No Technical Experience Required!

Dear Business Owners and Marketers,

I’m writing this post to calm any fears you may have that could be preventing you from moving forward.  You don’t have to be technical a.k.a. techie or geek to have an awesome website for your business!  You don’t have to understand, read, or write HTML code nor purchase expensive web developer software.  You can edit and update content, add photos, links, and blog about your business on-line, all through some very basic resources and knowledge that don’t require you to go back to school to become a web developer.

The first resource you need is Internet access with an account set up on a website/blogging platform (very simple). The second resource you need is your brain, filled with knowledge and experiences.  If you are a business owner or marketing on behalf of the business, the knowledge and experiences you share can easily be brought to the attention of your current or prospective customers online through your website/blog.

Here at Vivid Image, all of the websites/blogs we have put together for our clients are built on an ‘open source’ development software called WordPress.  If you can write, type, and click a mouse, you can use WordPress!  It really is user-friendly and you can literally add, remove or edit content (or photos) on your website from anywhere at any time, as long as you have Internet access (and can remember your username/password!)  If you’ve ever used any kind of word processing software, such as Word…you have absolutely nothing to fear!  PLUS, all of our clients always receive at least one training session before your website/blog goes live.  Oh – did I mention 90 days of unlimited opportunity to call us if you have any questions?

So all you smart, non-techie, business saavy people reading this……stop procrastinating and let us help you put together an awesome online presence!

How WordPress Keeps Our Writing In Check

Frustrated with the limitations of fonts, colors, sizes and other customizations you’d like to use within WordPress? These limitations are due to something called Style Sheets. This article is aimed to reduce your frustration and help you understand (and utilize) the benefits of your site’s style sheets.

What’s a Style Sheet?

It’s one of those fancy, 25 cent words that designers like to throw around. To those of us who blog every day and aren’t designers, we are more familiar with words like WordPress Edit Tools. The style sheets that exist are present for us in the options we have for changing our font. For example, we can BOLD, underline, and italicize any words we want. We can create Title Headings like the one at the beginning of this post, and sub-headings that are slightly smaller like the one introducing this paragraph.

What we can’t do is bring in all kinds of different fonts or vary the look of the headings that are pre-determined by the style sheets associated with your WordPress theme.

What We Want Isn’t Always Good for Us

In many cases, people want to deviate on a whim from the confines of a style sheet so they can highlight or draw special attention to something. While this may seem like a good idea, it results in an inconsistent look throughout your website. A consistent look and feel is a good thing. It brings professionalism to your site, conforms to usability standards, and reduces confusion for your readers.

Besides, style sheets almost always provide one unique method of drawing attention to something using what is called Block Quotes, like this one.

Imagine if someone thought it was a good idea to turn lots of their text blue and underline it? I bet you’d think it was meant to link somewhere, right? What if you were on a site, and navigated to another page that looked nothing like the previous one? You might question if you accidently left the site, forcing you to hit the back button or check the URL to figure it out. Style sheets prevent people from taking customized text changes too far, and they keep writing ideas in check.

If inconsistency and confusion weren’t enough, consider that some fonts you might want to use are not compatible on some browsers and operating systems. If it weren’t for style sheets, your website could look really bad to some people, depending on how they are viewing your website. Instead, style sheets insure that everyone sees your website exactly the same- how it is intended! RSS feeds are a preferred method of viewing articles for an increasing number of people. It’s important to make data look consistent when syndicated, and style sheets do that too! Cool, huh?

Too Much of a Good Thing

Style sheets do allow you to change font color, add headings and sub-headings, use block quotes, and other items listed above. However, just because you can make things stand out, doesn’t mean you should over do it. You can create too much of a good thing. A common mistake we see is people trying to draw attention to everything on a website. If you draw attention to everything, you draw attention to NOTHING.

Take Away Tips:

• Write your post and then take a break, before you publish it. When you come back to proof your work, you’ll often see where you can make changes that make your writing more professional and appealing.
• Another tip is to get to know your writing style. If you prefer using Red, “quotes”, or underlining things, always go back through your articles to watch for your tendencies. Chances are you can reduce the frequency of these each time you write.
• Also, if you want to make sure something gets read, try using more bullet points. Bullet points are quick to read and usually get read first.

Now that you know more about style sheets, have we convinced you of the benefits? Do you have any lingering questions we can answer for you? Please share your thoughts.

5 Things You Can Do When Considering a Redesign

A great piece of art will stand the test of time – a great website will not. Online technology and design trends are constantly evolving. As we spend more time online, we’re changing the way the internet works. Faster connections let us take in more information, faster. New technology allows us to interact with that information. Today’s users don’t have the patience to read pages of information like a book. It’s all about getting across the big ideas, quickly – and allowing them to interact with and share that information. [Read more]

Being a Marketer is Like Being a Parent

 

The following is a guest article by Vivid Image client, Jackie Kaufenberg with Altimate Medical. A special thank you to MN AMA for sharing this insightful and fun piece with us. A full bio follows this article.

As a marketer for 13 years, and a mom for 5, I have learned a lot by experience. Many of the same basic principles apply to both my titles, as Marketing Manager, and Mom.

1) Benchmarks Matter: As a parent, I want to make sure my young kids are developing at or above the same level as their peers, or at least know what areas we need to work on. As a marketer, I need to focus on results and compare the results with industry standards, past results, or objectives. How did our marketing campaign do and why? What did we learn and how can we improve? [Read more]

Three Photos You Really, Really Want to Have

Take a guess at the answer to the following questions. We promise you won’t be graded.

1. What is the MOST clicked on tweets on Twitter?
2. Where does your eye go first on a blog post, web page, or even a brochure?
3. What is the quickest way for people to put a “face to a name”?
4. What is the trend in business cards?
5. How do you start to build personal brand?
6. What stimulates the most interest and some of the fastest comments on Facebook? [Read more]

Pursue Change With Small Steps

Recently my boss invited me to attend a 3 day Social Media Conference called SOBCon in Chicago.  It was a weekend full of inspiring speakers, fabulous presentations, and thought-provoking ideas.  I left with an ever greater appreciation for social media and its abilities than I thought would be possible. [Read more]

Successful Recruiting in Rural MN Using Facebook

Prior to joining Vivid Image, I spent 13 years of my life as a professional Recruiter (a.k.a. ‘Headhunter’) in both metro and rural areas in MN. WAAAY back in 1997, the company who hired me decided to give the green recruiter the role of ‘on-line sourcer’. They must have had some great insight into the power of recruiting through the world wide web back then because today, 13 years later, I cannot begin to imagine how a company could ignore the power of today’s web 2.0 and social media tools or worse yet, think Facebook is a taboo place to find talent. [Read more]

Pull Facebook Out of Your Toolkit As Needed

Three times this past week I have had people come up to me or send me an email asking the exact same question.

I’m trying to convince my boss/volunteers/co-workers that our business/organization needs to have an active presence on Facebook. Can you help me argue my point?

Well, I’m certainly not in the business of helping people win arguments, nor do I invariably defend Facebook. Here’s why. [Read more]

Each Time I Teach, I Learn

It’s no secret that I have a passion for rural Minnesota and helping small businesses. That is why I love traveling around Minnesota, teaching others how to grow businesses or non-profits using technology and the web. [Read more]

How Do I Get a Little Picture by My Comment?

The “little picture” you are referring to is called a gravatar. Like the one next to this blog title (top-left), a gravatar is a globally recognized (picture) avatar. If you’ve seen the movie Avatar, I guess the two are loosely associated in that what you choose for a picture will be how people recognize and interact with you all over the web wherever gravatars are enabled. [Read more]

Meet Michelle Falling, Newest VI Team Member!

 

Hello out there in cyberspace! I am SO excited to join this fantastic, professional, innovative, customer focused organization in the Midwest. [Read more]

Wordless Wednesday: Philanthropy One Glass at a Time

The kids of Vivid Image staff had their first lemonade stand of the summer at a recent business expo in Hutchinson, MN. They raised $25 for our local food shelf, selling little glasses of lemonade. [Read more]

Don’t Stop Make it Pop: Simple things YOU can do to make your content POP

First of all, if you didn’t get the headline – Click Here.

Like music, good design is somewhat subjective – what one person or audience likes, may not appeal to someone else – there are certainly some general rules of thumb that can help ensure that your site isn’t just a one hit wonder.

In this post, I will focus mainly on the copy and content that you write for your site. Its a simple (and often overlooked) aspect of your site that can make a big difference in its appearance if you take into consideration these easy tips.

If you emphasize everything, then you emphasize nothing.
What is the most important message? What’s the first thing you want your visitors to know/read/click on? If a visitor comes to your homepage, they should know right away what you do and what can offer them. They should also have a clear call to action to get them to do something. Buy a product, learn more, sign up for your newsletter… whatever you decide is most important, get them to do it without having to explain it. Dumb it down if you have to. Use simple and short phrases like “Learn More”, “Buy Now”, “Sign Up Today” or “Click Here to Get Started”. Use bigger fonts,
buttons or  graphics to help drive this point home.

Good graphics and headlines make all the difference in the world.
Even the most well written, exciting piece of content or post won’t stand out on its own. Use a clever headline or catchy graphic to get your visitors to read that wonderful content. Now, don’t just grab graphics from Google Images, be a bit more creative. iStockphoto.com (we use them all the time here at VI) offers an amazing selection of royalty free stock photos and graphics for as little as $1 or $2 per image. For blog posts and websites, you don’t need expensive high-res images – just go with whatever is cheapest. Better yet, dig out the camera and take some photos. Don’t be afraid to get creative.

Block quotes are under-rated.
Block quotes are used all the time by professional news agencies when covering a large, copy-heavy article. A blockquote reinforces a powerful message or statement from the article and draws the reader in to want to read more. These are just as powerful as graphics and headlines. So when writing content for your site, if you want to emphasize a point, don’t just make it Bold or Underline it. It looks messy and breaks up the visual appeal of your writing. Use a block quote instead. It should also be said that not every site easily allows you the option to create a block quote – and if it does, the styling and appearance of it might not be quite what you want. Get in touch with us to learn more and help get your site set up to use them.

“If You Want to Emphasize a Point, Don’t Just Make it Bold or Underline it…”

When it comes to text, keep it light & clean.
As unoriginal as this may sound, dark text on white or near-white background is the most readable way to present your content. Having said that, you don’t always need to have text that is 100% black… having dark grey or mid-tone grey text often provides a softer contrast and a cleaner look and feel. Try writing posts and content using #666666 or #333333 color font. Both of these are fairly standard in the hexadecimal (web) color pallet. Whatever you do, don’t force your visitors to read tiny white text on a dark background… It will kill their eyes after only a few paragraphs.

That’s it for now… now take these tips and run with them. Look for more posts from me with design-related tips and trends that you can take action on to help make your site look that much better.

Wordless Wednesday: iPad

Your thoughts or insights? Please share. Stay tuned for ours.

Managing Photo Galleries In WordPress

WordPress has great features for managing individual images or a small gallery of photos, but organizing a large collection of photos can be difficult. Luckily there are some excellent plugins such as NextGen Gallery that can add even greater image management functionality.

NextGEN Gallery

With the NextGEN Gallery plugin you are able to easily create multiple photo galleries and organize those galleries into photo albums. NextGEN Gallery has built in support for many features such as photo lightbox presentations and Flash slideshows.

This plugin makes it possible better organize large photo collections. You might create an album called Events, and that album could contain a photo gallery for each specific event. Other separate albums could be created to hold different types of galleries.

With the click of a button these albums, galleries, and individual photos can be added to any WordPress post or page in a list or thumbnail view, or as a Flash slideshow. [Read more]

A Sneak Peak at New Email Marketing Features

Vivid Image and Constant Contact have been teaming up for years to help hundreds of small businesses and organizations harness the power of email marketing campaigns.Over the years, this service has grown into a valuable tool to do so much more than just managing mass emails. Soon, you are going to hear about even more that can be done using Constant Contact, and we thought you’d appreciate a simple list of some of the best and new features available to help your business grow. [Read more]

Vivid Image Gets the Thumbs Up from Constant Contact

We are pleased to be recognized with a 2009 All-Star Award from Constant Contact®, Inc., a leading provider of email marketing, event marketing, and online survey tools for small organizations. Vivid Image was selected for meeting Constant Contact’s best-practice standards for the use of Email Marketing throughout 2009. [Read more]

Fun with Marketing and the Minnesota Lynx

The Vivid Image team is proud to be working to help promote the Minnesota Lynx sponsored event coming to our town of Hutchinson on May 7th, aimed at celebrating the achievements of Hutchinson’s own Lindsay Whalen. [Read more]

Time for Spring Cleaning

Today’s WordlessWednesday post is a reminder that even websites and blogs need a weeding of old information, a cleaning away of debris, and fresh new content.

Have you given your site any spring cleaning attention?

Organizing Posts with Categories & Tags

Categories and tags can be used to organize blog posts similar to how a book is organized with a table of contents and an index.

Categories could be considered your blog’s table of contents. Each parent category is a chapter, and each child category is a section within that chapter. A common mistake that many blogs make is to have dozens of categories in a flat hierarchy with no child categories.

To better organize posts, try to stick with less than ten parent categories, and group the rest of the categories below these as child categories.

Tags have a flat hierarchy and are similar to a book’s index. Tags can be used as keywords to further specify the content of a blog post or link together disparate posts.

Checkout this short screencast to see an example how to use categories and tags.

Next Page »