Article writing and content production is still a very big part of building a website’s credibility with Google and the internet user community. It is important to know what you are talking about, and it is important to have your articles published on the appropriate sites. Google’s Panda Update gave content and article writing a huge KO not long ago. Sites like ezine, that attracted a lot of attention and articles placed on those sites would come up well in Google search, are all but dead. Content farms, where really poor articles, or not even articles in themselves, just blocks of text, were being used to fool Google into thinking those sites were of value, and therefore the back-links to websites were boosting the rankings of those sites, for no good reason. Online marketing based on articles has had to lift its game. (more…)

When forming your company you took the time and effort to create a distinctive logo. This logo helps your customers to readily identify your company and helps it to stand out from the competition. However, in today’s competitive market, your competition might try to confuse the public by using your logo or one that is very close to it. In order to protect your company and its logo, you will need to register it as a trademark. While many states do not require registration, it is always a good idea to take that additional step. If you will be doing business in multiple states, then you must register your logo with the U.S. Copyright Office. If your business will stay local, then registration with your state should be sufficient.

Follow these necessary steps to protect your logo:

• Keep a copy of your contract with the person or company that created it.
• Register your logo with your state.
• Register your logo with the U.S. Copyright Office if you do business in more than one state.
• Store these records in a safe place.

This way, you have a record detailing the creation of your logo and proof that the logo belongs to your company. (more…)

Sticker printing is something that can really enhance both your online and offline marketing efforts. However, many business owners often skip over this type of advertising because they feel that it’s too expensive. That might have been the case a long time ago, but it’s definitely not the case today! Indeed, you can get effective stickers made at a price that’s truly affordable even on the most “bootstrap” of budgets. The key here is that you have to go online.

Online? Yes, definitely online. The reason why people go online is because everything is usually less expensive. This is because there is less overhead involved with maintaining an online presence for inventory purposes, so the cost savings can be passed on directly to the consumers. Think about it — wouldn’t you love shopping at a store that gave you a discount simply because you chose them for your business? Of course you would. (more…)

Building an online presence isn’t easy, but it’s really the key to getting just about every business goal that you have off the ground. The last thing that you want to do is allow technical expertise — or in most people’s cases, the lack thereof — to keep you from really getting your online presence fully fleshed out. Far too often people allow their dreams of running massive authority sites online wither and fall to the wayside because they feel that they don’t have the skills necessary to make the idea come to life.

A savvy businessperson realizes quickly that they can’t do everything in a business. There are naturally going to be things that they are good at, and there are also going to be things that they aren’t very good at period. The key here is to just step back and really make sure that you have other things that you really excel at completed, and then delegate and/or outsource the things that you’re not good at.

Web development is the perfect example of this, because you need to make sure that you have your online presence no matter what, right? Definitely — that’s why it definitely pays to outsource this to someone that can take care of it for you.

Now, you should keep in mind that just because you outsource the web development side of your business, that doesn’t mean that you’re never going to do any web development. Sometimes all you need is a live working example of how to do things in order to create your own theme and spin on an idea. Most outsourcing firms will get the job done in a very efficient manner, leaving behind more than just a few clues on how you can re-create their results. For people that want a professional design that they can go back and modify this is the perfect way to achieve those results. (more…)

As a brand, what is the benefit of creating a browser theme? People want to connect and they connect with what gives them comfort. We all spend a ton of time, if not the majority of our time on the internet as it is the fastest way in the world to send and receive information. Most of us use one of three browsers; IE, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. Whether we are checking our email, updating our Facebook status, or facilitating business online, we want a browser that is not only visually stimulating, but also one that is based on something we are interested in.

A browser theme connects technology and information for the user and creates a strong connection between this target market and your brand. It increases engagement, drives traffic to your brand, and gives value; building a relationship with your consumers. As a brand, you need to understand what brings value to the user. For example, sports teams have passionate fans that look for many ways to display their loyalty to their “sports brand”. As a result, many sports teams have created branded browser themes to connect and stay engaged with their fans. (more…)

Your logo is a visual representation of what your company stands for. It’s important to develop a logo that both accurately communicates the features of your business and can be easily translated for publishing online and in print. While it’s often a good idea to hire a designer to create a logo for your business, there are many tools available to help you create your own logo if your budget can’t be stretched to cover design services.

Types of Logos

NYU’s Visual Communications department teaches its students that logos can be of three basic types:

• Typography – Just your business name
• Type and a mark – Your business name plus an image
• Just a mark – A conceptual image only, like the Nike Swoosh

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While this may seem like the most obvious thing in the world and shouldn’t require that much explanation, suboptimal file types and compression qualities actually plague the internet everywhere. You can have a great site with excellent design that is utterly destroyed by inefficient or poor file types and quality.

Ultimately, it comes down to a balance of file size and load time. You don’t want any graphics to look horrible, but you also don’t want your audience to wait five minutes for the page to load. However, different file types accommodate different images better than others while also affecting their file size. Most of it comes down to the tiny details of the file properties and how they are compressed and represented digitally.

File Types: Lossless and Lossy

Digital images are very similar to digital music in that there are two different types of files: Lossless and lossy. Lossless images are only slightly compressed; they do not suffer in loss in image quality or information (they are the .wav and .flac files of audio files). Lossy images, on the other hand, undergo heavy compression, resulting in a loss of quality and information but also a smaller file size (they are the .mp3s of audio files).

The most common lossless images files are GIF, PNG, and TIFF (TIFF being the largest in file size typically) while the most common lossy files is the JPEG. Sure, there are other image file types, but they are rarely ever used on the web, and if you don’t know about them, you shouldn’t try using them. As a rule of thumb (though there are exceptions to this rule), lossy image files are typically smaller in file size and therefore load more quickly. Of course, highest quality lossy files can end up being larger in size than a lossless file of equal resolution and color palette (more on color palette in a second). (more…)

If you are going to establish your own business, creating a memorable logo is a really important part of it’s success. A uniquely designed symbol of the company name represents your business or your website. It can be always recognized and, in fact, this emblem has a purpose to promote and advertise your product, service or company.

Now, recognizing the importance of a good logo, we are going to talk about creating a good one. How to start and in what way to think? There are several pieces of advice that might help you:

1. A unique and memorable logo is a must because it has to appear again in your potential customers’ minds after seeing it maybe just once. It has to represent some general values like confidence, power, success, action or even happiness. The top companies in the world are represented by absolutely outstanding logos with distinguish shape, mark and colour.

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