How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

During this time of economic strain, most businesses have budgets which are dictated by number-crunchers. Sometimes, especially for small businesses, the number-cruncher is merely another part the brain of a multi-tasking entrepreneur. The mindset is one of protection which often results in decisions that are detrimental to business growth. As budget cuts are made, advertising and marketing are right at the top.

The truth is that most businesses (this includes your competitors) are not in front of those potential new customers because of slashed budgets. So now is the time to take advantage of this opportunity. You can be the one, visible solution to your customer’s needs and wants. Get in front of them now while the time is right. Eventually, as the economy turns up (and it will), you won’t be fighting to be seen from within a dense crowd of competition. They’ll already know you!

Now is the time. Take advantage of it!

Graphic Design, like fishing, can achieve great results, or come up with nothing. It’s all about presentation. Not every fish, at any point in a day or season, will be tempted by a particular bait.  A good fisherman needs to know what to use at any given time, accounting for weather, time of day, time of year, condition and depth of water, and many other factors. I’ve seen a lot of incredibly visually pleasing designs by very talented and creative designers that miss the mark completely. They won’t catch any fish!

Good design must appeal to the right ‘fish.’ There is always a target audience to whom we want to appeal. They will be attracted to a particular kind of look and, as importantly, message. When done right, they will ‘bite’ ( a little Cochoranesque, I know). When done wrong, no matter how pretty or colorful your bait is, they will treat it like just another piece of something in the flow of information and then promptly forget about it.

If your message is not hooking any new customers, contact us for some help.

This economy, the worst since the Great Depression (in case you hadn’t heard), is affecting not only industries of mediocre importance, like financing and autos, but an industry that is critical to the backbone of our economy—Graphic Design! If there is a collapse in the Graphic Design sector of our economy, the impact will be felt deeply within every corporation that understands the power of design. Recovery will take many years, after which time many well-known brands will be distant memories.

One can only imagine the fall-out as right-brain replacements offer up their feeble concepts for communicating the most important messages to target audiences—brand identities all represented by raster-format, oval logos encircled with Arial or Times; collateral materials as 8.5×11 tri-folds with off-center content, at least 5 font families, and clip-art images—all with drop shadows and an emboss effect; web site re-designs created with Front Page (enough said!); animated gif banner-ads everywhere; generic packaging that offers an equality to all brands; and a pervasive use of existing Power Point templates. This cruel assault on the visual senses of the American public can not be allowed, not to mention the devastation it would cause on the value of each business.

It must be recognized that the trickle-down effect of a collapse in the Graphic Design market would be catastrophic. Foreign powers would strengthen while the United States is crippled! This can not be allowed and the United States government must intervene to prevent the devastation. Sufficient funds are to be funneled directly to working designers everywhere, and now is not soon enough!

Mr. Politician, hear the cries of your people! Act now!

I’m always amazed when I meet a website owner who tells me that the first time they saw any version of a new site design was when it was shown to them as a web page. How can this process be helpful to anyone? There will, undoubtedly, be changes to be made—probably extensive and time consuming changes. The programming environment is very inflexible when it comes to big changes in the look and feel of a site.

Software developers have made it very easy to create the layout of a site prior to any actual web programming. Changes are easily and intuitively made. As long as certain guidelines are followed (pertaining to the limitations current browser capabilities), a complete and approved design can be created and then used for making the necessary parts that will become a website. Adobe Systems is the clear industry leader for such software. I use their complete Master Collection of applications. But there are other suitable applications, including many in the ever-growing open source market.

My process always involves client contribution. I show my client design concepts (usually more than one) with the invitation to offer changes and/or suggestions. Then there are other ‘checkpoints’ along the way at which I will show the progress. Ultimately, the collaborative effort can then be converted to web-ready graphics and there will be no surprises upon completion.

I would be happy to apply this process to your website. Contact me for a free consultation.

If you are the owner of a website, and you care how your site is seen, I encourage you to go through the following steps.

1. On a Windows PC, view your site using Internet Explorer version 7 (26.6% usage), version 6 (20% usage) (you will need to find a computer with IE6 because Microsoft does not allow both versions to co-exist), and Firefox (44.2% usage).
   • does everything look right?
   • turn off javascript and view again (see below)
   • if you have any Flash on your site, disable it and view again
2. On a Macintosh, view your site in Safari, Firefox, and Opera.
   • repeat the steps above

Current browser usage statistics
Current operating system usage statistics
Disable Flash in Internet Explorer 7
Disable Flash in Internet Explorer 6 (USER BE WARNED!)
Disable Javascript

The reason I encourage these steps is because any web developer is responsible for doing these things and much more. Unfortunately, there are many problems which can occur due to browser inconsistencies and user level options. Most site owners are unaware that their site may be broken when viewed within other conditions.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has assembled standards that should be followed for any website to provide a visitor with the best user experience. This includes standards that will allow the hearing and sight impaired to benefit from your content.

If you would like a no-cost evaluation of your site, contact me.

Whether your site is an online store, an informational site, for social networking, blogging, gaming, or whatever, you probably want people to find you. And usually there is a specific group of people that you want to find you and maybe some kinds of people who you wish would not find you. This is all done through Search Engine Optimization.

The topic is far too large to cover here in a comprehensive way. There are many books written, online advice offered, and businesses specializing in just this area. Large companies have full time staff devoted to improving their ranking with search engines.

Many variables will contribute to your site’s ranking. But there are some basic steps that can be taken to give your site the best chance of being ranked highly.

One of the most important strategies for SEO is what’s known as link popularity or inbound linking. This refers to the number of times that your site’s domain is linked to from another site. The more times that one of the search engines records your domain in its database, the higher the value it places on that domain. But relevancy is important. If your domain is linked from a completely irrelevant site, the spiders are smart enough to figure that out and will not include it.

There are also important strategies which should be used within the programming of your site. This is known as organic SEO. All the spiders look for a sequence of related pieces of information. Things like page name, page title, page description, keywords, headers, image tags, link descriptions, and paragraph text. All these things taken together, provided there is consistency and relevancy among them all, are what the search engines will use when considering the value of your site relative to the criteria that a searcher is using.

Link popularity and organic SEO are techniques that do not cost any more than the initial time to implement. Outside of fee-based strategies, these are the best approaches to getting your site seen by your target audience.

For a no-cost evaluation of the optimization of your site, contact me.

Let’s say you own a retail store. Your observation of the visitors to your store showed that 90% of them walked in through the front door, went directly to one section of the store, looked closely at the bottom shelf or that section, and then walked out. What would you do with that information? You would consider what is on that shelf, in addition to considering why the other sections of your store were not getting any attention. Then you would naturally make some changes.

These observations can be made of the visitors to your site. Most web hosts provide some basic visitor traffic software, usually through a control panel, which you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your site. You can also establish an account with Google Analytics which is a free service and offers detailed data about your site.

These tools can help you analyze your site’s effectiveness. You can determine where visitors are coming from, what search words they are using, what pages they visit and for how long, what time of day, week, and month sees the most traffic, etc. Empowered with the data, you can then make modification to your site, the ways and methods you promote, and other business building strategies.

There are two important reasons why you should update some of the content on your site on a regular basis.

First, for live visitors, you are giving them something new to be interested in. The added benefit to you is that for every time they come back and see something new, there is a likelihood their frequency of return is greater. So give them a reason to visit again.

Second, it will improve your site’s ranking. When a spider goes to look at your site it is looking for new, updated content. If it sees that nothing has changed, it will most likely increase the amount of time before its next visit. On the other hand, when fresh content is seen, the spider will increase its frequency of visits to your site. The more indexing, the better your SEO ranking.

If you would like a free website consultation, contact me.

When applied to business graphics, the effects of the power of design are more far-reaching. Good design can (and should) be part of a business-building strategy. Bad design can prevent a business from growing simply because of the impression it gives to potential customers. Think of any large corporation. Now picture the way they present their business graphically through any medium. While we can be critical (and as designers, we will be!), any successful corporation is presented to their audience with some degree of professional design. Do you think that a company gets successful first and then says “hey, now that we’re successful, lets start spending some of our profits on professional design!”? No, the professional design was an early and critical part of the success story.

Why Do I Need You?

About five years ago I made a cold call to a very small engineering company. After hearing my brief introduction and explanation of services, the lone man in the office reached across his desk a picked up a tri-fold brochure to hold it up for me. He proudly said “I made this myself and printed it on my inkjet printer, why do I need you?” His masterpiece was on plain white paper with bright, multi-colored type—shaped, shadowed, styled and positioned boldly across the center. A clip-art, cartoon illustration in a square box placed near the top and left of center. And some smaller, yet still too large and bold, text near the bottom. After a quick and deliberate shut-down of my defense mechanisms, I smiled and simply said, “I guess your all set, have a nice day.”

Just last week I was in that area again. I went in and introduced myself to the same man. It could have been five years ago. Everything looked the same and there was no obvious sign of any business success of growth. One man, one cluttered desk. I suppose its possible that this man is a millionaire because of his business savvy and just wants to downplay his success, but my guess is…no.

Would my help have changed his success? I’d like to think so, but there are too many other variables. What I do believe is that, based on what I saw of that brochure, he was hurting his own business.

A Better Example

Here’s a better example which includes you, the reader. We depend on the internet for so many things now. How many times have we searched for a product that we wanted to buy and found multiple online stores selling the same product? How do we then narrow down our choice? Price? Yes, of course. Then what? When there are multiple e-stores listing our product for the same price, including shipping, what drives our decision? Easy. The one that appears to be the most reliable, reputable, and professional. That is a perception which comes from the look and feel of the business’ site—the design! The e-commerce site which has made an investment in professional design for their site gets a return on that investment with our purchase of a product.

So design has power. Power to persuade or power to dissuade. Power to compel or power to repel. Power to make a sale or power to convince a potential customer to buy from a competitor.

There are some who don’t understand the power of design. There are those who don’t recognize that some people have made a life’s work of understanding and applying good design, not for the sake of visual appeal, but to achieve a specified objective on behalf of a client.

As one of those designers, I would welcome an opportunity to meet with you for a no-cost evaluation of your business identity. Contact me anytime.