vendor should analyze your site to identify and implement a short-term strategy that addresses sitewide issues affecting search rankings, such as server settings, URL structures and the information architecture. These few adjustments will open your site to indexing and better results on the search engines. This process should take no longer than one month to strategize, execute and begin seeing increased traffic as a result.

Long-term - A long-term SEO strategy is a minimum standard for b-to-b companies, and you'll benefit for years to come with minimal maintenance. When creating a strategy, your vendor should identify on-page factors (such as title tags and Web content) and off-page factors (such as link strategy) that make your site search friendly for specific keyword phrases. Developing and implementing this long-term strategy can take between three and six months. Err on the high side if your site needs to be completely redesigned. If your site provides a solid foundation for visitors but needs to be optimized for the search engines, then plan on three months as a realistic implementation time frame. You can expect to start seeing results from a long-term SEO strategy as quickly as two weeks after implementation and definitely within two months.

Pay-per-click-Your PPC strategy is an activity that will send traffic to your site the moment you start spending money. In two weeks to one month, you can expect your vendor to have an initial PPC strategy developed and ready for implementation. You will see increased traffic almost immediately. Remember though, overall results and ROI will vary depending on the cost you pay every time a visitor clicks on your advertisement.

Aaron Kahlow is the Managing Partner of BusinessOnLine (www.businessol.com), a provider of Internet marketing and search engine marketing services.

Welcome to Web & Graphic Design Made Easy

2007-02-22T08:26:00.000-08:00

My name is Gel Smith
I am a Web & Graphic Designer and here are some tips and easy explanations of terms used in my field.

Enjoy and ask me, ask me, ask me ....

Flash ... what is that?
Macromedia Flash is an application for developing rich content, user interfaces, and web applications.
Did you know?
Web users must download and install the player in order to view and interact with Macromedia Flash content. The Macromedia Flash Player is installed on 97% of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide and on a wide range of popular devices. Macromedia Flash supports a broad range of platforms and browsers, including new browsers such as Safari 1.x.

Page width ... what is that?
Most people using the Internet these days use a screen resolution of 1024x768, but there are still a significant number of people using 800x600. You'll have to be the judge of your own customers,
Did you know?
It may be wise to keep your design within the width of 775 pixels. This guarantees that nearly everyone will see your order form clearly. Using widths of 100% will work, but will produce elongated forms for shoppers with resolutions higher than 1024x768.

Description tag ... what is that?

The Description Meta tag defines the site information most search engines will display when they list the site on their search results pages. The tag should provide a concise and enticing introduction to the site's contents. The description should include as many site keywords as possible, but the main purpose of the Description Meta content is to convince search engine users to click through from the search results pages and take a look inside. Generally, the Description Meta tag content should not exceed 250 characters, including spaces.

Did you know?
Description Meta tag has lost much of its former prominence as several search engines have replaced the Description Meta content with snippets of body text on their search results pages.