Design:Divide

Taking Your Site Mobile

Published on November 13, 2008 in Mobile and Web. 0 Comments

Taking your website mobile is something very relevant today for more and more people. How do you know if your site should have a mobile friendly version and offer special mobile perks?

Though you can format your website specially for mobile browsers, doesn’t mean that’s all you should consider putting in the mobile version of your site.

There are many types of Internet capable devices with smaller screens, joysticks, track balls, d-pads and touch screen. It’s best to create a stylesheet that tries to take all of this into account or better yet, create a few specialized stylesheets and experiences for specific devices.

On a recent trip to London I’ve noticed many different devices that people are using to access the Internet. Most of these are cell phones sporting all kinds of screen sizes and Internet connection capabilities.

Though nearly every place in London has Wifi and many US places offer it as well, doesn’t mean that everyone uses it. With that in mind, remember to optimize your mobile sites as much as possible for quick loading and small load sizes. If you’re using images, remember to use sprites when possible to reduce load time and http requests.

For a few good mobile site samples, check out the mobile versions of: Volks Wagon, BrightKite and LinkedIn

Vimeo, a better YouTube.

Published on October 28, 2008 in Web. 0 Comments

Vimeo, a user-submitted video hosting and broadcasting service is a fantastic service with more options and a slicker, more appealing interface, and quality submissions at every turn. I ventured to the Vimeo site to spend some time getting to know it for an upcoming project, and found myself watching for quite a while. There are so many great videos uploaded by users, many of which are HD quality, that you can easily spend your free time watching videos that are much, much better than anything that YouTube has to show.

Check out this fantastic video from Magnus Engsfors called Suddenly.

Who let a LION in the house?

Published on August 13, 2008 in Resources. 0 Comments

Lion door knocker

I’ve recently received several direct messages through LinkedIn from recruiters who are open LIONs that have gotten in the house some how. Luckily, they have to get my permission before entering my “house”, so I can just as easily decline their self-invitation to try to join my network. Obviously its nice to know recruiters at the right time, but letting them in on my network degrades the quality of my network.

For everyone, LinkedIn is used differently. Some use it as a “look who I know” tool, others use it as a potential new business tool, and I use it as a “my network=my resources” tool. I only add people to my network that I talk to on a regular or semi-regular basis. My network is also only comprised of people whom I’d personally recommend for a project or job, and people who are in different categories in my field and similar fields. No one way is right, or wrong necessarily, but just about personal choice. Because my network is, in my opinion, of great quality, I’m very wary of who I add to my network and I’m very conscious of who I let into my network because once you’re in my network, you can see who’s in mine. Maybe I’m just too nice, but I try to protect my network and keep it more on the private side.

Most likely, the way these recruiters have found me is by getting accepted into one network which I’m in and they have scoured the network from there contacting everyone, including me, to ask to be let into my network. The only time I accept is if it’s someone I already know and that we’re connecting on LinkedIn for the first time. Sorry LIONs, no free steaks here.

Successful E-blast Messaging & Marketing

Published on August 1, 2008 in Email Marketing and Marketing. 1 Comment

A new client approach me and my team about doing some branding and marketing for their newly formed company. The client brought a good case study on why do-it-yourself marketing doesn’t work so well and how putting money in one area won’t necessarily fix the problem.

One item they wanted us to help them with was a landing page which an e-blast campaign would drive subscribers to. First of all, they were unclear about what a landing page was and how an effective landing page should work. The bigger problem was not that they didn’t have a landing page yet, but was that they were sending out an e-blast campaign that had only one response; to remove that user from the list.

This client’s e-blast campaign consisted of a very long email, with no graphics, no branding and which looked like a tedious task just to read and sent it to a list of potential customers whom they borrowed from past employers. Everything about this previous sentence is wrong. Let’s start one by one.

Lists should be qualified, interested potential customers, not unsuspecting recipients. The best kind of subscriber is one who opts in themselves. It’s understandable that when you’re a start up company in your first few months of operation that you don’t have a list yet and that people don’t know who you are yet. The last thing you want to do is send SPAM in any one’s direction, especially a potential customer. If you don’t have a list yet, try going to an industry trade-show where potential customers go to look for your services. An easy way to get a mailing list is to have a giveaway that requires them to put their business card or contact information into a drawing to win a fun prize. By entering in that drawing, they understand that you’ll be adding them to your mailing list. Secondly, add a signup form on your website for users to request to be added themselves which lets you know that they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
Long email type of e-blasts won’t win any readers. You have to think about this in two different ways. For one, step inside the shoes of the recipient. If you received an email trying to sell you something and at first glance, thought, “Boy, this will take a while to read”, then you, just as they, would either pass it up for later (never) or trash it. Secondly, think about this from a sales perspective. You’re better off to say less, but be concise than say everything and be broad. Shorten your copy and stick to the key points of the message that you’re trying to convey and end it with a call to action, whether it be to order your product, or to go to your website for them to get more information, order or sign up for your product or service, or to just correspond with you. Remember, less is more.
No visual aides and no branding aren’t very helpful. If you had signed up for an newsletter for a company, you’d most easily identify with that company by their logo and branding that you would have already seen at some point. When you receive a generic looking email, you’re more likely to pass it by or move it directly into the trash. Adding your logo and a few touches of brand design to your e-blast campaign will help strengthen your brand and help recipients easily identify it as yours. A clean, elegant design with the right amount of copy can go along way and can even be inviting to read. Depending on the audience, it can even be very enhancing to the product or service.
Never send from Outlook or any desktop email client. Something that wasn’t mentioned, was that they sent this out from their desktop email program such as Microsoft Outlook and didn’t use a professional e-blast sending service to deliver the content. For one, they had to hand enter the email addresses, had a 500 recipient limit with their particular desktop application, and had to Blind Carbon Copy those recipients. Needless to say, if they used a service, they could have set up a campaign list and imported those addresses and began to manage them appropriately. Additionally, any images that they would have included come across as attachments and are even more likely to annoy the recipient and get caught in the spam filter than you’d realize.

What about messaging?

The correct way to think about messaging for an e-blast is short and concise, but based on the use of the e-blast and the target audience and the expected content. Someone who signs up for a Target newsletter is expecting something different from someone who signs up for the XBOX newsletter. Two different audiences, two different e-blast objectives.

Start by defining the objective of the e-blast, its purpose and the content to go in it. Once you determine the audience and objective, write your e-blast tailored to those. Keep it short and informative and have a strong call to action in there to get readers to respond to it. Write in terminology that the recipient will understand. Don’t use lot or buzzwords to try to dazzle your user, no matter how intelligent they are or have privy they already are to those words. Keep the language on an easy to understand level. Recipients will see through your e-blast if all you do is use buzzwords. Using too many buzzwords also brings about questions of credibility. Just because you can use buzzwords doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand them.

If your call to action in the e-blast campaign is to drive traffic to your website to sign up for something, think again. Instead you should drive them to a landing page or mini site (whichever is appropriate) to get them to view the information you want them to view and/or sign up. If you’re trying to get your users to sign up for auto insurance, your e-blast should have been informative about your services offered and why they should choose you. When they click through to get to your landing page, you can provide more details about your offerings, but most importantly, give them the form that you’re requesting them to fill out to get an official quote. The fewer links that take the user away from that page and the less distractions, the better. Focusing your user on the intended content will prove to drive your conversion rate. The last thing you want to do is drive your user to a page with an overwhelming amount of information or link that take them elsewhere and way from the goal you have of getting them to sign up or purchase your product.

The last thing to remember about having a successful e-blast campaign is to tread lightly on the usage of the email list. Unless the user asked for it, they don’t want to receive an email from you every day trying to sell them something. Many companies send out something just once a month and/or on special occasions only. If you send too many, the potential clients will start to avoid your email because they’ll see them as tedious tasks that they are being asked to fit into their already busy schedule, or worse yet, they’ll immediately request to be removed from the mailing list. If at any point they do request to be removed from the mailing list, you should do it. Continuing to send mailings to someone who has asked not to is a great way to anger them. When you’re brand is on the line, the last thing you want to do is give yourself a bad reputation and change and positive pre-conceived notions about your brand to something sour.

Generate Traffic To Your Website For Free

Published on July 8, 2008 in Marketing, Organic Search, Search Engines and Web. 0 Comments

Sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not. There are numerous websites out there that will sell you “information” about how to generate traffic to your website, but this post is one place where you can learn one way to generate traffic to your website for free.

One easy way to generate traffic to your website for free is simply to have a company blog. Surprisingly enough, if you have a company blog and set it up as a sub domain (such as: blog.designcarter.com) you’d be surprised how many people will be willing to remove the blog from the URL and check out your site. Don’t use a blog site such as blogger because you will miss some of the benefits of hosting and running your own blog. Additionally, if you provide relevant blog topics, free advice, or free insight, people you will notice that those certain blog entries will generate lots of traffic, and if you were to include a link to your website as a reference for getting professional help with that piece of information, you’ll notice that you generate a lot of traffic just from that.

Well, if it’s that easy to generate more traffic to my company website for free, why aren’t others that I know doing it? Well, probably because they either don’t know, or they don’t take the time to write blog entries. There are plenty of blogs out there. How do I know if yours will generate traffic? Well, if you write relevant topics that give totally free advice, guidance, and or free insight without trying to sell yourself, you’ll find that you could hit that sweet spot of information that everyone’s looking for, but nobody’s finding. If there are industry related topics or words that you chat about with others in your industry, but those words are changed when talking to potential customers, why not use those industry words in your post?

Keep in mind when writing blog entries, try to write them as often as possible, at least once a month, but you should shoot for at least once a week. Once your blog has triggered the “quicker update” schedule that many blog readers and search engines pick up on, you’ll be more likely to work your way up to the top of the search engine list for organic searches. Because your blog is being updated frequently, search engines will start responding quicker to your posts as it will treat them like news articles. Ever wonder why something that just happened and is newsworthy is already on the web and close to the top of the page for news articles? Well, search engines have already picked up on many of the relevant and popular news sites and know to “fetch” the new information as soon as it posts. If you can get your blog posts often enough, you can trigger your blog to get more notice by search engines.

As more and more people click on the link to your blog from the search engines, and they find your information relevant, search engines will pick up on that and will start to place a heavier weight on your blog because it’s beginning to show that when someone searches for certain search terms, that your site has relevant information related to those search terms.

Also remember, it take a little while for search engines to begin to pick up the information in your blog and learn to start visiting it more often. Additional ways that you can help jump start the search engines to take notice in your blog is to sign up for a free service such as Feedburner or if you use fantastic blogging software such as Wordpress, they have those features built in to ping the search engines and other places when you’ve made a post. Additional things you may not have thought about, or are aware of would be the use of social networks to promote your blog. With my blogging software, I use a plugin that works with Twitter’s API to create a tweet (it’s a twitter thing, similar to a post) that sends my followers a message that I’ve posted a new blog entry and gives the title. Integrating social networks in ways such as this can show immediate results, and all those things together can all work towards getting your blog more notice. Who knows, maybe one day your blog could be the talk of the industry and you could be generating lots and lots of traffic.

Need help setting up a company blog to generate traffic to your blog and your website? Not sure where to start or how to do it? Get in touch with us to set up your own blog.

Voicing Your Opinion To A Client

Published on June 20, 2008 in Web. 1 Comment

While working with a group of designers and programmers today, we had a little powwow about a new site design which led to some interesting conversation about managing clients and when it is appropriate to voice your opinion about staying with the design and strategy choices of a project to clients. This made me start thinking about how client relationships differ from shop to shop while reflecting back on shops that I’ve worked at.

One ad agency that I’ve worked at had a rather interesting approach that seemed to work for them when voicing their opinions and ideas about projects to clients… and honestly, I kind of applaud them. Their take on taking bad client suggestions/requests and turning them down stemmed from the phrase, “we were hired as an advertising agency because of our years of experience and sound, proven tactics.” In a nutshell, when a client whom thought they knew a thing or two about advertising decided to suggest a change to a project’s collateral whether it was a brochure, TV spot, or Website was based on irrelevant information, or purely personal preference, they were quick to point out that they were hired as their advertising and marketing agency, and that they advised strongly against such changes because of the goal of the project and the research method of attaining that goal. Surprisingly, that worked about 90% of the time. There was still 10% that said, “my way or else,” and they were just as fine to step aside in their argument and do as the client requested.

A common problem among many agencies across the world is when to say no to a client. My take on it, is very similar to that advertising agency I once worked for. I’ve been doing what I was hired to do for quite some time, and have experience, knowledge and sound, proven logic behind the decisions I make for my clients to help them meet their goal and overcome any hurdles between getting their products or services to their customers. However, there are times when dual input actually enhances a project and its effectiveness in meeting the goals and overcoming those obstacles. I have on several occasions suggested moving a project down one path, had a client respond with a request to move down another path, and after a meeting where both sides gave case-in-point examples, we were able to form a new path together with ideas from both sides coming together to form a plan that actually turned out to produce more results than either previous plan of achievement would have produced.

It is when we take all things into consideration and look at the marketing challenge with open eyes that we are able to take an idea, no matter how bad or good it may seem and look at it objectively and be able to see it for what it is and make rational, strategic decicions based on the objective and the plan of action to meet that objective. When you’re able to separate personal bias and “he’s paying, so he gets his way” thinking, you’re able to come to a well positioned strategy to meet the needs of the business.

Magento : Lets take this out back!

Published on June 7, 2008 in Development and Web. 8 Comments

I have a client who recently switched his hosting provider to a more flexible one, and as we transferred to the new provider, we made a few improvements to his site’s back end and found a new product to meet his e-commerce needs as well… or so I thought.

Magento Opensource eCommerce

Enter Magento. So, at first glance, Magento looks like a sweet Web app. It has really cool features and tools that will help my client manage his online sales and order process, notify him when his stock is getting low, when someone has placed an order, and eventually integrate with QuickBooks so that there’s less data entry and more selling. Besides all that, it’s opensource, scalable, and is actually a pretty nice e-commerce solution. For the person who has to develop it (me) it’s a nightmare for now.

When I got this client I started to educate him on best web practices, why they matter, and what is going to improve his website. Eventually I was able to ween my client off of a GoDaddy website and GoDaddy shopping cart set up because it posed limitations, slow response times, and lack of features. But, what do you expect for a “cheap” solution set up by the client himself who isn’t a web developer, much less a designer? So, after a bit of research and keeping an open ear out in the development community, I suggested we try Magento as it looked to be the ideal solution and would allow customization and custom skinning. Little did I know that as soon as I switched over, what should have been a 6-8 hours for set up, product transfer, and skinning turned into a “To be continued…”.

The first thing that threw me off once I started to change the way Magento looked and worked was when I opened Magento’s root folder and got lost trying to find where the files were that I needed to make changes to which would update the design and content accordingly. Everything is done as a PHP include and it’s buried deep within folders, within folders, within folders which aren’t always logically labeled. Besides that there were may files with the same exact name in different folders, so that if you were in the wrong folder and didn’t know it, you might be changing the wrong file. Another issue I encountered had me 4 hours into a debugging with setting security on the site, with an initial attempt at searching on my host server for the security configuration file via Apple’s Terminal and then finally arrived at the problem. The problem turned out to be a corrupted file several folders deep into the site’s files that was corrupted on install. Once I figured that out, I was able to fix my problem in about 10 minutes including uploading the new file and also fixed another administrator side error that was being caused in the admin area.

Other beef I had with it, was that on default set up, it runs sluggish due to the amount of JavaScript that is uses which is placed in the header tag in the HTML. It also takes 5.44 seconds to load a blank page… blank in the sense that there are no products being loaded or displayed, just the design shell. I also fought and continue to fight with the coding to get a simple page to call functions correctly and pull data from my database to basically recreate one page’s content for another page. This ongoing battle is also part of the “To Be Continued…” part that is frustrating. Another learning curve I had to adjust to was based on the fact that their files are built as PHTML and if you’re not familiar with what that is, it’s PHP and HTML combined as a custom PHP extension which is definable in your server’s httpd.config file.

To add the icing to the cake, if you go to the Magento forums, there are many, many, many developer and implementation questions and a few administrator responses. There was a couple of questions that ranged in age of 2 weeks old to 2 or so months old which still had not been answered. Forums for developers are a great way to help out others and yourself overcome issues, bugs, difficulties and learn how to do new things. On the forums currently for Magento , everyone seems to be asking questions with very few answers. Seems like the community as a whole are having problems too. I work with a developer who also has been implementing Magento into a client’s site… and his basic response to Magento was very similar to mine.

Magento was definitely written by back-end developers as you can tell. I think in a version or two, Magento will probably be a pretty solid, front-end developer friendly product with easy skinning and a ton more standard, built-in modules. Until then, plan on long nights and ample frustration… Or maybe you could try all those different desktop stress balls and such that are out there.

How To Create A Custom E-blast Part 2

Published on June 4, 2008 in Email Marketing, Marketing, Mobile, Web and iPhone. 1 Comment

In this article I will cover some of the basic specs of building a custom e-blast for direct mail marketing and personal use. If you missed the first post, you can read How To Create A Custom E-blast here in my blog.

Custom E-Blast

Assuming you are already familiar with web design and know that web graphics are built at a resolution of 72 ppi and in RGB color mode, we’ll begin with the preferred size of an e-blast. Best practice of building an e-blast is at a size of 600 px wide and as long as your content needs it to be. If you stay around that size, or even a little bit smaller, you’ll find that your e-blast is compatible with many e-mail clients both desktop versions and web client based (ie. Yahoo!, MSN/Hotmail, Excite, Gmail, etc.) and you’ll even find that it works nicely with newer devices, such as Apple’s iPhone.

You’re probably asking yourself why you would want to design one so “small” when websites are built larger than that, and your monitor is capable of viewing larger resolutions. Well, the answer is simply so that you ensure that your intended recipient is able to see your e-blast as intended on what ever viewing platform they use. Let’s say for a moment that you know that your entire list contains only people with Yahoo! email addresses. Just because they may have a Yahoo! email address doesn’t mean that they necessarily check their email by logging into Yahoo! mail to read it. It could be automatically forwarded to another email address, it could be downloaded to their mail app such as Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Entourage, or Apple’s Mail, Apple’s iPhone, Blackberry, or any other device and email reader program that exists. So, being compatible with your audience’s preferred email reading ways is important for usability reasons and to help remove any barriers that may exists to get them to read your message.

Once you’ve gotten the size out of the way, your next question will probably be, what format should this be in and how should I code it. For e-blasts, you will find that you can and should be using JPG images, GIF images (animated or static) or both, along with good old HTML. Most mail readers are able to handle embedded and inline CSS for the styling of text, but not for positioning. You’re best off to use tables, which may contain DIVs, and CSS. The types of things that you can define in CSS that will work well in e-blasts include: both background and font color, widths, heights of tables, table cells and DIVs, borders, font attributes to include sizes, weights, font families (ie. Arial, Verdana, Georgia), text alignment, and padding.

Best practices for mixing images and browser text stems from knowing the limitations and possible outcomes of using them with different email readers. It is best to use both graphics and browser text for many reasons. Some email readers do not display images until you’ve granted them permission to download the graphics. If your e-blast was all graphics, the viewer might never see any text associated with the mail, not click on the download images button, or worse yet they, or their email reader might think that your e-blast is spam. Spammers for a long time, and continually use emails with all images so that they can still displaying words that usually trigger spam software to mark them as spam or delete them because spam software can’t determine if there is “text” represented in the image and it makes it harder for the spam software to catch it as spam. These days, spam software usually automatically marks messages with all images as spam because of this practice. Additionally, some e-blast sending programs allow you to input a text only version for people who either block images, or people with screen readers so that they can still receive the message.

Another best practice for mixing images and browser text is that if you have a background image/texture behind browser text in your e-blast, consider defining a background color too through CSS so that when your e-blast gets to a program such as Microsoft Outlook with versions that do not display background images, your recipient will still be able to read your message. As an example, if you didn’t plan ahead for this and let’s say that you put white text on a dark background image, and when the user reads it in their email reader which doesn’t display background images, they might not see it if the “page” background is white too. White text on a white background has no contrast and therefore can’t be easily read or seen.

Having a healthy mix of images and text is good not only to help avoid spam blockers, but also because it helps make your e-blast lighter in terms of size which will help with loading times. As with any website or e-blast, if it causes your user problems or takes too long to load, your user may become irritated and delete the email or navigate away from your site. So keep in mind that web optimization is a good solution.

The next best thing to do when creating a custom e-blast is to test, test, test it until it’s working correctly and displaying the way you want to on as many email readers as you can and that you have access to. If you don’t already have multiple email addresses, you should at least set one up under different email reader such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, GMail, set up desktop email reading programs such as Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage, Microsoft Outlook, etc. to also retrieve these accounts and when you send out your test, be sure to include all of your test accounts in those. Only send out your final e-blast to your mailing list only after all testing has been completed and finished. Nothing will look worse than you sending out your e-blast numerous time to your recipient without a valid reason (ie. a significantly incorrect piece of information, such as an event day, time address, etc., price or otherwise important information). A good testing solution for you may be the one offered by Campaign Monitor which allows you to test many mail reading applications all at once.

When you’re ready to send it you have a few options. You can either have a custom e-blast generating program built for you by a company which can be as simple or complex as you wish, or you can use an online service such as Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor that I highly recommend or any other number of providers out there. Each of the online e-blast service providers out there charge for sending e-blasts on their own pricing structure. Find out which one is right for you and offers the features that you want.

To sum up creating a custom e-blast…

Build your e-blast at 600 px wide or less, use JPG images, GIF images (animated or static) or both, and use both images and properly formatted text. Use HTML which may include DIVs. Lastly don’t forget to do cross email reader platform testing to only yourself first before sending out your e-blast to your mailing list.

If you need further consultation, guidance, or even someone to build your own custom e-blast or e-blast sending web based software for your company, consider DesignCarter Interactive Agency to help you with those needs.

Markup + FTP + Terminal + More = Coda = Awesomeness!

Published on May 18, 2008 in Resources, Technology and Web. 0 Comments

I’ve always been a fan of hand coding XHTML and CSS and all things web for a long time now. I’ve worked on both Windows based computers and Macintosh Computers and tried a variety of coding programs. Over the years, I’ve been drawn to Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver… until recently. The past 5 days, I’ve been working in Coda by Panic Software, and now, I’m totally converted! The program is fantastic. I’ve always been a big fan of their FTP program Transmit, and with Coda, it’s pretty much built in… along with Terminal, and a bunch of other handy features.

Coda Web Development Sofware Logo

In one word, Coda is awesome! Goodbye Dreamweaver! Check it out for yourself!

Go Ahead. Touch My Ad.

Published on April 4, 2008 in Interactive, Marketing and Technology. 0 Comments

I read a news post 2 days ago on Engadget about Microsoft’s Surface coming to consumers April 17th through AT&T. I’ve been following this since it’s inception and introduction to some New York hotels for a trial run and have wondered when they’ll be coming to the consumer’s home, and more importantly, when we’ll have the opportunity to create advertisements for display on it.

Microsoft Surface

We’ll be able to add a new type of ad in the future, ones which you can touch. Since these table top units are being advertised to businesses and you and me at home, I’m sure we’ll find new and innovative ways to implement advertising. In the future, when they supposedly have these at restaurants, like Chili’s for the tables, I’m sure there will advertisements for their desserts while we wait for our food, and maybe advertisements for their gift cards.

How about a new version of mobile gaming and perhaps a new way to engage with a brand during those waiting periods? Keeping with a restaurant theme, how would you like to play a game at your table with your friends while you wait for your delicious food to arrive? How would you like to play games brought to you by advertisers, and maybe games which would have you interact with their products? Who knows, maybe in the future table tennis will be more than, well, table tennis?