When I first started this business I had some business cards made.
I didn’t give it much thought and threw them together pretty quickly.
I’ve been talking about new cards for quite a while now and one of the members of Business Leads Exchange Networking Group that I attend is a graphic designer and illustrator named Dan Szwedko. I know Dan pretty well from the meetings and I like his work. What I thought I’d do is to get a fresh perspective on my card design.
One of Dan’s promotion ideas is that if you’re only printing on one side of your business card you’re also wasting valuable advertising space that you already own. He has a special on two sided business cards.
I gave Dan my logo, my company colors and the text that I wanted on my card. Those of you who read this blog know that I like black text on a white background. It’s always the easiest to read.
I let Dan know this as well and being an artist Dan wanted to add some color to my card. I told him to use my colors any way that he wanted.
He sent me this back…
I must admit that I think the color definitely gives it some style and looking at it I realized that if we flipped the gradient background and put the tan on the top, all of my contact info will still be black on white.
Same with the back.
I really like the ghosted logo Dan added on the back so I kept that and added a bit more text.
I am very happy with the final product.
If you would like to take advantage of my freind Dan’s special of 1000 two sided cards for $47.95, plus a flat fee of Only $25.00 for layout. Just visit his site dsgraphics.net. It’s quality work at a great price and he will even include Free Shipping!
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Bird-Malaysia.
I love the main picture. The bird appears to be breaking out of the image. A cool trick.
One look at the rest of the page and you can understand exactly what the site is about. Main site navigation is at the top, right below the header, easy to find and use.
I’m not crazy about the tan text on a brown background. It looks very stylish, but I think is hard to read.
I like that they ask you for your contact information right away. It’s out of the way, but still noticeable.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
All too often the fun and joy of owning a car can get overwhelmed by costly repairs, expensive insurance, and annual fees. So, just to remind you of why you drive, here’s a site with the hope it will give you a grin, bring back a memory, and spark new ways on how to enjoy your car.
When designing a new site I usually don’t write the content. My feeling is that no one knows your business like you do, but I will offer some help if needed.
One of my new customers had this question, “When I re-write my first page, would it help to include any information so the search engines will find it?” I replied with some basic information that, I hope, was to their point.
Absolutely! You want to place your the keywords or search terms that you want to be found for on your page. Every page should be writen with this in mind, although your human visitor should be your first priority.
Keywords can and should be groups of words. Action words, not just “widgets”, but “buy widgets” or “buy widgets in Pittsburgh PA”. Without the quotes, of course. Using multiple words like this will get you better rankings for those terms than just using single, more generic terms that are much harder to rank well for. It will also get you more qualified visitors that are more likely to want to buy what you have to sell.
You also want the most important keywords in the headlines. You want a main headline for the page and a smaller headline for each paragraph or section that you write. Have your keyword once in the headline and once or twice (no more) in the body text.
Use these keyword suggestion tools to search for popular search terms. No sense optimizing your pages for something no one is searching for. You also want to pick terms that are relevant to your business. Why have visitors come to your site that are not interested in what you have to offer?
There is much more to know about this, but I think it’s a pretty good start.
It seems that every day you are hearing about new browsers showing up to make your web surfing experience a little (or a lot) easier amd more fun.
I thought I would post some good reviews that I have read on each of them.
Today I read a very nice and thorough review of the new IE8 which is still in Beta that is on the SEOBook site.
I recently had a customer who has a site that I’m working on, that is selling products, ask me where to start with promoting their site to get more sales.
I told them I would start with their manufactures because they have a relationship with them already.
I advised them to write to them and ask them if they have a vendor page or a blog where you could get a link to your site. Tell them you have a vendor page and would also be willing to give them a link back.
I do realize that one way links will be more valuable for them, but if a link back helps them get the link it may be worth it. Plus many manufacturers if they are your vendors won’t ask for that.
I also suggested that they do the same with their customers. They could have a testimonial page, which they didn’t already have, which could give them a link back as well. I have written before that testimonials are great to have on your site.You don’t want a page with just a bunch of links. That’s a “link farm” and search engines now ignore those.
If the page of links is relevant to your site, like vendors or customers, that’s better.
You might want to write and distribute articles. Articles can help get your name out there, provide valuable links back to your site and establish you as an expert in your field. All good things for your site.
Finally I told them to look for blogs that relate to their industry where you can add comments.
Usually that site will allow you to have a link back to your site as well. It’s important that when you are commenting on a site that you say something valuable, relevant to the original post and relevant to your site. Comments that are self serving or off the topic stand out as just that and usually are deleted or ignored. If you give them some good free content for their blog (site) they will allow you to have a link to your site at the end of your comment.
This may be quite a bit to digest in one sitting and a bit simplistic, but it’s a pretty good start.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
This is a fun game to play. It’s pretty simple, but maddening. All you have to do is click on the ball and it changes color. It took quite a while, but I got it.
When I first started this business I thought that a cool way to work! I’ll drag my laptop outside to the back deck and work from a lounge chair, or my couch, or just stay in bed with the TV on in the background and work.
I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but I for one can’t do good work that way. A job is a job and work is work no matter where you are and you should prepare yourself for that. Working at home is no different you really need a bright comfortable work space that’s away from the everyday (every minute) distractions where you can do your work. I do like to keep something with me everywhere I go where I can jot down ideas, but I know that I do my best work sitting at my desk.
I was thinking about that because I saw a nice post on a site called Home Business Eye that gives some great home office design ideas.
Here’s a cool little bit of JavaScript code that will allow you to have a background image slide show.
It’s on the Willmaster site and it’s free. The script can provide a slide show in any HTML tag that can publish a background image. As examples, the HTML tag could be a div, a table’s td, a p paragraph tag, even the body tag itself.
