How To Make Your Web Site “Home Sweet Home”

Having a snazzy building in a bustling location is no longer what makes all the difference. Users from various walks of life spend tons of time on the Internet a week. This means that the chances of someone “visiting” your website and determining the status, success, and vibrancy of your business is much more likely than someone walking into your building establishment seeking more information. If your website is not walking the walk and talking the talk, then you have already lost the majority of your potential audience that you are marketing towards. It is no accident that consumers and other entrepreneurial business owners equate visiting a business with taking a tour of their web site.

There are three purposeful necessities that many business owners have expertly applied towards growing their physical business (and/or building their own home), but may have overlooked in regards to their digital property – the website:

1) Conceptualize – Brainstorm, envision, and plan what you want your digital property to accomplish.

2) Design – Convey your business’s desired personality and atmosphere, setting it apart from competition.

3) Develop – Execute your plans in a way that can be built upon or tweaked later if necessary.

So you might be saying to yourself, “Well, I hear what you’re saying, but I only have a few small ideas of where to begin.” Good! You are already started to “conceptualize.” Upon posing the following questions, designing and developing can be made less intimidating, while strengthening your preliminary concepts.

+ Does my website feel like home?:

In other words, if my web site could be a digital living space, would I feel comfortable residing in it or would I just want to visit it from time to time. If you don’t like where you live, you can bet that there are others who have thought the same and moved on to another business that has intently imbued tender, love, and care into their home.

+ Can I find everything around my home?:

Most of us might immediately shake our heads, thinking of all the stuff we have lying in storage. However, approach it from a more simplistic angle. That is, can I find the essentials of my home? Whether you answer yes or no, your web site should be able to be easily navigated through without having to search through all the useless stuff.

+ Has my home been retooled/remodeled since the new millennium?:

Almost every property that we have ever lived in has needed to be redone in some way, either after just getting everything together after moving in, or after living in it for an extensive period of time. Outward aspects of the home and the internal contents within become outdated as time passes. Your web site, in a similar regard, is the same. Chances are, if your site design (i.e. the outward aspects) and your site content (e.g. your appliances, worn-down walls, etc.) have not been optimized for the expectations of the “digital shift“, then you could very well be losing prospective customers as you read this entry.

+ Do you look for opportunities to invite guests over?:

I’m not implying that every day should be a frat party at your place, but more like an organized, social gala. Your guests should be able to live, move, and breathe comfortably within the space of your home, no matter how lavish or minimalist it may be. Engage your guests in an experience that will linger in their minds in that they will be waiting for the next event for weeks to come. Actually, scratch that; let them come knocking on YOUR door, seeking more reasons to utilize your business.

Whether your web site is your business or not, you need to be absolutely certain that your domain, which is your online home, is complying with not just your marketing scheme but properly delineates and conveys an accurate message coupled with a profound experience. In this way, your business’s web site will engage your target audience with succinct trust and a sophisticated, yet homey attitude.

If you are convinced that your “online home” has fallen behind in the times, you don’t have to go at it alone, nor should you. Seek out digital media experts who understand what it means for your business’s online image to be the lifeblood of what can make or break your marketing strategy in the long run. As for Image Cog, we agree that your Web site should be a closely integrated component of larger marketing strategy. However, we profess that your site is the most important component of that strategy.

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Web Design Meets Interior Design In Three Steps

Web Design Meets Interior Design In Three Steps

In a past article entitled Is Your Web Site Important To Your Marketing Strategy, we talked about how consumers can equate visiting a Web site domain with visiting a physical business. Conversely, a “physical business” can be referred to as an “internet property” or “internet real estate”. When you get right down to it, your Web site domain should not only be professional and insightful, but have a look and feel that can be comparable to the handiwork of an interior designer.

According to the Sheffield School of Interior Design, there exists an essential three-step method that is key for designing any good room:

1) A successful room is functional.
2) A successful room expresses a mood.
3) A successful room exhibits a sense of harmony.

We at Image Cog firmly believe that “just having a website is not enough.” Just like the three-step method in interior design, there requires a similar approach towards strategizing to creating and maintaining a Web site.

1) A successful Web site domain is functional:

Navigating should feel as natural as reclining back into a seat. All hyperlinks should be as reliable as placing a glass atop of a nearby table, knowing it will not fall over. In other words, your business’s Web site should compliment itself while making the interactive experience for a user streamlined so as to feel comfortable engaging in without thinking twice.

2) A successful Web site domain expresses a mood or tone:

This aspect of your Web site’s development can be dependant on two factors:

How the atmosphere within the company is on a daily basis.

Just as a formal setting in a room might be designed with the intent to evoke a mood of conscious etiquette, your business’s Web site might, for example, want to display a sense of bourgeois and expertise through complementary imagery, a subdued color pallete, and a stringent, contextual tone if the atmosphere within the company is of the formal suit and tie attire. Remember that the physical atmosphere your company chose to set was a conscious decision made on what was most appropriate to help your company compete with in its industry. The design choices made on your site must be equally deliberate.

How you wish to present your company’s image to your target audience.

Just as a room is filled with bean bag chairs and an outside view of the ocean, depending on your audience, your company’s image might want to be portrayed as laid-back through a soft, yet vibrant color palette and a casual, contextual tone that retains that necessary level of experience and appeal that your target visitors are looking for. Your audience, target or best customer, should be your guide. Here again if you are conscious of what will be appealing in the physical setting, you should make every effort to be consistent in the virtual setting.

3) A successful Web site domain exhibits a sense of harmony:

Harmony is just as important for a business’s Web site design as it is in interior design. Just as Japanese interior design uses natural colors to minimize the feeling of clutter and serve as a simple background, matching color tones, and consistent layout design and font style must work together to create cohesive continuity between one another to convey the asthetics necessary for a pleasurable experience.

There is much more to the process of web design than many Web site domain owners would give it credit for. The similarities to interior design are also quite close-knit and worth examining further in future articles. Though, if after reading this article your Web site is suddenly conveying a different message to you than it was before, discuss this further with your webmaster or design firm to make sure your “internet property” is poised to be as successful and presentable as possible.

What Can Flash Bring To Your Website?

1. Animation
2. Video
3. Interactivity

Animation

Although recent technologies, such as AJAX, have been encroaching on Flash’s bread and butter, it remains the premiere way to include lightweight animation on a web page. Flash’s animation abilities go well beyond what is capable with movies embedded with video plugins and GIFs. The vector-based drawing tools of Flash allow content creators to design really great media, and to publish even long movies online with a small file size. Also, consider Flash’s ability to monitor its own loading progress — something that Javascript can’t do. And remember, Flash has a greater install base than any video plugin, so you can’t beat its compatibility either.

Video

Flash offers a lot of great possibilities for video that other solutions don’t. First and foremost is compatibility. Flash video works in nearly every browser, and is installed on nearly every system. The best part is that you can support all kinds of browsers, devices, and operating systems with one flash video file. Flash’s first video format wasn’t great, but Flash 8 has much improved video quality at smaller file sizes. Adobe has promised to bring the excellent AVC (H.264) format to Flash 9 very soon. This will hopefully enable reuse of video files between Flash and standards-based players such as QuickTime 7. But Flash’s advantages go beyond playback ubiquity.

With Flash, video, animation, interactivity, and connectivity can all be joined into one multimedia presentation. Consider premium ad banners that combine low-bitrate video with crisp vector overlays. This is a great way to combine video with legible text or corporate logos at a very small size and with very high quality graphics. Then, once you’ve captured the browser’s attention, you can mix in interactivity to provide a link, form, or even a game.

Interactivity

By far, the most appealing aspect of putting Flash in your site is bringing rich interactivity with extremely high reliability. I like to think of Flash as a sandbox within which a developer is free to write code without worrying about browser compatibilities. Indeed, Flash has lots of advantages for bringing dynamic content and presentation to your site. Flash’s ability to communicate with server scripts is very robust, it can request XML, plain text and media, and can easily format that data. Flash can then bring in embedded fonts and graphics to create print-style layouts that display consistently. Consider a products listing page where the user could quickly sift through the items by clicking on keywords and have the listings cleverly reorganize themselves with animations in real-time with no loading time.

Bringing it all together

YouTube uses Flash’s video and interactivity features for showing video. It builds on that experience by connecting to other movies and allowing the user to send videos to friends, but the possibilities go well beyond that. Vector animations could be used as lead ins to video segments, providing vital time for loading while still entertaining the user. Imagine a photography studio with cinematic-grade slideshows and desktop-class browsing and filtering capabilities. Flash’s bitmap manipulation and filters make it a great way to enrich media that is otherwise bland. For example, thumbnails might receive drop shadows and rise off the page when a user mouses over them, or they might get a color transformation. Flash can also do smoothing when upscaling images, providing a great way to get just a bit more out of smaller graphics. Whether you’re trying to create a more customized atmosphere, add video or animation to your web page, or provide robust interactivity, Flash has something great to offer.