Cirrus ABS » web design

7 Online Marketing Predictions for 2011

Kevin Mullett — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:01:29 +0000

The thought occurred to me several days before New Years that an onslaught of ridiculous and unsubstantiated predictions was imminent. This lead me to a knee-jerk tweet that had some obvious truth, along with a thinly veiled attempt at humor. Below are 7 online marketing prediction tweets I made for 2011.

SEO will be just as important as wearing pants when marketing products and most services.
Unless you are part of a select few type of services, you will almost certainly be required to be wearing pants while marketing in 2011 and I submit that actively promoting your website to the search engines via search engine optimization will be just as important. Think of how you do research before making major purchases or selecting vendors.
People who make a resolution to “try to do” Social Media, will have results of those who “try to” lose weight.
Social media may be a fit for a portion of your marketing efforts, but if you “try it” it is almost certain to fail. To be successful you must follow a plan, apply necessary resources to accomplish it, and then allow time for the program to work. It is unlikely you will magically wake up the next morning ready for a swimsuit photo shoot.
Just like Lady Gaga outfits, Social Media and SEO will evolve and change. Who will you ask, is this a good idea?
It is not so much that the experts where wrong as it is that they are constantly aiming towards moving objects. Google, Bing, and the social media sphere have changed numerous times in 2010 and 2011 is unlikely to be anymore stable. Having professionals whose job it is to stay on top of changes will allow you to take advantage of them before your competition does.
Site owners who build, or pay for, a new site & then treat it as “done” will be disappointed with its effectiveness.
We fall victim to our set it and forget it culture when we constantly strive to not participate in our own success. Like it or not, websites require attention if they are to garner attention from visitors and search engines. A website is not a check-mark when done item.
Achy Breaky heart won’t make a resurgence and neither will the failed marketing fads and gimmicks of 2010.
OK, look I even listened to Achy Breaky Heart a few times myself, but it’s dead and so too are some of the ridiculous gimmicks of 2010. Businesses are forced into a difficult position of trying to figure out where real return will come from and if pop up short term fads are worth doing. It is wise to partner with someone who has seen these come and go.
Disingenuous professionals will use hyperbole and stats pulled from their backside to win your business.
You know this guy. He is the one who says EVERYONE is using Facebook now, even though you are not. He has no issue using statistics out of context to prove that you are alone in not being “up to date” with your marketing. Beware as this fellow just might not have your best interest at heart.
People who don’t really know what they are doing will convince you they do because there is money in it.
Now we are not talking about shifts or evolution here. Nor are we talking about trial and error. No we are talking about people who recognize what people are wanting to buy and are jumping in because there is coin to be had, without regard to their knowledge of the subject. They’ll take your money if you give it to them.

There you go. Pure marketing gold. Head these marketing predictions for a fruitful 2011, and don’t forget to check back towards the end of the year to see how they hold up. Contact us for a serious look at your 2011 marketing efforts.

Notes from the Front

Bill Gardiner — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:10:17 +0000

When the sales department at Cirrus engages a new customer we often have to educate and build awareness of the Web’s role as a sales and marketing tool and the positive impact it can have on business when executed properly. All too often, however, senior leadership becomes aware of the underperformance of its company website when they see competitors’ new or re-designed websites or when told by a key customer that its website doesn’t look up to par. At Cirrus, we are driven to provide our clients with the best tools to maximize their online visibility, which, of course, leads to more clicks and more leads. Businesses with underperforming websites (i.e. stale, outdated websites that don’t organically rank well in the search engines) have never experienced real lead generation from the Web and typically aren’t comfortable “taking the plunge.” All too often, these businesses contract with a freelance designer or use internal resources (IT, marketing, interns?!) to redo their website, and virtually 100% of the time all they end up with is a more attractive underperforming website.

If You Build It They Will Not Come.

Another common driver of change is current customers’ comments and feedback on the look, feel, and functionality of a website. While this is crucial to the design process, it is too easy to focus solely on your existing customer base and lose sight entirely of growing that base. In most cases, you don’t know what you don’t know; while you may see an increase in site conversions, you won’t see an increase in traffic by making it look pretty. This initial bump is often caused by excitement and buzz about the “new” site, yet the buzz (and business) quickly fade back to previous levels.

The Seeds of Change

All of a sudden (or seemingly so) we’re noticing more businesses inquiring about optimizing their existing websites themselves or paying a firm like ours to optimize it for them (rather than redesigning it first). Somehow, it seems as if a collective conscious awakening has occurred and businesses are recognizing that driving new site traffic from search will lead to more business. The problem here, again, is, you don’t know what you don’t know. These sites are often years old (many times built by inexperienced “developers” or agencies more focused on looks than results), have no backlinks or PageRank built up over time, have no mechanism for getting fresh content onto the website let alone a CMS. Also, in many instances, a company’s expectation of SEO is way off base – expecting to score well for competitive terms in a very short timeframe. What gets me is how people make the assumption that by merely saying they are engaging in SEO they’ll displace hundreds or even thousands of websites for particular keywords or phrases is possible because they essentially “willed it to be so.” As with so much in life, you need to have the right tools, the right content, and the right level of ongoing attention (SEO is never past tense) and WORK – remember, SEO revolves around content and building authority both of which require resources. Of course, this all starts with a strategy to get from where you are today to where you want to be, bringing the right resources to bear (time/money/effort), and executing the plan. Once there is a plan in place, then look at what visitors experience when they arrive at the website (imagery, look, feel) and focus on improvements – not the other way around.

If you’re on the fence about what direction to take your Web presence, ask yourself (or your team) what the difference between H1, H2, H3, etc., tags means to search engine placement – or not. Ask them what Caffeine did for your Google search engine results. You trust an expert to do your broadcast marketing, print work (in many cases your invoices and letterhead), maybe even your on-hold message, so why would you not trust a professional to work in a space that you are inherently not familiar with? Give us a call, and let’s have a frank and open conversation about your Web presence and what it’ll take to achieve your goals. Now, what you do with that information…

Oh Noes, Tumblr Is Down And So’s Your Website

Kevin Mullett — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:57:23 +0000

Sometime late afternoon on Sunday the 5th of December, the popular social website and social content aggregator service tumblr.com went down. This of course means anyone attempting to get to websites created on the tumblr CMS (Content Management System) platform are not accessible. Now a service outage is something that can happen to the best services, but what we are are discussing here is being prepared to deal with website outages when it is critically important to you as a business or individual.

Here is an example. Some Fort Wayne friends created a quick tumblr.com website to host a free event. This seems logical because they are not being compensated and want to keep the cost low. All marketing and promotion sends people to “theirfortwayneeventsite.tumblr.com”. Now if tumblr goes down, as it has, they are stuck with promotion efforts that send people to this dead Fort Wayne event website with no way to quickly change it. If instead they had at least used a full domain name like “theirfortwayneeventsite.com”, then they could worse case, create another temporary or replacement website and point to it.

Find out more about our website design and development services.

Remotely Updateable Kiosk Application Developed

Kevin Mullett — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:24:14 +0000

I’ve heard people refer to Cirrus ABS as “a Fort Wayne Web Design Company”, and while local online marketing solutions and web design is a core focus, it hardly represents the totality of work we do.

Cirrus ABS has created many unique technology solutions over the years including this recently developed remotely updateable kiosk solution to display NAWCWD award recipients. This .NET application utilizes our eBusiness Suite content management system (CMS) for remote, network, or onsite (via the kiosk) management of the content and uses Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for the dual display presentation (kiosk + large display). This allows for navigation presentation styles in line with current mobile platforms like hand gestures. The application includes configurable recipeint pages with the option to add up to two additional pages in singular or dual column formats. The system also creates daily backups.

Read more about our custom software development services.

5 Handy Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers

Rick Kemery — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:08:51 +0000

Many times a Web developer may need a handy utility to speed up a process. The follow list of Firefox add-ons can do just that. For helping with Web design, an add-on like ColorZilla can help select the right colors, by using a Photoshop style palette chooser.

And for Web development, the Firebug add-on can provide a full-range of debugging tools.

ColorZilla

ColorZilla can help when it is difficult to find the exact color that you are looking for. This handy Firefox add-on provides a Photoshop style color picker and palette browser. If you are stuck on selecting the right color for Web design, this add-on is meant for you. It provides a quick way to match a color found on the Web to a design. And you will not have to open Photoshop to get the right color. It is also wonderful for developing a color swatch.

Firebug

Firebug can be a great companion for Web development. This add-on offers a comprehensive suite of debugging tools, which allows a Web developer to view code properties on every Web page. With Firebug, you will be able to view and edit the HTML, CSS and JavaScript properties of a Web page. Plus you will be able to view potential bandwidth bottlenecks and HTTP headers. This is an excellent utility if you are looking for an easy to use debugging add-on.

Web Developer

Some say that the Web Developer add-on is a virtual “Swiss army knife.” With Web Developer, you will be able to disable key browser features, such as JavaScript, images, CSS and more. Plus, you are able to view and edit a Web page’s CSS and HTML on the fly.

A debugging tool is included for dynamic JavaScript, which is also good for AJAX debugging. You will get the ability to edit forms and form data. There is also an additional line guide and ruler for measuring out Web pages on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

Save Complete

With Save Complete, a user can save an entire Web page to their hard-drive, without downloading difficulty. If one uses the traditional “Save Page As” option in Firefox, a few things could go missing in the offline copy, such as images or CSS elements. Save Complete is great for archiving purposes, and even better for storing the entirety of a Web page.

Screengrab

Screengrab can help if you want a quick utility to capture a mockup image of a Web page, . Without needing to open up your favorite image editor, this add-on can take an entire screen grab of a Web page, allow you to grab certain portions of a page, or a selection. Other options include “copy to clipboard” and “save as a file.” This is a handy add-on for Web designers who are consistently mocking up Web pages and need quick access to a complete screenshot utility.

These add-ons are great for a novice or casual Web developer, but if you are looking for a professional website design, we have just the right thing.

Need a complete solution for your website? We have what it takes to win on the web…

At Cirrus ABS, we combine our expert approach to Web design and Web development in our NetCentered Business Strategy. We provide a full-range of Web services, from expert copy writing, to complete solutions for online marketing – we have it all and more. We’re not a traditional Web design firm, because we go beyond what’s offered somewhere else.

And the technology that drives our successful Web solutions? The Cirrus eBusiness Suite, a comprehensive Web platform.

Contact Cirrus ABS to ask about our comprehensive Web solutions and how they can work the best for you. We serve any size of business, with our Small Business Website (SBS) offerings, to our competitive industry solutions.

Writing for Blogs and Optimization

Rick Kemery — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:39:05 +0000

For the optimization of a blog, the All in One SEO Pack should be considered a “must have” for blog writers. Fundamentals of the pack include in the ability to edit the title, description and keywords of a blog post. For new users of WordPress, this plugin provides out-of-the-box workability. After installing, a user can access main features immediately, without the need for additional configuration. And for an advanced user, it supports a variety of features to fine-tune its integration on a blog, such as canonical URLs and title formatting.

And for blog writing? Well, develop your personal blogging style with attention to a few tips found in this blog post. These can help out in key areas such as readability and tone.

All in One SEO Pack

Under the settings menu, there are options to edit the home title, description and keywords of a blog. This will allow for quick optimization of a home page, without the need to edit files. When writing a title for either a home page or a blog post, keep the message clear and to the point. As the pack suggests, search engines use a maximum of 60 characters in the title. Being able to provide a concise message, within the restrictions of character count, is one approach to writing effectively with this package.

Search engines use the description field to provide a snippet on a results page. Again, try to be clear and concise while ensuring that the description is below or at 160 characters. Writing effectively for both the title and description helps keep a uniform and clean format throughout a blog. And when search engine users find this content, the title and description will both adequately convey the topic and message of the post, while conforming to standards.

The All in One SEO Pack will also use keywords automatically with associated blog tags. However, this section is not as “mission critical” as ensuring that a clear and concise title and description are present. However, make sure that both the associated tags and keywords reflect the topical meaning of a post.

Blog Writing

Aside from writing the title and description concisely, it can take years of work at writing to develop fluency in tone, delivery and style. And to develop one’s own writing style, the best approach is most certainly hard work and commitment. A well-respected and prolific English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who was popular for writing The Eustace Diamonds, would dutifully write 250 words of a novel each day and would never skip a day of writing.

Trollope’s personal quotes reflect his feelings about writing,

“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily” and “Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

As one starts to develop their style of writing, they will start to notice the intrinsic qualities of their style. They’ll be able to edit on the word and sentence level more aptly, to convey a concise and overarching message throughout a piece of work. As one starts to get better at writing and editing, they’ll be able to develop and refine their tone to reach and captivate a varied audience-but it starts with hard work, and a commitment to writing.

As you may know, writing for a blog is somewhat different from website content writing. To develop a style of blog writing, approach a target audience with informality and a conversational tone. Essentially, effective blog writing conveys your own conversational tone and a passion for a given topic. Once you are finished writing, read the post aloud and slowly, paying attention to the syllables of each word and their overall flow from one word to the next. For example, the following universal English phrase, “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” flows well, reads well and has certain resonant sound characteristics, namely assonance and alliteration.

Flesch-Kincaid Formula

One can also gauge the grade level of their writing by looking at the Flesch-Kincaid formula. This assigns a grade level and score to a text, to determine the overall difficulty of reading. Generally, academia reads on a Flesch-Kincaid score of the low 30s, and print/magazine tends to score in the 50s, or at the high-school grade level. It is based on the syllable counts in the text, and the use of simple words versus complex words (monosyllable or disyllable words versus tri-syllable or more).

The Flesch-Kincaid formula is interesting to look at, but not the end-all of writing. Use it as a tool to understand how word usage affects the reading of a text, and how important that can be to determining the ease of reading. Microsoft Word has the ability to score readability statistics using Flesch-Kincaid, if you check “Show readability statistics” under the proofing section in Word options.

Cirrus ABS – Web design and copy from seasoned professionals…

And if you’re looking to have a team of seasoned and professional writers to craft exceptionally written Web copy, we can help. At Cirrus ABS, we meld our team experience into all aspects of Web design, development and copy writing, including the business process and marketing with our award-winning Cirrus eBusiness Suite platform.

Contact Cirrus ABS to learn about our unique Web approach. We’re headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana and have been in the business of Web solutions and NetCentered business strategy since 1995.

The Popularity of Mobile Browsing

Rick Kemery — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:32:47 +0000

The use of mobile internet browsers included with cell phones are becoming quite popular, especially with the latest news about the upcoming launch of Apple’s iPhone 4G. As more people catch on to the idea of utilizing their cellular data plans for mobile browsing, the advent of reading the news, or accessing other media over a cell phone is “all the rage” in the technology and other web-related approaches, including the adaptation of mobile browsing techniques and applications in Web design.

In just a few years, the popularity of mobile browsing became so popular that every technology-based company wanted a piece of the pie. It started in 2006, with cell phones that were capable of handling the mobile internet browser applications, and those were usually limited version of their full-featured web browser parents. They were developed to be small enough to handle the capability of the cell phones at the time. With the advent of new cellular technology, such as with the release of Apple’s iPhone, the arena of mobile browsers changed into a completely new world of opportunity.

With the increasing attention towards the use of mobile internet browsers on cell phones, the term wireless portal was coined to define the movement of mobile browsing. This portal is used as the landing page of mobile browser users.

You might remember the PDA of the early 2000s–now a mere dinosaur of the past, but it was also the first platform for straightforward non-cell phone focused mobile web browsing. The codenamed Apple product, the Apple Newton, was the first to use such mobile web browsing technology, it was released in August of 1996.

As time staggered on, so did the innovations of mobile web browsing. Now we have cellular devices capable of offering full-featured mobile web internet browsers, which are able to handle HTML, CSS, scripting, and other web API formats. Popular mobile web browsers include the Android browser, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer mobile, Safari Mobile Browser, Opera Mobile, and other mobile browsers commonly found on gaming consoles like the PlayStation 3. It’s clear that the web has switched over to individuals becoming more invested in what they find on the web, and more involved in the technology behind it.

Social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook for mobile phones have been the main motivators for people to start using their cell phones as mobile web devices. Over just a one-year period, from 2009 to 2010, the number of people who used their cell phones to access web-related services for Twitter, Facebook and mobile browsing tripled in numbers.

Web Design and the Buzzworthy HTML 5 API

Rick Kemery — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:44:33 +0000

With the latest buzz by Apple on a few new interesting tidbits of information about HTML 5, the web development community was presented with some alluring and somewhat provoking uses of HTML 5. The API at its most basic foundation is used to expand on a users interaction with a website – by expanding on the capability of what a simple video, image or even a div tag can do.

Web design used to be simple, a few blocks of text, and maybe an image or two; but that was when Netscape was still a browser and not a throwback of the past. Although Netscape moved on to become Firefox, the idea of web design also transformed over time.

With the movement from HTML 4 to HTML 5, web design took a step towards the future. I remember being amazed back in the 1990s of seeing video and animated images creep into web design. Although the use of animated images took off and became the cliché of the decade, it did speak to a larger idea – multimedia was becoming the de-facto user experience on the web.

After YouTube was created in 2005, multimedia was solidified as the primary source for immersion and fun on the web. And now with the integration of social media and interactive media, we’ve come full circle for immersion on the web.

HTML 5 offers a variety of newer web features for web design, APIs that allow advanced media playback, document editing (a la Google Docs, for example), the ability to draw on a 2D canvas (and support for dynamic images), web messaging and more.

With the move from HTML 4 to 5 new rules were also introduced. Added was the ability to use inline SVG, MathML, new elements such as article, audio, canvas, footer, header, and new attributes such as ping and charset – deprecated elements include applet, center, font, and noframes, for example. HTML 5 also allows old browsers to ignore the newer attributes – for a bit more compliance. For a more complete list of the changes from HTML 4 to 5, see dev.w3.org.

Develop your Website One Step at a Time

William Clausen — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:56:14 +0000

So, you’ve gone through the process of getting a website for your business. Hurray! But making it live for the entire world to see isn’t the end of the line. You need to come up with a comprehensive website development strategy in order to make sure that your website continues to grow. If you don’t have some sort of game plan for adding in new content, images, videos or more, you can end up finding yourself wanting to work on everything at once.

One of the best ways to get started is to single out one area of the site that you know will need to be developed further. After all, you’ve gotten your potential customer to the site, you want them to hang around and convert. Take your most popular product or service, break it down into areas that you know still need expanding on, and go from there. Once you know what you are missing, it’s easy to plan out what you need to do.

For example, Product A currently has a webpage describing the item and why it’s the best solution for your client. However, you’ve noticed that there is a large interest in some of the finer details of the product. Your analysis of the questions and information that is being requested shows that you can put together three PDFs on the specs, two videos covering some of the uses of Product A, a widget that can calculate the amount of savings it provides over other popular alternatives, a handful of questions that you can add to your FAQ page, and a few content pages that go into further detail on its uses in specific industries. Now that you have a checklist on how to provide your users a better experience, you can just start down the list. Rinse and repeat for each area of your site, and you will find that developing your website isn’t as overwhelming as it first appears.

You don’t want your website to grow stagnant. A good website development strategy, along with a proven web design, will ensure that it doesn’t end up that way.

Just don’t do it!

Nicole Moran — Fri, 14 May 2010 13:28:35 +0000

Just don’t do it!

Does the size of your logo on your site matter? It matters a little…in that your logo should be there. But it shouldn’t be the focus on the page. Do you want me to come to your website and just stare at your logo and not read any content? No, doubt it…the point of your website is to drive me to an action, to pick up the phone, to learn more about you or to buy something. Not to be hypnotized by your logo!

I’m only going to say this once…please, listen! YOUR LOGO IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ON YOUR WEBSITE! If you didn’t catch it the first time, re-read that…and again…and again…and again.

Why am I harping on this enough that I’m writing an entire blog dedicated to it? Because one of the most common requests we hear as web designers is, “Can you make my logo bigger?” Yep, we can. No, you shouldn’t. It does not “need to stand out,” in fact, it shouldn’t—at least not as the most important thing on the page. It does not “need to draw extra attention,” again, it shouldn’t. A giant logo on the page does not need to re-reinforce “who you are,” they already know who you are. They came to you, remember?

Who is your logo most important to? You. That being said—your logo IS important. A good solid logo goes a long way to good solid branding. A few tips on logos:

It should be on your website. It does not need to be the focus on your website, nor repeated over and over again on your website, other than in places like the header and footer.
It should be on everything else—your business cards, marketing pieces, company clothing, etc. (on that note, if you do have a website, your website address should also be on every piece of marketing, emails, business cards and clothing—you name it, as well)
It should always be the same. The colors shouldn’t change with the seasons. You should not re-brand every other quarter because you’re bored with your logo and you just want to spruce it up. It should always be the same aspect ratio…meaning your logo proportions should be consistent. You will obviously have different sized logos; that is fine as long as the shape is the same. You should not size a logo down for something and decide to reshape it to make it fit somewhere better than its normal shape would. If you saw the Nike logo and it was a really short, fat swoosh, you’d probably wonder if you were buying Nike or a knock-off Niko.
If you do rebrand, because let’s face it, it does happen: be consistent. Don’t keep some things with the old logo and some with the new.
Your logo should be visible. Don’t tuck it into a corner and make it invisible–it SHOULD be seen because it is important.

Moral of the story? You need to have a logo on your website. It is not the focus of your site. Think about even going to Google and doing a search. You probably barely acknowledge the logo there—you already know who they are—you went to THEIR site…so the logo just kind of blends in as part of the page. You would probably notice if it wasn’t there, but the size of it would not be a big deal…their logo is not what makes you go back to their site…and a bigger logo is unlikely to convert your site users into “business.”

I’ll stop you on the argument you’re probably posing already, “Yeah, exactly Google does it! They change their logo with holidays and seasons and days of the week and colors, etc.” Are you Google? When you have the brand recognition of Google, go to town. We won’t stop you. In fact, do you want us to help design the different logo versions? Otherwise, until you have the kind of brand power (or budget) Google or Nike has, “just don’t do it.”

If you have six minutes of your life to waste…watch this video on YouTube—at least the beginning! Make My Logo Bigger Cream. It’s a spoof sales video, exaggerating a common misconception that the bigger the logo, the better.