We would love to help you succeed in all your business endeavors and work within your budge with cost effective marketing that will bring you returned business, Contact Us today!

Creating contests that involve participation

1. Your Facebook page should add value to the consumer, so that there is a reason to join the page and to keep coming back. A great way to do that is to get the consumers involved! Offering coupons and contests are a few examples.

2. Big Idea: Offering something enticing to consumers to join the fan page can help build a large community. Examples might be: free shipping, offer discounts, weekly deals, and coupons.

Targeting the Proper Demographics

1. Determine who you are targeting. Who does your brand want to reach? Anyone can use Facebook now so why not get involved yourself. When you have determined your target audience, search for the demographics within the search option. Also, it is KEY to find your competitors online. Go to their Facebook page and see who they are targeting. Make sure you reach out to them as well. You can personally invite your competitor’s followers to your Facebook page which will help you get more users quickly.

2. Not all Facebook pages will grow, generally because of Facebook’s demographics. Understanding Facebook’s demographics can help you determine if starting a fan page is worth the time. According to Quantcast estimates, Facebook favors towards female youths. Also, 53% of users have kids and a majority makes $60,000 plus a year. With this, there are still 50% college age users. While these are the current demographics, these stats are constantly changing, so check on the stats frequently for change. As Facebook evolve, your campaign might need to evolve along side it for maximum potential.

3. Big Idea: Some brands cannot expect huge followings on Facebook. Of course products that target the demographic most prominent on Facebook usually expect to have the fastest growth spurt. But any followers are better than none, even if that means four followers, who may end up being perspective clients.

Creating a Resourceful Page

1. Use the information on the page as added value that connects to the brand. Make the content on the facebook page a resource that people will want to come back to.

2. Big Idea: By having a facebook page you allow your brand to reach new demographic areas, outside the familiar consumers that already know and love the business.

Network with others

1. Building a large following takes manpower, meaning you need to connect with as many other networks as possible. Example: take advantage of free Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, MySpace pages and connect them to your home page. Don’t expect your fans to find you manually, most won’t, instead add a button from your home page.

2. Big Idea: Connect as many social networks to your brand website. This can help funnel potential customers throughout your brand.

If you would like help with your next social media campaign for your business, feel free to contact me, I would love to help!

I will begin with the traditional method of web design and then explore a new method that many developers are now using due to the vastly changing web world. Feel free to sit back, relax and take notes as we explore the wide world of CSS.

First, let’s look at the history of CSS (Cascade Style Sheets). The governing body of the Web, W3C, recommended CSS in December 1996, with CSS Level 1 specification. CSS Level 1 described attributes for use in HTML pages. These attributes replaced the traditional font tag along with other “styles” such as borders and colors. In May 1998, W3C introduced CSS Level 2, adding additional capabilities to level 1, including positioning attributes. These attributes replaced the widespread incorrect usage of the table tag to design web page elements. The most recent version of CSS is 2.1 removes some of the attributes that previously had limited usage and adds refinement to others.

Problems with the Traditional Table Layout and CSS Responses:

Making simple changes such as moving images, changing navigation, or switching colors can take hours. Traditional Table layouts have slow-loading pages because the browser has to retrieve the page from the server and decipher the complex elements of the nested tables. When using CSS, the browser instantly renders content from the server because there isn’t extensive markup language there.

Another down side to tables is the browser needs to retrieve, analyze, and render each individual page. The browser has to go through these steps for each page, which can really slow down your website. But, if you use a cascade style sheet (CSS), the first page of the site allows the browser to cache the linked style sheet file that is used for that page. Meaning, all of the remainder of the pages will load faster since the style sheet has been decoded.

Lastly using traditional table layouts adds lots of extra code, which takes time for the computer to figure out and longer for rendering, features such as font tags. This can be minimized by moving codes to a CSS design. This will minimize your code by as much as 50% or more!!! Less code = a faster loading website!

Hopefully this has helped you better understand CSS and why it has become the web standard for design. If you have any questions feel free to comment on this article or contact us directly. We would love to help on your next project.

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• 15 CSS Habits to Develop for Frustration-Free Coding (noupe.com)

A question I often get from perspective clients is: “should I build my website in Adobe Flash?”

To answer this question lets look at the cost vs. benefit of an all/ partial built flash website.

Benefits of a Flash Site:

• Slick Look
• Able to animate just about anything
• Strong potential for great looking portfolio
• Excellent presentation piece
• Attractive for Splash Pages (home page)
• Great for applications that might be used on your website

Downsides to Flash Sites:

• 

  Image via Wikipedia

  Search Engines can’t read the website because it is essentially a movie embedded in an HTML page. So if you care about Optimizing your website for search engines don’t even think about going fully flash. Think target audience! How is Flash going to help in the use of your site? No search engine to date is able to extract textual elements from Flash content. For most people SEO is a very valuable source for bringing visitors to you website – without a search engine’s help you could potentially loose up to 80% of your web traffic!

• Hard to update – you need a Flash Web Master to update the site, as they need to make edits in Adobe Flash.

• Long Download time - means you are waiting longer for the website to load in your browser. Most people don’t have time to wait, or aren’t patient enough.

• Flash requires bandwidth – even though most people use DSL Internet, there are still people who use dialup or other limited bandwidth internet connections. Flash files take a much longer time to load then HTML, especially those with sound effects, embedded movies or bitmap images.

• Blogging is hard – if you blog often this would be very tedious with flash as you have to update the site through an FTP (File Transfer Protocol). There is no way to directly update your website content online.

• No Content Management System (CMS) – How regularly do you want to update content? Using an all Flash website means you are uploading all your content manually to the web server and manually updating. This means opening up the Flash software and adding new text or pages. This can be a problem after a while as its time-consuming and increases the size of your Flash website. Ultimately it will slow down your slick looking website, and might have some impatient visitors leave the website completely.

On the other hand, if you have a Flash designer working on your case, the website can be set up to use text files to automatically add content to your website. Problem solved? Wait, putting in all those text files will take download time, and again you will lose impatient visitors.

Flash can be a great tool and limited use draws spectacular results. It involves understanding your audience before letting your site run loose on the Internet.

One solution is to have two versions of your website on the splash page (first page that people see, or your default page). A Flash and a non-Flash version of the site. We all get excited about fancy animation power with Flash, but you have to step back and sit in the shoes of the user. Some animations are distracting and can deter from what your site is actually offering. At Sayenko Design, we create hints of Flash in most of the websites we create to enhance the professional look but never do we wrap Flash around content. The conclusion is: use Flash wisely if you do and don’t sweat it if you don’t include it in your design.

This may seem like a trivial thing but it actually has a big impact on our market exposure – and it allows us to market in a very economical manner.
Please take a few minutes and help us let the facebook community know who we are.

We are in business today in this tough economic market and we are hoping to bring brand awareness to others by having you on our list of Facebook friends/fans -

You can click here to the Sayenko Design facebook page
or search for (Sayenko Design) in the search box and click on “become a fan” – I would
love to add you to my friend list and stay in touch with you.

Thanks much – I hope your doing well!

Mike Sayenko

The top prediction for 2010 from Nielson Wire, an Internet source for market research and trend analysis, is that businesses will embrace online video (social videos).

What’s more powerful, an article or a short video of the same content?

High engagement makes video an irresistible choice for online marketing. The user experience is rich, the call to action powerful. Momentum is already building as half of the American population has clicked on an online video.

Will a video help on my home page?

Absolutely, expect up to 80% of your visitors to click on it. But wait; if you optimize the video for search engines, the SEO video will drastically increase your chance of being on first-page rankings.

Where do I start?

I recommend a flip camcorder, which costs around $100 – 150. They are easy to use and have a USB port that goes directly into your computer for uploading your content.

From there, edit down with software (there are lots of quality inexpensive ones and some come with the computer such as iMovie for Macs) to 3 minutes or less (based on research, a video should be no longer then 2-3 minutes for a home page).

If you’re careful with your recording, you might not even need to edit. From there post it to your favorite social video site such as YouTube or Vimeo. And finally embed the code to your personal site.  This way, you are spreading the word about your video through multiple channels, and the power of embedding lets anyone add your video to their blog or website.

Today, video is a compelling choice for engaging content that can be brought to life in a matter of minutes.

Northwest Canopies, INC, based in Bellevue, Washington, builds custom canopies in order to meet the specific needs of their customers. Founded in 2000, the company provides long lasting shelters for RVs, boats, heavy machinery, livestock, and sports equipment. These canopies have proven to be a wise alternative to shipping containers or monthly slip and storage fees.

In designing NW Canopies’ website, our goal was to create a professional, clean design, by highlighting the website with strategic key word placement for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.

We also kept in mind the possibility of ecommerce expansion in the future and designed the website to accommodate that possibility.  We started with market research by sifting through different websites on canopy products. We then pulled together a branding strategy that would make NW Canopies’ website stand out from the rest.

This led us to create a logo and color scheme that communicated a northwest feel through the use of a green palette. From there, we re-branded from the old website, pictured on your left, to a green earthly tone and an easy to use navigation that symbolizes a shelter like covering over each menu item.

We are happy to see the website grow in success and enjoy our friendship with the fantastic people at NW Canopies.

We would love to help you succeed in all your business endeavors and work within your budge with cost effective marketing that will bring you returned business, Contact Us today!

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In reality, most people glance at each page and, if you’re lucky, scan some of the text, clicking on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles what they are looking for. Usually there are large chunks of the page that the user doesn’t even look at.

The Home page of a website gives a first impression and thus should have some thought invested in its design. It needs to be straightforward, easy to navigate, and possess a clear message. Below are some questions you need to ask yourself about your current website or the one you plan on building. If you cannot quickly answer the questions below then you might want to redesign your website.

Lets Start with the Trunk Test:

• What site is this?
• What page am I on?
• Where am I in the site scheme?
• What are my options from this level?

Design

• · Conventionally, the logo should be at the upper left hand corner because we read left to right and it is the first thing that catches our eye. Also, the logo should be easy to read, conveying useful information or enhancing the branding value of the website.
• · The home page should have Call to Action and contact info placed prominently.
• · Click-ability should be obvious
• · Scan-ability – fast info
• · Text entry areas are obvious – Empty space effectively ends the page and no one is going to scroll beyond it. Anything below this will be lost, so design page layout and flow to maximize sales potential of page real estate.
• · Formatting applied via CSS (Cascade Style Sheets)
• · Conventions applied to all pages
• · Busy-ness and background noise are minimal
• · Footer includes copyright date and text
• · Correct Spelling/ Grammar
• · Image Quality – make sure images are not pixilated (stretched out)

Navigation

• Site Map
• Sense of scale, directions and location
• Page name matches that links that bring people there
• Breadcrumbs and site-level Navigation

When it comes to site design, most think of a product brochure, while the users reality is much closer to “billboard going by at 70 miles an hour.” People don’t read pages. They scan them. Try the three second scan-ability rule on your website. What can you remember about it after that time span? The most important information should stand out from the rest in those three seconds and you should be able to recall what that information is.

Does this all make sense? If you use these easy usability conventions, your site will communicate clearly and effectively.