Clean (clutter-free and simple) website designs are very popular and give your website a very professional look. Here are 5 examples of clean designs that we hope will really inspire you.
In today’s online arena, businesses of every size are engaging their audience and potential clients through social media. Even the term social media is bigger now than a year or two ago. Whether you like it or not, it’s a medium you’re going to have to deal with if you want to grow your business. For us, our best reasoning to our clients is “It’s better that you use it and expand your brand to your community, or your competitor will.”
Time
This is probably the main reason why social media costs so much. I know there’s plenty of people who tell you that you can do it in just a few minutes a day and never have to think about it for the rest of the day. Not entirely true. Scheduling posts is a great way to leverage your time, but what happens when your posts get a bunch of responses and some of them are viable leads? Do you then respond the following day when the trail is cold? I hope not. You respond while they’re engaged and lead them to a meeting, phone call, or call to action on your website, or better yet to BUY SOMETHING! This isn’t possible if you’re not available to respond when things are happening.
Value
There are quite a few social media companies out there. You don’t have to search hard before you find one either locally or via a quick Google search. What may be hard to find is what they charge, hourly or monthly rates, and what your ROI may be. (we’ll get into ROI shortly). Lets go the hourly route for now. Signing on to each of your accounts doesn’t take long right? Then thinking of a good post that is NOT the same for all your accounts may take 5-7 minutes each to come up with something clever and original. Using Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your posts could take about 2-3 minutes each to post a message and a short link. Reading back your feeds, wall posts, timelines, etc could take about 5-10 minutes each here depending on all the people you follow, and save or read posts. Then of course you have to respond to their posts, blog articles, at-replies, direct messages, wall comments. I’d say another 4-5 minutes. Did I lose you? Add all that up for all your separate accounts and you’ll easily be over an hour’s worth of your morning coffee.
ROI – Return On Investment
There’s a couple of ways to look at this. For the business owner trying to do this on their own, you’re immediate ROI is the money you may save by doing your marketing on your own. However, you also have to invest in a LOT of constant research to stay up on all the latest updates and improvements in order to ensure you’re social profiles and accounts are the best that they can be. Honestly that’s a daily task that isn’t done in under an hour.
Using a marketing firm probably won’t give you back 2-1 for each dollar you spend either. Chances are you’ll spend a lot more than you stand to make. Of course this rather depends on your website, products, and or services. There are ways to gauge the effectiveness of their services though:
New fan page Likes
New Twitter followers (real users, not spammers)
Improved views on your customized YouTube page
More connections and recommendations on Linked In
Improved +1’s on Google Plus
Unique Identity and Personality
You can’t fool people. Well some maybe, but its pretty easy to discover social accounts that are poorly managed. You’ve seen them, the big goose egg for a Twitter avatar instead of a nice head-shot. The overstretched fan page cover art that was never created specifically for the cover art but instead chosen by Facebook automatically. The Linked In profile picture that is of a family pet or worse the person in a swimsuit. (I’d post actual pictures, but I don’t want to get hate mail). My favorite are the ones that got started, got heavy into it, then suddenly stopped and never returned. They most likely got frustrated with the lack of engagement for many reasons both valid and some unbeknownst to them.
Each of your social profiles should be a little bit different because of the audience of that platform. For example, your Twitter avatar and profile may be a bit more casual, where your Linked In profile will and should be more business professional. One major point about each of your profiles though is that they’re optimized fully. Meaning a great bio, edited profile or avatar picture, links back to your website, phone numbers, and if possible location and email address for quick contact.
I hope that this was informal to you. If you have any accounts that may need a bit more attention, please take a few minutes and adjust them now. If you believe you can take on your companies social media accounts, be encouraged that you can do so and be effective so long as you keep up with your audience in whatever way or medium they’re most active. For those of you who don’t mind sharing please comment below in how much time you spend daily or weekly in your social efforts.
Even those who have great aptitude in writing sometimes find themselves with literally NO WORDS! Unlike our verbal language, writing is actually one of the most difficult activities that we humans use to formalize communication sin la boca (without your mouth if you don’t speak Spanish). It sounds simple but as Wikipedia has defined it: writer’s block is “a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand.” Uh, yeah- I couldn’t have said it better. But what does one do when the deadline is looming and the children are to bed and it’s man vs. machine and you realize…I’VE GOT NOTHIN’! Thank God writing pro’s like Mike Rose (famed UCLA Graduate School faculty member and author) even acknowledges that it truly is “an inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than lack of basic skill or commitment“. Whew…I’m off the hook a little! But now what do I do about it?
Why do you we do this to ourselves…it‘s supposed to speak back to you right? Like in some gone from a book to the big screen movie—the leading character is some highly paid British actor/actress paid to throw their laptop out the window of their 5th story NYC walk-up in utter despair. Yeah…in the real world most of us don’t have the kind of money that allows for those despairing moments. So I have opted not to spend hours wasting good wine or time employing this useless tactic. Instead I think it’s best to stare at something else. Walk around your house- look at some pictures, clean, cook, do a little laundry or run an errand. Heck, play with your kid or a game of chess with your spouse. Do something else besides stewing in the quagmire of I have no clue. You would be amazed how making the best salmon with a lemon dill sauce can jump-start a blog idea. Personal Example: One day I was frustrated about a concept I dreamt about (and DID NOT GET UP & WRITE IT DOWN.. I know bad, bad, bad) and was about to scream when my daughter asked me to color with her. As I was taking note of how precise my “staying within the lines” was and how the unbridled charm of a child’s Crayola skills were, yes the cliché lightbulb went off. And before you knew it, while she was still coloring outside the lines, I was pecking away on my laptop. Writers cramp over came writers block and I was grateful for it.
You know what they say in real estate…Location, Location Location. And I agree. After a very busy weekend and stressful morning I found myself not able to color in anybody’s lines or muster up enough energy required to even stare at a blank page. So what else could I do to get the boost usually relegated to a high-priced cup of Starbucks coffee? I went outside. Yup in the lovely 70° weather, I listened to the sounds of a almost perfect May day in Connecticut. And before I knew it, several titles/concepts came to me which enabled me to write this blog AND birth 2-3 ideas for some other projects. Fantastic right! Sometimes a simple change of location can do wonders for inspiration. Being jailed at your desk is not worth it when you can get some fresh air and use the objects/sounds/feelings around you to motivate your imagination. Like an artist who can use a host of colors or materials to create their masterpiece, so can writers. And I’m not talking laptop vs. plume…I mean what you use to connect ideas/concepts/words together to tap into your linguistic intelligence and unlock the door to your next novella.
1.) Interview a customer about particular concerns/challenges as well as solutions and then blog about it. I’m sure they will love the attention & it gets their name advertised in social media for free. Or you can opt to share an anecdote about an issue that occurred in your own business, from the problem to the solution.
2.) Dialogue with industry-friends via social media and let the responses shape a blog post or video blog with them weighing in on topics relevant to industry news items.
3.) Consider product or service comparisons, a Consumer Reports of sort but on issues like social media, graphic design, use of WordPress themes vs. traditional HTML websites.
4.) Report on a conference or webinar you attended giving perspective to real issues facing people in your own industry or some great highlights and tricks of the trade that you learned.
5.) Address customer questions you’ve received on the same topic/aspect of service. This lets them know that you’re listening and are willing to receive feedback once it’s out on the www.
6.) Expand upon a comment you wrote on someone else’s blog & parlay that into your own blog post. Tread lightly here, these are your peers after all. But bringing in a different angle never hurts.
7.) Correlate what inspires your daily life into the business world and create a blog connection. Hence, look out for my upcoming blog “Coloring In and Out of the Lines in Social Media” – thanks to my daughter’s crayons.
Have you ever been to a website that loaded very slowly? Did that website have some images that loaded abnormally slow, even though they weren’t that large in size? The reason for that may be that the images were re-sized improperly, most likely with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) webpage editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver. This problem could have been avoided if the images were optimized.
Adobe Dreamweaver is a very powerful webpage editor that can be used to customize just about everything on your website, including specifying or adjusting the resolution of your images. When you click on an image you have inserted into Dreamweaver, you get the properties window, which allows you to specify the size of the image (resolution) and a host of other options.
Notice in the the above example the image file size is 4162K. That means it’s about 4162 kilobytes (or about 4 MB) which is very large. Also notice that the W and H (width and height) values are both in bold. That means that the current size of the image (266 x 140) is not the actual size of it (4096 x 2160). If you click on the refresh button next to the image size Dreamweaver will resize the image to the proper size (4096 x 2160).
If you change the size of an image using Dreamweaver’s image properties tab, you will just be changing the image’s resolution and not the actual file size. Using this method to downsize large images will make the images load very slowly.
This is NOT a good method for re-sizing an image for a webpage!
Dreamweaver wasn’t designed to be used for editing images. The purpose of the width and height boxes in the properties tab is to specify a resolution (size) for the image or object you have selected if there are no dimensions specified. A much better way of optimizing images is with Adobe Photoshop.
Using Photoshop to Optimize Images
If you have Adobe Photoshop, then you have the perfect tool for optimizing your images to display on your website. Here are some quick and easy steps to optimize your image in Photoshop:
1. Open the image (File > Open)
2. Re-size the image with the image properties window (Image > Image Size)
Notice at the top of the window where it says “Pixel Dimensions:” that the file size of the downsized image is now 109.3K which is a whole heck of a lot smaller than the original image file size of 25.3 MB.
3. Instead of “Save” or “Save As” use the “Save for Web & Devices” option (File > Save for Web & Devices).
If you look at the top right corner of the Save for Web & Devices window you will see these options:
Most of the time, I alternate between the 70 and 60 quality setting depending on the size of the image. I have set this image to the JPEG High preset, which gives the image 60 quality by default. If you are re-sizing an image for a thumbnail (320 x 240 or below) 60 is a great setting because you won’t see any degradation in quality from the original. I use the 60 quality setting most of the time, unless the image is very large (1024 x 768 or larger).
Original quality vs 60 quality
The original on the left is full quality (no compression) and the optimized on the right is 60 quality. At this smaller size, it’s hard to see any degradation in image quality at the 60 setting. As you can see, the optimized image on the right has an estimated load time of 3 seconds for a 56k dial-up connection. Of course, most users today have cable and other much faster connections, but it’s nice to know that even on the slowest connection, the image still won’t take too long to load.
4. Upload the new and improved image to your website!
Now you’re ready to load the optimized image(s) into Dreamweaver or whichever editor you use for your website.
Video of Image re-sized using Dreamweaver vs. Photoshop Method
As you can see in this video, the image that was optimized using my Photoshop method (on the left) loads a lot faster than the image that was re-sized using only Dreamweaver (on the right). The optimized image loads almost instantaneously!
Many more small businesses are waking up to the idea of blogging. This makes us at Design Theory pretty happy because we preach about the importance of a blog for our clients and partners. Though not all blogs are created equal, there are different platforms, designs, and purposes. Still each blog’s purpose is to capture an audience and keep them coming back for more week after week, post after post.
Idea 1: Make Your Blog Easy to Leave Comments
This one should be a no brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many blogs are out there that have great content, yet lack the ability for readers to post comments. There are so many plugins and applications that allow users to use many different social and popular mediums to easily submit a comment. A free and commonly used one is Gravatar. Receiving a comment on your post is one of the most gratifying moments of blogging. Good or bad, it’s still people taking time to speak out about your work. Be sure to promptly approve your comments and reply. Unapproved comments is a sure-fire way to show a reader you don’t care about what they have to say.
Idea 2: Make Your Blog Easy to Be Shared
It’s safe to say most blogs out there are using open sourced platforms like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla. So utilize the plugins available to allow your readers to quickly share. Most are pretty easy to install and configure. Since a lot of blog article titles get shared through social media be sure to choose some of the more popular ones in your settings. Some examples are TweetMeme, Shareaholic, Google+1, and the Facebook Like Button.
Idea 3: Write More Help Topics
A common misconception with business blogs is to use this as an advertising stream. That’s actually not a good way to use it. In fact you’ll want to write more posts that actually help your readers and less about your own services and products. More successful blogs out there are blogs that constantly offer quick tips on fixing, making, creating, and developing things. And if you can condense a long dissertation to some cliff notes and still offer a productive outcome, you’ll create a nice following.
Idea 4: Get The Word Out
If no one knows about your blog, then no one reads your blog. An easy way to start promoting your blog is with your friends and family. Get them to read it to find errors and offer suggestions. For them that may be enough to get them to read it to try to tell you all you’re doing wrong. Its better coming from them than strangers. Then use social media like Twitter and a Facebook Fan page to further spread your great articles. Install some SEO plugins to help optimize your content for Google too. Include tags in your posts to help with indexing. Lastly, sign up with directory sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and submit your articles to them.
Idea 5: End With A Call To Action
Sometimes finishing your post is harder than starting. How to leave or Segway from your final points without sounding redundant. Try ending off with asking your readers to perform an action. Encourage them to comment their own points, a controversial rebuttal, a quick assignment that they can perform on their own for their own gains or improvement. This is also a great place to plug your service to help wrap up all that you talked about while offering your reader a time-saving deal or money-saving opportunity.
This is NOT a good method for re-sizing an image for a webpage! 
