Month: February 2007

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Personal Design

Design is a very personal thing. When choosing a look and feel for your brand you are going to have to accept that not everyone is going to like it. This means that you can avoid trying to please everyone.

A good example is the 7 Series BMW I saw in a car park today. When Chris Bangle took over responsibility for styling at BMW he introduced a whole new look to the product line. His design was controversial, largely because the BMW brand was already successful and the look of its existing product highly popular. Now, several years later, the old product looks dated and the new BMWs are as stylish as anything in their class.

If Chris Bangle had based his design decisions on offending the fewest people he would likely have created a “lowest common denominator” look that would not have positioned BMW for the future. The Pontiac Aztek, by contrast, was designed with full use of focus groups and customer input. It was an abject failure in the market, one of the most enduringly ugly vehicles of recent years.

Design decisions aren’t easy but they should represent you and what you stand for. Remember the old adage: “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”.

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St Louis web designer introduces guest writer

We are very pleased to introduce a guest writer to our blog who will contribute under the name of “St Louis Marketing Executive”.

He will be sharing perspectives drawn from his experience of branding, global business management and marketing in a B2B environment, and has promised us a monthly contribution.

Look for his first post this week!

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Imagery … and its use on web sites.

A recent visitor to our blog let us know how much he has enjoyed reading our posts. He said he particularly enjoys our “Eye of a St Louis web designer” photographs which have included everything from garden weeds, shells, acorns and our latest entry an ant habitat!
Thank you Mr. B for your kind comments.

It got me thinking about the use of imagergy in web sites. An image can speak a thousand words. Take this photograph for example.

We use it on the portfolio pages of our web site and team it with the phrase “Stand out from the Crowd” to emphasize the metaphorical message it sends.

Web site visitors are …and this is not meant to be rude … inherently lazy. As a web site designer one of my objectives is to get the message of any given page, across as quickly as possible and the use of appropriate imagery is a great way to do this.

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Eye of a St Louis Web Designer

As a web designer I spend a lot of time at my desk “creating” Sometimes it is nice to have a little distraction to let those creative juices flow or just rest the eyes. While my office window offers a great view, an unsual item on my desk is currently acting as my “eye rest”

It is an ant habitat, and watching these industrious little creatures is amazing. In three days they have done this much tunneling!

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A web design project:St Louis based Throttlenet

As a web design company one of the best compliments a client can give, is to refer us to one of their clients. This ties with a client approaching us to rework an original project we completed for them.

We are currently undertaking one such project, with the redesign of the web site for Throttlenet. We first starting working with Throttlenet, A Full Service Information Technology Integrator, in 2000 and have partnered with them in the development of numerous projects over the years.

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Designing web sites for cross browser compatibility

Although most people will stick with a favorite browser to view web sites there are a multitude to chose from … Safari, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox …. and all of these have many versions

Consider browser choice with operating systems( e.g Linux Fedora Core 4, Macintosh OSX 10.4, Windows 98, Windows XP) and the different combinations grows horribly large.

As a web designer an important consideration in designing and coding a web site is how well it is going to perform across the gamut of browser and operation systems. In an ideal world all browsers would display any given web site in exactly the same way. Alas this is not the case. What may perform fabulously on Internet Explorer 6.0 may be full of flaws when viewed using Netscape 7.2.

During the development of our web sites we constantly test our code to see how it performs… testing them on a total of 53 browser/operating system combinations. This enables us to tweak our code so our web sites look good and perform as designed no matter what operating system or browser you or your site visitors are using.

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Blogging: A tool for your St Louis Business?

Most business owners understand the important of having a presence of the web. As the internet has evolved it has offered more and more platforms for interaction and one of the most popular to emerge over the last few years is blogging …both for business and on a personal level.

So is your business ready for a blog? Here are the top 5 reasons you should start blogging

  1. A business blog is a excellent way to get found by people searching for your type of product or service.
  2. Search engines love fresh content and will visit a blog more frequently than static page websites.
  3. A blog shows your personality, your expertise, and your character; people will hire or buy from you when they feel they trust and like you.
  4. A blog expands your global reach, pulling in qualified prospects you would never have reached before.
  5. A blog allows you to interact with readers, get feedback, introduce them to your ideas, and builds relationships.

Blogging is easy to do and requires no technical knowledge to execute on a day to day basis.

If blogging is a tool you would like to add to your marketing mix then contact us today. We are experts at configuring and integrating blogs to both new and existing web sites.