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Back in the early days of advertising, coming up with the best logos used to be a pretty easy matter. All you really needed was a good font, a competent designer, and a catchy idea. Because advertising was so new to people, they were not yet jaded by. A pretty picture really could sell items, and quite easily at that.

Nowadays, things are more difficult. The top logos have come to saturate our national consciousness. Things like the Coca-Cola logo and the Nike swish, culturally recognized icons, are hard to duplicate. The more time that passes, the more people tend to resist new logos. In the same way that the best clip art is all over the web while new attempts are quickly forgotten, so the top logos tend to forestall new innovation in logo design.

Part of the problem is that the best new logos have to employ some tricky psychology that older ones didn’t. People are so sick of having things sold to them that they often don’t really want to see your company name in your logo – at least not in a clear and straightforward manner. Most older logos incorporated the brand name in a fairly easy to read text, but newer ones often obscure it. The challenge for a logo designer is to both associated the image with a company while at the same time obscuring the fact that one is doing so.

Of course, this principle isn’t universal. The best logos for food service companies are often pretty direct and straightforward. If you look at local coffee shops or small bookstore chains, for example, you will see the name spelled out in quite clear, classic lettering. This demonstrates an important principle for designers. What makes the best logos depends on what you are selling. You only want to be cutting edge if you’re selling cutting-edge products. The best logos for food service should not look high-tech and futuristic. Instead, they should look wholesome.

The idea of “the best logos” might be flawed in itself. As a young designer, I wanted to put my mark on the world. I was always studying what I thought to be the top logos, and trying to outdo them. What I did not realize was that logo design has a lot to do with what you are selling. The best logo might look quite conventional, but still fit the product very well.

Posted under Web Logo Designs

Increase your conversion rates with these tips on web design and development

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Good web design and development is more than just coding. You need to consider more than just a visually pleasing page. With very few exceptions, websites are there to make money. Sure, it’s true that you’ve got to have good content and plenty of it in order to raise your search engine rankings. However, once your visitor arrives, it’s imperative that the visitor can quickly and easily discern what you have to offer.

You need to make it easy to navigate your site as well, placing links to other pages on your site which are relevant to that reader’s interest. While it may seem obvious, your web design and development plan must include the assumption that your visitor does not necessarily land on your homepage. You need to organize each page accordingly. Your general page layout and screen size are other factors which contribute to usability. In a nutshell, usability is most important to your success. Here are a few tips that will increase your conversion rates.

The latest figures on screen size indicate that upwards of 80% of users use the 1024 x 768 screen resolution, so it’s best to design your page to that size. A three column page makes a good composition, but in order to be sure your sales propositions are clear to the other 20% of visitors using the smaller screen resolution, it’s best that your sales propositions be placed in the left hand column. For example, if you have an e-newsletter, place this offer in the left hand column.

Remember what we said about not assuming your visitor lands first on your homepage? A good web design and development plan means that you must place your offer for your e-zine in the same position on every page. You’ll increase your readership exponentially, since every visitor will spot your offer.

This brings us to the scrolling factor. Unless you make your purpose and value proposition visible in the top portion of the page, without the user needing to scroll down, chances are good they’ll never see it. All such messages should be displayed in the left hand, or second column, as appropriate.

Your web design and development plan must tackle the complex problem of each page’s organization of content. Knowing that a first time visitor can land on any page on your site, introductory material must be written such that your visitor is not confused. Make the purpose of that material clear, on that page. Do not write it as a continuing saga with the assumption the reader has read the previous page. This isn’t really tricky, as long as you apply the principle of the material being standalone information.

Now for navigation aspects. Let’s say you’ve got a gardening website. One page contains an article on the general care of roses. Your web design and development plan needs to address the question of which of your other pages might be most relevant to that reader, and place links to those other pages in an easily found location. As your traffic grows, you’ll begin to see user patterns to refine your links to suit your traffic.

Incorporate these tips into your initial web design and development plan and watch your traffic grow. Pretty isn’t enough, but fortunately, you can have both beauty and function.

Posted under General

Your web logo design is an essential component of branding

Many website businesses don’t even have a logo. Instead, they rely on color schemes or page layouts to help customers identify the business. This is not enough. Think about large household names like IBM or Microsoft. Who doesn’t recognize their logos? The IBM website is really plain Jane, with the basic blue and white corporate looking page. However, their logo is distinctive. Microsoft has a logo which is a bit more colorful, but just as easily identified. Logos are a major component of branding. Every marketing piece, product label and stationery is embellished with the company logo.

Let’s say your website does not have a logo, but you do have an HTML e-newsletter. When you send out your newsletter, using the color scheme of your home page, your readers are not going to easily identify with a simple color scheme. There are, after all, only so many color combinations. However, with a good web logo design, readers don’t need to think at all about who you are. A glance at your logo is all it takes.

A carefully planned web logo design creates several psychological advantages. First, it’s visually appealing. It’s interesting, but not too ornate. It’s different enough to be easily identified and associated with your business. The psychological effects of such a web logo design? It creates a warm and fuzzy feel, with a friendly aspect. For example, let’s say your sister sends you letters regularly, using stationery decorated with roses, which also appear on the envelope. When the mail comes, her letter stands out from the crowd. It’s the piece you’ll open first. This is what branding is all about.

It’s clear that a good web logo design can help identify you, as well as subtly creating a positive feel towards you and your business. Your logo deserves plenty of thought and research, because you do not want to change it. This will only create confusion in the mind of your visitor. Think about the Morton salt box, with the girl holding the umbrella. This company has been around for a long time. While they’ve occasionally made small changes to update the image, this logo is still easily identifiable.

So, how does the web logo design process begin? You’ll first want to surf around to your competitor’s sites and see what they’ve done. If you’re in the gardening business or any kind of ‘green’ business, you may be surprised to find that green and yellow ochre are the most common colors used. It’s not smart to go along with the crowd, in this case. This color branding concept has been overdone. You need to think outside the box in order to distinguish your business from theirs.

Here’s just one example of a good web logo design: I remember one garden site I purchased supplies from, subscribing to their newsletter as well. Their logo was a large red tomato, a simple photo placed against a white background. It was truly eye catching. Following my purchase, some months later, I received a piece of snail mail, their seasonal catalog, bearing their distinctive logo on the front. The catalog was shrink-wrapped in plastic and contained a frig magnet – you guessed it – a large red tomato. It is both cute, useful and eye catching. It’s still on my frig. Every time I see it, I think of that company. What a smart move!

If you’re not artistic, hire a graphic designer to create your web logo design. It’s worth every penny. You want your customers to remember you in a positive light. You don’t have to be as big as IBM to accomplish this. All it takes is a good web logo design!

Posted under Web Logo Designs

Setting up a website? Your web design layout is more important than you might think

You’ve located a perfect marketing niche for your product or service. You’ve got your business plan and marketing strategies ready to go. You have your domain name and hosting service in place. What you don’t have is your web design layout. While you may plan on hiring a web design firm to make this happen, you’re well advised to put in a little effort of your own before hiring a professional.

No one knows your business better than you do. You know the flavor of the appearance you want to convey to your customers. While a good web page designer may have the visual elements of good graphic design down pat, only you know what will be of special appeal to your niche market base. You also may have the inside scoop on marketing techniques that will edge you up in your search engine rankings. These factors may be totally out of your web design layout expert’s purview. They are looking to create a pretty page that will please a visitor, once they’ve landed on your page. Web page designers are not usually conversant in SEO issues or spider turn-offs. So it’s worth your while to make a mock-up that takes these important issues in to account.

Your page composition is a good starting point. Your home page must be inviting, while fulfilling sales objectives. As soon as your visitor hits your home page, you want them to see your main sales offerings, without having to scroll down. A good web design layout makes these sales points immediately visible, not hidden in the last half of the page. You want them to find your most valuable propositions right off the bat. Make a mock-up of your site’s web design with this in mind. Ad placement is another important component of a good web design layout. Make sure you make it clear what ads you want your visitors to see up front. Your web designer is skilled in visuals and graphic design, but may not understand the importance of ad placement.

Good web design layout must also take into account what type of software will be detrimental to your search engine rankings. Flash(R) slide shows used to be a huge problem. The search engine spiders would essentially flip out when they encountered Flash(R) displays, resulting in no future visits, or indexing, of that page. While the spider bots can now deal with them, after a fashion, there are still a number of details to be taken into consideration before integrating these sophisticated software programs without damaging your rankings.

A good web design layout must also consider different browsers. When you engage a web page designer, make sure they know the problems associated with dealing with different browsers. The majority of web surfers use Internet Explorer. However, Firefox and Opera are competitors. Each of these browsers display your web design layout differently. If your design layout accommodates IE exclusively, you’re going to lose out on that segment of potential customers using a different browser. Your page may appear distorted and unprofessional in appearance, with strange effects that will have that visitor surfing away forever, never to return.

If you make the effort to create a mock-up that incorporates these marketing concerns into your web design layout, you’ll end up with a site that draws the maximum number of visitors. Let your web master take care of the graphic elements.

Posted under General

Setting up your own website can be overwhelming, especially if you have to deal with codes and such. You want - no, need - a website. How else can you market your affiliate products? But you know very little about web design and even less about html coding. You can’t afford to hire a webmaster, either. After all, you are only starting out. You’re just dipping your toes into the world of Internet marketing and figured you’d try to sell digital products through your own website. So what do you do? How can you veer away from cheap designs and get yourself a design that is both professional and eye-catching?

The answer is simple. Get templates for web pages. Templates for web pages are much like office stationeries and letterheads. They’re striking and even better, they’re pre-made. This means you don’t have to worry about design, lay-out, colors, font sizes, and such. All you have to do is pick a template and fill out the areas you need to just like you would a blank form. Then, you make simple changes to the template as you see fit and voila, you get a classy web page within minutes!


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Posted under Templates for Web

We all know there are downloadable graphics. But free downloadable graphics? Is there such a thing? We live in an age of commercialism and aggressive online and offline marketing, after all. If there is no such thing as free lunch, why should there be graphics that you can download for free? Believe it or not, though, these graphics exist. What’s more, you can get them for free! All you have to do to avail of the freebie is sign up for Mike Filsaime and Lucius Kern’s newsletter. How bad can that be?

Every day, thousands of new products and services are launched - from ebooks promising shortcuts to wealth to drugs that guarantee instant results. As many digital products there are in the market, there are even more Internet marketers. This means the competition among marketers are stiff. If you are one, how do you make sure you can get your fingers into the profit pie? By making your website eye-catching, of course! Good, original content is a great way to get traffic but it’s not the only way to drive traffic to your site. Remember, Internet readers have very short attention span. They look at the title and the first sentence or paragraph. If it doesn’t interest them, they move on to the next website. However, even if you have great content, no one will read it if your page looks flat and boring.


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Posted under Downloadable Graphics