Blog tools that help you get a loyal fan base
May 12, 2008 by Maria G. Nozza |
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Monday’s Promotion Tip for Graphic Designers
You’ve taken the plunge. You’ve started a blog. You are either with Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad, or my favorite, WordPress.
Now what? Well, if you are using the blog as a marketing tool for you company, you want to get the word out about who you are and what you do.
You want to create a loyal fan base that keep coming back to your blog, day after day.
Strategies for getting people to your blog everyday:
- Feed readers: For your more tech-savvy readers, they may use a feed reader (like Newsgager or FeedLounge). This allows them to scan at a glance all the different posts of all the blogs they are interested in quickly. Then they can read what interests them. Some of them are even compatible with Outlook, sending all the RSS feeds to Outlook (EX: Newsgator).
- Subscriber links in your blog: I use FeedBurner so that visitors to my blog can subscribe to my blog in their favorite reader (there’s a huge list like Google, MyYahoo, MyMSN, etc.)
- Email link: Then you’ll have readers who don’t know RSS feeds / readers but do understand email. This allows them to have delivered to their inbox any new post that you create. You do have a few choices to do this but FeedBurner offers it too.
C O N C L U S I O N
You have to make it easy (and offer different solution) to get people to your blog on a daily basis. This helps build your traffic and improves your ranking in the search engines.
I know this is going to sound really strange, but I subscribe to my own blogs. This is so that I can send some spider traffic my way!
Always take screen captures!
May 7, 2008 by Maria G. Nozza |
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Wednesday’s Production Tip for Graphic Designers
I have a new client that I’ve been learning a lot in terms of what not to do! Today and tomorrow’s posts will deal with a few things I’d like to share.
I was floored (totally floored) during a website redesign when in the middle of it the client says to me “I don’t even remember what the old one looked like ” and wanted me to create an itemized list of everything I had changed on the site!
Not only is this an absolute waste of my time, am I truly expected to remember every little thing I changed? The answer is YES.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take a screen capture of her old website. Even though it had been up for YEARS, they couldn’t remember what it looked like originally!
Luckily, there’s the wayback machine!
C O N C L U S I O N :
Always take a before shot of any webpage you are working on. Then present the client with a before and after shot.
It will save you a ton of heartache. It will also save you the grief of clients thinking that what you did was a simple “tweak” of what they had before (and therefore gypping them).
The screen capture is proof!
See your website as others see it
March 12, 2008 by Maria G. Nozza |
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Wednesday’s Production Tip for Graphic Designers
I’m going to lay it on the line. I hate Web Design.
I hate it because I could never really tell what others were seeing when they looked at my site. In print, more often than not, what was on my screen was what got reproduced in print. So, when I would see my work on other people’s browsers, and it didn’t look right, it would drive me C-R-A-Z-Y!
I use a MAC for the most part, but I make it a point when designing webpages to check out my site on various computers and browsers to make sure that my site looks good in all browsers.
After all, most people are still on Internet Explorer and on a Windows machine (and don’t get me started on the fact that IE 6 and IE 7 display the website differently!)
There are many factors that affect how others view your site. Among them are: your operating system, your monitor brand, the settings on your monitor, your internet browser, etc…
So what can you do about it?
Well, I love the internet. You can find everything you need with a few keystrokes and a mouse click!
So, not surprisingly, I found a solution for this. If you want to see what your site looks like in various browsers, check out:
It’s broken down by operating systems, web browsers, and different versions:
Linux: BonEcho, Epiphany, Firefox, Flox, Galeon, GranParadiso, Iceape, Iceweasel, Kazehakase, Konqueror, Minefield, Mozilla, Navigator, Opera, SeaMonkey
Windows: Firefox, Clock, K-Meleon, MSIE, Navigator, Opera, Safari, SeaMonkey
Mac: Firefox, Safari
BSD: Epiphany, Galeon, Opera, SeaMonkey
A second option:
This one you have to pay for if want to use it repeatedly. It’s quite expensive at the moment. But you do get a free trial for 24 hours or 200 screen captures FREE simply by signing up.
The advantage with this one is that you can see by OS version, browser (it includes AOL) and if you have Flash or not (and the version).
C O N C L U S I O N :
Even if you look at a website on one computer, but in different browsers, the colors will look different. These screenshots are very helpful.
Graphics file formats for the web
February 27, 2008 by Maria G. Nozza |
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Wednesday’s Production Tip for Graphic Designers
Choosing what format you should use on your website is a juggling act between size and image quality.
My concern was, when and why to use each file format. And of course, smallest size for the greatest quality.
GIF: Graphics Interchange Format
- GIF file formats are limited to 256 colors. That’s it!
- It’s great for drawings with a limited number of colors, solid colors, technical drawings, clip arts, and diagrams (better than JPGs)
- You can also create very small animations with it
- Supports transparency (very pixelated though)
- Interlacing feature
JPG / JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group (named after its inventor)
- Full-color images are supported (24-bit)
- Ideal for photographs and pictures with lots of colors
- Lossy compression (lossy means that compression data is lost): you can actually choose how much compression to use with major image-editing programs: the higher the quality, the larger the file size. When you start to see pixelated pictures on the internet, you know they’ve been compressed to much.
PNG: Portable Network Graphics (pronounced “ping”)
- Newest file format. It’s set to replace the GIF.
- Not compatible with older versions of Internet Explorer
- Larger than JPGs as PNG use “lossless” compression
- Alpha transparency with no pixelation
- Better interlacing
- Adjusts automatically to your display
- Able to write short text description for search engine optimization
What do I choose?
I choose mostly JPGs. For images where transparency is needed, I simply add the background color to the graphic and save it as a JPG.
A warning of transparent GIFs: they look terrible if they are on darker backgrounds. I’ve never been able to make them work well.
Bullets and lines I create as GIFs.After I read that PNG were not widely accepted in older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, I didn’t want to risk using them — yet.
Promote yourself with screencasts
February 25, 2008 by Maria G. Nozza |
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Monday’s Promotion Tip for Graphic Designers
We’ve always heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. For designers, this is perhaps even more true. Well, a 15 minute screencast can replace an article that would take 3-4 hours to write.
Screencasts have become increasingly popular as an effective marketing tool. They are basically short videos. Usually, it includes a narration accompanied by video demonstrating what is being said.
How you can use screencasts on your websites:
From the point of view of the designer, a screencast can save you loads of time while presenting the information in a more interesting way. The viewer learns by watching.
- Technique that is used in your field
- Software tips
- Video tour of your website
- Critiques of websites
- Case studies
- Product reviews
- Book reviews
- Personal message
C O N C L U S I O N :
Screencasts adds interest and a dynamic touch to your site. It’s far more interesting to a viewer to watch a video describing a technique step-by-step than sit through and read an article.
The bonus: it takes you far less time to create a screen cast than it is to write, edit, and publish an article.
