In many ways, New York City’s Tavern on the Green is a marketing success story. It is one of the most recognized brand names in the United States; at one time the name alone was valued at $19 million. When you think of an upscale eatery in the Big Apple, this name probably comes to mind. However, it is also an abysmal failure. Due to bad management combined with market conditions, the actual Tavern on the Green restaurant went bankrupt a few years ago.

The family run restaurant was in debt to the tune of $8 million. This means that the company could have simply sold the name, paid the debt and been left with a sizeable profit. However, the story did not end that way. Instead, the Le Roy family, which owned the restaurant, was dragged into a lawsuit with the City of New York, which claims some kind of ownership of the name. In fact, through some legal maneuverings that are beyond my understanding of the law, New York City ended up with the rights to the name. This lawsuit tarnished the image so much that the City was only able to sell the name for a little more than one million dollars, although this does not include the rights to use the name inside New York City. The city is retaining those rights.

The speculation is already high: will the name be used for a chain of restaurants? Perhaps a line of food, or a cookbook, or even a grocery store? The license to use the name included a stipulation that a set percentage of sales must be donated to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which means that there will at least be some social value to the sale.

Most people in the business world feel that the licensees, Tavern International, got a good deal despite the stipulations and will make a handsome profits. The Tavern on the Green brand is possibly the most recognizable upscale, non-chain restaurant name. Hundreds of thousands of tourists spent a good portion of their monthly paycheck just to have lunch in the iconic restaurant. These same people will be highly likely to buy a product bearing the name and logo design, even if it costs a bit more than the customer is used to spending.

Restaurant logo designs and names can be much more valuable than even the restaurants themselves. Consider, for instance, the Spago and California Pizza Kitchen lines of frozen pizza. You can get hot, high quality pizza for the same price or less, but consumers are paying for the name of a restaurant that they will probably never experience in person. The same goes for Lawry’s. They are the standard for seasoned salt, and most consumers no longer associate the name with the restaurant that began the brand.

The Tavern on the Green restaurant is being developed in New York City, this time to be city-owned and run. Interestingly, the related line of products will probably hit the market long before the actual restaurant sees its second opening night.

It is very important for designers of any kind to have a professional website — especially if their field of design is one like home remodeling, in which people will be spending a lot of money and living with the resulting product for a long time. Not only should this website have a portfolio showing some of their best work, the website itself should be a reflection of the business’s style and standards of quality. Graystone meets all of these criteria.

Website Reviewed: Graystone Inc.

Website Address: http://graystone-inc.com/

The website is aesthetically beautiful and filled with photos of finished products that are just as beautiful. However, one of the really remarkable aspects of this CSS website is the way the logo has been worked into the website design.

The Graystone logo is attractive and professionally crafted, showing a modern and sophisticated yet simple style. The name of the company is written in rounded upper case letters with a few gentle curves for accents. A similar font is used throughout the website. In addition, the home logo has overlapping shapes that are rounded squares. These overlap and tie into the transparency motif that is very stylish in logo design right now. In places where bullets are used, these are the same rounded squares in the same colors as the logo. In addition, the colors from the logo are used throughout the website as well.

This website builds a powerful brand from the moment the landing page opens due to these and other elements. In addition, the types of projects that the company handles are listed and a beautiful portfolio shoes examples of their work. There are ample social aspects, such as tips on maintaining homes, and generally a well-rounded amount of information placed in this well-designed website.

Creativity: 5 stars. We have already gushed about the way the website ties into the logo, but the importance of this element cannot be emphasized enough. This is why it is often a good idea to have your website designed by the same company that creates your logo: they understand your brand intimately.

Ease of use: 4 stars. The website is well-organized and easy to look through. However, there was one confusing thing: under Services, we expected to find a list of services offered and perhaps even a price range. Instead, there is a huge block of text covering everything from the services offered to routine maintenance. It’s just too much information, and too much non-service-related information at that.

Functionality:  4 stars. There are social media links and a variety of ways to contact the company. However, the social networking links are only present on the home page—not even on the Contact page! This must be an oversight.

Content: 5 stars. The content is upbeat, positive, and at times humorous. It is very relevant to the brand.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is very appropriate for its audience. We enjoyed poring over the photos; someone planning a remodel is sure to enjoy it even more.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Military logos are different in each part of the world. Some are very ornate while others are quite simple. One thing they all have in common, though, is their representation of their country or organization. Each logo has a multitude of symbols that characterize the kind of people who use them. For a logo to be effective, it must fulfill this purpose. If it fails to properly represent the country or organization that uses it, then it fails as a logo. A military logo also stands as a rallying or unifying symbol.

All around the world, one vital part of every government is their military. They stand as the country’s defense against war and other threats. A military’s logo is a source of pride and marks them as their country’s protectors. Here are some of military logos some countries use and how their symbols represent the soldiers themselves or the people they are protecting:

Construction is a pretty straightforward industry, and the construction logos for companies in this field seem to follow suit. However, occasionally we see a construction logo that is creative and catchy, showing evidence of serious “outside the box” thinking. The following ten logos are great examples of using creativity and style to represent a rather concrete profession.

Most of us have visited t-shirt shops both on and off the internet, some of us quite frequently. A new t-shirt website is generally nothing to write about. However, Loviu is offering not just another t-shirt shop, but an interactive experience that will appeal to many art and casual wear lovers.

Website Reviewed: Loviu

Website URL: http://www.loviu.com/shop/

CSS website design allows sites to have some really cool bells and whistles without interfering with SEO or loading speed. The Loviu website shows off some of these features. The home page features thumbnails of the more popular designs, which pop out when you move your mouse over them. The website is interactive would-be artists can submit their own designs and have website visitors vote on them and even buy them, making Loviu a potential source of income for freelancers.

The website also offers a blog, a forum, and multiple opportunities to like them on Facebook. They clearly are trying to build more than a t-shirt store, but rather a place where t-shirt artists and t-shirt wearers can interact. This is a novel business scheme, and one that we hope succeeds.

There is ample visual stimulation thanks to all of the t-shirt designs, which is why the very simple design seen here is the only right choice. While color and unusual fonts are used to call attention to certain elements, they are used very sparingly. Even the logo design is simple: the name of the company in a modern lower case script. The overall result is a feeling of minimalism without getting austere or boring. In this case, while building a brand is important, overly complicated visual elements would detract from the t-shirt designs and reduce sales.

Creativity: 5 stars. The design is very creative, which is difficult to accomplish while maintaining the necessary simplicity. Black and white are the main colors, but little details such as paint dripping from the log-in boxes, add interest and artistry.

Ease of use: 5 stars. This website has a somewhat complicated model, but it is explained well. Visitors are walked through the process of submitting, voting, and ordering the shirt designs. Buying, voting, and submitting are each given their own header on the navigation bar, so you can easily find the function you need.

Functionality:  5 stars. As we mentioned before, you can ‘like’ the brand on Facebook, subscribe to the blog, or talk to other visitors on the forum. This is clearly a business that is trying to build their brand and their fan base.

Content: 3 stars. Because the business is active throughout Europe, there are an astounding nine languages to choose from. However, there are minor errors in the English version. They are minor indeed, but they detract from the overall shopping and browsing experience.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. The brand is youthful and stylish, like most of the designs. Loviu has obviously taken the necessary steps of identifying their key audience and creating a brand that will appeal to them.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Luxury brands are desired by everyone, even those who can’t afford them. This is because what they’re actually selling is a dream, an ambition of owning something that only an elite few can have. Most people fantasize about riding the world’s fastest sports car, wearing that 20-carat diamond ring, or savoring the taste of gracefully aged world-class wine. This just shows that through emotional attachment, luxury brand logos are able to capture the attention of all markets whether it’s A, B, C, D even when their actual target are the upscale ones. Here are the top luxury brand logos that have been capturing the public’s heart for years. Click here to see another top list that we wrote about before.

1. Chanel

Chanel is the first brand that comes to mind when we talk about luxury fashion brands. Part of this can be attributed to the simple yet powerful logo designed by Coco Chanel herself in 1925. The two interlocking C’s have a round structure and are joined in a way that is similar to how jewelry chains are linked together. This hints at the brand’s inclusiveness and exclusivity. Today, Chanel’s double C logo represents elegance, luxury, and class.

2. Swarovski

The Swarovski swan logo is so powerful that people don’t know that the brand changed logos twice. The first was an edelweiss flower, which was then changed to an S.A.L. logo. The latter was replaced by the graceful and elegant swan logo only in 1988. The pixilation at the swan tail-end represents light refraction by a crystal. The dark blue background is suggestive of water, which is another clear substance.

3. Hermes

This world-famous luxury brand started as a leather goods store, hence the duc carriage logo. The font used has no round edges at all and is extremely square. This helps connote the image of being serious and straightforward, which is suitable for a leather goods store. The Hermes logo exudes antique excellence and represents heritage.

4. Van Cleef & Arpels

This French luxury brand is renowned for its high-quality goods ranging from perfumes to watches and jewelry. The logo consists of a large diamond that refers both to the brand’s luxury status as well as to their strikingly elegant jewelry. The brand’s initials, VCA, are prominently displayed along with a pole that was traditionally used to denote French shops. This original logo has never been changed and has been in use for almost a century already, so it contains many references to the company’s history.

5. Givenchy

Like the Hermes logo, Givenchy’s logo doesn’t make use of rounded edges in order to give it a straightforward and serious image. Four G’s are arranged in such a way as to make the logo look like a big square with small spirals within it, connoting spinning and movement. The logo implies that while the brand is already established, it is continuously changing to launch new trends.

6. Versace

Unlike other luxury fashion brand logos, Versace’s logo is illustrative. It makes use of an image of Medusa, a character from Greek mythology who turned anyone who looks into her eyes into stone. According to Gianni Versace, Medusa’s image is very appropriate for his brand because she is the embodiment of fatal attraction. It is able to project the image of being glamorous, sultry, seductive, and sensuous, which are characteristic of the brand’s clothes.

7. Louis Vuitton

Everyone is familiar with Louis Vuitton’s monogrammed bags, luggage, and fashion accessories. The initials L and V are layered over each other in order to give the logo a distinctive and easily recognizable structure. They are in a very heavy serif typeface to imply significance and boldness, while the whole company found below the initials are in small unassuming writing. What makes Louis Vuitton’s logo attractive is this contradiction of humility and substance.

8. Dom Perignon

This champagne is very popular among the elite and is envied by those who cannot afford to spend several hundred dollars on one bottle. The company’s logo is very simple with the name printed in a large cursive script that is softened by rounded edges. It appears as if it were handwritten to give it a more personal touch. The logo also features a small golden shield, which represents tradition and wealth.

9. Christian Louboutin

Like many luxury brand logos that takes advantage of contradictions, the Christian Louboutin logo melds together opposites – a serious newspaper-like font and a flashy handwritten one. The L in Louboutin is wittily curved in such a way so that it would also form the C in Christian at the same time. The wave like structure of the logo evokes a feeling of movement, which represents innovation that is key to consumers coming back over and over again for the newest shoe styles.

10. Mercedes-Benz

The three-point star of the Mercedes-Benz logo was created in 1909 by Gottlieb Daimler to represent the brand’s dominance in land, air, and water transportation. To place a better emphasis on the star, a silver circle was placed around it. What the logo basically says is that wherever you find yourself in, the only vehicle to trust is a Mercedes-Benz.

With the millions of websites on the Internet today, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Any company that wishes to be exposed needs to have their very own website, and not just any website. It has to be creative and unique if it’s going to catch the attention of clients and the consumers. It also needs to represent the business and their brand well. That is why, companies spend a lot of time, effort and money into designing their own websites.

Here is a list of 8 websites that are innovative, creative and easy to navigate. From personal blogs to professional websites, they all breath a breathe of fresh air into the mundane and ordinary Internet landscape.

http://luciasoto.es/

Lucia is a graphic designer and photographer who made a cute and fresh site to showcase her work. It’s a simple site that scrolls left and right with a few images of a cartoon version of Lucia. The site is great because the colors are relaxing to the eyes and the curves on the background images maintain a smooth transition from one section to the next. It’s a far cry from most personal sites that have a lot of graphics and a cluttered layout.

http://www.keystone-logistics.com/

Keystone Logistics is a company that specializes in chartering, forwarding of cargo and other transportation services. The background seems to be a satellite image of roads and ships. It’s also very interactive, leading you from one image to the next as if you are moving through the water and the streets. The background changes from step 1 through 6, showing the visitor the different operations of the company. This gives their customers an overview of what their company can offer and how they can help them with their transportation needs.

http://sylvaintoulouse.com/index.html

Sylvain Toulouse is a French graphic designer and art director. The website houses all his works. His portfolio is presented very neatly with each piece in a square area. They are arranged beside one another and are dimmed when the mouse isn’t hovering over it. It’s a clean and stylish way to present his work to potential clients. You can also toggle the language of the site from French to English with a click of a button.

http://www.head2heart.us/

Head to Heart is a charitable website supporting the Gifts of Water and Street Grace causes. Again, you can scroll from left to right with navigational buttons on the bottom of the screen. All the information you would need about the website and the charities are all displayed. The website references a map to help the visitor go through all the sections of the website and learn all they need to about the various charities. The images are textured and look a lot like scrapbooks and collages.

http://www.toucouleur.fr/

Toucouleur is a website that houses the portfolio of a French design company. Its most stunning feature is its amazing header image. The website itself is also very textured and uses earth tones to make it more appealing to the eye. Below the header is a textured layout using earth tones. There are elements of a traveler’s notebook that make the site more accessible to its visitors.

http://www.ernesthemingwaycollection.com/

The Ernest Hemingway Collection website is the official home of the products inspired by the American writer. The site imitates what could have been the desk of the prolific novelist with a cup of coffee and some photos. The background is a rich wood photo that many desks have and lends to the overall aesthetic. You get to experience what it must have been like to be Ernest Hemingway and be a part of his life.

http://saizenmedia.com/newsite/the-agency

Saizen Media is a company that creates and develops websites for various clients. Their own site is very dark and futuristic. The Saizen Media site has an almost graphic novel feel to it. It’s very masculine, something that can be said about their clients as well. They make use of glossy images that help create the graphic novel feel. They proudly display their various works and clients by redirecting you to their websites.

http://barntarnst.com/

Bärnt & Ärnst is another design company that specializes in Photography, Social Media Marketing, Web Videos, etc. Their site is very minimalist, opting to use simple images as placeholders for their pages. A camera is used to redirect to their photography portfolio and a bird and book for a twitter application, for example. They use pastels and simple art to create a cool effect. They also have an interactive page where you can draw your own images.

One of the most important components of a branding campaign is an excellent logo. As most of you would notice, majority of dental logos look strikingly similar and create little differentiation from one dental practice to another.

A dentistry good logo is one that takes design one step further. Instead of making an eye-candy, a well-designed logo is one that was created with a unique perspective and intelligence to see thing differently from the rest.

The following dentistry logos below will provide you with a good dose of inspiration so you’d inject a little more creativity into the logo design process. They will definitely make you smile in awe at the brilliance of the execution of the idea that it presents several layers of meanings to consumers. Some of the logos below are astonishing in their conspicuousness while others shine in their hidden secrets comparable to the likes of Colgate Palmolive.

These days, the best logos are those that immediately grab the attention of viewers and then subtly work to express their business nature and ethos. As you can see, most of the examples above are not all bells and whistles. Simplicity is often the key to a successful logo design that will enhance the persona of a brand.

Often, designing a logo is like putting the pieces of a jigsaw design puzzle together. The client would come to you with a box in their hands. Rarely, the box would have a picture on the lid and you right away know what the client is looking for and what they need.

Most of the times, though, there is no picture on the lid and you open the box to find a bunch of puzzle pieces. It is the logo designer’s job to sift through the puzzle pieces, research, investigate and then put the pieces together to create a coherent and meaningful logo design that not only looks great, pleases the client but more importantly connects with the client’s target audience and broadcasts the right message.

Of all the design disciplines, logo design is one of the toughest. One hardly recognizes this fact mainly due to heavy commoditizing of the logo design industry. I agree we are also guilty of doing that to an extent. Once upon a time, designing a logo was an art form. It went beyond graphics and visuals. But with the advent of online logo services and the ease of launching a logo design business by any one from anywhere on the planet, designing a logo has become a cheap and sordid affair, to put it mildly.

Having said that, there are still companies and designers out there today, amidst all this chaos of flea market of logo design websites, who continually strive to approach logo designing as an art form. They are the designers who try and figure out what all the pieces in the box mean and how they all fit together. Check out some of these logo tutorials at Tripwire Magazine and you will see how designers share their knowledge.

The most basic and important pieces of the puzzle are:

Company – Research into the company history or if it is a startup, get to know the company philosophy and core values. This information can come from the client, the company website etc. Understanding the company in isolation and in context of our it’s competitors is very important.

Market Segment – Research into the market segment that the company caters to is quite vital to the development of a great logo. This includes general design trends and how companies are branding themselves.

Target Audience – An in-depth look into the target is very critical to the success of the logo being developed. The demographics and sensibilities of the target audience would help you understand the tone and sentiment of the design that is required.

Competitors – It would pay to take a look at the competition in terms of how they are crafting their brand strategies, what they are trying to communicate and how they are being perceived.

The process starts with this investigative work and as the pieces fall into place, the designer could then construct a mind-map (I will talk more about this in an upcoming post). Having a bird’s eye view of the landscape before digging into the actual design or before firing up Adobe Illustrator would pay large dividends during the brainstorming phase.

Of course this process relates to the designer that cares about their clients and the effect their logo design would have on their company’s image and bottom line and get paid enough to make this happen. These days, you often find designers throwing together recycled designs or worse yet, plagiarizing other logos in an effort to work on a volume rather than quality to make ends meet. To be honest, you can not blame such designers entirely since clients encourage the “cheapest” kind of offerings that leads to the deterioration of the market sector.

We are in an age now where almost everything can be done on the Internet. The World Wide Web can provide convenience to those who don’t want to leave their homes to run errands. Because of this, the emergence of ecommerce began. Now, people can simply buy goods online and have them delivered to their doorstep. Everything from food, clothes to electronics can be bought and sold online.

With so many businesses offering ecommerce to increase clientele, it’s important to have a website that would entice shoppers. Here are some key features that an online store should have if they want to be successful and have a lot of customers coming back for more.

Start with a Clean Homepage

The homepage is very important because this is the first impression the buyer would have of the ecommerce site. With one look, the customer should be able to know what this site is selling without having to browse through the catalogues. Make sure that each page can be accessed from the homepage and have the interface be as user-friendly as possible.

http://www.everythingbutwater.com/

Everything But Water has a great homepage that leaves no doubt about what their product is. Even the color scheme alludes to the water. It has clean lines and large, readable font that would help customers navigate the different pages.

Clear and Visible Shopping Cart

The online shopping cart functions just like its real-life counterpart. This feature allows shoppers to view their items and even get a sub-total of their purchases. The shopping cart is very important since customers want to keep track of their purchases and ensure that the item they want was registered. Make sure to have the shopping cart visible at all times and updated with the latest purchases. This would give your customer piece of mind and a more organized shopping experience.

Here are some features to add to your shopping cart:

• Verify Page. Always add a verify page whenever the shopper adds something to their cart. This would help the customer prevent mistakes in ordering items.
• Table-Based Layout. The table should show the item, its price and the quantity to be bought. A short description of the product would also be helpful.
• Get FAQs Straight. Some helpful links should also be visible on the shopping cart’s page. Questions about shipping, payment and returns can be answered here.

Display Product Features

In order for the customer to buy an item, he or she should know every little thing about it. Since they can only rely on their sense of sight when ordering a product, be generous with descriptions, photos and specifications. Have photographs of the item from different angles and display whether they could get the same item in a different size or color. It would also help to have a preview function on the products page for faster navigation. Availability of each product should also be updated often and displayed.

www.asos.com

Asos provides its customers with different photos of their product from its details to what it can be paired with. Also, it has a page where visitors can create their own looks and find inspiration from other people’s style.

Optimize Search Functions

Customers love a good search box. This saves them the trouble of combing through hundreds of product pages. One thing that can be done to optimize the search field is to add an auto-complete function. This would not only make searches quicker, it can also suggest other results that the buyer wasn’t thinking of. This way, they get the most out of their shopping experience.

Be Original

Aside from technical aspects of an ecommerce website, the aesthetic impact would go a long way to entice customers. If they enjoy looking at the products and features on the site, then the bigger the possibility that they would come back again and again. No shopper would like shopping on a poorly made and generic website.

It’s also vital to mirror the brand’s image in the website’s image. An online clothing store should embody the vibe of the clothes it is selling. The aesthetic of a hip teens’ online clothing store should be different from an online grocery ecommerce website.

http://www.eastbay.com/

East Bay sells athletic clothes and gear. Their website is very masculine and has a lot of bold details. This would attract a lot of teen males, the site’s target demographic. Though they do sell women’s clothing, the main design is focused more for the male audience. It also has a fresh, urban feel which can also be said to be attractive for athletes.

A good logo can differentiate a company or product from the millions of others out there today. A great logo, though, can make people pay thousands of dollars just to have them on their car, handbag, sunglasses or coat. Such logos represent the epitome of luxury and can give anyone high-class status.

But what makes a luxury brand logo so effective? Surely, a hefty price tag isn’t the only thing that makes a logo sought after. In its core, a logo is used to represent the company that owns it. It should generate brand-recall as soon as the customer’s eyes land on it. With the assurance of quality, these premium brands make their products wanted by placing a mark to indicate that a certain product is at the top of its class. Some brands even refuse to enter a market to ensure their brands do not dilute.

In an effort to find out what makes a premium brand logo different from the rest, let’s take a look at some main similarities found in most well known brand logos. Reference: Jacob Madison Branding.

Simplicity Is Key

Most premium brands stick with the basics when it comes to their logos. They don’t overdesign in fear of losing the brand’s name within all the decoration. A minimalist approach to logos is the aesthetic of choice for these brands. This helps emphasize the name of the brand and eliminates unnecessary distractions from it. Doing this makes their logos recognizable from an adequate distance away.

• Short Names. The brand names themselves are quite short. This makes it easy to create a logo around the name and maintain a manageable size. If the name of the company is too long, chances are it would be typed in a smaller font within the logo. This makes it harder to read. For brands like Prada, Chanel and Dior a shorter name makes for a simpler logo. In the case for brands with a longer name, abbreviations are used to condense their names and make it more viable to use in their logo: LV for Louis Vuitton, RR for Rolls Royce and CK for Calvin Klein. Of course you have to be careful not to make it too generic.

• No Fancy Decoration. A lot of premium brand logos also steer clear from fancy decorations. Most of them only use their names or their initials. As mush as possible, they do not make use of borders or trimmings. They also capitalize on using contrast to further enhance the readability of their logo. This is the reason why a lot of premium brands only have black and white logos. Some brands play with color to create brand recognition. Tiffany and Co. use their signature Tiffany blue color as the background for their logo.

• Crisp, Clear Font. For the logos that have only their brand’s name on display, they make sure that the letters are all legible by utilizing crisp lines and utilitarian font. Curvy and ostentatious fonts are rarely used, even if these are associated with luxury and royalty. It’s because they are harder to read and would distract from the name of the brand. The more minimalistic the font, the better for these premium brand logos.

• Minimal Images. A lot of premium logos also use minimal images, if any. One central image should enough to convey their brand. Lacoste uses its ever-popular crocodile while BMW uses a simple circle with blue and white panels. Sometimes, the image itself can stand alone without the name.

Has a Strong Connection with Their Product

It’s also important for logos to give a taste of what the brand is promising. This also helps the consumer to associate a certain characteristic, like speed or royalty, with the brand.

• Luxury Car Brands. A lot of luxury cars make use of their logos as hood ornaments to proclaim that this automobile is made by a specific brand. The instantly recognizable Jaguar on the hood of a car can symbolize speed, something the Jaguar cars promise to its owners. The Ferrari’s horse alludes to an engine’s horsepower, the amount of power an engine can sustain. For cars, speed and power are their most desirable traits. That is why these are often what the logos wish to portray to the customer.

• Incorporating Logos into Design. It also helps that most luxury fashion labels incorporate their brand into the design of their products, thus making the logo more sought after. Louis Vuitton and Fendi both use their Initials as the inspiration in many of their luxury bags. Customers know that as long as there is the LV or double F on their bags that they have a high-end product in their hands.

A logo for a charity or non-profit organization works similarly to logos for corporations or businesses. They identify the welfare or charity and try to communicate their principles to the public. Designing a charity’s logo also has some similarities to creating a logo meant to entice customers. They both want to associate their brand with the work they do and hopefully differentiate themselves from other organizations.

Here are some questions a logo designer would need to answer in order to create an effective logo for a charity or non-profit organization:

Who is the Client?

All designers know that being familiar with a company’s identity is crucial to creating an effective logo. This information will help them shape the images used in the logo to properly represent the company or organization.

It’s the same in the case of creating a logo for a charity or non-profit organization. After all, the logo is the visual identity of the charity and so would represent them to the public, their benefactors and sponsors. Without knowing who the client is, the logo may not work well enough to embody them.

What are the Charity’s Goals?

A good question to ask is “what are the charity’s goals?” This will give you an idea about what the charity stands for and what their purpose is. The answer can also help you in determining which images to use in their logo. Knowing about the charity’s goals can also help you figure out how you can design the logo in such a way as to achieve those goals.

A good example for this is the logo for Habitat for Humanity. The organization’s goal is to provide communities with homes for those who need them. Their logo is quite simple. It depicts the roof of a house with people beneath it and the name of the organization beneath. This image easily conveys what the charity wants to do or provide for others. This helps the charity because future sponsors or volunteers would have a clear picture of what it is they can expect from the charity and how they can help.

Who are the target audience?

Like all logos, it’s vital to know who the audience is so that the design can be made relatable to them. Also, knowing the audience means knowing their perception of the charity. This would go a long way in brainstorming how the logo should look to convey the message the charity wants to convey.

A charity’s benefactors can be seen as their audience. This is because these are the people the organization wants to help. Animal charities, for example, usually have animals depicted in their logos. The World Wildlife Fund has a panda on their logo because it is an endangered animal. Supporters of WWF know that they are working towards preserving the wildlife and the environment. A lot of animal shelters use cats and dogs on their logos because these are the common pets that they want to provide care for.

What Message Would They Like to Convey?

The Non-profit logo itself can become the medium of expressing the message of the organization. Whether it’s safety or charity towards others, using the logo to express that message can be a valuable tool for any non-profit organization. It’s also important for the logo to create a non-threatening atmosphere. It should convey a calm and safe aura that mirrors how the charity would like its benefactors to feel.

Looking at UNICEF’s logo, their message can be clearly seen. They are an organization fighting for the rights of children across the globe. The mother and child image in the center clearly represents this. The olive branches are a symbol of peace while the globe represents all nations of the world. The logo also closely resembles the logo of the United Nations. This is fitting because UNICEF has been a part of the UN since 1954.

Where will the Logo be Seen?

This question should be asked for technical reasons. For logos that will be printed on merchandise, limiting the colors would be wise. This would make it easier to reproduce and would cost the charity less to print on T-shirts, mugs, keychains, etc. If the logo will be part of an international campaign, it would be best to use words or images that can survive translation. Looking at the UNICEF logo once again, the mother and child image can be understood by anyone around the world and the name of the organization can be instantly recognized as well.

Feminine Logos – There is no doubt that the female form is attractive to many. However, it can be a symbol as well—of motherhood, of femininity, of creation, of the home, and, of course, of sexuality. The following ten logo designs show how to use the image of a woman in a way that is effective without being racy or offensive.

Research shows that there are millions of users aged three to twelve who are already web proficient. However, designing websites for children is often left out in web design literature.

Designing a website for children is as interesting and challenging as designing a website for adults. The design elements and layouts needed in websites for children calls for a certain amount of creativity and imaginative play: the challenge is how to how to keep the users interested and stimulated. To be able to succeed at creating a website for children, here are web design practices that you have to learn.

Features of Websites for Children 

The best way to hold children’s attention is to create an environment that stimulates all their five senses. A great example of Disney Play House website at http://tv.disney.go.com/playhouse/mickeymouseclubhouse/index.html.

1. Bright colors. Go to a toy section and you’ll notice that it’s a world of bright colors. That’s the deal with children. Give them visual stimulation, and you’ll haul them for the long run. The same applies to Baby and Child Logos.
2. More pictures, less text. Unlike adults, kids don’t visit a website to read information. If you present them with long blocks of information, they will hardly stay in your website. However, they are readily attracted to pictures, so use less text and more pictures to deliver a message.
3. Animated characters. Children are fascinated by animated characters or mascots. Give them animated, speaking characters, and you’ll have their full attention. They are attracted to characters that are fuzzy, woozy, huggable, or cute, too, so think of this when creating one. For some design ideas, think Elmo or Barney.
4. Simple navigations. Kids will be viewing your site, not reading them. Make the navigation simple and easy so they don’t get confused. Do away with text-based links – stick to large buttons and graphics as much as possible. For design ideas, look up how Peppa Pig and Winnie the Pooh websites incorporated large icons and navigation bar into their website theme. Also, make sure all important items can be seen without scrolling down the screen – most kids don’t scroll to see what’s down there below, they just click on whatever appears before them.
5. Learning games. Kids don’t want to read – they want to play. Entertainment them with games that stimulate their minds. When kids are entertained, they are more likely to visit a site again and again. Activities that allow customizing of characters seem to click with kids, regardless of their age group. Provide activities that allow them to create their own characters, garden, house, etc., and they’d love staying in your site.
1. For kids ages 3-5, simple games like picture puzzles or matching shapes are suitable. Consider adding printable items like coloring or layouts for making puppets, paper dolls, or other crafts.
2. Kids age 6-8 need more mentally challenging games so crafts and coloring won’t do. Adventure games, guessing games, and the like are likely to keep them interested.
3. Kids age 9 – 12 prefer games that allow them to compete with others.
6. Music and sounds. Kids love music. This is why most TV shows and films for kids have singing and songs. Add song background to games to make play time more enjoyable. Kids also enjoy sound effects; you can put sound effects to navigation buttons and games.
7. Pre-loaders. Kids have little patience. How do you keep their attention when the website is loading a page? The trick is to add a pre-loader that will grab their attention and make them stay on the page as it loads.

More Techniques to Consider 

Now that you know the principles for creating an environment that is conducive to children, let’s walk through some more basics for creating an effective children’s website.

• Research the age range of the website’s target audience. This will guide you in determining the most appropriate topics, games, songs, and other content to include in the website.
• Create a happy environment by incorporating elements that elicit happy, positive feelings. Mickey Mouse’s happy face and buoyant personality, for instance, brings out the happy ambiance of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse website.
• Kids respond to elements they are familiar with, and most of the things they know are found in nature. Use elements such as trees, mountains, clouds. Club Penguin, for instance, has penguins, polar bears, and other elements found in the arctic.
• Make it feel real by adding depth to the design. Realistic atmosphere can be achieved using three-dimensional elements, Flash-animated landscapes, sound effects, floating objects, and more.

Designing a website for kids is fun. Learning what interests them will help you create a website that effectively engages these young Internet users.

It can be difficult to run a small business, so apps making this task a little easier are in high demand. This is exactly the service that FreshBooks is offering: a smartphone app that simplifies billing by integrating your mobile device into the process.

Does this app offer a solution or yet another piece of software that will be more of a problem? Many business owners will make this decision based on the marketing. A brand that places consumers at ease is one part of that package. A well-designed website that is easy to navigate is another part. Therefore, it is important that this CSS website be easy to use, have a clear sense of brand, and spell out exactly how it will make lives easier.

Website Reviewed: FreshBooks

Website URL: http://www.freshbooks.com/

The logo design is simple and ties into the name, with a fresh green leaf and a straightforward font that is professional and simple. The blue and green logo colors that dominate the website also give a feeling of calm. The landing page treats viewers to a branded experience that includes a tour of the software, recommendations from major business publications, and a list of reasons that FreshBooks is different. So far, so good.

However, the landing page is not the only positive feature. The website is well-organized throughout and makes it very easy to find information. There are a variety of ways to interact with the software and the company brand—a blog, phone numbers, a software tour, and even a free trial. Add-ons are suggested, making it clear that businesses can customize the product while also adding more revenue for the app company. This website does away with any objections and issues that an interested businessperson might have, and it does so in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Creativity: 4 stars. While there is nothing stunning or unexpected about this website, the mix of colors and fonts is professional and does a lot to build the brand without detracting from the websites usability.

Ease of use: 5 stars. There is a lot of information, but it is organized in a way that is intuitive and easy to browse. All parts of the website are accessible with just a click or two, which will make it easy for a busy businessperson to decide if the app is right for them.

Functionality:  3 stars. There is a blog featured at both the top and the bottom of every page. The phone number is front and center, making it easy to find as well. However, we could not find any social networking pages, which is an unfortunate admission. Many apps have their own Facebook or Twitter, so neglecting these areas can be a huge disadvantage for an otherwise viable business.

Content: 5 stars. The content is professional and well-written. In addition, there is a clear focus on the target audience.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. Every aspect of this website presents Freshbooks as an easy-to-use solution for the busy businessperson. This website will also be instrumental in building the brand.

Overall: 4.4 out of 5 stars

Approach to a successful logo: A logo is a design/emblem/trademark of a company. Brand, on the other hand, is an idea or image associated by consumers with a particular product or service. The two are highly interdependent concepts; each depends on the other for success. A brand must use a logo to create a lasting impression on their customers. If the logo design is poor, then it won’t achieve the intended effect. In the same vein, a smartly designed logo won’t create much of an impact if the brand it represents is not well-received.

To come up with a successful logo then, designers must approach from both the company and the customer’s perspectives. You have to create a logo that effectively captures the company’s identity. At the same time, it should connect to customers. Here are two basic steps every logo designer should take before designing a logo.

1. Know the company. No designer should start designing a logo without doing prior research. You need to know first your client’s marketing or branding strategy. The logo you create should be consistent with the rest of the brand. You should also know your client’s target market in order to create a logo that connects with company’s customer base. Learn their needs and wants, the color they respond to. This shouldn’t be involved too much work as most businesses have already researched the answers when they created their marketing strategy. The information you gather from your research will give shape and life to your logo. You will realize, too, that research will help a lot in the brainstorming and conceptualization process.
2. Pick a catchy name. If you are tasked with coming up with a brand name also, it would be a lot tougher than you can imagine; the challenge is it should be instantly recognizable. On the other hand, you can also have a lot of fun with it. A brand name can be based on religious belief (Canon), whimsical (Sony), or a simple word (Apple).  No matter your choice, the name should be recognizable and great sounding. It must carry enough weight.

A Logo That Stands Out 

A logo should be distinctive and therefore calls for strong imagination and attention to detail. But how do you make it stand out from the competition while enhancing your client’s brands. Here are some design basics to consider.

1. Choose the right typography. The size and style of typeface used in a logo says much what a business is about.  Find out what typefaces are commonly used in your client’s industry. A slanted typeface indicates movement and is suited for services that depend on speed (e.g. courier services). Formal companies such as educational institutions typically use Trojan Pro, while the fashion industry uses ITC Avant Garde Gothic. Again, make sure the typeface you choose is in line with your client’s goals.
2. Pick the right color. Shell’s original logo was an unattractive black and white. It was only when the company changed the logo color to red and yellow that it becomes more memorable. Starbuck’s original color was brown; it didn’t stand out from many other coffee brands that used the same color. Today, when you put the green Starbucks beside these brown logos, your eyes immediately go to the green brand. As with picking a typeface, there are no hard rules to stand by when it comes to picking the ideal color. You don’t even have to base it on the product, but find out what your client’s target consumer’s psychology, and you’ll get there.
3. Pick your logo layout. The layout of the various elements of your logo can have a dramatic effect on the way your audience would perceive the company. Usually you would go for common layouts such as vertical or horizontal but you may also have to explore other non-symmetric layouts that would involve integrating the various elements of the logo tightly.
4. Make sure it is scalable. You might think the logo is going to blow up to the whole side of a 15 X 30 feet billboard. However, you also have to consider that your client might be going to use in their letterhead, email, business card, and the likes. The logo should be clear and readable on a large scale and on a tiny scale. Speaking of readability, the secret, really, is to make the design simple yet bold. Customers should be able to distinguish it at a glance. That’s what makes Apple, McDonald’s, Toyota, Nike, and other popular brands work.

A logo is effective if it establishes trust and convinces consumers of the quality of a product or service. It should mirror the confidence of a brand and it should come with an attractive, easy-to-read, recognizable style.  They should help a company stand out from the crowd.

A website has become a necessity for small to large business owners who want to reach their customers easily and conveniently and increase awareness about their website. Apparently, just any website won’t work these days. You need in terms of navigability, features, consistency, and content. When you’re competing with tens of thousands of other online sites, how do you stand out?

The answer is web design, and when it comes to designing a website, it’s the small details that distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary.

Take Maserati. This luxury car has the same number of wheels, windows and doors, and seats as ordinary car. Because of the time spent by the designer on details, Maserati puts other cars to shame with its plush leather seats, prestigious wood interior, auto parking, entertainment system, and more.

The same is true in web design. A website that pays attention to details holds more value than generic sites.

Consider taking a closer look at a site that impresses you at first sight. You will realize that it’s the subtle details that set it apart from competition. The core concept here is value – you want a website that gives value to you and your customers.

Value-adding Details 

Some web designers overwhelm a website with unnecessary details that it looks cluttered and overwhelming. What you want are details that are not only visually appealing, but also enhances user experience – be it the way your visitors perceive the theme of the site or the level of ease in navigating it.

To reiterate, esthetics and usability are the details you want to focus on in order to enhance user experience. By having a deep understanding of how the interplay of different visual elements – layout, contrast, negative space, etc – create a different impression, you will be able to manipulate them better in order to influence people’s perception and use of a website.

So how can a website create a difference? Here are some examples and tips.

1. The Concentrate website is one of the most cited examples of a clever visual wordplay. Concentrate is an application designed to increase your productivity when you study or work by blocking distracting apps and websites. The website features an ad-like image of a halved orange beside a can of “Concentrate” juice.
2. Don’t make your use of drop shadows too obvious. Drop shadows are great way for adding dept to a flat, 2-dimensional medium.  When overdone or poorly executed, they can give a website an unprofessional look.  Subtlety is essential. Also, make sure to use consistent lighting source. For instance, if you use two shadows, see to it that the source of light is the same. How intense a shadow appears will depend on the color of the background. Use dark shadows for darker backgrounds and light shadows for lighter backgrounds.
3. As with drop shadows, practice subtlety when using gradients. Gradients can help pull in different elements together, but when overdone, they can make your website look heavy. Colors degradation should be smooth and stick to one color (when using gradient) to create a light, elegant effect.
4. Emphasize call to actions and improve readability of navigation bar by selecting color wisely. When navigation buttons are easy to read, they increase navigability of a site.
5. Make sure the elements are properly aligned to create a neat and organized effect. Grid system also improves white space as well as simplifies the designing process. You can use available grid systems or you can create your own.
6. Use icons. Icons not only add personality to a website, they also make it easier for your visitors to quickly find the information they’re looking for. Hence, they help make your site interface is more user-friendly. Just make sure not to overload your site with icons.
7. Attention to details can be measured up to pixel level. Pixel lines have many uses. One, they can be used to highlight a color. Two, they serve as good contrast between two colors. Three, they help make outlines more visual distinctive against other elements of the page.
8. Scale fonts to a readable size. Texts should be arranged into scannable chucks to make your site look more elegant.
9. Make sure background image or text does not overwhelm the page. Rather, make sure the background textures are muted. They should add style and personality, but they should not take away your attention from the main page.

As with any product, creating an extraordinary website requires patience and a great amount of attention to details. We have given you 9 useful tips, but there are lot more things you can actually do to create a visually stunning and useful website.

Web designing is a risky business. Designers are often left divining what their clients want. So how do designers make sure your creative ideas matches your client’s preference and goals?

The key is to take the guesswork out of designing. You can do this by involving your client in the website design process. You need to ask their objectives, their opinions, their own design ideas.

Taking the guesswork out of designing will also involve transparency on your part. You will need to give your client an idea of the processes and steps involved in the designing of the website, not just the final product. This will help give your client confidence in your process.

The following steps can help ensure that you and your client are on the same ground.

1. Defining goals - Most of the time, client will give you a vague “I want a website that will help get more online visibility”. This won’t give you much creative direction. You want more particulars, more specific goals such as “We want a more contemporary look,” “We want to move up Google list,” or “We want a cleaner interface to make it easier for our customers to navigate the site”. Lead your client through the brainstorming process. Ask the right questions so they can provide realistic and measurable goals rather than general, abstract goals. If you will just make wild assumptions about what your client wants, you will both end in disappointment.  Data-driven decisions, on the other hand, lead to more effective websites.
2. Creating a design outline - There must be a logical flow to the arrangement of the pages in a website. They should be organized in such a way as to increase a website’s usability. You don’t need high-tech tools to plan out your web design. A simple pen and paper will do. Create a diagram of the pages and sub-pages to be included in the website. If it doesn’t look right, just start again until you’ve hit the right note. You can also label index cards or Post-its with page/ sub-page titles. Arrange and re-arrange them on a table until you’ve arrived at the best visual hierarchy for creating an effective website.  If you client is asking for a revamping of website, use analytic tools such as Google Analytics to get an idea of website visitors’ actions. This information will help you determine which pages get the most traffic and which ones get low traffic, what people like most about the website and what call to action lead to most conversions. You will then be able to create a more precise plan of action for improving a website.
3. Mapping out content goals - Sit down with your client. Explain the visual hierarchy, and what it could mean to user experience of the website. Then ask your client to rank the elements or items on the page based on importance so you’ll have a clear idea of how to distribute information. The most important items will take the lion’s share of a page’s space – say 50%.  Your client, for instance, would want to devote the most space on describing the services and the least space on industry-related articles.  Having a clear idea of the client’s goals and how they relate to each other will allow you to plan the best hierarchy of content.
4. Identifying the best website feel - The website is where your client will meet their customers. As such, the website should cohere with the business’ identity. It’s their brand that’s at stake here. The website should be relatable in order to create a strong emotional connection with the costumers. A website may be formal, casual, fierce, tamed, edgy, classical, etc.
5. Identifying the final elements - Now that you have a visual hierarchy of the pages and sub-pages, a solid hierarchy of information, and a nominated website personality, then you’re ready to pick the elements that will go into the website. The design elements should be able to bring all aspects of the website together to create a coherent whole. The visual style should speak to the audience what the company is all about. Explore different themes, different environments. Do you want a calm or an intense environment? Can you create an environment that’s halfway between the two?
6. Putting the elements together - Now that you have everything on hand – from goals to design components – you’re ready to put them all together. By involving your client in the design process, margins for error are minimized. The result is a website that is relevant, effective, and informative.

Logo Aesthetics – Saying a logo is just an image is like saying a flag is just a piece of stylized cloth.

After the papers published images of the toppled statue of Saddam in Baghdad and the people flocked into the streets, we knew that the regime was over. We didn’t even have to see the actual Saddam Hussein being captured.

When Neil Armstrong and his crew reached the moon, they planted the flag of the US.

After the Allied Army defeated the Germans at the end of the Second World War, they destroyed the Nazi flag on top of the Berlin headquarter.

A logo is more than just a graphic image; it conveys an idea, an identity, a meaning.

When thinking of logo, aesthetics is important. However, you should go beyond the visuals and focus on the idea you wish to convey, on what each element symbolizes.

Selecting a Logo 

Logos are used for brand recognition. They can visually stimulate the memory of a viewer. They’re all about brand recognition. When you see two golden arches, you know its McDonald’s. When you see a swoosh, you know it’s Nike and three stripes is Adidas. When you see an image of a perfectly shape white apple with a single bite on top, you know right away the product is Apple’s.

Logos are the simplest way of conveying what your business is about. They can be made up of text, illustration, or a combination of both. They do not only add visuals to a document or web page,  No matter your esthetic choice, the most important is it projects your company’s image.

• Make your logo unique. Remember a logo is your trademark, your corporate identity. When people see it, they would immediately associate it with your company. They won’t confuse it with someone else’s.
• Keep your design simple. Think Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, IBM, AT&T, Microsoft. These big companies all use simple designs. The simpler the logo design, the easier for people to remember them.
• Never imitate someone else’s design. You don’t want to wind up in court for copyright violation, do you?
• Pick a logo that mirrors your corporate image. If you’re selling gothic clothing and accessories, a logo consisting of skull and bones may be appropriate. However, if your website is about graphic designing, you may want a logo that expresses your creativity.
• Pick a color that mirrors your image. There’s a psychology to colors, and you can use this knowledge to your advantage. For conservative companies, experts suggest regal colors like maroon, purple, navy blue, and dark teal. Red suggests aggressiveness, while black and white gives off a contemporary feel.

Types of Logos 

When it comes to making logos, a little creativity would help, but remember to keep it simple. And make it work.

• Text logos. With a dash of imagination, type fonts can be turned into symbolic works of art. A simple manipulation of shape, size, and color is needed to come up with a different meaning. A colorful, curved font conveys creativity. Thick fonts, such as used by IBM, convey power. Just like IBM, your own company name can be made into a logo. Just make sure the typeface conveys the features or qualities you wish to be associated with your company.

• Symbol logos. Text logos are “closed” imageries – that is, the meaning they wish to convey is well defined. Symbol logos, on the other hand, are “open” – they invite many interpretations as to what the meaning of an image conveys. Let your imagination run wild when creating a symbol logo. You’re much less restrained here than when creating a text logo. Just make sure you don’t go over the board with your creation. Again, simplicity is important. Take note from the likes of Nike and McDonald’s. You can go with traditional symbols like wheat for harvest (e.g. if you sell fertilizer) or waves for ocean (if you’re a cruise company), or you can create an entirely new symbol just like Nike did with their “swoosh”.

• Combined logos. If a symbol appears so esoteric, you can add text to make the meaning clearer.

You have many options when it comes to creating a logo that tells what your business is about. Don’t settle with the first you come up with. Come up with as many variations as you possible. Also, don’t base your choice on what you personally think is attractive. Think of your audience – how do you think will they perceive your logo.

Wine Logos – There was a time when wine was a stuffy beverage for people who would rather discuss sugar levels than enjoy their drink with good friends. However, these days are over. There are many new wine companies that are pushing wine as a young, modern, and fun part of life. Their logos are an essential part of this marketing effort. While we have written about winery logos before, the following ten deserve an entry of their own for being part of the new wine brand.

As you can see, wine logos don’t have to be stuffy or traditional to be attractive and relevant to their fields. If you think a modern logo design such as this might be right for your company, talk to a professional logo designer today.

Editor Website – It can be difficult to earn a living as a writer, editor, or indeed any freelancer. Having a well-designed website  and logo design is the first step toward building a personal brand that will build your career and earning power. The Three Penny Editor is a CSS website designed to do just this.

Website Reviewed: Three Penny Editor

Website URL: http://www.threepennyeditor.com/

The website is created with images reminiscent of writing in past times. As you peruse the website, the pages are framed by an old-fashioned typewriter, with the information on what appears to be the paper in the machine. Dusty earth tones are the main colors, accentuated by pops of red. This website presents a brand that is classic and relevant to the field of editing, which is the main service being offered here.

Many people wonder if editing services are worth the expenditure. This website answers that question, with links to testimonials as well as completed books that have been published with the editor’s help. The editor is indeed the author of a book on editing, which in addition to her resume gives her a decidedly professional feeling. If you are instead wondering whether you can afford the services, the prices are spelled out in their own section. The writer logo is also quite interesting.

This website is a mix of form and function that presents its owner as a professional with years of relevant experience in the field. That is exactly what you need in order to kick start your freelance career. You can easily get a sense not just of the writer’s abilities, but of her style as well.

Creativity: 5 stars. We love the color scheme and the old-timey writing elements. The earth tones make it easy to accentuate with color and also contribute to the brand. The mix of fonts—a typewritten Times New Roman and a clean, modern cursive—maintains the vintage feeling while adding a modern touch.

Ease of use: 4 stars. The website is very easy for potential customers to use due to good organization and logical placement of different elements. However, while there are testimonials and a ‘portfolio’ section with book covers of projects the editor has been involved with, there are no actual before and after samples, which is what we were expecting as a sample of editing. Many people do not understand how editing would refine their writing, so this would be an excellent addition.

Functionality:  5 stars. This is a highly functional website, with links to social media, a blog, and other necessary elements. It also puts in a plug for the editor’s new book, which can add to the potential profitability of the writing career while giving the editor a more established feeling. After all, most people trying to get published would rather deal with someone who has gotten there themselves.

Content: 5 stars. As we would expect from an editor and writer with such an impressive resume, the written content is outstanding.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website presents a unique brand that is definitely relevant to its purpose and the professional it represents.

Overall: 4.8 out of 5 stars

Visually communicating certain ideas is a simple matter—for example, a type of business, or a particular product. However, ideas and tastes are a little more complicated to portray in a logo design. Many of the concepts that logo designers are charged with communicating fall into this category—abstract, intangible, and difficult to communicate. However, an experienced logo design professional knows how to use colors, shapes, and other elements to show almost any type of feeling or idea. The following logo designs take on a rather difficult concept – spiciness – and portray it well in a visual image.

Furniture Brands – What makes people buy a piece of furniture? Although most items in the home do not have a visible logo design, brand is nonetheless an important factor. When you are choosing furnishings for your home, you want to know that your purchases will be sturdy, stylish, long lasting, and make your home as beautiful as it can be. While it is difficult to see more than surface charm in a furniture showroom, a solid company brand can lead to customers trusting in your products to live up to their expectations. Here are a few furniture logo designs that communicate all this and more.

There seem to be several factors that make Furniture Brands and furniture logos successful. First, they use font and shape to hint at the type of products that they offer. Second, colors, usually traditional, give customers a feeling that they can trust the company in question. Last, there are elements in each that tie directly into the aspects of the company that make it distinctive and different from the competition. While this genre of logo design is definitely unique, it is not unlike other types of logo design in its need to communicate abstract ideas in a concrete, visual way.

A Beautiful Restaurant Website – Most restaurants now have websites, and some even has CSS websites. However, few have exceptionally well-designed websites that build their brand. This is unfortunate for the restaurants that are missing it.

Oakley Fayre is not missing it. This beautiful restaurant website is simple and has most of the information that customers are seeking. In addition, it appears to be an attempt to branch out into ecommerce. The restaurant is now offering ‘hampers’, which are gift baskets, filled with local treats. They are offering international shipping and payment options, suggesting that Oakley Fayre is ready to take their locally acclaimed restaurant to a global market.

Website Reviewed: Oakley Fayre

Website URL: http://www.oakleyfayre.com/

Is this brand ready for the globe? We think it is. The logo design and brand of this CSS website are beautiful and distinctly Irish. They will appeal to people looking for a taste of Ireland. In addition, they do not compromise the brand of the core restaurant. In fact, this brand only enhances it.

The gift hampers seem to occupy a relatively small part of the website, which is unfortunate considering that they are the sole money maker of the internet presence. We also would like to see a little more about the restaurant, which forms the core of the brand. This website does a great job representing the brand, but it just does not say enough about the components that make up that brand.

Creativity: 5 stars. Green is a perfect color for a brand that focuses on eco-friendly and locally sourced products. It is offset well by taupe colors and other earth tones. Photography is also used creatively to show off the restaurant to those who cannot visit.

Ease of use: 5 stars. The website is small, but this only makes it easier to navigate. It offers basic information on the website and also a list of links to suppliers. Because the café uses locally sourced goods, linking to the suppliers is very appropriate.

Functionality:  2 stars. There are some frills—a map, for instance, on the contact page. However, there are several elements that are noticeably missing. For example, there is no menu, which is unfortunate because many will want to view that before visiting the restaurant. In addition, there are no social networking links and no blog. This brand has made it almost impossible to interact with them on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake—and a potentially devastating one.

Content: 5 stars. There are a few minor issues with phrasing, but the website is for the most part well written. We only wish there was a little more information about the actual food!

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is very appropriate for a food brand of any kind. It has a distinctly Irish feeling that will make its products and gift hampers more attractive to an international audience. It accomplishes this without compromising the brand’s attractiveness to tourist and local markets.

Overall: 4.4 out of 5 stars

Photography Studio Logos - Photography is both an art and a profession. As such, photographers must walk a fine line between pleasing their customers, remaining true to their artistic impulses, and marketing themselves in a way that maintains enough business to pay the bills. These photography logos are interesting and original, very different from the images that you would see in any other type of logo design. They are the cornerstone of each photographer’s brand, a hint at their personal style and the type of product that a customer can expect from the business.

While many photographers use their own photographs in their Photography Studio Logos, this is in general a bad idea. First, there is a good chance that many customers who would like several of your photographs might not like that particular one. Second, a photograph usually doesn’t work well on paper and stationary, giving your business a lower case look. For an appropriate, inviting, multipurpose, and yet intensely personal logo, you will need to talk to a professional logo designer. Here is a small sampling of the attractive and interesting Photography Studio Logos we have seen around lately.

Electric Car Website Review – If you are trying to present your brand as a technologically superior option, then only the very best designed electric car website will do. Tesla Motors does not disappoint in this case. Even if you have never heard of the company, this CSS website will make you want to drive one.

Website Reviewed: Tesla Motors

Website URL: http://www.teslamotors.com/

The landing page has an ever-changing set of photos, showing the cars navigating both classic mountain roads and normal everyday scenes. Can you already see yourself in one? Good. Click on ‘Go Electric’ and you will see another reason to want a Tesla: they are completely electric, the kind of car that you plug in to your garage wall. This tab contains information about why the car is better for the planet as well as answering questions about the car that many people may have.

There are only two models of Tesla car, each of which has its own tab on the electric car website. From here, you can find out anything you want about the cars… except the price. It’s okay; you probably can’t afford one anyway.

There are several ways to get more information. You can ask for a quote or even, if you have the money, order one. You can join the newsletter as well. There are no social media sites listed on the Tesla Electric Car Website, although we are sure they exist somewhere.

Creativity: 5 stars. The website is crisp, clean, and simply perfect for the brand being presented. The cars are shown in a variety of situations, in both photographs and videos. The cool gray makes the colors of the cars stand out and also brings attention to the red Tesla logo design.

Ease of use: 5 stars. It is very easy to answer basic questions about the range of the cars, their acceleration, and other issues that we think of when contemplating driving an electric car. In addition, the site is organized so you can focus on the model that interests you the most.

Functionality:  3 stars. It is easy enough to find the blog and newsletter signup as well as other information, but locating social networking sites is a real challenge. In fact, we were unable to find any. A brand this unique and interesting needs a Facebook page and a Twitter; many people who cannot afford to drive this car would love to follow the brand and become owners someday.

Content: 5 stars. The content is perfect, the right mix of sales and speed. It is professionally written and builds the brand. It also is informative and walks a fine line between being informative and being too technical.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website presents an upscale, luxury car brand that will appeal to the upscale audience who can afford it. Is there room for an electric luxury car? We think so. As gas prices seem to rise by the day, even the wealthy will soon be priced out of the market.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars

Heavenly Star Logos seem to be popular in modern logo design. This may be due to the variety of connotations that the shapes have. They can represent wealth and fame, as with Hollywood stars. They can mean excellence and recall the days when a gold star meant you had studied your hardest. Last, they can represent the heavens, and all the sense of wonder and imagination that goes with them. The following ten logos are great examples of Heavenly Star Logos being used appropriately and beautifully in modern logo design.

Cake Sweet Cake Website Review – Bakery websites… I hate to write about them, especially right before a meal. Yet, I seem to find many that are well-designed and beautiful. Perhaps it is something about the industry; perhaps something about the nature of a baker. Either way, get ready to be tempted by yet another.

Website Address: cakesweetcake.co.uk

Cake Sweet Cake specializes in wedding cakes, but they have a wide range of offerings. This website is organized so it is easy to see samplings of the main offering, but without excluding the smaller treats that build the brand. Pastel colors and girly fonts dominate the website, building a fun and yet frivolous brand that will appeal to engaged couples and anyone looking for a tasty yet stylish treat. However, earthy browns give a modern feeling and tone down the sugariness of the lighter hues.

There are subtle sales elements, such as the suggestion that the cupcakes make great gifts and can be gift wrapped as needed. There is also more obvious sales information, such as serving suggestions and the cost of different cakes. In all, this cake website makes it easy to see what the baker’s work looks like and whether you can afford it. If all bakeries made the process this easy, brides and grooms would be saved the trouble of numerous trips around town. It also assuages the fears of someone who worries that a certain type of cake might be too expensive. You can find out easily at this website, with no embarrassment involved.

Creativity: 5 stars. The background of this website is very creative; actually, the entire website is quite clever. It builds the brand while leaving the emphasis where it belongs: on the products. We love the slight angling and soft light in the photographs, which makes them feel like they sprung from a Martha Stewart magazine.

Ease of use: 5 stars. It is very easy to poke around and find out more about the baker and the products. In fact, most parts of the website can be accessed with a single click. The navigation bar is helpful as well.

Functionality:  5 stars. From the home page, you can view the logo design, a menu, search the prices, or follow the brand on your choice of social media… just to name a few options. The cake website has many interesting and needful features, and most of them are accessible from the landing page in a single click. This is functionality at its best and most efficient.

Content: 4 stars. There are a few grammatical errors in the website, but it is otherwise well-written and descriptive. Combined with the photographs, which are professionally done and show the products to their best advantage, this site should come with a serious Food Porn alert.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is very appropriate for a bakery. It has a fun and whimsical brand and color scheme, but also a professional touch. It will definitely be appropriate for engaged couples and sweets lovers in the bakery’s area.

Overall: 4.8 out of 5 stars

Online magazines are gaining popularity; after all, a website is a much cheaper and ecologically friendly way of starting a magazine and can gain fans until there is enough funding for a paper edition. Web magazines are especially becoming popular in niche and underground topics. Skateboarding Photo fits in both of those categories.

Website Address: skateboardingphoto.co.uk

As the name of the website suggests, this e-zine is all about skateboarding photos. The website landing page features a cascading line of current and previous issues along with a few miscellaneous announcements. Because there is only a cool black background and then the tiles, it is easy to make a choice… although the lack of a navigation bar makes me feel a little lost. Even after I found the navigation bar in the upper corner and clicked on the button that made it appear, I still felt a little lose because the bar only takes you home (where I already was) and allows you to like the website on Facebook. Not exactly a huge range of possibilities.

However, it is easy to find the main elements: issues of the online skateboarding magazine being promoted as well as the places where you can sign up for the email newsletter and become a Facebook fan. These are really good enough, and the magazine is excellent. In all, I thought this website deserved to be reviewed among the best CSS designs, but I have to sigh a little at the lost potential.

Creativity: 5 stars. The ezine is full of creativity, and I really liked the way the pictures are showcase by the relatively plain website theme. All elements are wisely chosen not to detract from the photos.

Ease of use: 2 stars. A navigation bar (a real one) would make this website so much easier to use and also ensure that internal pages were actually looked at once in a while—if they indeed exist. I poked around, but I could not find any other section of the website.

Functionality:  5 stars. This is one area in which the company excels. The links to the email list and the Facebook fan page are both very amusing and also go well with the magazine brand. This website manages to get the job done in a simple and yet edgy way.

Content: 4 stars. The content is well written, albeit sparse, and definitely intended to appeal to the skateboarding audience. This is important considering that the product being promoted is, after all, a magazine. However, there just are not enough words. People cannot find their way around.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is definitely going to appeal to the magazine’s market. First, the black and white color palette has a cool feeling even as it emphasizes the beauty of the photos. Second, the photography used in the website is excellent. Last, all elements give a youthful feeling that this young subculture can relate to. I am not a skateboarder, but I enjoyed this website—and I were a skateboarder, I am sure I would have enjoyed it much more.

Overall: 4.2 out of 5 stars

We have always maintained that graphic artists need to have the most attractive and well-designed websites—especially those that work as web designers. However, we officially take that back, because we have found an industry with an even greater need for great CSS web design: blog theme designers.

Mojo Themes is a good example of this. Considering that the company is selling WordPress themes, they had better have a great site. People are looking at this website as evidence of their design skills. Moreover, because they are selling a large number of themes, they need a few organizational skills as well.

Website Address: mojo-themes.com

The center of the Mojo Themes brand is a little green monster with a pirate-like eye patch. He (or she) can be seen around the site, functioning as a mascot of sorts. This monster adds a little fun to an otherwise austere website. The Mojo Themes site indeed presents a great amount of information, but manages to keep it interesting and well organized.

Mojo Themes also functions as a sales website for freelance WordPress theme creators. We are assuming that this is a very new endeavor, because it seems like an off-shoot and has not been incorporated into the main website very well.

Creativity: 5 stars. The Mojo character is cute, and it provides a kind of comic relief to an otherwise serious website. However, it is not without creative accents: pops of color to emphasize information, for example, and other fun details.

Ease of use: 4 stars. The website is very easy to use, but it may contain a little too much information on the landing page. It can be tempting to include a little of everything on the homepage, but it is rarely a good idea. It can be a little overwhelming, and most people will visit internal pages anyway if they are really interested.

Functionality: 3 stars. Finding the social networking website for this company is a bit of a pain. You have to find the Contact page, and then scroll down a little once you are there. These social media links should be front and center, where they can help build the brand. We assure you that they would be more effective than endless tiles of themes that are too small to discern.

Content: 5 stars. There are a few small mistakes deep in the website—for example, on a sample restaurant menu, noodles are described as being ‘severed’ hot. However, these things are few and far between. For the most part, the website is well-written and correct, and it certainly has that professional touch.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website may be a little crowded and at times a little disorganized, but it is on the whole a wonderful website with a great brand. It fits a lot of information into a small site without too much bulging and crowding. We think that the simple theme used in the Mojo Themes website will make other people want to purchase their products.

Overall: 4.4 out of 5 stars

Are you a diehard lover of the Opera browser? Niche products such as this seem to inspire a great deal of emotion in the people who prefer them. If you love a good Opera every now and then, and you aren’t talking about a fat lady singing, then the My Opera community might be for you.

My Opera is a community of sorts for people who use the Opera web browser. However, it also functions somewhat like a social network. You must register as a user, but from there you can get support related to the product or interact with other Opera lovers via blogs, chat rooms, photo albums, and groups.

Website Address: http://my.opera.com/community/

The amount of information shared on this website is rather phenomenal. Just looking around the landing page, I can see tons of photos, videos, news stories and popular discussions. You can discuss your My Opera discussions on your social networks with an easy click, and you can even find out what the software engineers behind Opera are having for lunch that day via the Opera Lunch Menu Twitter. Pretty much every little bit of interaction has been squeezed out of this site, and good CSS web design gives a clean, well-organized edge.

If you planning a website that will contain a lot of small pieces, this is one method to consider. After all, the My Opera website is a virtual mosaic of small bits of information, but there is no denying that it works.

Creativity: 3 stars. The website is well-organized, well-ran, and very well-balanced—but it really is not that creative unless you count the photos and videos submitted by users (we don’t, by the way).

Ease of use: 5 stars. This is where the My Opera website really shines. It has a large and diverse website, but it is very easy to fine everything. In fact, you can find it all quickly, usually with just two or three clicks.

Functionality: 5 stars. This website does not just function as a social network, it allows you to interact with it via other social networks. You know it’s 2011 when you are stepping out to Facebook or Twitter to talk about another social network that you belong to! Links to social media are placed all over the website to make it easy to coordinate with other pursuits.

Content: 5 stars. The words are very well-written considering that this is not a product (or a website) from an English speaking country. The writing is humorous and fits in well with the fun, youthful brand.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is meant to offer support, but more importantly, it is offering fellowship among lovers of a niche product. While many of the people on this website have a social networking presence elsewhere, they keep coming back here because the website makes it easy for them to find the latest news about their fave browser and also to interact with other enthusiasts.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars

We posted a while back about a CSS coffee website that was so close to being perfect, but not quite—it was missing a lot of crucial information about the product. That’s why we are so happy to bring you another CSS website review of another coffee brand, one that is getting it right.

The Illy Issimo website avoids the brown coffee cliché and instead uses the brand’s silver and red brand colors. The product is front and center from the landing page onward. A can of the coffee is shown on the front page, along with a list of all of the flavors. The main photo is of a beautiful woman enjoying the product.

Website Address: us.illyissimo.com

Moving product also seems to be a priority. Prominently placed links on the landing page offer both a store locater and a link to online websites selling the product. Illy will even deliver cases of the product to your home or office. This CSS website is not just great at promoting a brand; it is great at selling the product. And, after all, that is where most business owners get their paychecks. This website is flawless, smooth, and as cool as the drinks the company is selling. It has a European feeling that will complement the Illy brand, and it also has the potential to serve as an ecommerce website. In short, Illy Issimo’s website has it all.

Creativity: 4 stars. Despite its good branding practices and the beautiful photography, there is nothing really remarkable about this website. It is a basic and stripped-down website, but nonetheless a well-designed and attractive one.

Ease of use: 5 stars. This website is extremely easy to peruse and offers quick links to shop or find out more about the product. Ease of use may be the main reason for the bare bones organization of the website. Whatever the motivation, we love it.

Functionality: 5 stars. Not only can you connect with the brand via different social networking websites, you can even buy the product. This website is versatile enough to do it all, and to do it on just a few pages. This website may not have all of the frills, but it has all of the necessary elements of both a branding website and an ecommerce website in the same streamlined package.

Content: 5 stars. The copy is for the most part well-written, although there are a few awkward bits of phrasing and grammatical errors (capitalizing ‘Master’, for example). The drink descriptions are scintillating and make us want to try the beverages.

Appropriateness: 4 stars. This website is a great fit both for the Illy brand and for the product being sold, Illy Issimo. While the colors tie into the parent brand, the website is obviously dedicated to the drink and does a great job of selling it. This is a product oriented website that is geared toward a young, savvy market where cold coffee is a necessity and drinking a great brand of it is just as important.

Overall: 4.2 out of 5 stars.

How do you make an old-fashioned prep school feel modern without doing away with the tradition altogether? The Raffles Institution website walks this fine line, presenting a brand that offers a traditional university preparatory education with modern features and facilities.

A crest, associated with prep schools all over the world, is placed on the home page but positioned to be part of the background. Photos and line drawings of students and facilities help to space out the writing and make the website easier to read, while providing insight into the actual school experience. A presidential recommend is placed on the landing page, which together with the crest gives the school a very official and substantial feeling.

Website Reviewed: Raffles Institution, Singapore

Website URL: http://admissions.ri.edu.sg/

Parents don’t just choose a school based on academics; they do so based on the school’s reputation and their personal perception of the type of education offered. This website will be instrumental in creating the right reputation and making parents want to choose this institution for their own children. It also simplifies the application process, which some schools seem to purposely complicate.

Why does a school like this need a website? This website will ensure that the school has ample applicants and can choose the best and most promising. This will eventually raise the school’s reputation. In addition, the website shows that the school is a professional entity, worthy of parents’ tuition dollars.

Creativity: 5 stars. The colors of the website include a traditional taupe background with blue-green accents. Blue-green is a calming and trustworthy color—important when you are dealing with a family’s prized possession, their child—but it is also modern and adds contrast to the neutral colors in the background.

Ease of use: 5 stars. The website is very well-organized, making it easy to access information. Each item on the navigation bar expands so interested parents can find information in a single click. There is a good mix of practical information and photos, making the website very navigable and easy to peruse. The admissions process, curriculum information, and other hard facts are explained clearly.

Functionality: 5 stars. An online application process makes it easier for parents, and likely easier for the school as well. It would be nice if there were printable paper applications as well, because some parents don’t like to give out personal information on the internet. However, the process is very well explained so people know exactly what step they are on and what they need to do to complete it.

Content: 5 stars. The content is exceptional. Only perfect grammar and spelling are used—we should be able to expect this from a school, but unfortunately many fall short. This is more impressive when you consider that the school is located in Singapore, which is not primarily an English-speaking country.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. The website is very appropriate for a school. Warning: it will make you want to send your children there! The mix of modern and traditional, scholastic and social, presents a brand that many interested parents will find very attractive.

We aren’t huge fans of multi-level marketing or direct sales, but Javita has one well-designed website. It offers a lot of information about the opportunity the company offers—the opportunity to work from home selling their special, healthier blend of coffee—and a little information about the product as well. Direct sales are rarely about the product, so this is probably the right mix for the brand. We aren’t saying that in a mean way; branding is important to all businesses, but exponentially more so for direct sales.

Website Reviewed: Javita
Website Address: javita.com

The site is a creamy brown color, which is perfect for a coffee brand. The logo, which ambitiously features a cup of coffee with sun-like rays emanating from it, is prominently featured in the navigation bar, again adding to the brand awareness. This website is easy to peruse and easy on the eyes, encouraging people to become part of this company.

The moral of this story is this: CSS website design can be used to create websites that are full of technical frills—we all know that. You can wow and amaze your audience at every turn. However, some companies don’t need that. Instead, they want to win hearts over to their brand. As the Javita website shows, simple and beautiful websites can be developed using CSS as well.

Creativity: 3 stars. The site has a great sense of brand and a great ‘flow’. However, it is definitely lacking in creative elements. There is nothing here that ‘wows’ the viewer.

Ease of use: 5 stars. This website is easy to browse and offers links in multiple places, including a navigation bar. The information is logically organized, and includes printable PDF documents explaining the business model in more depth. There is a member’s only section that we were unable to evaluate due to needing a referral, but we assume that it is similarly well-designed.

Functionality: 4 stars. You may be a little shocked at the number of social media links—you can connect with the company via a variety of networking websites or simply like them on your own pages. Because this industry is very brand oriented, these functions are highly necessary. This CSS website makes it easy for customers to interact and even to commit. However, it gives no help to people wanting to buy the coffee. No links, no nothing. This is a shame, and it reinforces the suspicion that this company is more about multi-level marketing than the product.

Content: 5 stars. The content is sales copy—intended to sell the brand to interested parties. It is well-written and correct in every way for the professional image that the company is aiming for.

Appropriateness: 4 stars. The website is very appropriate for a sales recruitment website—but not so much as a company product website. We could find only a few blurbs about the health benefits of the coffee being sold, but nothing else. If a person were interested in the Javita products, the Javita website would not be a help.

Overall: 4.2 out of 5 stars.

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘unfold’? Most of us think of paper, unfolding a note or letter. This is how the Unfold website has been designed, to make viewers feel that they are unfolding the information. Stylistically, this website is top-notch.

Bright red is a bold color for the business world, but it works here, especially with the bold geographic shapes and the black and white background colors. This agency is trying to send the message that they are different from the many others, a message that is driven home by the design of their website. Although there is always room for improvement, this website is obviously born from a superior sense of style and a solid understanding of web design.

Triangles dominate the website, which gives it a feeling of strength and also ties into the ‘folded’ theme. They are used mainly as navigational aids and links. Your eye goes to them immediately so this is a good design strategy that will make it easy for potential customers to navigate the page.

Creativity: 5 stars. We love the way the name has been turned into the main concept of this website. This speaks to the agency’s creative abilities as well as their technical skills in web design. The lines are clean and crisp, with bright red as a main color and other colors used as accent only. If you are trying to promote your company as a creative design business, a website such as this one is a good start.

Ease of use: 5 stars. This website is very simple, with only the most necessary information, which makes it very easy to navigate. You can scroll through it or click on a topic from the navigation bar to find the needed information. Having more than one way of accessing information ensures that even less proficient users can find what they need.

Functionality: 4 stars. There are Facebook and other social networking links, as well as a beautiful aerial map of the agency’s neighborhood, but the social networking links are classified under ‘Sharing’, which makes them difficult to locate as most people will click on ‘Contact’ for this information. Also, there is no portfolio, which is important in the design industry. Potential customers want to peruse past work and see if the agency has the right style for them.

Content: 4 stars. The text is simple and succinct, but not very interesting.  Considering the creative concept of the website design, we were hoping to find a little humor or edge. Don’t bother looking; it’s not there.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is appropriate, both for the industry and for the name of the company. We like the way the name of the agency has been made the concept of the website. We think that this website is a great example of how CSS can be used creatively to build a brand and drive a concept home.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars.

Are you ready for a different type of fashion magazine design? International fashion website Satellite Voices just may be the magazine for you. This online zine, which is marketed to an international audience, offers news from around the world along with fashion that can look beautiful in any context.

The Satellite Voices website is a little edgy, which is a good brand for an internet magazine presenting international style. It is easy to access any article on the landing page, and a navigation bar allows you to sort information by topic (these are very general) or region. A listing of articles similar to that seen in the front of a magazine would be a good addition because that is how people are used to dealing with a normal, paper publication.

We encountered numerous error messages while perusing the website, which is frustrating for website visitors. This combined with the rudimentary organizational scheme make the website difficult to navigate. While the brand is appealing, SatelliteVoices appears to be all form and little function, which is definitely detrimental. However, these are errors that could be easily changed (hint, hint?).

Creativity: 5 stars. The design itself is simple with a colorful, splotchy background reminiscent of graffiti or street art. However, this is merely a background note; the main photography is stark and beautiful, with professional quality and a focus on detail. Even so, the background adds a touch of youthful fun and says a lot about the brand being promoted.

Ease of use: 3 stars. It can be very difficult to navigate this website. You should be able to narrow the topics to read exactly what you are interested in—the way people flip through a magazine. Instead the website has categories based on country and region or very broad topic categories. Viewers therefore must either miss out on great articles or simple page through every single issue—and who has the time for that?

Functionality: 3 stars. Does this website even know that Facebook exists? There is no contact information anyone on the website, although even a Facebook page would do a lot to help customers feel connected to the brand. The website offers almost no special or fun functions, as well-designed as it otherwise is.

Content: 5 stars. There is very little content on this website, but what exists is well-written and proper in every way. We especially love the way the magazine offers a clean look despite having a variety of different items on every page. This balance is partially due to the lack of text, although the organization of articles into picture blocks helps out a little.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is youthful and edgy, which is exactly the way that we would expect it to be. If offers the best of all worlds: a beautiful magazine based on style, with issues for different sections of the world, all for free and available from the privacy of your home.

Overall: 4.2 out of 5 stars.

Do you store your food according to the strictest food standards? Do you have a feed thermometer that you use to test your refrigerator and your cooked meat to ensure that they are the correct temperature? Unfortunately, many people do not pay attention to these little details, which may be why one third of Canadians have contracted a food borne disease. Twenty percent of British Columbian people do not use a meat or refrigerator thermometer on a regular basis, which would seem to suggest that they are not using one correctly. However, help is on the way! The government and several sponsoring organizations hope to make food safety fun with a website designed to teach citizens about the topic.

Simply storing meat at the correct temperature can cut back drastically on food borne disease. If you refrigerator is cold enough, bacteria cannot grow and spread as quickly. Under high temperatures, bacteria are killed altogether. In fact, you can make just a few simple changes and see a huge change in health and behavior. That is the point of this website. A bright superhero explains how to care for meat in a fun and nonjudgmental way. This makes it easy for households to learn about eating and storing foods, a dialogue that hopefully will lead to better storage and cooling practices in Canada.

Creativity: 5 stars. This website addresses a rather serious topic—food poisoning—with grace and humor. Not only is the website amusing, it offers good tips for people who are not aware of how to properly cook and store meats. Because many people do not know how to check the temperature in their refrigerator, it makes sense to have a website with detailed explanation.

Ease of use: 3 stars. There does not appear to be any navigation bar or other movement assistant. In fact, the only way to get around the site is to randomly click on links, or to scroll endlessly through the different pages. A navigation bar would be a welcome addition and make the website much easier to explore.

Functionality: 5 stars. The site is highly functional; there is a game at the top of the page (although in our opinion the link is not large enough) as well as buttons allowing viewers to share it through Facebook and Twitter. This website was designed to teach a valuable lesson, and it functions well in this capacity.

Content: 5 stars. The content is well-written and easy to understand. It explains a rather complicated topic (one that requires at least one full semester class in culinary school) in a way that can be quickly understood by an everyday citizen.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. The super hero theme is humorous and detracts in a pleasant way from the seriousness of the subject. We like the fifties retro theme; many housekeeping websites use a similar theme, so it has come to be associated with housekeeping in general. This website is bright and graphic, a great way of portraying the necessary information.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars.

La Porte Sainte Claire is a classic French restaurant that has everything going for it. It is located in the best place for French food—a quaint village in France—and is in a building with plenty of antique charm. From the foods to the wine list to the ambience, this restaurant offers the best of classic France. The website is designed to complement this brand.

The website features pictures of the food and the restaurant, in deep colors that contribute to an upscale feeling. The navigation bar in the center of the page appears to have been made from old leather, while the web pages that slide out from under it are of an ivory parchment. This website does not even feel like a website; it is smooth, silky, and subtle.

This website is not just about feelings; it also offers a variety of functions in an easy to use format. You can reserve a table, communicate with the chef, and peruse the menu. You can locate the restaurant on a map or leave a comment about your meal. The possibilities are endless thanks to great CSS design.

Creativity: 5 stars. We love the way the information glides out from behind the leather bar when the category is clicked on. While this website looks a little overdone, it is well put together and creates a sumptuous, luxury brand. The deep colors and earth tones help the vibrant colors of the photos and the food to stand out.

Ease of use: 5 stars. It is very easy to find whatever you need, even if you do not speak French. Menu items include English descriptions below to make the website accessible to tourists. The website is well designed, and all aspects of the website can be accessed by clicking on a link on the bar in the center of the page.

Functionality: 4 stars. There are no links to social networking websites, which is an unfortunate oversight. However, customers can perform just about any function through this website, from reserving a table to finding out about the historical area in which it is located.

Content: 4 stars. The content is well-written in French and also includes English descriptions for different dishes. The English descriptions for many dishes are incomplete; it would be good to complete them and also to decide whether the website is going to be completely bilingual or French-only. As it is, there is a little bit of English in the descriptions of the different foods, but the rest of the site is entirely in French.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is perfect for the brand of the restaurant and definitely has its fair share of rustic charm. While there are a few small issues, they do not interfere with the overall feeling of the website. It is very appropriate and a good example of how CSS can be used to create interesting effects in websites.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars.

A quick disclaimer: Although there are aspects of the Egopop website that do not make sense (like, you know, the name), we really like the style and hope to see more from this designer.

That said, Egopop is the website of a freelance designer. It is designed to showcase the work of the artist while building a personal brand. The landing page features the name of the company in modern, bubbly lettering, with clay animals and critters arranged in front. As you move your mouse, you can see the scene from different perspectives. At the upper left side, there are links to other pages in the website, which are the portfolio, an about page and a contact page.

Website Reviewed: Egopop

Website URL: http://www.egopop.net/

This website is adorable inside and out. However, it is a little confusing, which is surprising considering that there are so few pages. The information is not arranged in a logical way, but rather fit together randomly on the pages. It is hard to predict exactly what will be on any given page. Also, we have concerns about how a rather juvenile website will function as a freelance website.

Creativity: 5 stars. From the adorable clay animals to the almost haphazard way that the information is organized, this website seems to ooze creativity.  It is almost gratuitously creative, but this ends up to be a powerful and even central part of the freelancer’s brand.

Ease of use: 3 stars. To be honest, the landing page feels a bit redundant. It does nothing to sell product and does not act as a hub for the website. Instead it is just there. Even with cute clay critters, this seems a bit much. In addition, the portfolio page is cluttered. It is difficult to see exactly what the designer did in each project and when.

Functionality: 4 stars. Social networking links to just about every site available are present on every page… except the contact page. This is an unfortunate oversight that make lead to a loss in sales. After all, many people will not brose around the website; they will click on contact and then leave the website altogether.

Content: 4 stars. The content is not bad, but there are a few glaring errors. For instance, on the About page, the artist switches repeatedly from first to third person and uses fragmented sentences. These are easy enough to fix, so we hope that the creator will proofread and make the necessary corrections.

Appropriateness: 3 stars. As we said in the first paragraph, we really like this website. However, there is no getting around the fact that it is not very appropriate as a business website. The website could be modified to keep its cute factor and its fun, fresh quality while making it a little more work appropriate. This is the internet equivalent of keeping stuffed animals in your work cubicle. Design is an adult profession… let’s act like it already.

Overall: 3.8 out of 5 stars.

In today’s video I talk about the 5 important elements of a brand and how you can pay attention to these elements to ensure your brand becomes whole and successful. I talked about your company logo design, the wording of your brand including content on your website and your marketing material, your company visual identity, your brand promise and how you will have to differentiate your brand to stand a chance of competing with other companies out there. I will be doing more brand element related videos in the future where I will be talking about other important items such as your brand essence, brand promise, your positional statement, your brand personality and more.

For full transcript read 5 Essential Parts Of A Brand.

Biotechnology may be big business, but it is one with little public support. Few people realize that many of their favorite products and most needed medications are a direct result of biotechnology companies and the research that they perform. Here are a few logo designs that do a great job of selling biotechnology for the innovative and extremely necessary field that it is.

As you can see from our examples, there are a few details that create a good biotechnology logo design. First, bright colors are often a good choice because they help to make this relatively misunderstood field seem a little friendlier. Second, fonts are used to balance the tone of the images, whether it is to add a serious, straightforward touch or a little bit of approachability. Last, images are important to communicate exactly what the company in question does. The average American will have only a foggy idea of what bioplastic research entails; the job of the logo design is to make this a little more clear. In addition, there are numerous fields of biotechnology, and a great logo design can help to differentiate a company from the many others in the field. We are all visual creatures, so a biotechnology logo design can quite literally speak a thousand words about the organization that it represents.

In today’s video, I talk about the importance of cultivating an online brand irrespective of wether your business online or offline. I explore the various fundamentals that you need to take into account and ensure you project a positive outlook for your business. Tips include Googling yourself and your business, getting on to social networks, interlinking your various online brand properties, broadcasting positive information about your business online and responding to negative feedback proactively and quickly. Even though the list might seem daunting for small business owners, it really is quite simple to understand and implement.

For the full transcript, read Building A Small Business Brand Online.

It is particularly important for design-oriented businesses to have well-designed websites. After all, a website should help to build your brand, which hopefully includes good aesthetic style, and also give customers a sense of what kind of work your company specializes in. The Andersson-Wise website is one of the best architecture websites we have seen this year because of the attention to branding, especially in the little details.

Website Reviewed: Andersson-Wise Architecture

Website URL: http://www.anderssonwise.com/

The website is black with white writing, which allows the photos of different projects to really pop. The font and other visual accents are all very simple, which again draws attention back to the photos. This is a firm that feels comfortable letting their work speak for itself.

A navigation bar makes it easy to access all parts of the website, which include past projects, a published book of the firm’s work, and more. There is an area for news and press as well as links to the company’s social media pages. This website gives the firm a very substantial and legitimate feeling, like it has a huge presence in the architecture world both locally and nationally. This is exactly the impression that the firm is trying to portray. People prefer to have their home or other large project completed by an established professional rather than an inexperienced newcomer to the scene. A website can be a crucial part of creating this impression.

Creativity: 5 stars. The use of simple design and colors to bring attention to the photographs and portfolio may seem obvious, but it is in fact a difficult thing to pull off. Andersson-Wise seems to do it effortlessly, which suggests that their design skills are Yoda-like.

Ease of use: 5 stars. There is a navigation bar that makes it easy to navigate the website and find exactlw what you need. In addition, the information is organized into logical categories, making it simple to find. Again, simplicity is the over-arching theme.

Functionality: 4 stars. You have to make your way to the contact page before you get any access to social networking pages, which is an unfortunate oversight. If we had our way, there would be links to Facebook on every page and viewers would be able to ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ different projects. This website is well-designed, but it needs to be a little more functional. We feel that the architects have chosen form over function when they could have had both.

Content: 4 stars. The writing is technically good, but very difficult to actually read. There are just too many abstract terms strung together. Putting things in everyday language, making the wording as simple and sophisticated as the rest of the design, would be a huge improvement.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is very appropriate both for the brand and for the customers, showing the company to its best advantage and offering a lot of information. It shows off the company’s design skills and will give customers confidence in the architects’ skill.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars.

In today’s video I talk about the power of the right tagline or slogan for your business and the salient features of an appropriate tag-line or slogan for your small business. Using a few well known examples of brand taglines, I illustrate the importance of having the right kind of slogan and what care you should take when trying to develop a slogan for your business. A word of caution though: every brand does not need a tagline. You should only adopt a tagline when your primary business name or brand does not sufficiently carry across the message of what your company does or your brand message. Some times a tagline can be a hinderance to your brand if it is either absolute, redundant or inconsequential.

The Mario Kart Wii Experience website is designed to promote this popular Wii game by giving owners of the game a chance to share about their experiences while acting as a product information website for people who do not own the game. The website has a similar aesthetic style to the game itself, with a white and gray background and brightly colored characters. Indeed, Nintendo is good at branding and this website shows their skill. Every element from the fonts to the placement of the links was designed with the core brand in mind.

Website Reviewed: Mario Kart Wii Experience

Website URL: http://www.nintendo.com.au/gamesites/mariokartwii/

However, this website is unexpected in several ways. We expect Nintendo to be good at marketing their products, but this website offers a range of experiences that will encourage people to play this game. On the landing page, there are several videos promoting the game, along with links to score sheets, social networking pages, and even a history of the Mario character. One of the most fun parts of this website is the numerous videos that users have submitted of themselves playing the game. Even if you are not a huge fan of the Mario Kart games, you will have fun browsing this site and checking out the different functions.

This website has numerous functions that are intended either for adults or for the most media-savvy children, such as the ability to send MarioKart weapons to friends via Facebook. These extras tie the website into other sites and allow older fans of the Mario franchise to enjoy the website as much as the kids do. Because this game is popular among a very wide age group, it can be difficult to design a website that markets to all, but the Mario Kart Wii Experience does an excellent job.

Creativity: 5 stars. The website aesthetic design may not be unexpected, but there are fun details that build the Mario Kart brand, such as the little racer at the bottom of every page who can be used to navigate the website. These details complete the experience and give a professional feeling to the website.

Ease of use: 4 stars. The home page is a little overwhelming and cluttered; it can take a few moments to get your bearings. However, once you settle in, it is easy to find what you seek.

Functionality: 5 stars. This is not just a website, but rather a multi-media experience. You can access extras and printables, upload movies of your family playing the game, virtual-bomb Facebook friends, or just about anything else you wish. It is hard to think of a website with more different functions.

Content: 5 stars. The content is well-written and designed to be understood by younger readers without annoying the older ones. This is a difficult line to walk, but Nintendo does it well.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. It is difficult to design a website that is appropriate for the many different types of people who play Mario games, but Nintendo has done it and done it well.

Overall: 4.8 out of 5 stars.

In today’e video, I talk about Martin Lindstorm’s popular and ground breaking book Brandwashed as an anchor for how brands manipulate our senses and our psyche and how small business can compete with such brandwashing. I take 3 examples from the book to illustrate the points. I also liked Martin’s previous book Buyology and perhaps would do another video on that down the line. Branding has become an obsession and I plan to do a whole series of brand related videos that would help small business owners get to grips with the mysterious world of branding. For a full transcript read Are Consumers Brandwashed?

How much do you love your earbuds? For many of us, these are throw-away items, an accessory destined to be left at the gym or ruined by a child’s sticky fingers. Yurbuds wants you to buy into your earbuds… or, at least, their earbuds. According to this website, earphones can be instrumental in helping you achieve your dreams.

Website Reviewed: YourBuds

Website URL: http://www.yurbuds.com/

Yurbuds are sports earphones that lock into the ear via a mechanism that looks painful but hopefully is not. They are designed to work well with a busy, athletic lifestyle. To underscore the important of such a lifestyle, the company has posted a ‘Gallery of Heroes’ with people wearing the earbuds with inspirational words written across their faces. You can share your own story (and photo) through a link to the company’s Facebook page. Although most of us would never dream of submitting a photo of ourselves with painted words across our face, many fans would simply for the bragging rights of having been on such a large company. This helps the company build fans, an important part of getting sales.

The black website is designed so that the accents (and the earphones) are red. This makes the product stand out and also gives a streamlined feeling. While the fonts in the website are not identical to that used in the logo design, they are related and similar in shape and form. Details like this may not be obvious to a person without a background in design, but to design junkies these are the hallmark of a professional website.

The product looks well designed as well. The company swears that they do not fall out and that they do not hurt (again, they screw into your ear), making them perfect for modern people with busy lives. Design is important, but we’ll be sticking to our good old fashioned earphones for now.

Creativity: 5 stars. The website is not particularly creative, but it is designed to draw attention to numerous photographs that are indeed very creative and well-done. The photographs create the impression that the product is intended for people of all ages and lifestyles.

Ease of use: 5 stars. The navigation bar makes it easy to find what you need, and the site is clearly organized. The website presents a large amount of information in a logical way, which can be difficult.

Functionality: 4 stars. There are numerous links to social networking pages as well as an ecommerce section in which you can buy the earphones along with other branded items such as t-shirts and armbands. There are also links to contests being held on the Facebook page. These are scattered throughout the site, but they might be better placed in the same location on every page.

Content: 3 stars. The content is minimal but written well. We wish there was a little more information on the sales pages; most people want a lot more specifics before spending fifty dollars on a pair of earphones. While the earphones are described in detail elsewhere on the website, there is almost no info on the actual sales product page.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. All content is appropriate for the audience.

Overall: 4.4 out of 5 stars.

In today’s video, I explore the importance of package design and consequential branding with an brief case study of Honest Tea (http://www.honesttea.com/) and how they have successfully managed to keep their package design fresh and exciting over a period of time. Although this video does not dwell into the actual specifics of how package design is implemented, I do hope it will inspire both designers and product based companies on taking a fresh look at the importance of package design that works.

When it comes to concepts, this website is one of the best that we have seen. The CSS website is set up like a module on the Red Planet, with the background a rusty red sky. As you scroll down through the website, the sky gradually darkens and becomes the deep ink color of outer space, then lightens as you approach Earth. The information is centered in shapes designed to look like space modules, except for the apps which are orbiting their own planet.

Website Reviewed: We Came From Mars

Website URL: http://wecamefrommars.com/

But enough about form and function. There are enough nerd pleasures on this website to thrill even a hard-core geek. One of the things that will especially amuse most of you is the way the pictures of employees are placed in space helmets to keep with the website’s theme and the company brand.  You can even see a few likes and dislikes, which makes you feel like you know the people behind the brand a little bit. This is a website that you will enjoy perusing; it has been set up thoughtfully, with all of the details tying into an original brand.

Creativity: 5 stars. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to come up with a planetary theme, but there is definite imagination used in the execution here. We like the way the Martian theme was developed without cartoony Martians. From the color scheme to the information, everything fits in with the Mars idea. This creative brand deserves an A+.

Ease of use: 3 stars. You could find your way around Mars no problem thanks to a navigation bar combined with a completely scrollable website. Except—oops—the links on the navigation bar did not always work. Some did nothing, while others took us to the wrong place. It’s unfortunate in such an otherwise excellent website. All other components seemed fully functional, however.

Functionality: 5 stars. We like being able to see videos of the apps in use; it made us want them on our own smartphones. There are also links to social networking pages as well as a contact page with addresses, telephone numbers and emails. It’s easy to contact this business by any method that you prefer. All companies should make it this easy to contact them!

Content: 5 stars. The content is well-written, but there is not a whole lot of detail. However, the lack of written detail is more than made up for by the videos allowing potential buyers to experience the app for themselves.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. The people who are interested in these games will really enjoy the website as well. It gives a great idea of the general flavor of the games, as well as insight into the technical skills and eye for detail possessed by the creators. There is just the right mixture of fun and seriousness. This website will be selling a lot of apps thanks to its great CSS design.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars.

In today’s video i talk about building a customer focused brand by offering customers what they need rather than what you want or think they need and by showing and not telling our customers our brand story and giving them a great customer experience. Other tips include monitoring your customer experience, planning for the future and being relevant to your customers. Not an easy task but by not being customer focused, you will have a greater challenge getting your brand noticed.

The Red Velvet website uses CSS design to build a brand and also to make sales. It is a great well-rounded website that contains a variety of information, yet it feels organized and easy to navigate. If you have any experience whatsoever in design, you know what a challenge this can be.

Website Reviewed: Red Velvet Shop

Website URL: http://www.shopredvelvet.com/

When you land on the home page, you are treated to a scrolling picture bar showing popular ‘destinations’ on the site such as the Look Book and the Summer Sale. If none of these appeal to you, there is also a navigation bar at the top of the page as well as more links at the bottom. The color palette—white, gray, and linen—is designed to promote a feeling of simplicity while allowing the photography to take center stage.

One of the things that we love about this website is that it features multiple ways to browse the items for sale. You can take the traditional route by clicking on one of the categories on the navigation bar, or you can shop ‘by trend’. You can even click on favorites and see the various employees’ favorites, or if you are a regular visitor, check out just what is new to the website.

A few things we don’t like: when you click on the items’ product page, you have to read all about them and generally fall in love before getting to the bit about how they are unavailable. Also, a lot of the items are out of stock, which is, well, annoying to shoppers. This problem could easily be solved by leaving out of stock items off the category pages or at least placing them at the bottom. Also, social media links and other necessary information is tucked away in the footer, where few people will find it. However, these are small issues and do not detract from the overall good first impression we have of this website.

Creativity: 5 stars. The website is very creative, but what we really like is that it manages to keep a simple and minimalist feeling in the midst of the creativity. Anyone can throw colors at a screen; this brand took hard work and professional design.

Ease of use: 5 stars. The website is well-organized, with a place for everything and everything in its place. There is a huge range of products, but it is easy to find every one of them.

Functionality:  4 stars. Why would you hide social networking at the bottom of the page?

Content: 4 stars. There are a few small grammatical and punctuation errors in the text, such as in the product descriptions and the ‘About’ pages. This is in keeping with the informal, homespun brand being presented, but it does nothing to build a professional and trustworthy image. The photography and visual content is beautiful and well-designed.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This fresh and flavorful website is very appropriate for the young, fashion forward audience that it is trying to reach.

Overall: 4.6 out of 5 stars

In today’s video I talk about the basics of your Facebook business page optimization and a few other details. This is not an exhaustive study of the Facebook business pages nor a tutorial but rather just a brief into that would benefit small business owners who are struggling to get to grips with what all the fuss is about Facebook Business Pages.

While most CSS websites amaze us with cool features, this one will warm the cockles of your heart with its sweet country charm. Calico patterns and sweet, hand-drawn animals surrounding happy people having tea combine to give this website a gentle, vintage feeling reminiscent of Beatrix Potter.

Website Reviewed: Jolly Duck Bunting
Website URL: http://jollyduckbunting.co.uk/

This website is selling homemade table linens and also rents out vintage china and tableware for parties. However, more than any single product the company is offering an old-fashioned dining experience. This makes the website very appropriate. The items are shown in pop-outs that make it easy to look at the items quickly. The high resolution images allowed by CSS are used well here because it allows potential customers to see the patterns of the fabric in detail and to examine the china closely. CSS is particularly effective for image-heavy websites because it loads quickly and allows the photos to have more SEO power.

Where is the logo? Where are the social media links? While the products seem lovely, this business is not doing enough to build its brand. We hope that this is a beginner’s mistake and that a little more attention to these elements is given in the future. Until then, this remains a beautiful example of how CSS website design can be used to create a unique feeling for unconventional businesses.

Creativity: 5 stars. The use of the bunting patterns in the web design is clever and also gives potential customers an idea of what the finished products will look like on a set table. The animals are cute and add to the brand by tying into the name of the company. We especially like using the flags hanging above the table as a navigation bar.

Ease of use: 5 stars. Because this website is offering a lot of bespoke items, the pricing can get complicated. However, the website offers enough information to make this easier to figure out. A contact page allows people to contact the seamstress/business owner with any questions. The information is logically organized and easy to access.

Functionality:  3 stars. You have to travel deep into the website to get any contact information, and there are no social networking websites. This is unfortunate because many people would probably interact with the brand on social media and thus be able to remember it later when they are planning a party. Social networking would also provide free marketing, which no small business can afford to pass up.

Content: 4 stars. The text is well written, and the pictures say more than their allotted thousand words about the products. However, there is a noticeable lack of finished products and tea parties in action. These elements would give people a better idea of exactly what they would be paying for.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. This website is very appropriate for its subject and creates a charming, vintage brand that is appropriate for its subject.

Overall: 4.4 out of 5 stars

In today’s video I talk about common question that a lot of our ecommerce and online store website customers ask me. Should we use videos on our ecommerce product pages and if so, how? Using video on your product pages would be a great way to engage your website visitors and make the sale. Of course there is also a little bit of risk involved in using Youtube videos on your website. There are also other alternative such as Vimeo and other video hosting websites that you can use.

A t-shirt website for a young t-shirt designer has two major challenges: building the company brand, and selling product. This was the lens that we used to view Inkefx. For the branding element, the website visuals create a creative brand with just a hint of darkness, which is very popular in this genre of clothing design.

Website Reviewed: Inkefx T-Shirt Website
Website URL: http://www.inkefx.com/

The brand is similar to many other t-shirts brands that are popular right now, which can be good (you know it appeals to the market) and bad (it does nothing to set the brand apart from others). Branding is very important because so many people buy t-shirts because of the brand and are indeed willing to pay very high sums for the right brand. Consider, for example, the success of Affliction and Ed Hardy, two businesses that have casual wear as their core product.

As for selling t-shirts, one of the major drawbacks is that the link to the t-shirt product pages says “Buy Now”. It is the wrong place for a call to action; a better strategy would be to have that links say “Find Out More” or similar. Many customers will want to see more about the brand before committing to buying and not realize that this is, in fact, the way to do so.

Creativity: 5 stars. The website is creative and shows off the creators’ skill, especially in the color palette. Distressed black with yellow as an accent color world well with the brand. The photography is also creative and shows the products from a variety of angles.

Ease of use: 4 stars. The shopping page is the landing page, which is a little confusing because there is a ‘Shop’ page on the landing bar that takes you home. There are a few other elements that conflict with easy use of the website, but these may be due to the relative newness of the brand.

Functionality:  4 stars. From the landing page alone, you can follow the brand on either Twitter or Facebook as well as ‘liking’ or ‘+1-ing’ the brand in social media; links are available in both the header and the footer, making them easy to find. In addition, there is a newsletter that users can sign up for if they would like to hear about sales and other website events. There are such a variety of ways to interact with the brand that many users will choose to do so.

Content: 3 stars. There are a few errors and run-on sentences here and there throughout the website, but they are minimal. However, one of our real issues with the content is that it is not ‘branded’—that is, it is not really in the same tone as the rest of the website.

Appropriateness: 5 stars. The visual aspects of the brand are very appropriate for the audience of young men in search of casual wear. The brand has the potential to ‘make it big’ if the website has minimal changes made.

Overall: 4.2 out of 5 stars

In today’s video I talk about the recent trend in pricing models – “Name your price” or “Pay what you wish” strategy. This kind of pricing model is not suitable for all businesses but for the ones it does work, it would be quite a unique and innovative way of gaining customers and making a difference. The strategy comes with both pros and cons.

We were a little surprised to see how simple, attractive, and well-designed Frontend 2011’s new website is. While you expect for a web conference to have a pretty stunning website, this one is still a pleasant surprise. The website looks like it has been created from black ink line drawings on a simple white media, with occasional pops of color to add emphasis.

Website Reviewed: Frontend 2011
Website UR: http://www.frontend2011.com/

Most of the writing is in a font that appears to be handwritten until you look very closely, which is a clever way of giving the website a homespun feeling. In addition, the pages on the Frontend 2011 website are lined with a drawing of a curtain and an audience, to give the feeling that you are seated in a movie theater. The information is placed where the movie screen normally would be, while the navigation bar is just above in the curtain. This gives the entire website a finished and uniform feeling while making it easy to find the information that you seek.

Capital lettering in a modern font with serifs is used to call attention to certain parts of the text. As we mentioned before, color is also used very effectively because the simple white and black makes just about any hue stand out. The website is simple, but easy to navigate and friendly in feeling. It makes the event being promoted seem like it will be easy and fun as well. After all, if a group cannot manage to put together a working website, how will a convention with thousands of people be run? This website avoids this question by getting it right.

Creativity: 5 stars. We like the line drawings and the bespoke font; both go well with the other elements. They create a clean feeling while making it easy to draw attention to key bits of information. While black and white can feel a little austere, the cartoonish quality of this website lends a friendlier feeling.

Ease of use: 4 stars. It is easy to find what you need thanks to a navigation bar that is placed at the top of every page. Unfortunately, the names of the headings are a little confusing at first; hotel information is included under the heading ‘Practical’ while the heading ‘Sponsors’ has no list of sponsors.

Functionality: 4 stars. There are social networking links inside brightly colored balloons on the home page (balloons that disappear when you scroll over them, in fact). This is a fun addition, but email addresses are very difficult to locate, in tiny print at the end of a rather long page.

Content: 3 stars. The content is clever and written to appeal to a youthful market, but there are numerous spelling and grammar errors. We realize that this is a Norwegian conference, but why put a website in English if you are not going to translate it correctly?

Appropriateness: 5 stars. All content is appropriate for the audience.

Overall: 4.2 out of 5 stars.

In today’s video I talk about the powerful concept of remarketing and how you can use this to handle customer bounce on your ecommerce website. When you visit a website and look at products and then leave the website with out purchasing anything, Google remembers this via cookies and then serves ads on subsequent websites that are related to the website that you left with out making a purchase and in some cases, even the very same product you were looking at. This can be quite powerful but as with any kind of marketing strategy comes with some risks which I explore in this video.

Keywords are an important part of SEO—arguably the most important part. However, it can be difficult for even established website masters to identify what keywords and phrases will work best for them. Whether you are looking for organic or paid traffic, your keywords will determine your success in almost all cases. Here are a few ways to find the keywords that will drive traffic your way.

1. Think like a searcher. This is a very basic SEO concept, but one that seems to be overlooked by many. What phrases, adjectives, modifiers and even misspellings are commonly used by people looking for a website like yours? In order are people using these keywords? If you are having trouble getting inside the minds of your searchers, turn to your website analytics. You can see there what keywords are driving the most traffic your way and also which are producing the most income. In many cases, the results will surprise you—and hopefully inspire you as well. Similarly, identify what keywords are simply not working. Whether this is due to heavy competition or a simple lack of interest, its best to abandon these and focus on strategies that actually work.
2. Copy your competition. Not in a way that gets you blacklisted, of course! What I mean is to look at what keywords your biggest competitors are using. You can usually deduce this from their meta-tags, link anchor text, and other information. You don’t want to copy them exactly, but examining their strategy may give you a general idea of the direction you need to go in.
3. Don’t get distracted by volume. When you are just beginning a website, any traffic seems like a good thing. You become obsessed with page rank and numbers of unique daily visitors. However, in the long run traffic does not always equal income. In fact, if you are paying for search engine traffic, it can mean just the opposite. Consider your sales rate for key terms as well as your bounce rate. Focus not on the keywords that are bringing in the most people, but the ones that are bringing in the most money.
4. Avoid pay per click. Many people get caught up in the idea that they can get the same result of a high page rank from pay per click campaigns, and that these campaigns are therefore worth it. However, the easy way is rarely so easy, and this is no exception. Pay per click companies aren’t paying per sale, so look closely at your sales figures to see if you are getting your money’s worth. Hint: in most cases, you aren’t. Most of the time, you can get the same or better results from simply optimizing for the right phrases.
5. Consider negative matches. If you are running pay per click, or PPC campaigns (don’t say we didn’t tell you so!), you can at least use them for information. Pay close attention to what keywords are falsely driving traffic to your website. By ‘falsely’, we mean that they are bringing you traffic, but not bringing you sales. Sometimes when you look at this information, you see search terms that are clearly not right for your website. You can then set these as negative matches both for paid and organic results. This will ensure that you get only people who are actually interested, and take a chunk out of your ad budget as well.
6. Focus on long-tail keywords. That is, think of longer phrases that are both more likely to funnel highly directed traffic your way and less likely to put you in direct competition with the big guys in your field. These can often take you a long way, but check out the next suggestion as well.
7. Add shorter, higher volume phrases once you are established. Once you have built up a decent amount of income from long-tail or niche phrasing, you can begin to move in on your competitors’ territory by experimenting with short, high volume keywords. It seems counterintuitive to switch strategies once you have found one that really works, and we aren’t suggesting that. Add your high volume, short phrases to your long-tail keywords, but don’t replace them altogether.
8. Use keywords as business inspiration. When you see what terms are bringing the most traffic, you may find a few surprises. Perhaps people are visiting your website in search of a product or content idea that you are not offering—if you are really lucky, it might even be one that is simply not offered anywhere. This information can be used not just for SEO, but to plan the direction of your business so that you reach these untapped markets. Traffic will naturally flow toward this content because there is little else to serve them.
9. Evaluate and re-evaluate constantly. Using the above methods likely left you with a long list of keywords. Save this list, but don’t do anything with it yet except for gleaning the few most promising keywords from it. Focus on these few keywords and watch how much they earn. If a certain keyword is getting your website first page search engine results and earning you money, continue to focus on that word or phrase while introducing new and similar keywords from your list. If you are constantly in the process of changing and moving toward higher volume and higher selling phrases, your business is bound to grow in both page rank and income.
10. Avoid grey hat tactics. It may be tempting to go over to the dark side, especially when you see how much money the dark side is making. However, this is almost always a short term deal for them. Black hat sites have to constantly move and rebuild, never gaining a customer base or any kind of momentum. If you are trying to build a long term web business, stay with completely legitimate practices both in identifying keywords and in using them. All of your hard work and investment will pay off in the long term.

This week Google+ released the much awaited “business pages” feature and in this video I show you how to create a business page for your small business. Please note that creating a business page is not a big deal and is quite easy and intuitive. So you may wonder why I created a long vide for this. The reason is more to do with bringing awareness to small business owners about the importance of creating a Google+ business page and marketing it. So this is not a tutorial but rather a general discussion.

In many ways, the marketing world has been turned upside down. The ‘big’ marketing media such as television and publications are now secondary to blogs, social media, and other free means of gaining exposure. This gives small businesses an unprecedented advantage in the corporate world. You can turn your business into a success simply by getting people talking.

However, gaining this positive buzz often proves easier said than done. By the time you master a new strategy, it has already been replaced by newer, more effective methods. Here are a few guerilla marketing strategies that are hot right now and will likely be for the 2012.

Creative contests. There was a time when contests were relatively simple; you could have people drop their business card into a fishbowl and hold a weekly drawing, or some similar tactic. On the other hand, who wants to talk about that? Guerilla marketing is based on word-of-mouth, so design your contests to be both interesting and relevant.

Here’s a good example: a professional organizing company in Chicago, Hire Order, recently held a contest for the messiest desk. People sent in photos for the chance to win free services from the company. This provided three different kinds of positive buzz and exposure for the company. First, interested parties and the media paid attention quickly due to the uniqueness of the contest. It doesn’t hurt that the likely entrants were also prime potential customers. Second, there was more positive PR when the winner was announced. America is a country of voyeurs, and who doesn’t want to see what the messiest desk in the country looks like? Last, the company could use the end result as a case study to show potential customers what they do. And all it cost was a couple hours of time.

Instant expert Customers are more likely to buy from people they perceive as experts in the field. You can create an expert persona in a variety of ways, depending on your personal talents. If you are a charismatic person, you could volunteer to speak at an event, present an award, or otherwise place yourself in the public eye. This creates instant credibility, especially if you offer interesting information rather than a dry sales presentation.

If you are reluctant to get up in front of a crowd, there are still opportunities for building your star power. Try to participate in panel discussions regarding important issues in your community or even to sponsor a local team or event. Some people are good writers; if this is the case, you should begin submitting articles related to your business to both internet and local sources. Include links to these sources on your website and in your social networking pages. It is actually relatively easy to get published, but it still gives you the aura of an expert. Again, molding yourself into an expert costs only a few hours of time, but it can get your name out there and present your business as one of the best in its field.

In today’s video I talk about the possibility that you may be under pricing your services and how you can take a look at your pricing strategy and by adding value to your service, start to price your services for what they are worth. Looking at the competition and then pricing your services purely on price might not be such a great idea. Adding value to your service and then differentiating yourself in terms of price might be a better alternative.

Many economic experts are predicting that the economy may start growing rapidly in the near future. If you have played your cards right over the recession, this may mean a period of rapid growth for your small business. How you handle your company in good times is just as important as how you manage during downtimes. Here are a few tips for making the most of a period of rapid growth.

1. Invest in branding and logo design. When people are looking to spend money on products and services like yours, they will flock to the brand that is most compelling to them. Visual factors such as logo design are very important in these decisions because they will give your target audience a subconscious impression of your company before they even approach you. If you think your business is coming into a growth spurt, invest in professional branding and logo design services that will appeal to your market.
2. Delegate where possible. Make a plan now for how you will handle growth. What will your role be? In what areas are you the strongest? Often, in growth periods there is simply too much for a sole proprietor to handle. You will need to plan what duties will be outsourced and where you will send them. Decide now what you can do yourself, which functions will require a consultant, and which will require an employee. You will no longer be able to do it all yourself.
3. Choose customers wisely. You may enter a period where there is too much demand for your infrastructure. If this happens, don’t try to do it all. This will only lead to reduced quality and compromise your business. Instead, focus on the areas that bring in the most profit for the amount of time and energy they require. Many small businesses take whatever they can get in hard times, but this strategy will not work when you are growing rapidly.
4. Build your reserves. Growth requires capital, whether in the form of cash, credit, or easily liquidated stock. Prepare now by investigating new sources of investment and collecting the necessary documents. Apply for a line of credit early so it will be approved when you need it most. Try to foresee when a boom will happen for you and how you can identify it early enough to amass the capital that you need to grow with the times.
5. Remain calm and focused. Many small business owners assume that growth will be somehow easier and less stressful than recessions, but these periods present their own unique set of challenges. It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day struggle of managing growth and lose sight of your big picture. Throughout the growth process, remain calm and focus on your long term plan. This will help you to make the right decisions, ones that will prepare you for less positive times while maximizing your potential.

Small business owners need to be fearless leaders that manage their brand with an eye toward current situations and the future. Creating a brand that can withstand changing times can be challenging, but it will pay off in the long run.

The idea of having 100s of designers presenting you with logo design ideas and the ability to pick one winner and pay just that designer might seem quite appealing. In fact it is like a fairy tale. If you do not think of the realities of such a model, you could have a rude awakening one day when you realize that you have been the victim of one of the pitfalls of such an operation.

The fact that the designers who compete on such design contest websites have to participate in literally hundreds or even thousands of contests to have a decent chance of winning a few contests and being able to pay their bills leads to a multitude of scenarios. These include throwing together poor quality designs that are just graphics (and some of them quite ugly) and not “logos” that do not work for your company or your target market, plagiarising and copying existing designs to cut out the time it would take to properly research, brainstorm and come up with creative ideas and more.

In this video I talk about these scenarios and how these contest sites could turn creative design into a commodity and how it would effect you the client and the poor designers who work under such conditions with out pay and on spec.

With so many low-energy and low-cost ways of promoting your small business brand on the internet, many people assume that they don’t need to promote their brand ‘in person’. While internet branding and marketing venues such as social networking are certainly important, live events can also be valuable in building your corporate image. Whether you choose to be a sponsor of a live event or set up a booth at a local convention or show, live events can help make that personal connection that is so important to your customers. Here are a few of the advantages of live event marketing:

1. Live event marketing allows you to get to know your consumer base. It is easy to lose touch with your customers when they are merely numbers in an analytics report or faces you see only in business contexts. However, getting to know your market a little more intimately will help you to lead your business in directions that are more customer-oriented.
2. Live event marketing allows your customers to get to know you. Have you ever bought cookies from a Girl Scout? Sure, they’re a little over-priced, but the salespeople are undeniably customer-friendly. You are probably even more likely to buy the cookies if it is a niece or a friend’s daughter selling them. While you can never match the cute factor of a little girl, you can bet that your customers will be more likely to buy from you if they have met the people behind your business.
3. Live event marketing builds buzz. In a consumer survey by Jack Morton, eight out of ten people said that they tell others after participating in an ‘experiential marketing event’—that is, a live event that allows them to see, sample, or otherwise interact with products. People remember and discuss real life experiences. If you have a great product but just cannot seem to generate that all-important word-of-mouth advertising, this may be the missing link.
4. Live event marketing promotes brand recognition. What do you remember most: things you read about, or things you actually do? Allowing customers to interact in-person with your small business brand will make it more memorable to them because they have an experience (hopefully a positive one!) to associate with your name and logo design. Live events set you apart from every other name in the industry and plant the seeds of brand loyalty.
5. Live event marketing allows customers to get to know your products. If you are having trouble generating sales, the problem might not be your products. It might just be that customers don’t know enough about them to really want to buy. If you set up a booth at an event and allow customers to interact with your products, they just might decide that they need them. This is the concept that makes all of those home party sales work so well. When consumers actually put their hands on a product and experience how it works, they can then picture how it would benefit them in their day-to-day lives.

In today’s video, I talk about the importance of listing your restaurant or any other service business that depends on local traffic in Google Maps and Google Places Optimization. With more and more people searching for local services via Google Maps, it would create a tremendous drive to your local business if you ensure that your small business is listed on Google Maps and that your listing is complete and properly optimized.

Is your restaurant business listed properly on Google Maps?

The term ‘small business’ covers a wide range of business models and brands. A small business might make seven figures and have multiple employees, or be a single mother supporting herself from her laptop. Many of these very small ‘Mom and pop’ or sole proprietor businesses find that the small business advice out there is geared toward much larger operations.

Nowhere is this more true than in the world of ecommerce. Very small businesses can benefit in huge ways from expanding to the internet, but they have very special needs and considerations in doing so. Here are a few tips for running and marketing your small ecommerce enterprise

1. Go professional from the beginning. One of the best ways to ensure that your website is a complete failure is to do a slipshod job from the beginning. Your small business logo design, brand, and website need to be professionally designed and created for easy maintenance and longevity. Even if you manage to make a success out of the situation, you will pushing your business on a rough, uphill course until the issues are corrected. Design services are very affordable, so invest in them from the beginning.
2. Act like the big companies. This is most important in the areas of security and privacy. Customers will absolutely not feel safe doing business with you if you do not have a posted privacy policy and a secure payment gateway. The same principle applies to checkout; you will lose customers left and right if your checkout is not efficient and fast.
3. Build your fan base. Your most important task, once your website and logo are complete that is, is to lure traffic and, more important, customers to your site. You can begin to do this in a variety of ways. Open up social networking account and beginning finding and friending everyone you know. Talk to people that you encounter throughout your day about your new web venture. Ask people to mention you; word of mouth is critical in a small business’s success, and even more crucial for very small businesses with very small marketing budgets.
4. Be a local choice. There are many online yellow pages out there as well as sites such as Yelp that direct people to local businesses. Register with all of these sites. Even in internet sales, most people prefer to deal with local small business owners. You can also market locally by acting locally—sponsor a local team or event, join Rotary or a similar business organization, and generally make your presence known within your community.
5. Lure new customers with special deals. Many customers will visit a website for a special deal and then continue coming back if they enjoyed the experience. Offer a special coupon, a freebie, or even reduced price shipping can encourage newcomers to take that first step from visitor to customers. Just be sure your deal is one that you can afford to extend in huge numbers—there are a lot of bargain hunters out there!

In this video I talk about an online store that a friend of mine runs and how he is looking at the wrong competition and running marketing and SEO campaigns based on that. It is very important that you identify who your competition really is to ensure that you do not end up wasting time and energy chasing the wrong one and making critical decisions based on it. In your business, take a closer look at who you think your competitors are and try to analyze and see if they indeed are.

Whether you have an established small business or are still in the planning phases, you may feel a little daunted by strategic analysis. Even the term is intimidating! However, strategic analysis is actually a simple, concrete way of evaluating your small business and identifying future challenges. Whatever the type of brand and company you own, it is important to think ahead and to be realistic about future challenges. Strategic analysis can help you accomplish this in just a few simple steps.

Look Within: Strengths and Weaknesses

The first step to evaluating your company is to identify what strengths and weaknesses you have within your structure and your brand. What kinds of traits are going to be an advantage over the next months and years? What weaknesses could pose a challenge? In many cases, finding this information can be as simple as looking at customer feedback. If you hear a certain complaint or compliment often, this is likely a strength or weakness to be considered.

If you are having trouble seeing your business objectively, try looking at your competitors. Often, you can see their strengths and weaknesses more clearly. It is easy then to see what makes your company unique. One common weakness is an unprofessional logo design or a lack of a cohesive company brand.

Once you have identified your strengths and weaknesses, you can plan for success. Build on your strengths and find ways to make them core elements of your brand. Deal with your weaknesses and ensure that they don’t have a negative impact on your future.

Identify External Factors: Opportunities and Threats

Once you have looked at factors within your company, both positive and negative, it is time to look outside yourself. This can be much more challenging, but again it is necessary. What potential opportunities will be presenting themselves in the next months? Will you have an opportunity to expand? Is a new and untapped market building in your community? On the other side of the coin, look at threats to your business. Perhaps a new competitor is coming to town, or an aspect of your business has the potential to gain negative publicity. Identifying these threats before they actually affect your business will allow you to keep the damage to a minimum.

Again, having a strong brand is one of the best ways to deal with external factors such as competition. Act now to solidify your customer base and prepare for future competition.

There is a simple way to remember the steps of strategic analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, or SWOT. The strengths and weaknesses refer to internal factors, while opportunities and threats are the factors outside your business.

Many small businesses feel that planning ahead is less important than dealing with the present because you never know what will happen tomorrow. However, no one likes to be ‘tossed around on the wind’. You can’t predict the future, but you can act now to give your small business brand the best possible chance of success.

In today’s video, I talk about unnecessary policies and processes on your ecommerce website and your sales flow that actually alienates your customers and drives them away. Of course this is just a very simple list but the idea is to get you thinking about what you may be doing on your website that is counter productive and breaking your sales funnel.

This is an important question, and if you are like many small business owners, the answer is ‘No’. Unfortunately, many people are aware of the sad fact that their brand is simply not as strong as it should be, but they don’t know where to start in identifying and fixing the problems. Here are a few questions that will help you see where your brand stands.

• Is your brand geared toward your customers? Maybe you love your logo design, products, service, and everything about your small business, but you are not the one who matters. Identify what aspects of your brand your customers will love and what aspects they might not like so much. This will help you to take steps that maximize the positive elements and eliminate the negative ones.
• Is your brand different from all others? There should be a clear and obvious reason to choose you over your competition. Maybe it is your prices or service; maybe it is a unique product or the fact that you are the only local choice. Whatever your advantage is, make it a key part of your branding and make sure all marketing focuses on it. If you can’t explain why you are a different and better choice, your customers probably can’t either.
• Is your brand in a growing industry? Don’t stay on a sinking ship; instead, fix the problems and steer into more friendly waters. For best results, your industry should be growing by leaps and bounds. Sure, there are ups and downs due to the economy and outside factors. However, you absolutely must be in a growing industry; anything else is small business suicide. If your industry is not rising on the whole, identify new products, services, and directions that can take you onto a path of growth.
• How are the numbers? We all hate paperwork, but (to return to our ship metaphor) you can’t steer your business in the right direction if you have no idea where you are or where you are headed. Are you gaining market share consistently? Is your business getting consistent cash flow? Are your profits increasing? How are your profit margins? These elements paint a very accurate (and sometimes startling) picture of your small business brand.
• Are you positioned for growth? Don’t let a big break sneak up on you, or it just might pass you by. Instead, actively look for opportunities to grow and make a plan for how you will maximize them. No business can afford to stay stagnant, so include growth as part of your long-term plan. If you are not positioned for growth, both in the short and long terms, failure is inevitable. Luckily, you probably still have time to rectify the situation.

Many small businesses fail, and sometimes this is simply inevitable. However, too many fail for a lack of thoughtful evaluation and planning. Answering these questions honestly should give you an idea of where your brand is weak and how you  can make the changes that will lead you to success.

In today’s video I talk about the 6 most important pages on your ecommerce website. This video is aimed at the beginner online business owner and hence might have some very obvious points. My aim to get you thinking about the important pages on your website and conducting an audit to ensure you are not ignoring the most obvious ones!

There are certain business concepts that are difficult to understand. Branding is one of these ideas. It is crucial to have a brand tailored specifically to your customers’ needs, but developing this brand can be easier said than done. While it is important to consult a branding professional when building your small business brand, you ultimately understand your business and your customers in a way that no outsider ever can. Here are five steps to building a solid, customer-focused brand that your market won’t be able to resist.

1. Offer what they need, not what you want. If your brand is the best option for your consumers, it will be an easy sell. However, many small business owners develop a sort of tunnel vision, pushing something that is simply not needed by their customer base. It sounds counter-intuitive, and it is certainly counter-productive, but it is definitely a common business mistake. However, fulfilling a customer need does not mean selling basic commodities or changing your product line. Take for instance laundry detergent. Few people perceive detergent as a need. Clean clothes, on the other hand, are a necessity. Guess which one Tide is selling in their advertisements. You rarely see a picture of the detergent itself, but rather clean laundry and happy middle class families.
2. Show them, don’t tell them. Humans are overwhelmingly visual animals. This can be seen in almost every sector of our existence—consider the difference in popularity between the Lord of the Rings films and the long, wordy novels that they are based upon. You need to make your brand as visual as possible, with logo design and other branded elements.
3. Create a great customer experience. Your customers aren’t just buying a product or service, they are buying into your company and the experience that you provide. Every step of the buying process should be customer-focused and consistent with your brand. Take the time to figure out exactly what elements will set you apart from the competition in a positive way. Further, be sure your employees and consultants understand your vision so they can offer a uniformly perfect experience every time.
4. Monitor your customer experience. As the old business saying goes, employees are more likely to do what you inspect than what you expect. Constantly monitor your website, your employees, and every aspect of your business to ensure that your customers are getting the positive experience that will keep them coming back.
5. Plan for the future. What your customer needs today may not be what they need tomorrow. In addition, you will likely find that the future brings tighter and more similar competition, especially if your brand proves to be very successful. For these reasons and myriad others, no businessperson can afford to rest on their laurels. You must constantly keep in touch with your customer base and make changes to your business, your products, and your brand in accordance with changes in the market. This is the only way to ensure that your brand stays customer-focused and remains as relevant in the future as it is today.

A little while ago, I made a video called How to fire your non-ideal customers. Today I talk about the ideal customers and where and how you can find them. There is not point in getting access to 1000s of site visitors when your conversion of the right kind of customer is not good. In fact, finding the right kind of customer ensures you keep your sanity and run a profitable business in the long run.

Move over traditional advertisement; alternative marketing is the wave of the small business future. Cross promotion is one of those alternative marketing methods. It allows you to cut your time and money invested in advertising in half while wooing a market that you otherwise might never have reached.

Cross promotion doesn’t have to be as difficult as it sounds. It basically is marketing your business together with other small businesses. These don’t have to be competitors (in fact they should not be), but rather different businesses with the same market that you serve. Not only is cross promotion generally cheaper than traditional marketing, it can be more effective as well. You gain credibility and a sense of presence by linking your business to others in the community. Here are a few ideas for cross-promoting your business brand with others in your community.

• Trade sign space at your establishments, giving partners and yourself a free advertisement space.
• Create a flyer or postcard with advertisements for both businesses, then send it to both of your mailing lists.
• Make an agreement to mention each other when you deal with customers or the general public.
• Offer a special coupon that can only be offered to customers of the partner store. These can be distributed by placing them in a basket or a Lucite box at both establishments.
• Offer freebies or samples at the partner store (if your product allows this).
• Sponsor a local team or event together.
• Get together regularly to compare notes and talk about what has worked for you and what hasn’t, not just in the cross promotion but in other areas of business.
• Offer special sales events involving both businesses.
• Link to each other’s websites and social marketing pages.

Cross promotions are not free, but in many cases they will cost you half of the price of doing a promotion yourself because you have a partner to split the cost with. However, it is crucial that you choose the right partner. Here are a few tips for choosing a promotional partner in your community.

• Choose someone who is not a direct competitor, but rather is offering a very different product to the same group of customers.
• Look for businesses that offer related products (a local spa and a local health club go together beautifully for example, as do a shoe store and a clothing store).
• Approach the business owner or manager in person or in writing during a slow time.
• Put your agreement in writing so both parties feel that their interests are protected.
• Choose a business that is as successful (or more successful) than yours.
• Make sure your brands, including visual identities and logo designs, don’t ‘clash’.

Cross promotions are not just a potentially lucrative and more authentic feeling marketing style, but a huge opportunity to reach out to untapped members of your target audience. If a business offers great service and a needed product, a customer will be very likely to take their recommendations for other local businesses.

The home page of your website design, especially if you have an ecommerce website, is one of the most critical elements of your business success. In this video I talk about the various factors you need to keep in mind while designing your ecommerce home page. The list is by no means exhaustive but it is a good place to start.

Home Page Design Boot Camp

If you are already tired of leading a life filled with acronyms, you’d better get over it! There are two acronyms that we can guarantee that you will be hearing more of in the future: CSS and SEO. These two acronyms represent topics that are currently changing the way websites operate.

Most of us already know what SEO is, but CSS is an even newer topic. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a new design tool that allows website builders to create fast loading, original, attractive, and easily maintained websites. Best of all, CSS is incredibly search engine friendly, which means that a lot of potential customers will be viewing your mean, clean new website. Here are just a few of the many SEO advantages that CSS has to offer.

1. Prime placement of important SEO text. The unfortunate fact of web design is that what is meaningful to readers is not always so with search engines, and vice versa. With CSS, important wording can be moved to the top of the HTML file. Search engines automatically give more importance to text at the top of the webpage, so this can have a huge positive impact on how different search engines index and rank your website.  You can even place items in the HTML file independently of how they will actually appear to the viewer, allowing you to have a more natural flow without ‘burying’ important items in the eyes of search engine crawlers.
2. High weight HTML tags. CSS uses the familiar HTML tags that we are all used to, such as <h1>. This allows you to use headers as a way to show search engines what text is the most important to your page and thus to use important keywords to increase your site’s rank. It also allows you to construct menus using HTML tags, which yields the same SEO benefits while making it easy for users and search engine crawlers alike to access different parts of your website.
3. Easy to load pages. Your code to content ratio is very important both in loading speed and in search engine rankings. CSS creates beautiful, full featured websites with relatively low amounts of code to crawl through. This is because many CSS style sheets are externally linked instead of embedded. As with the other benefits we have listed, this makes it easier for users to access different areas of your site while giving you yet another SEO boost. Your readers and the search engine crawlers alike are more likely to explore your website thoroughly if it is quick and easy to do so.
4. Easy updating. CSS pages are incredibly easy for the webmaster to modify. This makes it easy for you to keep adding that all important fresh content while freeing up time for other endeavors. If you pay a webmaster to maintain your website, CSS will increase the amount of bang you get for your buck and prevent unexpected charges. In this way, as in many others, CSS offers the best of all worlds to both experienced users and total newbies.
5. Customizability. This is related to the previous benefit. Often, minor changes can be difficult to implement because you have to completely rewrite the HTML. With CSS, you can make minor changes to optimize success with visitors, however you define that. These changes can be made with a minimum of effort and without affecting your style or your SEO. With CSS, style, text, and SEO are completely different domains, making it easy to play with one without affecting the others.
6. Compatibility with a variety of browsers. Search engines are not currently ranking sites according to their compatibility with different browsers, but you will definitely benefit from being accessible to a variety of devices. CSS works well not just with computer users, but with PDAs and cell phones as well.

As with all innovations, it is easy to misuse CSS in ways that may be disastrous for your website. Here are a few “grey hat” or “black hat” techniques to avoid when using CSS to build a website.

1. Keyword stuffing. Many people think that the ease of using CSS to place keywords is an invitation to place a ton of them. It’s so easy to fill a page with words and then type the magic words, {display: none}, which hides them from viewers but leaves them perfectly visible to search engine crawlers.  However, search engines are getting better at detecting techniques such as this, so keyword stuffing just might get your site blacklisted altogether. Stick with placing keywords that make sense and using them sparingly to avoid getting red flagged.
2. Inappropriate image replacement. CSS allows you to use a technique known as image replacement, in which you basically tell search engines and text based browsers what is contained within an image. However, many people use this feature for keyword stuffing, which is not its intended use. Keep in mind that there are legitimate reasons to use image replacement, such as when you have a logo design with text in it that is important for SEO purposes. This is an example of a time when a CSS technique can be used for good or bad reasons. However you are using image replacement, there is a good chance that a search engine reader will interpret it as black hat and punish you with zero rank. Proceed with caution if you decide to use image replacement. A better way of dealing with the example given is to use an alt tag on all images.

CSS is gaining popularity quickly because of its easy use, unlimited style possibilities, and prime search engine management. This is due to the separation of content and style that the method has to offer. While CSS offers the perfect combination for web developers, it also gives almost unlimited possibilities for misuse. If you can resist the urge to trick search engines (and potential visitors) while using CSS to its best advantage, you will find that you get a result that is totally worth your effort.

I used to hate selling – both on the website and on the phone. On the website, this meant not working hard to ensure we are using the right language and the right sales process and on the phone, not being proactive and comfortable closing a sale. But after all these years tweaking our website, our sales process, our packages, and handling phone calls, I realize how much I love selling. I realized that I am actually helping customers find a service that they are looking for and selling actually is the process of helping them discover how your service or product fits into their requirement.

In this video I talk about a few tips on getting over the selling fear zone and get comfortable with selling.

Entrepreneurs are a representative of the American dream. Many people fantasize about turning their Big Idea into a lucrative and rewarding career, but only few people have the determination and vision to make it happen. Successful entrepreneurs are the real heroes in our nation because they show the rest of the country that dreams can be turned into reality.

Because we are so fascinated with entrepreneurs, they are the subject of many of the most famous Hollywood blockbusters. Their stories are particularly inspiring during bad economic times, when entrepreneurship becomes more attractive and more complicated to achieve at the same time. However, these stories are not just fantasies for would-be entrepreneurs; they are sources of inspiration and even ideas for people who are actually following their passion. Here are a few movies, old and new, that every entrepreneur should watch.

Citizen Kane

About the Film: This 1941 film is considered a cinema classic due to excellent character development and interesting film techniques. However, it is also based on the true life story of an entrepreneur whose name (and fortune) survives to this day: William Randolph Hearst. The main character, Charles Foster Kane, build a media empire with a mixture of passion and underhanded bids for power.

Real Life Entrepreneur Lesson: You can begin with nothing and still make it to the top. We love Kane’s ingeniousness, although we certainly do not recommend some of his techniques. Citizen Kane is often seen as a cautionary tale: don’t let the quest for power dominate your business decisions.

It’s a Wonderful Life

About the Film: You probably watch this 1946 movie every Christmas season for the heartwarming tale, but it is not just a holiday story. It is an entrepreneur story as well. George Bailey runs a family loan company that is placed in jeopardy when his uncle accidentally loses all of its money—literally loses it, because this is back in a time when a loan company would actually use paper money. Bailey considers suicide and is visited by an angel who shows him how different the world would be without him. He happily returns to his family on Christmas Eve and is bailed out by his neighbors, preventing the loss of his business.

Real Life Entrepreneur Lesson: The obvious lesson is not to be careless with finances, although most of you will not be carrying your wealth around town in paper dollars. However, another, more salient lesson is that you should never give up. Your business is making a difference, even if no guardian angel is available to spell it out.

Baby Boom

About the Film: Late eighties, power-suit-wearing business executive J.C. Wiatt is excited when she finds out that she has received an inheritance. Imagine her surprise when the inheritance is not property, but an infant. Humorous foibles ensue when she attempts to balance new motherhood and her career. In the end, she gives up and moves to the country. On a farm dotted with apple trees, she begins making baby food and builds an applesauce empire.

Real Life Entrepreneur Lesson: Entrepreneurship is often the best choice for ambitious parents because the corporate world simply is not accommodating of a parent’s needs for flexibility. You must look around you for inspiration and come up with a plan that allows you to have the work-life balance that you desire.

Cocktail

About the Film: Brian Flanagan, played by a young and less crazy Tom Cruise, is an aspiring entrepreneur who is studying for a business degree while serving drinks at night. He gets a job with a boss who teaches him how to be an amazing bartender and ends up moving to Jamaica to earn more money at a popular resort using the techniques he has learned. This eventually leads to Flanagan opening up his own bar, which is wildly successful.

Real Life Entrepreneur Lesson: While I would never downplay the importance of a business education, getting the right mentor can make the difference between success and failure. Flanagan learned the ins and outs of the bar business from his boss. The boss made some bad business decisions, but ultimately he taught Flanagan everything that he needed to achieve his goals—without a single book or term paper.

Chocolat

About the Film: This 2000 film tells the true story of Vianne Rocher, who would go on to become a famous chocolatier. Rocher moves to a new town as a single parent with a small daughter and opens a chocolate shop. She eventually wins over the provincial locals and becomes a success.

Real Life Entrepreneur Lesson: Rocher believes in her business, but she really focuses on quality and building a high quality brand. This eventually wins over the town, which builds the foundation for the international chocolate company which still exists today. She faces challenges squarely, but never loses her vision, which is definitely a lesson for modern entrepreneurs.

The Social Network

About the Film: Released just last year, this is the true life story of young billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. The idea for the website was developed in 2003 when Zuckerberg was a student at an Ivy League university. He decided to create an online social network for college students, which would eventually become open to the public and achieve the brand name status that it enjoys today. Myspace who? This story is inspirational because it shows us how a simple idea can turn into a fortune.

Real Life Entrepreneur Lesson: Don’t let anyone hold you back from your dream. Even if you are merely a young student, even if you face significant struggle (Zuckerberg was sued by former friends), even if your dream seems too big to come true, there is always a way to achieve success.

These movies provide so many more lessons than I can name here. I suggest viewing each of them when you have time and seeing what morals you can take away and apply to your own entrepreneurial dreams.

Have you signed up to Google Plus, the latest social media phenomenon. I did a video on the merits of this new social marketing platform and how you can benefit by getting on board now. At the moment, only individuals can open accounts. But business “pages” are on the way and once they are announced by Google, I am sure your small business page would really work well for you to connect with your target market.

Using Google Plus For Your Online Business Video

Every successful entrepreneur reaches a point where they need help. The obvious way of getting this help (if you can afford it) is hiring an employee. However, hiring and human resources is not on the average entrepreneur’s resume. It can be an easy enough skill to learn (considering that entrepreneurs tend to be fast learners anyway) if you know the dos and don’ts of the hiring process.

DO: Know what you want.

This may seem overly obvious, but consider: how many employers hastily jot out an ad without ever thinking about what they really need? You need to look around your business and do some serious thinking before even beginning the hiring process. If you are hiring for the first time, think about what duties you really want to hand off. What strengths and weaknesses will best complement your own? If you already have employees, you should think not just about what skills will enhance your team, but about what type of personality will fit best. You cannot put out a job ad with “bubbly and fun” or “thick-hided with an ironic sense of humor”, but you certainly can screen for these traits in employees.

DON’T: Write a garbage ad.

In case you have not flipped through the want ads lately, many businesses have very bad advertisements for open positions. They do little to market themselves to available talent. While there are many workers looking for jobs right now, the most capable employees are very much in-demand. The only way to get to them first is to make your want ad a way of marketing your business. Don’t give a dry list of demands and qualifications; focus on why the right person would want to work for you.

DO: Ask around.

If you were looking for a doctor, would you check the yellow pages? Most people would ask family and friends until they found the right person. You should approach hiring in the same way. Tell friends and family that you are looking for someone with a set list of qualifications and let them do the work for you. If you already have employees, be sure to ask them if they have acquaintances in the field. Often, word of mouth will bring in better qualified employees who are a better fit for your company.

DON’T: Make the hiring process too difficult.

Many employers impose huge amounts of challenges on would-be employees. The idea is that this gets rid of the people who are simply not motivated and leaves you with the most hard-working, qualified employees. In reality, this may leave you with just the people who have no respect for their own time. Make it easy for people to apply for a job, and you will end up with a more impressive pool of people to choose from when it comes time to pore through the resumes.

DO: Impose “smart gates”.

Smart gates are tasks that potential employees create in order to show you their abilities. We are not talking about a stupid English test; rather, ask something like: look at our website and tell us how you would improve it. This example may not work so well for you; a smart gate is only really smart if it is testing abilities and traits that will be the most important on the job, and if the average potential employee will not view it as a barrier.

DON’T: Disqualify people for the wrong reasons.

I have talked to many human resources people who had appalling rules. Whether they only hire people with good handshakes or never hire someone who has a colored resume, many have some way of narrowing down their candidates that has nothing to do with their ability to do their job. You should be hiring based on qualifications, interpersonal skills, creativity and other needed traits, not for their taste in shoes. Don’t cut people out for stupid reasons if there is a good chance that they would make great employees despite failing whatever silly test you have devised.

DO: Look for intelligence and common sense.

When I was in school, I was hired for a service job despite having no experience in the field. The manager’s reason was that I had people skills, which she could not really teach, while the other skills could easily be learned. I excelled in that job and stayed with the company until I graduated. When hiring, think about what you really need. Some jobs will require people skills, while others might need a good grasp of common sense. Look for these traits specifically, and don’t be afraid to give up some less desirable qualifications in favor of the ones you really need.

DON’T: Look for qualifications that you cannot afford.

One of the major mistakes in this economy is assuming that you can afford much more employee than before. This may be true on a temporary basis—you certainly may find someone who is out of work and simply wants a job—but in general, these people will leave as soon as something better comes along. You need to be very realistic about what kind of employee you can afford, not just to hire but to keep. Hiring is time-consuming and expensive; don’t set yourself up for having to do it again in a few months.

DO: Practice interviewing.

When you are interviewing, it is important to ask questions. However, you should not do all the talking. How can you find out anything about your potential employee if you don’t listen? Try to stick to questions and simply let the employee determine the direction and tone of the interview. This will allow you to get a really good idea of who the candidate is as a person.

DO: Train with a brain.

You have already decided what this employee will be doing, so design a training plan that maximizes their exposure to their job duties. Include specific goals, daily routines and more. Make sure you teach the employee everything that they need to know for their job, but not a whole lot more.

A video I made about your search not found error pages on your website and how you should take care not to frustrate your site vistors and how to properly handle these error pages to ensure your site visitors go back into your sales flow.

No Search Results On Your Website

For a full transcript visit: Not Getting The Right Results On Your Website?

Everyone who likes money should learn to be good with it. After all, for most entrepreneurs wealth does not come from a sudden windfall but rather from pennies stashed away here and there over the span of years. Money managing may be unpleasant, but there is one particular part of it that most people particularly hate: budgeting.

What does budget mean to you? To many of us, it has a somewhat negative connotation. We tend to think of earmarking funds for necessities along and leaving no money for more fun considerations. Budgeting does not have to be negative; if you are an entrepreneur, then it is completely necessary in fact. Here are a few budgeting faqs to get you started.

• List your priorities. This is an excellent exercise in simply learning to prioritize and manage time, but it can help with managing money as well. Think of the things that are essential to your business (rent, overhead, inventory, etc) and then move to the second place list. The most important items should receive the most money obviously.
• Don’t get hung up on the small stuff. When faced with any large task, it is easy to get hung up on the smaller aspects which, in the long run, are just not very important. Many entrepreneurs read that there is excellent budgeting software out there and lose focus on the budget itself. You should definitely research which types of software are right for you, but you can certainly begin making a budget without them. Many banks offer free software with a business account; these can be the right solution because the price is right and they are compatible with your bank account. Ditto goes for any other “detail” of your budget. Work on the big picture before filling in the details.
• Set up your budget with strategic priorities in mind. For example, many entrepreneurs need to see not just sales but sales channels. Your budget needs to be set up so that it is easy to examine how reality jives with your plans and modify accordingly. Accounting is so detailed that it can be difficult to discern these things, which is why budgeting and aggregation are important.
• Identify and watch for red flags. What issues could take down your business? In a constantly changing economy, often constantly changing for the worse, you need to identify these so that you can watch for them. For instance, maybe your margins are the most crucial thing right now. You need to incorporate these into your budget so you can easily see when you are getting off track. It is often relatively easy to correct these when they first occur, certainly easier than finding out when it is too late.
• Be consistent. You may be tempted to change categories in your budget as your needs change. This can be a good idea, but it comes with a major caveat. If you change categories often, then you may fail to recognize long term trends. These trends can be a key factor in making decisions and determining the direction of your company, so only make changes when they are truly necessary.
• Review your budget on a regular basis. I have found that a monthly budget review is perfect for identifying trends and making necessary changes. All budgets are wrong, even after years of honing them. Budgeting requires making guesses about what will happen in the future, which is never a precise task. The important thing is that you make a budget so you can compare the ideal financial situation for your entrepreneurial ventures with the reality. Regular reviews can help you to create a more accurate budget and also to identify problem areas.
• Involve employees. Many employees, even in smaller, more informal businesses, do not understand the ins and outs of their employer’s financial goals. If you have employees, you should involve them as much as possible in the ongoing budgeting process. Make them partners in the venture, even if only figuratively. Being aware of your company’s finances will encourage them to always make the best possible decisions and make them feel like a part of your business’s growth.
• Be prepared for the worst case scenario. Analysts are looking less and less optimistic about 2012. It is shaping up to be a year without growth, without credit and therefore a year without spending. You really need to step it up in order to be successful. Moreover, you need to be prepared for the possibility that your best efforts may still fall short. If you make a plan for dealing with financial strain before it even occurs, you will have a better chance of riding out the storm.
• Build sub-budgets. Change in the economic world means changes for entrepreneurs. You may need to introduce a new product, make a new marketing plan or even pull back spending. However, because these are possibilities and not definite plans, you probably do not want to incorporate them into your overall budget. You can still begin to work out how these things will affect your budget; simply make sub-budgets and budgets based on projections. It may seem like a lot of work, but you will be happy when the time comes to implement your plans!
• Don’t give up. It can be tempting to forget about budgeting and begin flying by the seat of your pants. After all, budgeting can take a lot of time, and it is discouraging when your budgets never seem to match the reality. Keep in mind that a budget is a goal—the way you would like to see money spent in your business. Even if your entrepreneurial ventures do not always meet the goals, you still profit from remaining aware of what you really want and need from your business.

Budgets are the only way to determine a path for your business and hold yourself accountable for staying on track. They do not take much time to manage once you have developed a system, but they can make all the difference in the success of your business. Don’t let a little work keep you from achieving your entrepreneurial dreams!

Todays video is about the different social networks available for the small business owner to target different types of customers. Besides the big social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, there are tons more out there.

These social networks are targeted at various niche market segments and it would be wise to explore these options depending on your target market.

Social Network Websites Video

Shopping is a major part of the typical American mother’s life. Although we joke about women’s love of shopping, most of it is very necessary. They are responsible for procuring all of the food, clothing, cleaning supplies and other necessities of daily life in almost all households. The fact that moms shop is not changing, but the economy has certainly changed the way that they select and complete purchases. Today you are going to meet a customer who is very likely a part of your target consumer base: the new frugal mom.

Many consultancies are looking at the behavior of the new, frugal mom with good reason. When the economic crisis hit, many businesses found that their products were no longer selling. Old marketing strategies and old ways of approaching the market were suddenly not effective. The numbers show that people are still spending money, but many entrepreneurs are having trouble keeping their piece of the pie. Here are a few facts about the modern mom’s shopping habits.

1. She is still shopping. Although many people cut back when the recession hit like a ton of bricks, consumer spending has rebounded, especially among moms. You can only go so long without buying your children shoes or replacing a worn-out sofa. The new frugal mom is shopping once again, but she is buying in different ways and with different motivations.
2. She holds the purse strings. Women are currently in control of most discretionary funds in the nation, and mothers of households are a huge subgroup. Moms are making the decisions for their families, including their partners, so your messages should be as female-centric as possible if you are selling a product or service that is used by any member of a nuclear family.
3. She is reluctant to spend. The recession is the Great Depression of our times. It has left an indelible mark on the public psyche. Even in families that were not devastated by the recession, the mothers are aware that money is a limited resource in a way that they were not aware ten years ago. Although the new mom is still spending, she is giving more thought to her purchases and looking for value more than ever.
4. She is less brand loyal than ever. A recent study found that only a little more than a third of moms are still staying with the same brands. The recession created a survival mentality, in which many people simply went with the cheapest options regardless of personal brand preferences. This was an eye-opening experience for many women, who discovered that their favorite brands were not as superior as they had always assumed. Many of us tried a generic cleaning spray or a lower priced laundry detergent and were satisfied with the results. This has led to general questioning of brand loyalties. This, of course, is a huge opportunity for the many entrepreneurs out there who no longer have to break through a wall of brand loyalty in order to build a consumer base.
5. She is blind to traditional marketing. The only way to live without spending in the modern world is to develop mental blinders, to simply stop noticing or stop responding to marketing. This is what many people did several years ago. This means that you must reach them in new ways. Special deals, coupons, social media—those are the more effective ways of reaching the new frugal mom. Right now, peer-to-peer advertising is on the rise. If you can win over a few moms and get them to tell their friends about your product, you are set up for success.
6. She still wants quality where it counts. There were certain areas in which brand name consumption did not change. One of these was baby formula. People are willing to skimp in some areas, but not when it comes to their children’s health and well-being. Even in the worst economic situation, the mothers still will consistently spend on their children if they think the expense gives them an advantage. This is a powerful insight for entrepreneurs offering products for children; the new frugal mom still wants her children to eat, wear and play with the very best.
7. She has different values. Remember those old laundry detergent commercials promising whiter whites with no ‘ring around the collar’? The new mom could not care less whether her kindergartener has the whitest underpants on the playground. She cares about whether the detergent is safe, whether it will irritate her child’s sensitive skin, whether it will hurt the environment, and whether the packaging will fit neatly in her cupboard. The same story has occurred in almost every industry. The new frugal mom simply does not care about the same things as her own mother, or even her older sister. Get to know what she wants from your industry, and offer it.
8. She is incentive-oriented. The main incentive right now is saving money—getting the same quality for a lower price. Coupon usage has gone way up in the past few years for this reason. If you can offer a coupon or other special offer, the new frugal mom will be even more likely to choose your company. This is even more effective than simply offering a lower price, because the shopper sees herself as getting a high priced item for a bargain price. Suddenly it’s a bargain, not a compromise. Almost eighty percent of mom shoppers report that they will try a new service or product if they have a coupon for it.
9. She is developing new brand loyalties. That mom who just became a customer because of a coupon? She may have scrapped old brand loyalties, but she is busily building new ones. If you offer a great product and superior service, she may become a loyal customer. Don’t assume that those coupon-bearing customers are perpetual deal-seekers that won’t be back; in many cases, they are simply a new frugal mom who is open to trying a new brand if the price is right.

I made a video recently talking about the importance of having a good internal search on your website. This is not to be confused with search engine optimization. A well implemented internal search will help your website vistors get the information they are looking for.

It is inevitable that some times what a web vistors is looking for may not be on your website. But if you put a little thought into how your internal search is implemented and what your “no results found” page says. The ”no results found” page could be a great opportunity to ensure the vistor is not frustrated and continues with the conversion funnel.

Don’t Frustrate Your Website Visitors Video

For a full transcript of this video, please visit this link: Not Getting Right Results

Please ensure that if you have an ecommerce website, you do not just include your products in your internal search index but also your policy pages, informations pages, your blog and more. This will ensure that vistors find what they are looking for with out hassles and frustration.

If you are looking for a fast-growing field for your next entrepreneurial venture or even for a new product that will sell well, food just may be the right match for you. Food and food products are some of the hottest products being sold by entrepreneurs. Here is a little information on the genre and a few of the reasons that we think it is so hot right now.

A Growing Industry

The American restaurant business grew one and a half percent last year. This may not seem like a lot, but keep in mind that many industries barely remained flat or even lost ground. There are other good indicators as well; food co-op membership is at an all-time high, which packaged upscale and foreign foods are selling at higher rates than ever. Venture capitalists are catching on; it is much easier to get an investment in a restaurant right now than in other businesses. An entrepreneur recently was loaned $10 million for the development and opening of a restaurant based on the humble grilled cheese sandwich.

Because of the increase in consumer and investor interest, many entrepreneurs are becoming interested as well. But why do consumers care so much about food all of a sudden?

• Home and hearth connotations. American home life is less stable than it used to be, or at least we perceive it that way. What could be homier than a high quality meal? Whenever Americans are longing for simpler times, food is an easy answer. It takes years to create a traditional family, but a comforting meal can be had quickly. This is particularly true in the case of small businesses selling classic comfort foods, such as the grilled cheese sandwich restaurant discussed before.
• Health concerns. The obesity epidemic is rampant, which has led to heightened concerns about diet and health. If a product has been shown to lower the rate of certain diseases or to have other health benefits, many Americans will be interested. If you can offer a healthy product with comfort food appeal, the masses will beat down your door to buy it. Investors know that. In addition, many people have special health needs that are not being adequately met by most food manufacturers, such as the need for gluten free foods.
• Green fever. Many people feel that the environment is in a state of rapid decline. While most of us do not have the power to make huge changes, there is a lot to be said for making small changes that can add up quickly. Plus, buying green or locally sourced food is a good way to at least feel like you are making a difference. Green food and related items are big sellers right now for these reasons.
• Ethnic traditions. How better to experience a culture than to sample its eating traditions? Many Westerners are becoming hooked on exotic foods, with their new and interesting flavors and textures. Packaged exotic foods are enjoying particular success right now because they make it easy for people to sample new and interesting foods on a daily basis. In the restaurant business, people are interested in sampling cuisines that they have never tried before, such as Ethiopian and Taiwanese.

If you are thinking about getting into this in-demand line of business, you are not alone. It can be a very lucrative proposition if you approach it correctly and plan for success. Here are a few things to think about when planning a move into the booming food industry.

1. Start small. You cannot jump into a new line of business feet first; test the water by trying a single food product and seeing how it sells. Start with a product that can later become the core of your brand, and then expand once that is successful.
2. Know the regulations. Because of the potential for illness in poorly prepared food, there are many regulations for people who want to commercially prepare it. These vary from state to state and from area to area, so you will have to find out on your own which apply to you. The list will probably include ingredient labeling, health department inspections and special certifications for food handlers. Sometimes your local government gives special grants to cover these costs.
3. Get your products out there. People may be reluctant to try a new food product, which is why you need to give them ample opportunities to see, taste and experience it. Get a booth at your local farmer’s market and sell product or at least hand out small samples. Cater for friends and generally do everything that you can do to expose people to your product. In addition, you may want to send samples to bloggers who post about your particular niche. This type of word of mouth advertising can be very powerful.
4. Look for capital before you need it. Food businesses typically operate with very low margins, which can mean that there will be a long interval before you begin making a profit—or even break even. This means that you will likely need funding. Luckily, there are many venture capital firms and other lenders that are interested in food businesses. Compared to other industries, it is relatively easy to get the loans that you need in order to start your business.
5. Talk to an accountant. There are some tax considerations when opening a food business that don’t arise as quickly in most fields. First, most food businesses need employees almost from the start; there are special tax credits if this is the case for you. In addition, there may be research and development grants that can help you as you try out new recipes, or at least tax credits. In addition, there are now special deductions for companies that are completely domestically based, which will probably include you.

Food and food products make up a unique field, but also one that is uniquely lucrative. They can be a huge success when run by the right person. Are you that right person?

This question is probably the one most often posed to ecommerce websites: ‘where is my order?’ It is also one of the more frustrating, because in many cases the person being asked has no control over the delivery process. The best way to deal with this question, which constitutes 70% or more of all customer service contacts during the holiday season, is to prevent it in the first place. Here are a few ways of doing that.

How To Deal With Order Delay Issues Video

#1 Don’t Underestimate your delivery service. 

In other words, assume that something may go wrong. Underestimating your delivery means overestimating your delivery time. Pad your estimates by a small margin so that most customers will get their orders on time, and many will be surprised by an earlier-than-expected package.

#2 Offer an order tracking tool. 

This can cost some cash to set up and maintain, but you will save in customer service inquiries and also in reputation loss when packages are delivered late through no fault of your own. Include a link on your ecommerce website as well as sending one to customers immediately after their purchase is made. This will allow them to answer their question without your involvement. It also allows them to see that you have held up your end of the bargain by shipping the order in a timely manner. Many customers who are provided with order tracking information will field their questions to the delivery company rather than to you.

#3 Communicate about the purchase. 

Sometimes customers just want to be sure that their order was not lost in cyberspace. A little communication can calm their worries. Send an email when the order is received and another when it is shipped, preferably with tracking information and instructions within.

#4 Include shipping information in your FAQs and any other customer service pages. 

State your shipping policies (remember to pad the time as I suggested earlier) and answer the most common questions regarding order delivery. This gives visitors an idea of what to expect before they even make an order.

#5 Use fast shipping where possible. 

Sometimes it is only a tiny bit more to send something with faster shipping. When this is the case, choose the faster shipping when your profit margins allow it. Customers will be pleasantly surprised and you will have fewer headaches. This can be especially beneficial during the holidays, when many delivery services run behind schedule.

#6 Be sympathetic. 

You know what it is like to wait for a Christmas package due on the 23^rd or a school textbook for a class that started yesterday. It is stressful. In fact, one of the major objections to online shopping is the shipping issue, both the cost and the waiting time. By delivering as promised as often as possible, you will be proving that buying from your ecommerce website is the right choice.

#7 Make amends. 

When customers have to wait way too long for a package, they get bitter and blame you. Try to make amends by communicating your apologies and sending a coupon for their next purchase. Meanwhile, address issues that seem to be coming up often. Make sure you are as vigilant about shipping as you are about every other aspect of your ecommerce website.

Remember, a few small arrangements – especially if your online store is on a dependable platform like Ringgle.com, can ensure not only professionalism during the order process but also fewer customer service headaches.

Small businesses are the focus of much economic action right now. Although they create a huge percentage of new jobs in the United States (something like ninety percent last time I heard), help for small businesses has been noticeably lacking in the economic stimulation bills passed by the government. If anything, the government is making it harder and harder to become an entrepreneur and find success as one, even as billions of taxpayer dollars are funneled to the corporations that are “too big to fail.”

This brings up an important question: how important are small businesses and entrepreneurs to the American economy? Or, more succinctly, are they so important that the government needs to step in and help them? With 14 million people unemployed and the recession hitting its second dip, it is important that the government focus its energy and funds in areas that will make the most impact. Here are a few facts to keep in mind about this important topic.

• Small businesses are important as employers. At the last census, there were six million American companies with paid workers. Nine-tenths of these employ less than twenty people. However, because each of these businesses have such a small payroll, these companies actually account for only one-fifth of all jobs. Only? When you think about it, that comprises millions of working Americans who need their job as badly as someone working for a large corporation.
• Most small businesses stay small. The little shop on your corner is probably not the next Google or Apple. Eighty percent of businesses studied in 2000 to 2003 did not add a single employee. To be honest, not all people want to grow. Many entrepreneurs became such because they wanted a flexible schedule or other freedoms. These people don’t really want to add another employee, which brings us to our next point.
• Many small businesses are not growing because they don’t want to. Before we spend billions making it easier to entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, it is important to keep in mind that many actually do not want to be big businesses. Many small business people own service businesses in which immense growth is impossible—a doctor’s office or a plumbing business, for example. Others are involved in businesses in which scaling up would not significantly affect their profit margin and thus is not as attractive, such as a restaurant. Some entrepreneurs don’t want to make it big… they want to make it medium.
• Small businesses usually grow slowly. The small businesses that do want to grow and have the ability still may not be able to grow enough to collectively carry the economy out of a recession in the near future. Growth has been made even more difficult in recent years because investment capital and paying customers are both dwindling.
• Small businesses are hit harder by the economic “weather”. A recent study found that small businesses that lost employees lost around twenty percent of them. Meanwhile, large companies with more than 200 employees lost only eight percent. This means that while small businesses may not be the savior of the American economy, a lack of attention to them can certainly bring the economy down.
• Small businesses struggle to woo and to keep workers. It can be harder to keep employees or even to treat them the way you might want to when you lack infrastructure. Small business tend to pay employees less, but also to have smaller per-unit profits. This means that many small businesses really cannot afford to be more generous employers. In addition, small businesses are less likely to offer health benefits and about half as likely as their larger counterparts to offer any sort of retirement plan. When you are competing for talented employees, this can be very destructive. You may have to make do with less trained staff while the corporations get all the real players.
• Countries that depend on small businesses as a major part of their GDP usually do not fare as well. A joint study performed by economists at Dartmouth and Harvard found that a country’s wealth is inversely proportionate to the percentage of workers who are self-employed. It should be noted that a third world person selling firewood is not the same in terms of opportunity to succeed as someone who runs an American dental office. Nonetheless, part of this is due to the higher efficiency and productivity in the more differentiated workplaces that corporations can provide. Clearly, we cannot put the burden of economic recovery on our small businesses without putting our nation in peril.
• Small business monies are often given too indiscriminately. Some small businesses want to grow and are in a position where this is possible. Obviously, these are the businesses that should be targeted in any economic growth legislation. Wasting money on small businesses that plan to remain small or cannot grow may be just that: wasting money. I am all for helping small businesses and entrepreneurs, but we need to focus on growth right now.
• Americans love entrepreneurs and small businesses. No politician can be openly hostile to these without alienating a huge percentage of constituents. This means that many politicians may push small business breaks even if they will not really help us right now. It just makes Americans happy. I know as a small business owner it certainly makes me happy! But from an entirely unselfish point of view, I would like to see our nation get out of this slump, which means being very smart about every dollar spent.

What does this mean for the United States? Clearly a lack of attention to small businesses can really harm our economy. On the other hand, small businesses cannot be expected to create fast growth in either the economy or employment. Small businesses are by nature small, although they add up to a massive impact. While helping small businesses will always be an important part of any economic recovery legislation, we need to keep our expectations realistic and maintain a balanced approach.

There is no point in focusing your time and efforts on a segment of your customers that fit the “bad customer” profile. Wether you like it or not, there are always bound to be customers that do not fit your company and your brand. Such customers end up wasting your time, your marketing efforts and your customer service.

How To Fire Your Customers | Full Transcript of video

This can be described by the famous 80/20 rule where 80% of your business issues and problems and customer service head aches are a result of 20% of your customers. If you can identify who this 20% is and fire them, your business would improve dramatically.

In this video, I take a brief look at this issue and suggest a few ways of handling this situation. I am surprised that most businesses do not realize this. In our own business here on Logo Design Works, I did a similar audit and realized that customers of a particular service made up 75% of our customers service calls and email correspondence. This was the brochure design service. I then analyzed the revenue model and realized that the actual revenue from brochure design projects was less than 11% of our total sales.

Because brochure designs are for marketing purposes and clients do not really have a good marketing strategy before they approach us, the designs we create almost always fel short of their expectations. Perhaps these clients have been exposed to brochures created by large companies, who spend thousands of dollars on creating their marketing material and set their expectations high. But they want this service for less than $400 and still get the same results. On top of that printing issues and coordination between their printer and our designers took up a huge chunk of time.

So I made the conscious decision to discontinue offering Brochure Design services. When we get calls related to brochure design orders, we politely turn them down. This has improved our customer service record quite dramatically!

Consumers all over the United States are protesting Bank of America’s new fees for using debit cards. Most Americans are used to using their debit cards everywhere they go, and having free access to their money at all times. Paying even $5 per month seems to rub many people the wrong way. After all, it’s our money, right?

Why is Bank of America (and a handful of other banks) choosing now to alienate their customers? The answers are not complex at all. Every business could use more money. There is the added benefit that placing fees on a debit card encourages consumers to use their credit card instead, which in turn brings more money into the bank. In addition, this and other banks will be soon seeing a hit in a major source of income: swipe fees. In my opinion, recently passed legislation regulating swipe fees is the reason for

While many Americans went about their merry way, a battle was being fought over debit cards this spring: that of swipe fees. As many entrepreneurs are aware, these can be very high, even crippling for many small businesses. Through lobbying and intensive effort, the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law was passed, limiting the amount of money that banks can charge for debit card usage.

The Federal Reserve will heretofore be responsible for overseeing the way businesses pay for debit cards to be used at their website or location. The new law holds that banks can charge swipe fees that do not exceed 21 cents per purchase, although there may be a possible one cent added on for fraud prevention. This may seem like a lot of money per transaction if you are not familiar with the current swipe fees, which average almost fifty cents per transaction.

This cap has already begun. Market analysts estimated that it would cost $6.6 billion every year from the banking business as a whole. Small business owners and entrepreneurs have long been batted about at the whim of these huge banks. Year after year they raise fees and find sneaky little ways of charging us more for even less services. Their profits are more than the average entrepreneur can even imagine, yet they are always asking for government handouts.

Can you tell that I have little sympathy for the banks? I might feel a little worse for them if they had not already found a way to weasel around this limit on debit card charges. While Bank of America is the institution getting the most press, other large banks such as Chase, Sun Trust and Wells Fargo either plan to follow suit or are already implementing a new fee strategy.

In addition to absorbing the fees that banks are losing with this new legislation, the new fee for debit card usage will encourage customers to use their credit cards. Credit cards are not subject to the same fee regulations as debit cards, which means that banks can still charge sky high fees to merchants who accept them. In addition, credit cards also come with other money making potential, such as interest and fees.

If you are an entrepreneur who relies on debit card purchases, you are probably wondering: what can you do now? Many small business owners were counting on the new debit card cost cap to keep their expenses down and pad the recession-tightened profit margins a little bit. Instead, we are faced with the reality that many customers will be using their credit cards instead to avoid fees, which places us still at the mercy of the banks. However, there are a few ways that you can cut your swipe fees and keep a little more of your hard-earned money in this recession. Here are a few tips. Keep in mind that some may alienate customers, while others may involve intense negotiation with banks, so use at your own risk.

1. Negotiate with banks. Most of the swipe fees that you pay are set in stone by Mastercard, Visa and the other major credit card carriers. They are determined by some complicated algorithm that takes into account the size of your business, the amount of money being charged there and more. However, the rest of the swipe fees that you pay are negotiable, and they can really add up! The service fees charged directly by banks can be negotiated down, especially if you have an existing relationship with the bank in question.
2. Offer cash discounts. As Bank of America is soon to demonstrate, fees can have the effect of changing customer behavior. You can bet that more people are going to be using their credit cards, inconveniencing themselves immensely just to save $5 every month. This can be bad for your profit margins unless you introduce incentive to use another option: cash. Offering a discount for using cash or a fee for using credit can guide your customers toward behavior that reduces your overhead. Customers may be annoyed by this, but if you educate them about the reasons for this they may be more cooperative and happy to pay in cash.
3. Set a minimum purchase. This is a tactic that I see often at a gas station near me. They accept debit and credit cards, but there must be a five dollar minimum purchase. This keeps them from paying a fifty cent fee on a seventy-five cent pack of gum and it and it also encourages patrons to add to their purchases. Does it work? In my case, it seems to. I cannot count how many times I have popped in for a soda and bought several other items just to hit that limit. This practice used to be technically against the rules for many credit card carriers (those rogue minimart owners!) but it is now allowed. Just don’t be too greedy about the amount of the minimum purchase, and be sure you have your policy posted so there are no surprises.
4. Raise prices. This should always be the last resort, but it may be one that you must turn to in order to maintain your business through the changes in bank policies. If you decide that this is the only way for your business, be sure to raise prices in a slow and steady manner that won’t attract ire. If there is one thing we can learn from Bank of America, it is that customers get mad when they are suddenly forced to pay more for the same services.

If you are running any kind of business, there is always competition. There are huge companies out there that would love to squash you like a bug. For instance, no matter what you are offering, Amazon probably offers it as well. The big internet companies almost all started as little guys, and they built empires from doing a lot of the stuff right. This tempts a lot of newer, smaller online businesses to copy them.

Don’t Ruin Your Business by Copying the Big Guys Video


This is not an entirely bad idea. The Big Guys are dedicating a lot of money to figuring out why customers do what they do. They obviously have found a recipe for success. But there are a few things that you should absolutely not copy. Here are a few ways to completely destroy your small business by acting like a large one. Don’t try these at home!

Mistake #1 Requiring registration to buy. 

Why not require registration? Customers hate it. They simply despise it. Who wants to give out their mother’s maiden name just to buy a child’s toy? No one. Many customers will tolerate this from big companies because they know and trust them—and they know that they will be back, so the registration will save time in the long run. They don’t know that about your small business! Also, many customers are willing to put up with a certain amount of crap just to get the bargain basement price that these big guys offer. But you aren’t even going there, because of my next point:

Mistake #2 Undercutting prices. 

Even though it may be tempting and the only solution – never fight price wars! You cannot offer a lower price than the big guys. The Big Guys take their huge buying power and use it to strong-arm suppliers into giving them a great deal. They are paying less than you, have larger sales volume than you, and thus can afford to give a great price. Offering the best price and staying in business will not be possible for the small guys because we don’t have the size and leverage that you need to be a bully. We have to find other reasons for customers to choose us.

Mistake #3 Stepping out of your niche. 

As I said before, and you have probably noticed this as well, Amazon offers everything. It is one of many websites offering everything—Costco.com and Overstock both specialize in selling wide ranges of products. You might look around at all these Big Guys offering everything and get the idea that this is a good business model for the small guys. But it isn’t, and here’s why: you can’t afford it. Marketing to the masses is expensive, but that does not mean you should give up. People coming to your website are not looking for everything; they are looking for one thing. Niche sales allow you to be very targeted in marketing and inventory. Even Amazon started small, with just books. Once you are a Big Guy, you can expand; until then, stick to what you know.

Mistake #4 Not building trust. 

If you look around the Big Guys’ websites, you might notice a few things missing. For instance, some times there is no SSL certificate, no BBB accreditation, and generally no trust marks. This might lead you to assume that you don’t need these. Don’t get me wrong. Some sites do have such marks. The problem is: people already trust the Big Guys. They don’t need any extra assurance. You, on the other hand, are unknown. They need to understand why they can trust you. So offer them proof that you are trustworthy, in the form of visible site security and other trust marks.

So although it is nice to look at the big guys and learn a few marketing lessons from them, it would be prudent to know what your limitations are and ensure you do not make the above mistakes.

Simpson University with it’s rich heritage and culture turned to Logo Design Works when they wanted to re-brand their sports and athletics teams to help motivate the team members and to inspire them to achieve great results with a new university logo design.

The resulting mascot design was that of a hawk which represented the Simpson University Sports Team’s spirit and endurance. The fierce looking hawk was created to help inspire the young athletes. The mascot is now widely used in Simpson University.

Simpson University athletics started in the 1950’s and now is comprised of 11 sports. Playing in the Cal Pac conference gives Simpson one of the biggest NAIA conferences to compete in. The Cal-Pac conference is composed of Bethany University, Menlo College, William Jessup University, Holy Names University, Mills College, Pacific Union College, and Cal State Maritime.

Top 4 Ways to Destroy Your Search Engine Ranking – Everyone talks about how to improve your search engine ranking, but where is the fun in that? Today, I thought I would take a break from the obvious and talk about a few ways that you can sink—that is, completely destroy—your search engine optimization and make your website Public Enemy #1 on Google’s list.

How To Become Google’s Enemy!

#1 Artificial link-building. 

You just opened a new website and—surprise—there are already 6000 links to it, all of them brand new? Sound fishy? It totally is. You are not the smartest person trying to sneak this one past Google. Accept that, and move on. Everyone knows that those links are fakes, Google included.

#2 Hiding text. 

CSS makes this really easy, but many people also try the classic trick of placing text in the background, in the same color so that it is not easy to see. The consumers may not see it, but the Google bots will. Another similar trick is placing lines and lines of junk in your code. There is even a WordPress plug-in that makes this easier—that is how common the practice is. The problem is that Google bots are programmed to spot these types of trick because they are so obvious. Either one may even get your website de-indexed, which is basically S.E.O death.

#3 Link farming. 

This is different from artificial link-building, because it is reciprocal and does not feel like you are doing anything really wrong, although I can assure you Google won’t see it that way. Unlike the other SEO fails, you have probably encountered this one because it is that common. Website owners create a dedicated links page and link to several or even hundreds of their online friends. In exchange, the friends link back to them. The problem with this is that none of these links are really relevant; after all, the really relevant links in Google’s opinion would be those of your competitors. In addition, it gives customers an easy exit route from your page—ouch.

#4 A lack of fresh information. 

It doesn’t matter if you add new text by hosting a blog, changing up your text, or even adding new products—just make sure there are regular additions and that they are relevant to your business. It is really that simple. Having no new text tells the bots to bump you even further down the page, while new text signals relevance. Just make sure that the text is unique, and that it uses the search engine terms you are trying to optimize for.

A lot of these tricks used to work, but so many people used them that Google began programming their bots to see right through them. That means, not only do these not help, they may be held against you or even destroy your website altogether! This can be a devastating issue for a new small business owner who simply did not know the rules, so make sure you avoid these four deadly mistakes mistakes.

Whether you are running a traditional, brick-and-mortar business or an ecommerce website, a professional website is something that every entrepreneur needs. A website forms the foundation of your internet presence and allows you to build your brand at very little cost. In addition, a website can streamline your business by allowing your customers to order, pay and manage their accounts online. There are so many good reasons to have a website and no good reasons not to—so what are you waiting for? Here are a few tips for getting the website that is right for your entrepreneurial plans.

• Decide what makes you different. Whether you are offering lower prices, a local alternative to big corporations or a unique product, it is important that you know why customers should choose you. If you don’t know this, your customers will not either! This core difference between you and your competition will form the basis of your brand.
• Discover your audience. Once you know what sets you apart from the other businesses in your genre, you should think about the type of people who are looking for you. Rest assured, regardless of you are offering, there is a market looking for it. It is simply a matter of finding that market, positioning your business as the right choice for them, and then making sure that they know about you. However, in order to position and publicize your business, you need to know who your message is intended to reach. You need to know more than basic demographic information, including what the market’s daily schedule looks like, how they prefer to shop and what their aesthetic preferences are.
• Talk to a professional. A professional website designer can help you to identify and define your core value proposition and target market, but it will cost you. It is better if you enter the design process already having given the matter a lot of thought. At this point, it is time to find a website designer who has built websites that are successful with your core market. Do not attempt to build a website yourself or use a template. This will lead to a generic-feeling website that will not be as effective with your market. You should also outsource logo design and other branding design elements; you can’t afford to cut corners in these areas because they will form the basis of your online presence.
• Consider going mobile. Once you know your audience, it should be easy to identify whether they are accessing the internet from a PC, a smartphone or even a tablet PC. If your market does a lot of shopping and information seeking from mobile devices, you should consider having mobile-friendly websites developed for their convenience. The more mobile your market is, the more likely they will be to ignore sites that are not mobile friendly and prefer ones that are.
• Incorporate social media. No entrepreneur can do without social networking in the modern world. It is simply a necessity. You should think carefully about which social networking websites are most appealing to your target audience and then create profiles. Give these profiles a lot of thought and make them as appealing as possible. Again, templates feel generic and tend to ‘turn off’ today’s marketing-savvy consumers.
• Be connected. Your social marketing profiles, website and physical locations should not exist as islands, but rather as an interconnected network. Make sure there are plenty of ways for visitors in one platform to find out about and interact with the others. Don’t just throw up a few icons or links; make a point of mentioning your other ‘homes’ and inviting people to visit.
• Entice customers. Your marketing needs to do more than inform; it needs to entice. Again, that unique value proposition that you developed in the first step will be crucial here. Consider what will be the most effective means of reaching your audience and what types of campaigns will appeal most to them. Some markets prefer businesses that partner with charities or are otherwise socially responsible; others are brought in by contests and giveaways. Knowing your audience is key. It will save you the time, money and effort of running marketing campaigns that are not successful.
• Don’t forget to optimize! Search engine optimization has gotten a bad name due to ‘black hat’ or disallowed techniques. However, SEO is the only way to bring customers to your website and thus an area that you can’t ignore. If you don’t understand how to best design your website to get top search engine rankings, discuss the matter with your website designer or even consider hiring an independent SEO consultant.

Once you have made it through these seven long steps, you should be rewarded with a website that is appealing to your market and a growing amount of traffic. However, if your website is not successful, one of these core entrepreneur website problems may be to blame. Here are the cardinal sins of business websites, to be avoided at all costs.

• Distractions. You don’t need a flashy, blinged-out website to attract most markets. In fact, too many distractions will make your business look less professional and distract customers from actually making their purchase.
• Confusing navigation. Your website designer can help with this. Your website needs to be organized into logical categories that are easy to understand. Customers should be able to find what they seek in just 2-3 clicks.
• Inappropriate size. There is a happy medium between having a website that is merely a few pages and running one that is a behemoth. Trim pages that are not necessary. Offer a well-rounded amount of information, but trims the frills that don’t make sales.
• Lack of updates. You cannot design a website and then leave it. Most small business websites require almost daily updates and tweaks. Customers like to know that the website they are visiting is current and often updated. It shows them that you are a professional and that any orders they make will be processed quickly.

Although you don’t really notice it, local marketing is all around you. Every time you open a telephone directory, turn on the radio or even go to your kid’s football game, local marketing is there. If you are like most people, you really don’t notice it. This is because local marketing tends to be really, really bad. Those little guys have all these advantages over larger corporations, but they just don’t know how to take them. If you are one of these little guys, avoid making the following mistakes.

Top 5 Local Marketing Mistakes Video

#1 Not putting your stats in marketing. 

All marketing for a local business should include your address, phone number and website. If you are near a well-known landmark, point that out. Otherwise, people who encounter your marketing will not know how to make that next step. Sure, they could always look you up. But they won’t. You can count on that. While you are at it, make sure this information is easy to find on your website and also through locally-focused websites like Yelp. By ‘easy to find’, I mean put your contact information somewhere obvious and ubiquitous, like your header and your footer.

#2 Failing to tag. 

If your business has a physical location, this needs to be in your title tags and meta tags. Why? Google bots are just as clueless as your customers. They cannot magically discern where you are located. If you want to come up on the first page of local search, and believe me, you do, then you need to tell the bots with your tags.

#3 Ignoring major local business sites. 

Yelp and Google Places are the two most important of these that I can think of, although there are certainly others. Why are they important? Consider the way a typical customer searches. They type something like, “shoe store Cleveland” into their browser, and one of the common local search sites will be the first to come up. The customer will then click on one of these reputable, recognizable sites and browse a bit. If your business is listed, they will then see it.

#4 DIY marketing.

If you plan a more complicated marketing scheme such as a television ad, an internet banner or even a simple flyer, please PLEASE consider hiring a graphic designer or at least someone with design experience. If you are going to go through the trouble and expense of creating a marketing campaign, let’s make sure it has a chance of bringing in new customers! There are so many pitfalls to design that I cannot even cover them here. Just take my word for it: DIY design is never a good idea.

#5 No means of measurement. 

Marketing is one of those “practice makes perfect” areas. You need to start somewhere, see what works, and change your plan as you go. The problem is that you will never know whether something works, much less how well it works, without having some form of measurement. The great thing about business is that most of it is highly measurable—you can look at traffic, leads, conversions, anything you want really.

Nextel has been through a lot of brand changes. In the United States, it merged with Sprint more than five years ago and kind of disappeared off of the radar when it comes to customers. However, the Nextel brand is still alive and kicking in other parts of the world, such as the booming Latin American market. In fact, Nextel has almost ten million customers. And, they are rebranding to be more inviting to these markets as well.

The old Nextel logo featured the name in an eggplant purple, with horizontal stripes through the last three letters that gave a sense of movement. The writing was all in upper case letters, which created a formidable impression. The new logo design, on the other hand, is as friendly as can be. The color is a youthful bright orange, and the lettering is all lower case—a device that is overused in modern logo design, but could actually be appropriate in this case. The X is the real change; it has been modified to resemble two arrows coming together.

The new slogan will be “Your World. Now.” This will, obviously, be translated into the appropriate languages for each audience. It is a simple tagline that should not create problems in translation. The two arrows in the logo design are meant to imply different ideas coming together.

The old Nextel logo design was, well, old. When I first heard about this rebranding, I thought, “Surely they are not still using the same logo from a decade ago!” But indeed they were. Yes, it is well past time to rebrand. I like the new wordmark; the kerning is well-done and the arrows are obvious without taking over the logo design. Communications is a fast moving business. A telecommunications logo design that seems passé and out of date says nothing good about the carrier that it represents. After all, who wants to be seen using last year’s cell phone?

The tagline is a little generic, but there is a good reason for that. It can be difficult to develop a phrase that translates well into a variety of languages. In fact, the only way to accomplish this is to be as simple as possible, which is exactly what Nextel did. I tend to associate the color orange with Cingular, but perhaps the Latin American market does not make this connection. In addition, there is a European company in the same line of business that is actually called Orange—and guess what color they use?

I am not familiar enough with Latin American markets to comment on whether this is an appropriate design for them, but this design would work perfectly well in the United States. It is a simple, memorable update that feels modern and fresh while still communicating what it needs to say. The Nextel logo design feels like a communications logo. The arrows forming an X is a device that has been done before, but not enough that it feels overdone.

There is nothing original or mind-blowing about this logo design, but it is definitely an improvement over the old. It is hard to imagine a logo design worse than the old one, in fact!

Most people develop their website and then focus on S.E.O. However, this is actually approaching website optimization backwards. In fact, many of the most effect ways of optimizing a website occur in the development phase.

Many websites are designed by professional developers, but then they have to be basically torn apart by S.E.O consultants in order to make the site show up in search engine results. The good news is that there are ways you can develop a website to get it right the first time. Here are some S.E.O tactics that you should keep in mind when planning and developing your site.

How to Build a Website Search Engines Love Video

#1 Know your Keywords

In the past, I have written extensively on finding and choosing keywords, but most you are probably current website holders looking for a way to improve an existing site. While it is never too late, you’ll get better results with a whole lot less effort if you develop your website after identifying which keywords you are planning to incorporate. You’ll still need to modify your site as your market changes, but you’ll be starting off on the right foot.

#2 Plan a Static U.R.L Structure

Dynamic URLs are common in modern web design, but they present an S.E.O nightmare for a variety of reasons. Develop your site without them. Choose static URLs and base them on your keywords from the very beginning.

#3 Think Outside the Site

Many of the best SEO development tools come from outside your actual site. Open accounts on your preferred social networking websites and place links and buttons prominently on every page of your website. Don’t overdo this—too many buttons ad doohickeys can be annoying—but definitely choose a few favorites. Also, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. This will allow you to identify problems with search engines and respond to them before they become a site killer. Google will actually tell you how they see your site and notify you of issues—information that you can’t afford to go without.

#4 Follow the Pack

By this, I mean you develop your website according to the standards of whatever convention you are using. Whether you are using HTML, database or CSS, follow the rules religiously, even when breaking them seems to work. This will make it easier to modify your website as you go along. Keep in mind that if your website grows, you may need to delegate tasks to someone who won’t necessarily understand an unconventional system.

#5 Create an XML Sitemap

Many people neglect this step, but it is one of the most important SEO tricks. Once your site is up, generate an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines. This is easy to do with that Google Webmaster Tools account that you already opened! For best results, create your website so your sitemap updates whenever you make a change and notifies the search engines automatically.

#6 Plan to Analyze

The only way to keep your website relevant and high ranking is to regularly analyze and modify accordingly. Why not set yourself up for success from the start with analytical tools? Choose any package that appeals to your specifications and budget, but make sure your chosen tool allows you to track sources of revenue and traffic. A great tool is Google Analytics and it is absolutely free. I use it on all my sites.

#7 Leave Room for Text

A common mistake is getting so caught up in design that you forget to leave room for the stuff that will actually boost your page rank and income: content. Make sure all of your pages have ample space for keyword-rich text. This means at least 200 words of content along with appropriate, html headers as well.

#8 Avoid Duplicate Content

Search engines hate duplicate content, and even if you get away with it you are still cannibalizing your website. Give each concept, product, service, or whatever you are peddling its own URL and then leave it there. You can still link to this URL from a variety of internal sources, but it needs its own home. This is not just good for SEO, but good for website organization and management as well. As the adage goes, a place for everything and everything in its place.

#9 Title Consistently

Don’t design your pages like they are an island—pick a title convention that will be used throughout your website. Whatever the structure you choose, make your titles brief and descriptive with relevant keywords.

#10 Mark Non-Text Elements

The best example of a non-text element is a photograph. You need visual elements to make your site more palatable, but don’t let them be wasted space. Mark them with ALT Tag attributes that include keywords. Avoid going overboard here; search engines know how to spot this and will punish accordingly.

#11 Think Meta

Write a unique, professional meta description for every single page—not only will this help search engine crawlers, it will often show up in the search engine results as well. Consider this description one of the most important pieces of copy on the page. Use keywords and good sales practices to begin getting your customer’s attention before they even click on your link.

Similarly, allow for other meta tags from the very beginning. Depending on the type of website you are running, you may need canonical or robots tags. This is particularly important if you are using tracking codes.

#12 Redirect your Visitors

Redirects are another URL-related SEO strategy that can boost your page rank. You know that people can find you whether they type www or not. So you’re done, right? In fact, when they don’t type in the full URL, they are basically going to an internet generated duplicate of your website. This gets even more convoluted when other websites are linking to a non-www version. Identify your main URL and then program your website to redirect to it. This ensures that you get ‘credit’ with search engines for all of your external links. This can be done on the server side with an .HTACCESS file or with some CMS systems – like with the Ringgle platform, this can set up with the admin panel.

Similarly, you should never completely take down a page of your site, especially one with those valuable internal links. If you want to remove a page, 301 redirect it to its replacement. This way, you won’t lose any of your hard-won SEO footing.

These development strategies may seem simple, but when used together they can have a remarkable effect on your website’s page rank. Plan your website for success from the very beginning and continue to program according to good SEO practices for continued success in the future.

I like to keep up with the branding world for obvious reasons, which is why I tuned into the Today Show a while back to see the author of the latest book on the topic, titled Brandwashed. According to author Martin Lindstrom, who also wrote a book on neuromarketing called Buyology, brands are literally taking over our lives, from birth to death.

Martin Lindstrom is reporting from inside the belly of the beast, because he is a well-recognized branding expert who has worked on some of the sneakiest cases of brandwashing. He points out that by their third birthday, American children can recognize an average of one hundred logos. They tend to view these brands as friends, because children have not yet developed the natural suspicion that adults have. Studies have found that McDonalds can sell carrot sticks to children—that’s right, vegetables. Any dummy can sell crispy, salty French fries, but selling raw vegetables to toddlers requires some serious marketing power, as any parent can recognize.

Lindstrom points out the places where marketing is sincere and the places where it lies. One example he gives is Whole Foods. When you enter one of these markets, you walk past fresh-cut flowers, water fixtures and hand-chalked signs. These things subconsciously signal freshness to your brain. This is not dishonest at all, but as you go deeper into the store there are aspects that have been placed there to trick you. In the produce area, there is often a stack of old-fashioned boxes. This gives the impression that the fruit has been picked and transported in the traditional manner, which is what we want to believe. In fact, that stack of boxes is one single piece, which has been manufactured by Whole Foods and placed in every produce department in every store. Now, that is sneaky.

One good thing about new methods of branding is when it is used to give customers what they really want. For instance, when Calvin Klein developed the Euphoria perfume, they used focus groups. The women were dabbed with the cologne and asked to close their eyes and tell a story. The company kept tweaking the cologne until it produced the desired emotions. That is not customer manipulation, but rather giving the customer exactly what he or she wants.

How can a small business compete against this wave of branding? It is growing increasingly difficult, because customers are developing blinders—they are learning to overlook traditional branding simply because it is so ubiquitous. However, there are a few ways that you can overcome this. The most obvious is to market your business with integrity. Modern consumers have a finely tuned BS-meter. If you are unique, honest and authentic in your branding and logo design, you will stand out.

No legitimate logo designer or branding consultant will tell you to lie to your customers. I am completely against any deceptive behavior. I believe that branding should be about showing what makes your company and products unique, and putting your best foot forward. Customers can sense the difference between the real thing and a fake. Make sure your logo design and brand represent you completely, and you will have a chance in a brandwashed world.

Marketing is one of the most important parts of running a business. Most of the small businesses that fail, do so because of either a lack of marketing, or bad marketing. You need to get the word out about your business, and you can do so most effectively by avoiding the following five mistakes.

Do NOT Commit These Marketing Mistakes!

Mistake #5. Focusing on Marketing Rather Than Relationship Building. 

Marketing should be about creating a relationship with your customers. You probably know a lot about your customers, so put this knowledge to work! Compare it to dating: you don’t simply hand a lady a list of reasons to choose you; it takes a little more finesse than that! You need to build a relationship over time. If you have any experience with dating, you know that different women have different preferences; some want flowers and dinner at expensive restaurants, while others would rather spend an afternoon at the park. Customers are the same. That is why traditionally selling has been compared to seducing. Because you know your customers pretty well, you should be able to figure out what will really wow them and how to best deliver it.

Mistake #4. Fading Out of the Limelight. 

I have seen this so many times that it is beginning to feel like one of those depressing, predictable Greek tragedies. A small business owner will run a brilliant marketing campaign, which begins to gather momentum, and then the campaign ends and the owner simply stops. This is a mistake because you will never build momentum this way. Running a small business means that your marketing wheels must always be turning. Once you have your customers’ attention, don’t let it go! Do not give up the limelight, not even for a day.

Mistake #3. Marketing to Everyone. 

Some of the most popular marketing techniques are also the most expensive and least effective. Why do people use them? Because they fail to see the obvious. Whether you are running a small town business or an online empire, only a handful of the people who encounter your business are going to be potential customers. Marketing to everyone is expensive, and is a waste of time. Instead of doing this, put a little thought into where your customer is likely to visit and what types of nontraditional marketing will appeal to them. Focus on your primary target market first!

Mistake #2. Not Getting Help When Necessary. 

Most small business owners somehow believe that outsourcing marketing will be too expensive.. The surprising face is, marketing and branding consultants are not that expensive; in fact, when you consider what your own time is worth and take into account that it will take you at least twice as long to perform the same tasks, I bet you are probably going to save money by outsourcing a lot of your marketing.

Top Mistake #1. Doing Nothing. 

This is probably the most common mistake. You spend so much time planning, preparing and researching that you rarely get a marketing campaign off the ground. Remember what I said earlier about momentum: you need to be marketing constantly. Constantly. It is better to try something new and fail than to sit around second-guessing yourself. The only way to be a success is to take action: track results, learn from your mistakes and always look for new ideas to market your business.