Archive for October, 2006

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Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

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Creating a company logo becomes much easier when one begins to get a feel for what is appealing and why it is so. It is essential to learn how to use the principles of visual communications and combine them efectively with basic production techniques. Equally important is, gain awareness of how important are the factors of ethics and social responsibility highlight within the creation of visuals. Much of good logo design is a matter of taste, and invariably differs from person to person.

The company logo design is a graphical representation intended to differentiate companies and their products from their competitors trait within the market. It typically includes the brand name and indeed, an allegorical graphic element, called an “emblem” or “combination mark” aspect element within the professional jargon. A company logo must be a direct, simple and powerful representation of the brand s name and character. Complicated illustrations and types are to be avoided unless mentioned specifically. A company logo design has to convey a great number of information with a few strokes, letters and spots of color. The company logo is an asset for the company and is its registered property that goes with its products.

Originality and distinctiveness are the essence of a company logo design. highlight within the highly competitive market no one could risk to mistakenly design a logo similar to that of another company. This can lead to the confusing the potential customer about the business. Company logos have become the faces and economy of our business. Even the general public has become very responsive to logos, their meanings and implementations. The companies take pride in their logos and want to protect its image on printed matter, on the excellent Internet, in advertisements and other places that put them feature within the public eye.

The logo design process begins with the formulation of a set of objectives and a verbal description of what the logo has to convey. The consistent use of clear typefaces is a way of establishing a recognized and professional identity. The typography can and could be new to create a dynamic look that allows the viewer to focus resting on the logo. A large bold or semi-bold typeface often signals strength and significance. An italic typeface can be used to describe softer values and to convey a lighter impression. A professional logo designer develops conceptual pathways for the logo, combining the various aspects and transforming ideas into sketches.

Ultimately a logo stands for everything a company or product represents. It is undoubtedly one of the top most important parts of an organization s corporate branding strategy. It is the reflection of the company s culture; it s purpose and goals as well as the values and aspiration of its customers. Whether starting a new business, launching a new product or service or revitalizing an existing company, branding and identity would considered to be an integral part of the business plan from the start. A good company logo design stands as a part of the marketing strategy, when competitors can underestimate its value and effectiveness. The company logo can give the business a much-needed edge resting on the road to success.

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Do you want to have a feature rich web site with animations, sound, and an opening splash screen?

Do you want to use Flash extensively on your site but and its most important to understand if you are afraid of hurting your search engine positioning?

Do you require an opening splash page but were told that the search engines would not index your site if you or someone you know had one?

Well there are ways to have the benefits of Flash on your site and still be attractive to search engines. It is all in how the Flash is used. Some of the methods are simple while others require more programming experience. But we all can use Flash without driving away the search engines.

first let s look at the problem. Search engines index a site by looking at the content. In this case we are talking about text content, not pictures, video, sound, or animation. A basic fact to keep in notion on having a very search engine friendly site is, have high quality, targeted content in text form and limiting the use of anything that can get resource within the way of the search engines analyzing this content.

But what about Flash? Flash converts everything into a Flash file, or SWF file playable by the Flash Player plug-in. All the text in this Flash file will be converted from text to vector graphics, and since the search engines cannot read text in a graphic, they will be unable to read the text in a Flash file. Therefore they will be unable to index the information element within the site.

So how to we obtain around this seemingly insurmountable problem? It is all in how we use Flash in our site. The trick is, either wrap the Flash inside typical html coding, or by using xhtml you can easily have Flash display text from an external source. I will limit this article to the easier methods for using Flash in a search engine friendly manner.

Let s look at the three main ways we can want to use Flash on a website:

1. Splash Page
2. Flash navigation
3. Flash content

Starting with the Flash Splash page there are a couple of ways to handle this. If we just have the Flash Splash page as the opening page to our web site there will be no way aside from the meta tags for the search engines to index the page, let alone learn any more pages in your site.

The trick here is, give the search engines something to work with. This can be easily done in two ways. you can most defiantly put a text only navigation bar just below the splash screen, this way the search engines can at least establish the other pages in your site. But to allow the search engines to index the actual splash screen here is a neat trick. Place the Flash file in a layer, you can most defiantly then float that layer over the web page allowing you to hide all the plain html text you want underneath the Flash layer. This has the added benefit of giving content to visitors who do not have the Flash player installed on their system.

With a Flash navigation bar things are much easier. As long as only the navigation is in Flash the rest of the page can use search engine friendly text, plus you can easily put a text only navigation bar across the bottom of the page so that the search engines can Uncover the rest of your pages. This is a good idea anyway and one that I always follow. Plus when a visitor reaches the bottom of your page they have some links to follow without having to scroll back up the page to your navigation bar.

Using Flash content in your internet site follows the basic principles outlined above. As long as you have some text based content for the search engines to index you will be OK. I have found that having Flash animation resting on the top of my page where it fills the screen, followed by additional text is a nice hybrid approach. It gives your visitors the content rich experience you want to provide plus gives the search engines all the text based content they need for proper search engine indexing.

if you or someone you know really want or need a complete Flash site there is one more thing you can easily do. This requires more work, but it will keep your site highlight within the search engines. Create two versions of your online business, one in Flash and one using regular HTML. Have a simple home page that allows visitors to select either the Flash or HTML version of your site. Include on this home page your main keywords and navigation links to at least your site map and main pages so that the search engines can Uncover their way around your site. This gives you the preeminent of both worlds, the fully feature rich Flash site, and a search engine friendly HTML web site.

One final note, Google now is able to index Flash files, pulling out the text content from the SWF files. This is a magnificent advance and allows us to use Flash more freely on our web sites, but note that they are pulling the TEXT out of the Flash file. So in order to make your Flash files Google friendly you would include your search engine optimized text as text inside the Flash file, just like you would in a regular html web page.

So with proper planning and a few tricks we can have a very rich Flash site and still benefit from easy search engine indexing.
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Affordable web design and hosting - Success with Keywords

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Internet is the game of words. The better you use them the higher the chances of your success. Right words will make you win; use the wrong words and you lose. It’s that simple.

Once you add your website to your marketing tool box you should know how to use it. The problem of people is, even though they need their website to help market and help them grow business, they generally tend to forget the strategy part to promote their business & website. If you are one of these groups of people, your primary goal must be to attract visitors to your site because without them, the whole business of having a website becomes useless.

 Say your primary goal is to depend on search engine traffic for your website promotion, and your web site is not standing nearer than number 200 on the search engine results pages, no one will know you exist because very few people bother to look past the first four pages of results. There are literally billions of websites out there all hoping one day to make it into the top 20. Sadly, most will languish in the wait or just give up trying. So what do you do to make it happen? Well a good place to start is with keywords.

There is a whole science of key words and also there is a professional help available as SEO (search engine optimization) but we will not get in to it. Look at the search engine browser window, if you’re wondering what people are looking for, that is where you’ll find the answers. So the starting point is to develop your site content around the terms (keywords) that people are searching. Though it doesn’t pay to just take a guess at these keywords, you need to know exactly what terms people are using in their searches. You could get a lot of help in this regard with online keyword databases.

You can try this strategy where you choose a domain name for your website that includes your chosen keyword(s). Lets’ say you have an online store and your product is a new types of hybrid flower you’ve developed a new kind called flowerX. Now if you create a website with a domain name that is simply the name of your online store, still chances are your site will get few traffic because very little amount of people will be searching for your company name. But if you have confirmed that flowerX is a popular keyword that maybe thousands of people will be searching for, it would make a lot of sense to include that keyword in your domain name as well as on your sites pages.

It’s all about giving the search engines what they want. Of course there are lots more to consider in pursuing a top position in search engine results, but without the right words, It is never going to happen.

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Monday, October 30th, 2006

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The famous Puma leap or the big yellow “M” reminds all of us the famous “PUMA” and “McDonalds”…

No matter how young or how established a company is, they need to make their brand accustomed to their customers. With so many similar kinds of products and services, what makes a company so unique and stand out from rest of the crowd? Or in more simple words “How will your potential customer remember you? The answer is “YOUR LOGO”. It s the company’s logo that makes all the difference.

Logos are a unique way of pictorially representing what can be said in a few words or a sentence. Logos can be simple, from a simple dot to a more complicated conglomeration of colors and patterns. Company logos could represent the company’s products or services in a single image. It could be unique enough to be differentiated from the rest, but special enough to be remembered by the company’s potential and existing customers.

Companies make their logos using a combination of icon and text or a simple icon. The text new aspect element within the logo can have the company name in full or abbreviated text and the icon or even just a symbol or a brand mark. A logo can or can not have the company’s name, but having the company’s name is an added advantage. Also there are magnificent logos that just contain the company initials, for instance Y! of Yahoo.

The size and color could not be a rampart to the functionality, effectiveness and the attractiveness of a logo. Identity of the company would be properly portrayed. Logo designers would always substain in consideration the basic design principles of color, size, clarity and consistency when designing logos. Companies would hire professional logo designers who will understand your company and your mind set.

Companies going for professional logo designers could make sure that their professional logo designers are equipped with the latest skills and well informed with the latest trends in designing. Designers would be aware of copyrights and trademark issues and one would make sure that his designers are not copying from any other logos. The use of third party fonts, too many shadows and glares are also not recommended. Another important thing to be kept in mind by designers is that the logo would be flexible enough to detain its original color and shape when transformed to a different medium.

There are now thousands of designers of logos. It is always advisable to hire professional web designing firms who are very skilled in logo designs and equipped with proper logo designing softwares.

Monday, October 30th, 2006

Only a few years ago the only way to add sound to your online business was to use a .wav or midi file. The problem with this was that the file size would be fairly large and the whole file needed to be downloaded before it would start to play.

Streaming audio was made available aspect element within the 90’s and was in two basic formats, mp3 and Real Audio which enables the audio to start playing while it is still being downloaded. The size of these files is a lot smaller as compression algorithms are used but some loss of quality can be evident depending on the magnificent algorithm.

With these streaming audio formats audio player software is required by the browser and a streaming server is also needed.

Now audio can be streamed using Macromedia Flash (version 6 or above) from almost any web server and most web browsers can play the flash format files.

This is all very well but unless you can most defiantly program in Flash (Flash 8 basic costs $399) you would need to pay a programmer to develop the audio button, which would also be expensive.

WebSiteAudioReviews.com has reviewed most of the easy to use software products that enable anyone to add audio to there web site and cost from $20 - $100

Most of these software programs have built in sound recorders so all you ought to do is record your track and click a button which creates the required html code and paste this code into your web page. Then upload the .swf file and html file to your online business and you unreservedly hold audio on your internet site in just a few minutes.
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