Graphic Design with Process Development

Posted on July 16, 2014 by Cheryl Hanson

Any business needs a way to reach their customers through a graphic design path. It ensures good communication for your customers. The business owner or manager needs help in reviewing their logo, and understanding how the visual impact of this key piece of business marketing really works.  Most often, the business picks a logo on the feel of the image or the graphics, and runs with this recognizable tool off that “feeling choice”.  The logo is more than just a visual stamp on a letterhead; it is the image that most customers will remember vs. the name of your company. Remember, the key to any marketing effort is to place yourself in your customer’s shoes first.

Graphic Design Should be Process Flow in Kind

With your logo, that is a great first step in your graphic design.  From there, you can ask your graphic designer to come up with backgrounds, small symbols for print and web use, and all kinds of small reminders of your logo marketing.  Use these graphics or illustrations as reminders for your customers in flyers, email marketing, business cards and any print materials that you plan on creating.  Unify and dedicate your messaging with these small graphics and illustrations.  Cover your cars and transport vehicles with this kind of material, and use your unified message on all building, apparel, and giveaway tokens you create.  Use them in your website.  Graphic design is a platform, even more than your web development.

Graphic Design Process with Customer in Mind

How graphic design works is it reaches your customer on a inner physiological level.  The potential customer sees the van or car with the logo, and responds to the graphic design on a feeling or remembrance of past emotion.  It works better even than a smell from childhood, as the customer has no other way to register the emotion; they must recall and remember.  This is why every company with a solid marketing platform ensures that the logo will be well thought out.  Without a conscious decision to enable a memory response, the customer will not register the logo or the company it stands for.  For many years, Coca-Cola has had the red wave lettered logo, and everyone has a memory of emotional response to the image;whether good or bad. Through the years, the company has used current language by adding “Coke” but they still are required to use the old and reflective logo of the past.  No company did it better, by engraving the feeling of joy and wavy lines in the feeling of the typography.   Make sure your logo is very carefully instilled in your product, as it could be graphic design will become your product through its emotional memory response.

Graphic Design Can Convey Details

Sometimes, the graphic design will have details incorporated like a phone number that is a vanity number, which is easy to read and remember.  If the number is expertly crafted in a visual way, it can be even more of a tool for the company or business to allow customers to remember the dial numbers they need for pizza delivery.  Or, if the business is a special craft or service house, the item of specialty should be in the image.  Even using a feeling or texture of the craft in question can be the way to communicate with your customer in your graphic design.

 

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Video Live Feed for Internet TV

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Cheryl Hanson

Have you ever wanted to host a video live feed on your website, to show how busy your restaurant is, or a particularly interesting part of nature, business or weather?  When there are bad storms, or a special event, I always check for a live feed to see if I can locate a video live feed from your desktop, tablet or phone.  It is a great way to stay connected to the many world events that we all are so fortunate to be able to participate in, globally through the internet.  With the internet connection of over half the world, through so many devices, why not share your own part of the world to many?

World Wide Video Live Feed is TV for Internet

Live streaming video by Ustream

If you have wanted to ensure a real life internet program of the owl nest box in your backyard, or a trickling stream that catches light and moonlight in an especially beautiful way, why not setup a web cam, and a network to support it!  While you are at it, set up your own TV station via a web hosting platform like UStream, or even a hosted platform on a web server with Amazon AWS service.  One of my favorite live UStream channels is the NASA Public station, that allows you to see the relevant space missions when they occur.  There are great free TV programs too on this channel, that allows for the channel to be paid for.  You can see the channel on this image box above, and in this fashion, your Live TV Channel can be supported on their servers, taking care of all the technical aspects of the Show, and all the many viewers who may be watching at once.  If you have an especially hot topic, like a game, or a concert, that is widely produced and marketed, this can be the correct path to ensure that your TV station does work.

Single File Streaming on your Video Live Feed

Using some of the the technology that is supplied now, there should be browser compliance on your part to ensure that the Video Live Feed works for most.  Producing your show in H.264 and WebM  should ensure that you are reaching all browsers.  Checking with your service provider who hosts your live stream, and they should give you good feedback on what equipment will work the best.  Using a good wireless camera, connected to a high speed internet connection, with a router and a fast modem will be the correct process.  You can also find wireless cameras that will run with power connection, so all you will need is an electrician to set up an outside electrical box near your taping or video live feed area.  If we use the creek idea, for a tv show that is nature at its best with some relaxing music to broadcast too, you can often find your electrical setup is the most problematic obstacle.  As well, two cameras, one that is for night, and the other for day, with a solar camera indicator, is often a good way to go.

Video Live Feed should be simple and Fun

There are many ideas you can use to set up your Video Live Feed, like a roaring fire, a fishtank, your gaggle of farm geese, or even a box of puppies as they grow.  A busy corner of your street can be a community watch feed that may end up being tampered with, but it can be a real force for good.  If you run a busy restaurant, or a daycare, why not broadcast your space, with your customers?  Sometimes a busy saturday night can be fun to watch on a Video Live Feed, and give your customers a heads up when the restaurant is quieter or full of families and children.  Posting a Live Surveillance Occurs Here Sign, can ensure you are communicating with your customers so they do not misunderstand your intentions for sharing their images or movements.

 

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Speed Up Your Website with Great Integration

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Cheryl Hanson

Website design is not just about the front end integration, or how the site looks, but the background integration will ensure you can speed up your website with great tools and resources.  The best development plan begins with not just how the site looks, but how it runs.  When the Obamacare website snafus began to be reported, it was not about the website design on the front end of the site, but he backend or background tools not integrating with this development.  The only way to speed up your website is to step back and look at the host, the code, and the function within those tools.  Many tools can improve the speed of your website, and make your site zip along for your readers.

Speed up your website with a great host

Where will your site sit?  Where will your customers ultimately go to reach your site?  When you are developing a new site, chances are you do not have any current customers that use your website yet, so a new site can emerge during the website development easily, and evolve as your front end integration improves.  This means you can build your first few pages, navigation among the pages, and you can add the details that your customers need from your online bulletin board.  The hours, address, phone number, and map can be accessed on your contact us page, and added with your mission page, about us page, our products, or our services page.  Adding pictures, graphics and interactive maps will improve the look of your site, but they will not speed up your website.  In fact, having too many pictures, images and graphics is quite distracting and can be a load on your host server account.  If you are spending around $15 per month on your host account, do not expect to have a dedicated server for your website use.  In fact, you are sharing your server with many domains, and websites.  A dedicated or VPS service, will cost you around $100 to $200 per month, with un-managed or managed care packages to be decided upon.  As well, a server that is not central to your country or state, can also be a speed hog, if it is located further away than your customers.  This is why it is important to use this list when choosing a host:

  • Find a host that is geographically close to your customer base
  • Do not blindly choose a host based on a superbowl ad or commercial
  • Use a host that can work with a separate name registrar for your name domain
  • Use local and network support associates to guide you to good hosts that you have found successful
  • Use forum sites for reviews on existing nation wide hosts, and chose a server farm close to your location
  • Always include managed server support in your host package
  • Test your server package with a consultant before you migrate to the server, to ensure they have good response times on up and down loads.
  • Backup, security, CDN, cloud architecture and email hosting packages all are on this host.  Be sure to discuss your office network needs before you migrate.
  • Speed up your website initiative begins with a properly maintained host-you are never done with this change

Speed Up Your Website with CDN File Management

The best way to speed up your website is to integrate your website database with a Content Delivery Network or CDN.  There are lots of companies that do this service for free, but the best is CloudFlare.  Working within the DNS or Domain Name System, this tool allows you to push your content through a proxy server on their hosted network, and let the internet pull data easily and quickly without a fresh cache each and every trial.  The addition of a CDN to your setup will give you a quick download of less than 3 seconds.  More than 3 seconds, and your site can be quickly discounted by your readers and customers.  Do everything you can to speed up your website to appease your customers as they will be more likely to feel comfortable with your business, when it appears to be a quality run enterprise.

Speed Up Your Website with Google PageSpeed Service

So far, the only expense we have discussed for a newly hatched website, would be hosting and name registration of around $150 total per year.  This is not a large expense when you consider your web presence is important for continual business strategy.  Adding the CDN from Cloudflare is free, and so is adding google pagespeed service.  This service should in fact, be added before your CDN, to ensure that the DNS records are in place before you proxy them.  The specifics take just around an hour to install, and with this service, your html, CSS, and other code is actively monitored for effective internet use.  Hire a good technical web developer to install this to your server and DNS, and your speed will stay under 3 seconds consistently.

Speed up your website and speed up your business at the same time-it is a task that any existing or new website must consider.

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E-Commerce is Best for Business

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Cheryl Hanson

Your store or idea is growing, and you are selling some innovative and new ideas at a rapid clip; why not produce your own E-Commerce Storefront to increase your business?  Being a good business in today’s marketplace means you have many areas of marketing and growth.  There are many ways that a web based E-Commerce business will increase your bottom line in a physical setting, as well as an online position.  Let me explain how, with a simple example, your local donut shop.

E-Commerce will Increase your Business Exposure

When you are emerging as the best donut shop on main street, in anytown USA, you can benefit from selling your product online, in an E-Commerce platform.  Many people would never think that this would be possible, but with a little ingenuity, you can begin to reach more customers than your downtown shop can reach.  You already have a tested and true product.  The market near you has loved your sweet solution for many months, and found your close local shop very rewarding. The local respect you have achieved is something that will drive your online presence easily; and bring you nationwide success.

Being in the marketplace, you know your customers.  They are mom’s on the way to the park, with their little ones in strollers.  They are business men and women on their way to work, to satisfy a craving for themselves and for their team.  Being a good force of action, your customers are also the local skate park crowd, that grabs a bag of your day old donuts off the cart on the sidewalk.  You have three distinct customers, and for this you need three distinct websites to attract them in their individual ways.

Nationwide, these three customers are web savvy, and will be easily captured with other web savvy e-commerce exposure from existing customers.  Mommies and Mommies to be are good customers with little ones-they will make up 35% of your customer base.  Business persons are local and need product on a whim, so they may need to be enrolled in a donut of the month club-a prime recurring membership opportunity.   And the skate park group needs one on one marketing with a customer service expert that you hire from your store to work with their group directly.  Setup a skate team with your local community, and hire the marketing expert to work with other events in the local area.

How these groups relate to E-Commerce

Mommy and Me customers are going to be gift driven, and require impeccable customer driven service.  Your E-Commerce site for this market will be searching for organic based sugars, and will be very value driven.  Demographically, you can count on this very dedicated customer to share experiences easily.  Prepare your E-Commerce site for this market with pristine, impeccable customer service anytime, day or night.  Ship for free, and offer a membership plan with a discount.  Rely on social marketing to drive your donut shop product into a designer donut marketplace online, with beautiful gift inspired marketing boxes, cards and presentation.  Think about hiring a graphic designer, and a print house to glam up your marketing for this group.  An inspiration of the baking creme-de la creme world will be easily spread when your customer service is completely mistake free.

Business persons interested in a treat each month, without delay of their diets, will be welcome to ideas of automation and expedite of their special treat.   Shipping needs to be overnight, and a great way to detail this step is to logistically use a baking house or a facility near Memphis or Dallas where the overnight shipping hubs of Fedex and UPS operate.  Plan to utilize your logistics to expedite quality and great customer service.  A membership house will be the right choice for this demographic.

Skaters and board enthusiasts will be less motivated, and will make up around 20% of your sales.  But, being a nationwide untapped market, they will ultimately enjoy being recognized. The key to utilizing this great resource, is to provide some leadership in your store front store, and get involved in your community.  When other skaters and athletes see that your donut shop is a welcome retreat on a rainy day, they will use the carb boost to their advantage.  Being involved in the skater competition tour, finding an ally with a board manufacturer or shoe company will be a goal.  The E-Commerce site you put together for this group could be more about merchandise, and information than shipment of day old donuts.

E-Commerce Task List to Consider

Ultimately, you will find all three groups are unique in their niche market, but they will need an require some real tangent business savvy steps to flower and bloom.  The best way to meet the demands of these markets is to setup great logistics, customer service and marketing experts.  As a small business owner, how do you find this kind of skill grouping?  The best way to move out into the nation and find similar customers of this demographic, is to expand, but do it slowly.  Think about the products you would like to sell, how you would produce them, and then how you would fulfill the orders as they come in.  And, when there are problems or issues, how do you handle these complaints.  The last thing you want to have a growing bad reputation online.

  • FEDEX Offers distribution and direct shipping from Memphis
  • UPS Offers distribution and direct shipping from Dallas
  • Marketing Experts can be Found via a Job Post on Monster.com
  • Find a merchant account that allows an API tool to separate your customer service center from your banking.
  • In HOUSE Banking, Customer Service, Logistics, and Marketing is always best.  Your hired guru for each of these specialties have more ownership when you set the standard from your own office.

Some helpful resources on E-Commerce are found with our team.  Let us build the correct website for your customer base, and do a great job at the specialized E-Commerce platform for your market.   Meeting your market’s needs is what E-Commerce is all about, and how you will find success.

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