Month: January 2010

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The uses of color in web design

Color is one of the most important tools in a web designers tool box. It happens to be one of my favorite.

The uses of Color: Define: Engage : Differentiate

Color can can be used to define, think of brands like T Mobile (they have a trademark for Magenta) , UPS ( What can brown do for you) and our very own Indigo Image.

color_logos

It can be used to engage – look at these example of call to action elements.

And can be used to differentiate, look how the use of color on this web site is tied into the navigation.

Colors are also associated with different emotions and meanings but interestingly these emotions can change depending on the palette in which they are used.

Stay tuned for more about color palettes next time.

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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A couple of time saving Google Tools

Here are two time saving tools recently launched by Google.

Firstly if you are a blogger and use Twitter to promote your blog posts (it was one of my best uses of Twitter – Can Twitter Help My Business), Google’s Feedburner now incorporates a “socialize function”. This allows Feedburner to automatically tweet any new blog post directly to Twitter. It can be customized in a variety of ways including

  • Post content: Title, Title and body or body only
  • Inclusion of a link
  • Automatic creation of hash tags
  • The ability to add custom text

A nice little time saver, you can read more about it here: AdSense for Feeds: Socializing your feed with Twitter.

Secondly is the Share button built into the latest Google Toolbar, download it here.
The share button enables you to send any page you visit to a huge variety of social networks, blogging accounts, email address anything from Facebook to Yahoo Bookmarks. It provides a shortened version of the URL – particularly useful for Twitter accounts where you are limited to 140 characters.

As usual both of these tools are offered for free. What tools are you using to save time?

Click for more tips and tricks

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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Zoe Feast Web and Graphic Designer

I have an usual name, Zoe Feast. That’s Zoe with a long “eeee” sound at the end and Feast pronounced Feast… as in Thanksgiving Feast. It really is that easy!

As a self marketing project I have made use of my name and launched ZoeFeast.com today. It follows the lines of a ” business card website”, inspired by this great blog post. A simple, one page portal to my networks and company.

I broke away from my Indigo Image corporate brand image for this project and enjoyed the creative freedom.

What unique aspect do you have with which to market your business?

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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St Louis Web Designer’s question of the day: Do you provide web hosting?

Do you provide web hosting? This is one of my popular “Frequently Asked Questions”.

The short answer is no, but the long answer is yes.

We are a web design company not a web hosting company and are happy to leave the intricacies of web hosting to the experts. However we can work with any web host of our clients choosing (or recommend a hosting company). This is a seamless process for our clients and all the nuts and bolts of getting a site live are taken care of. Once their site is ready we will open a hosting account suitable for their needs, upload all the files, configure email addresses and make sure their domain names are pointing to the right place.

This one stop shop type service is what most clients are wondering when they ask “Do you provide web hosting”

2010 © St Louis Web Designer

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A decade in Business for the St Louis Web Designer

10 years in web design
Happy New Year! 2010 will see Indigo Image, home of the St Louis web designer, celebrate 10 years in business! It is a milestone we are extremely proud of, showing that we can not only survive but thrive in this highly competitive market.

We have had lots of really great clients over the last decade but have a particular soft spot for our very first client “Jacqueline’s Journeys”. The web site is no longer active but I will always be grateful to Jacqueline for putting her trust in us to build her online presence.

So we are looking forward to what the next 10 years will bring, the clients we will meet and the new technological tools in our “tool box”.

2010 © St Louis Web Designer