It’s always a good idea to design or wireframe a website or application before jumping straight to the coding or graphic design part. Wireframing, prototyping, mocking it up reduces the time to decide which part goes to which part.
The importance of it has always been taken for granted by many designers and developers to speed up development not knowing that it actually increases the development time because of revisions, missed user cases and sometimes simple user interface design mistakes.
Google recently launched a new site layout for it’s search results page. Google dropped official support for IE6 on March 1st, 2010. This meant that Google could rearrange the results page to be both mobile friendly (without switching to their mobile version, iPhone users rejoice!) and make the page much, much faster to render by the browser. In this day and age of fast, inexpensive computing, that might not look like much, but it’s still an advantage for mobile users, and lets face it, you’re probably still supporting Windows XP on your mom’s 6 year old computer, or trying to send links to your sister’s spam ridden and slow laptop, right? The less time we’ve gotta spend chewing on a page load, the better for everyone.
I just love Facebook advertising.
Contextual advertising has become more and more specific as the web grows and evolves. Thanks to Facebook, it’s gotten more detailed than ever. Facebook profiles contain TONS of information about a user. Age, sex, marital status, education level, job title, interests, activities – you name it, you tell tell Facebook all about it. And this has become an advertisers dream.
If you haven’t ever created an ad for Facebook, I highly suggest you jump on and start the process – you don’t need to pay anything. Take a look at just how specific you can get:
When we first started our company tweet strategy I was asking myself what am I going to tweet about. Our strategy called for 1 tweet minimum per business day. However as I started our strategy it became easier and easier to find the 140 characters of content I needed. The first tactic I use a lot is tweeting what I read, most of us read a lot on our industry and their is natural knowledge that is tweet able. When I read a statistic, an announcement or something that I think may be interesting to the people who follow our twitter account I am quick to tweet. Including a short URL to allow ease to read the full article is effective. In addition I tweet about our company news – new hires, new clients etc.
“My company is growing” is a sentence that every person in business would like to be able to boast. If you’re not growing you’re dying right? Our question today is how does good marketing and advertising help a business grow, and keep it from dying?
Allow me to answer a question with a question. Does a good business owner have to spend money to make money? Well I suggest to you that the money a business owner spends must make money! Positive growth will always be achieved if a company constantly takes on positive projects, and if marketing projects in particular are giving positive return on investment; growth cannot be more evident. Good marketing increases incoming demand and we’re all chasing demand with our time and our money. Better marketing will mean less time spent chasing demand. The catch is that you must ensure the money spent is less than the money made. If a business can handle this increased demand, they can handle growth, save time and money and boast that they are growing.
In February, I spoke at a luncheon for the Advertising Association of Winnipeg. Today, I spoke at a luncheon for the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce. I had decided to use the same presentation with some tweaks, knowing the attendees would be very different (they were). I figure, an hour two should get this presentation where it needs to be. WRONG! So many changes have occurred in the past 3 months, I spent several hours updating copy and screencaps to reflect the very latest.
When I woke up Saturday morning I went to get the Saturday paper and I noticed the new yellow pages, white pages and another small yellow pages book that you can keep in your car had arrived. So I asked my wife do you want me to put these in the drawer where we normally keep them and she said what? No I don’t want those put them in recycling. Now she may be a little biased because of what I do for a living but really she is an example of a common breed of consumer. She has a smart phone (iPhone) which she loves could not live without and if she wants any directory or company information she does not use the yellow pages she uses her smart phone. So all those advertising dollars spent went in the recycling for my family. How many others are doing the same.
One of the hardest challenges you go through when you are a small business is growing your business and maintaining control of your business. It is very common in a small business to have the owner(s) control a great deal of the sales and operations. This is necessary to get the business past the first few years in which most businesses fail. Once you get through this stage if you want to grow your business, you need to decide to leverage your time.
Your Business Needs Quality Design
Experienced web designers can tell amateur design by many marks. Observing heavy, thoughtless drop shadows and harsh inner bevels is perhaps the easiest. Google knowingly sported both for 12 years.
Google’s home page is legendary for its simplicity. The recent arrival of the new search results page, and other visual and functional enhancements, is accompanied by my favourite Google move yet. Google Docs is great. Google Earth? Super cool. But finally updating the worst logo to ever emblemize a company not headquartered in a car? Brilliant.
Facebook and Google have been making a lot of changes in the past few weeks, and some of their changes have included terminology.
Facebook Pages – Becoming a “fan” of a Facebook page is gone, you now “like” a page. Therefore, they aren’t called “Facebook Fan Pages” anymore.
Google Places – This used to be your Google Local listing. Now you have a Google Places page.
Make sure you update your marketing materials – nothing screams “I’m not up on the latest social media” like having outdated terminology in your advertising.
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