Blog

Web Design for Beginners, Part 2

August 20, 2010
by Robin Moss

Yes, the second post is up! I am honored to be a continuing guest blogger on Edmee Roche’s (@edmeeroche) She’s Gone Blogging site. In this post I discuss how to choose a web designer. Yes, I think there should be a method to your madness.

Another thing to think about that I did not mention on the She’s Gone Blogging post, is that you should make sure you like and trust your web designer. This is someone you are going to work closely with to design the first impression of your company on the internet. You need to feel secure in knowing that you have hired someone that can take your vision and make it a reality.

Web Design for Beginners

August 10, 2010
by Robin Moss

I was honored to be asked by Edmee Rochee (@edmeeroche) to guest blog on her site She’s Gone Blogging about Web Design for Beginners. It is a fun topic, one I really enjoy.

It is being done as a series of posts, so you need to keep going back – it covers what you need to know before you start to design a site. I even go into the basics of shopping carts and the differences between them. It is an overview for beginners, so if you just want the basics, you should check it out!

Is the Influence Project Influential?

July 28, 2010
by Robin Moss

Fast Company wanted to show that they could make anything go viral, so they got together with Mekanism. Mekanism is “a creative company that builds digital audiences.” They also guaranteed Fast Company that anything they do will go viral. Okay, I can believe you can do something so out there, so outrageous, that it can go viral – and with the backing of Fast Company (Fast Company did put it out in their e-mail newsletter, online and in their print publication) I buy that. But what does it prove and what does it gain you. So together they launched the Influence Project.

So what happened with the Influence Project (which was launched the first week in July), in the first week 13,000 people signed up. I admit, I was one of them. Funny thing is, since then (another 3 weeks) only 7,000 people signed up. What went wrong. Easy, it was ill conceived. How you ask. Lots of ego and little planning.

Web sites are for people, not for going viral. The Influence Project web site was created all in Flash 10. You don’t have Flash 10 you can’t get in. Rule out iPhones and iPads (okay, most of them have computers at home). Now let’s talk about corporate users (you know, Fortune 500 companies and the like), they control what applications are on the computers and trust me, they are not all on Flash 10 – I know, those people can wait till they get home. It is just that you made the site more difficult to use.

Okay, everyone is at home using their modern computer with Flash 10. Let’s hope they all have broadband, because this puppy is slow to load (about 20 seconds on my Uverse account)! You load up the link your friend sent you. But the instructions on the page are really poor (although it appears they recently changed them (perhaps from criticism from the crowds). When you went to the site it said nothing. Now it tells you to click on the picture to show influence, but in actuality you have more influence if they sign up, no one got that from the site. No one. Everyone called me and asked me what to do.

News flash. Good site design does not require phone support to navigate. Presently I am ranked 2,183 out of 20,076. I sent out one tweet and posted it once on my personal Facebook page (and I am not a big FB user and have limited friends). Two of my friends signed up, two. Guy Kawaski (big name got 56 people to sign up. Mari Smith managed to get 304 people to sign up. These are not big viral numbers people.

Mekanism and Fast Company want you to think that 20,000 people joining the Influence project is “viral”, I’m here to tell you 20,000 people is nothing. While I would love for 20,000 people to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter. Put the number in perspective, Fast Company has a subscriber base of 723,230. So out of their subscriber base (which doesn’t include all the people who read their online magazine or subscribe to their e-mail newsletter, follow them on Twitter, etc.) they were able to get 20,000 people to sign on. Oh, and the people that signed on tweeted about it to their connections, so it went to people who might not follow Fast Company.

Fast Company might think this was a great success, but I think it was a great dud. They started building this up with an article about viral campaigns and Mekanism in their May issue of the magazine. What they didn’t mention is a lot of viral campaigns don’t bring in a return on investment (luckily, online campaigns often are inexpensive). Take Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, even Burger King admits they only had a minor bump in sales (9%) for a campaign that got them millions of hits online.

Viral campaigns sound great, but are you reaching actual potential clients or are you just reaching “people”. Keep your eye on the ball, which is growing your business. You want to reach those people that can and will use your products and services. Going viral is great, growing your business is better.

June 30, 2010 – Social Media Day

June 30, 2010
by Robin Moss

Wow, we have our own day. Mashable has announced that today is Social Media Day. The first question is, will anyone notice. It is very prominent on the Mashable site (first thing you see), so then I went to Facebook. Facebook has the ability to sent a message to everyone. I expected to see something announcing to the almost 500 million members that this was a very special day, a day celebrating what Facebook has helped shape – social networks. Alas, no global message, Facebook let the moment pass.

So I went to Twitter and checked my stream, and lots of social media, but not a lot of Social Media Day. Hmmm, how could Social Media Day go unnoticed. I checked CNN (online of course) They even link to Mashable and The Wall Street Journal (checking the technology sections of course). Then I went old school, I “Googled” Social Media Day and no major news media outlet (sorry KCTV Kansas City) came up, only Mashable.

So does this mean social media doesn’t work? No, it means social media doesn’t work in a vacuum. It is what I tell my clients. You want to be on Facebook, because if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. You want to be on Twitter, because you want to have the opportunity to meet people, influence people, show people that you are smart, funny, engaging, etc. – pick your adjective that best describes you. You also want to be on Twitter so that you can know what people are saying about you and your company and your product. You can’t respond if you are not a part of the conversation. You need to have a LinkedIn profile so other professionals can find you and know who you are and what you do. You want to have a YouTube channel so they can see you in action (keep checking back, I am editing our video!).

So why did my Google search yield only Mashable links (okay and KCTC), because Mashable forgot that the traditional media, and other social media outlets still look to old fashioned ways to be kept up-to-date: press releases, phone calls, personal interviews. Social Media works, you just need to use it in conjunction with more traditional forms of media if you want to be sure to get wall-to-wall coverage of your very first Social Media Day. Maybe next year, we will be everywhere!

Art of the Logo

June 4, 2010
by ribit

Following on Robin’s excellent post about branding, I wanted to take a closer look at one specific aspect of building your brand, the thing that one might say is the foundation of every brand: the logo.

We here at ribit do a lot of work for start-ups and small businesses in additional to our larger, established clients, and one of my favorite challenges when we get those clients is being able to start at the very beginning in building their brand, and specifically in doing their logo design. The reason it is a challenge is largely due to the fact that so many people have trouble understanding what a logo is, and what it is supposed to do.

A logo is a hieroglyph. A rune. A pictogram. It is a simple, easily recognized symbol that stands in for the name of your business. Done properly, a logo can become a sort of letter added to the collective symbol alphabet. It should not, and indeed cannot, capture everything about you and your business. To do so would require it to be very complex, and when it comes to logos, simplicity is best.

Consider the Nabisco logo. If you don’t know what it is, go look in your pantry. Chances are something in there will have it. On any of their products, it will be in the upper-left corner. It is a red triangle with the word “NABISCO”, surrounded by something that looks vaguely like an old fashioned T.V. antennae. Nothing about that thing (and incidentally, it is actually called “The Nabisco Thing” in internal Nabisco marketing documentation) seems to say anything about what Nabisco does. Taken out of context, that thing does not say Ritz or Nilla Wafers. Heck, it doesn’t even say “snack food”.

But we all know that it means Nabisco. We’ve been seeing it on the upper-left corner of boxes of crackers since we were children. That thing is possibly the ultimate logo ever created. Everyone knows what it means, that silly little oval and line sketch has become a symbol, a hieroglyph; a letter in our collective alphabet that means “Nabisco”.

As far as possible, every logo should aspire to that standard. It should be simple, instantly and easily recognizable, and it should be usable but also unobtrusive on every piece of paper and every web page or TV ad that your company produces.

Some basic guidelines:

Simplicity! Do not be afraid of “plain”. Your logo is like a letter, not a painting.
Recognizability. Avoid obscure or arcane looking symbols. If the viewer stops and thinks about what the logo is rather than what it stands for , they are no longer thinking about your company.
Scalability. Your logo should look good on packaging, on a letterhead, projected large on slideshow, or printed small on a business card.
Professionalism. The logo is your business, not yourself. If, for instance, you dislike a certain color, but that color works well in the logo design, do not let your personal preference ruin your logo.
Trust your designer! You are paying them to do your design. Trust their expertise, otherwise why did you hire them?

Designed and used effectively, your logo can become a symbol that, when viewed, sets up a whole series of associations in the mind of the viewer and constantly reinforces your brand in the public eye.

Branding 101: Why Do I Need To Be Concerned With Branding?

May 18, 2010
by Robin Moss

When you read a book do you start in the middle and read towards the beginning, then towards the end, then start at the beginning, then read the ending, the finish off all the pages you missed? You could, but the book probably won’t make much sense. For that same reason we “try” to get clients to let us develop a brand that will influence everything we do for them.

They need to have a logo (yes you might need a black and white version, and even a horizontal and vertical version in some cases), having a consistent logo allows people to recognize your company when they see it. Ericsson and Texas Instruments both provided me their design standards, prior to the internet (now you get them online) the 3-ring binders were 3 inches thick. ribit still made everything we did for them unique, but we followed their branding/design standards so that everyone knew at a glance that the work was for Ericsson or Texas Instruments.

If a client wants a brochure designed, and they need a logo, we will start with the logo design. If they have come to us for a web site and a brochure, we will start with the design of the web site as that will be the larger project and have the greater implication for design. If you design the smallest project first you might design yourself into a corner for the larger project. The continuity between the projects will help to build your brand.

Don’t forget all the small bits and pieces, your letterhead, your envelopes, your business card – they should all reflect your brand. As we move our clients into Social Media we are making sure that their brand is carried through. Their blog should be a part of their site so the design is seamless. YouTube Channels can now be customized so their appearance can more closely match the branding implemented on your web site. While Twitter and Facebook have limitations, within their framework you should brand yourself as much as possible and as closely as possible to your own corporate standards.

And last but not least taglines. They seam to be making a resurgence. Should you have one? It an be a positive addition to your brand. ribit has used one for the past six years which is quite simple… be interactive. If you need help with that, call us, we’ll be glad to help!

Making a Site iProduct Friendly

May 4, 2010
by ribit

In the process of creating the new Ribit web site-as well as my own personal site-I had occasion to test the site out on an iPad. Browsing on an iPhone/Pad/Pod (hereafter referred to as an iProduct) is very intuitive and easy, but also very different from what we are used to on a desktop or laptop PC. Contrary to what some might think, the iProduct multi-touch interface does not merely substitute touching for clicking, and our usual instinct of viewing a page and vertically scrolling to the next page or section of content doesn’t always serve us well. Viewing a web page on an iProduct is more akin to looking at a menu of items available for perusal. When you first visit a site, you see the entire front page. If this page has a lot of stuff on it, you will see a tall vertical strip of content, all of which is far too small to actually be read or viewed effectively. Tapping an area automatically zooms the screen to that area of content, bringing it into focus and making it readable. Tapping again zooms back out to the full page, touching and sweeping your fingers around allows you to freely pan (I don’t like to call it scrolling, it doesn’t feel anything like scrolling on a normal PC) in any direction. All very intuitive and very, very cool, but as I discovered, this and other aspects of the multi-touch interface have some consequences for web design.

First if all, there is navigation of pages. We are used to point and click; an iProduct gives us touch. Easy enough, but when designing, one has to remember that a human finger is not as precise and pointy as a mouse cursor. Navigation elements on a site need to be large, and have more space between them, to make browsing your site on an iProduct a good experience. Another thing to remember is that there is no such thing as mouse-hover or mouseover on an iProduct. The cursor does not exist when the screen is not touched, and so many of the event handlers web designers use to highlight things like navigation buttons simply won’t work. With this in mind, navigation needs to be made very clear. A link, whether it be text or a graphic button, needs to very obviously be a link. Along with rollover states for navigation, drop down menus are problematic on an iProduct. Apple has given us the functionality by invoking the normal mouse-over event when touching on a navigation element that triggers a drop down, but unless your site is extremely large I would highly recommend doing away with hierarchical drop downs in your site menus. One touch per step to the destination should be the rule, as far as it is possible.

Another interesting thing I discovered is that certain CSS properties that work perfectly fine in Safari on a desktop computer are ignored on an iProduct. The most important of these I found are fixed elements such as DIV tags with a position:fixed attribute, or background images using the background-attachment:fixed property. The reason for this is simple, and makes sense once you think about it. On an iProduct, in order to accommodate large amounts of page content on the smaller screens, the user has to be able to pan around the page, and unlike a desktop environment, you don’t get the ever-present cursor and scroll bar with its handy buttons, to say nothing of having a mouse with a scroll wheel. The result of this is that a touch and drag on an iProduct screen has to pan the page around on all directions, and fixed elements will not behave properly in that environment. Accordingly, Safari on the iProducts ignores the fixed property items and moves them around with the page as a whole. It might be helpful to think of a web page on an iProduct as akin to looking at a static printed document that has active areas that allow you to bring up other, related, documents.

The easy solution to all this is simply to make your navigation really big and chunky, which I hate; and to avoid the use of fixed properties in your CSS, but frankly the cool things you can do with them in the desktop environment make that an unattractive choice. You might notice I have used them here.

Can we have our cake and eat it, too?

The answer is yes.

We have a couple of options we can use to accomplish this. WordPress makes this very easy as it has some built in functionality that smooths the process along. If you are not using WordPress, similar results can be achieved using CSS Browser Selector. For WordPress users, check out this excellent article by Nathan Rice on using the WordPress body_class function to detect if your user is on an iProduct and serve them altered CSS instructions to make your site iProduct Friendly.

I’ll let you read the article to get the full scoop, but what is happening is essentially that if someone on an iProduct comes to your site, alternative CSS instructions can be used for any elements that might be problematic in the small-screen multi-touch environment. I was able to use this to remove the fixed properties from various site elements, and best of all, I was able to increase both the size and spacing of text and graphic navigation elements. For the user the changes are totally transparent, and I as the designer don’t have to compromise on my desktop design in order to have a usable site on an iProduct.

With millions of iProducts flying out of Apple’s warehouses, I think iProduct prep is going to become a vital step in delivery of web sites.

Welcome to our New ribit Web Site

April 19, 2010
by Robin Moss

Yes, we are the cobbler’s child. At least every five years we totally redo our web site. Trash the old one and start over from scratch.

This time we decided to leave the old content management system we used (short tutorial – a content management system is a database driven system that allows us to build you a web site where the content of the pages is separate from the design and structure of the web site. This allows us to be able to give the web site owner a user name and password that will allow them to update the content on the pages without changing the design or structure of the web site, using a content editor that is “similar” to editing in your basic word document editing software package.) and switch to WordPress.

WordPress offered a lot of advantages, ease of use being first and foremost. WordPress also has a huge community building Plugins, small applications that add functionality to the “base” program. You want more SEO (search engine optimization – what you need to get higher in the Google rankings) than you get out of the “box” from WordPress, there is a plugin for that. You want a Captcha field (those annoying squiggly letters that automated programs can’t generate to “steal” the form) to go with your contact form, there is a plugin for that. You want it, someone has probably already made a plugin for it.

So why didn’t we “switch” sooner. We at ribit pride ourselves on not only creating sites that work, that incorporate the SEO you need, that connect you to the Social Media, that have a blog, but we create sites that have unique designs that reflect the owner of the web site – that will help them reach their marketing goals and objects. Whenever we looked at WordPress sites, well, they looked like WordPress sites.

The challenge for us was how to make a WordPress site that doesn’t look like a WordPress site. This is what we came up with, different frog paintings on each page, the blog (okay the blog looks like a WordPress blog), a portfolio that is very clean and highlights just a smattering of our work.

We are going to be added to the site in the coming weeks, keep coming back to see how the site progresses. And welcome to our new site!

Social Media, Is It Worth the Time?

March 12, 2010
by Robin Moss

Everyone always asks me how much time I spend on Social Media, and is it worth it. I Am here to tell you that it definitely is worth every minute I spend on tweeting, blogging, updating, etc. I probably spend fifteen to twenty minutes a day keeping up with social media. If I am adding in a blog post, I might spend more – if I have a heavy load of commitments to clients and training meetings I might spend less, but on average I spend fifteen to twenty minutes a day.

What do I get for my time spent on Social Media you ask, I have a community of people on Twitter, that when I have a question, they will answer for me, they have amazing insights into things I might not, and best yet, they refer business to me. By posting interesting tidbits and links to articles of relevant information, I make myself a useful resource on Twitter. Yes, they refer business to me! My fans on my Facebook Fan Page, while few in number, have access to a portfolio and a “sampling” of my thoughts and posts. Not to mention that Facebook, if it were a country, would be the fourth largest country in the world, don’t you want to be “listed” as a part of the “country”?

Plaxo and LinkedIn are interesting places to be a part of, I admit, I am not that active in Plaxo. I tend to post a status update once a day, and check the status e-mails every week to see what is going is new and to send out birthdays (I love their birthday card feature!). LinkedIn is great for not only keeping up with what is going on with all of my contacts, but for the Groups feature, where you can either run a Group or join a Group. Either way you can easily become known as an expert in your field by replying to discussions that are posted, starting your own discussion within that group or submitting a news item for that group. LinkedIn also let’s you answer questions, posted by other members which let’s you establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Is PR Really Necessary?

February 21, 2010
by Robin Moss

If you build it won’t they come? Clients always think if you build them a beautiful web site, a great web site, if you put in all the meta information (code that the people creating your web site put in that the search engines read) that correlates with all the information on your site, that people will come by the droves to their site. Alas, only in Kevin Costner movies does “…if you build it, they will come” work (and yes, for the uninitiated, I am referring to a line in the movie Field of Dreams).

So you have your blog on your web site (or you are using a WordPress, Blogspot, Blogger or one of the many other blogging web sites available) and that is garnering some interest. And you took our advice and you set up a Facebook Fan Page for your company, and you started to use Twitter, but how do you get people to know about all the great things you are doing (and saying).

That is where PR comes to the rescue. Yes, your blog, your Facebook Fan Page, your Twitter account, your YouTube Channel are all pieces of your PR campaign, but you need a coordinated campaign and a way to reach your audience.

Public Relations campaigns are built around reaching the appropriate individuals in the media to get your story out to the masses (i.e., your potential customers and clients). Most people think you can just send out a press release and viola! Instant Story. Front page of the paper. Not so fast. To get good coverage you have to sell your story, you have to have a relationship with the reporters and know how to engage them. More importantly you need someone who knows how to get your story in the paper, on the air, or in their blog.