Category: Indigo Image Tips

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Your web site…is it time to re design?

Re-design is a natural cycle of having a web site. What worked well …say eight years ago, may not be performing up the mark for you today. While many changes can be made by a little web maintenace here and there, there comes a time when only a full scale redesign is going help you accomplish your objective.

But how do you know when that time has come? Here are four tell-tale signs that the time has come to re-design.

  1. Your Business has grown or changed
    While any good web site will be designed so it can accomodate moderate business growth, if your business is booming and you have extended your service offering it is likely that your original web site is not doing you justice. The same goes if you have changed the direction of your business.
  2. Outdated Design
    You only get one chance to make a first impression and if the overall look/feel of your site is radically “behind the times” you can lose credibility. If your site features animated clipart, is coded as frames or looks like a “Front Page template you are the victim of an outdated design!
  3. Your information lacks organization
    If you have been adding to your site over the years it is likely that your navigation has become a little confused. Making your visitors “think” when navigating will not engage them to the same extend as a well thought out navigation and information structure.
  4. Poor Performace in the Search engines
    Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn’t designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.

If any of these senarios describe your web site contact us at info@indigoimage.com to see how we can help bring you up to date in the web world.

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Our web and graphic design blog

We started our blog in June 2005 and nearly three years later are still going strong.

You may find this blog intresting if you are looking to hire a web or graphic designer, you are interested in web site usability and search engine optimization or are a web/graphic designer looking for some tips and tricks.

Today I am going to talk a little about the sort of subjects we cover here for any of our new readers. Each of our posts are given one or more label to categorize them so I thought it would make sense to talk about our categories:-

  • Design Snippets
    We cover subjects here that are useful to graphic and web designer. For example Meaning and associations of color, What is Ipsum Lorem and Favicons.
  • Eye of the St Louis Web Designer
    A picture speaks a thousand words and most of the photographs we feature in this section are of something that has given us inspiration, from a fabulous natural color palette to a great texture or pattern. As mentioned thoughtout these posts a designer’s eye never sleeps
  • FREE
    Who doesn’t like free stuff. We cover everything from free custom i google designs, the free definition phase or our projects to our much visited recipe for a garden deer repellant.
  • Graphic Design projects
    A showcase of graphic design projects, from brochures, letterheads, banners, menus, logos, newsletters, greeting cards and packaging.
  • Indigo Tips
    Tips to improve your productivity and internet experience
  • Internet marketing
    The ever changing world of  Search engine optimization.
  • Logos
    A showcase of our logo design
  • Project Progress
    We multi task big time and this section illustrates the current projects we are working on
  • Random Thoughts
    I think everyblog needs a section like this..a little bit of everything here..and as the title suggests …random
  • STL Marketing executive
    A category written by our guest writer. He shares perspectives drawn from his experience of branding, global business management and marketing in a B2B environment.
  • Web design Projects
    A showcase of our web design projects
  • Web Site Usability
    Considerations for giving your site visitors the experience you want them to have.
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Celebrating a blog milestone


Writing a blog takes commitment. Obviously there is the element of time it takes to write a post but there is also the commitment to deliver quality content and post regularly.

Today we are celebrating our 200th post!

A tool I have recently started using to read blogs is Google Reader Another great free application from Google, Google reader allows you to subscribe to your favorite blogs and then delivers any new posts to your iGoogle page via a widget. (For more information on iGoogle see this post). Using the reader allows you to keep up to date with the blogs that interest you and saves time from actually visiting the blogs.

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Your blog voice

In a post I wrote last week I talked about creating branded blogs and mentioned we were currently creating one for St Louis based Throttlenet.

The blog is now up and running, visit it here>> ThrottleBlog

Throttlenet have their blog set up so various team members can contribute, which is a great approach for a multi faceted corporation. It will give the blog a very rounded “voice“.

We have two “voices” on this blog me..St Louis Web Designer and St Louis Marketing Executive

We have very different styles but that is exactly how a blog should be. Each contributor has a unique voice and personality, and brings to the blog something that no one else can.

It takes time to develop a blog voice but the more you write the more your style and voice will evolve.

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St Louis Web Designer – tip of the week

Ok this has nothing what so ever to do with designing web sites but a is a tip for all those St Louis gardeners battling with deer infested gardens. This is a nugget of gold found online and provides a very cost effective way of protecting your plants from ” deer digestion” Many web designers I know are very keen gardens so I felt I should share

Ingredients:-

2 eggs
1 cup of skimmed milk
1 cup of water
2 tablespoons of dish detergent

Put all ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth. Pour mixture into a old “409” type spray bottle. Spray all the plants in your garden that the deer like to eat.

The deer are repelled by the smell of rotting eggs… but I have been unable to detect much of a odor. It is cost effective and bio-degradable.

I whip up a batch of this a week and it does the trick

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Are you using iGoogle?

As a web designer I spend a lot of time online and Google continues to make those online hours easier.
They have recently introduced iGoogle which allows users to personalise their searching experience and create a talyored interface with user defined content. I have the feeds from my favorite blogs, bookmarks to expediate my work process, St Louis weather forecast and a spell checker. The variety of “stuff” you can add to your home page is huge, tools such as a translator, windows short cutes, a To-Do list, feeds, joke of the day ….the list is endless.

iGoogle also offers the opportunity to add a theme to your home page. I selected beach …a dynamic theme in which the sun moves throughout the day mirroring the position of the sun at my Zip code! There is also a bus stop theme which matches your local weather.

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Email content filters

Back in May, I updated the content filters on my regular email account and as an experiment kept a tally of the number of emails the filters have sucessfully re routed to my junk bin. Today the tally hit 10,000!

The content filters do need tweaking everynow and again but is well worth the time and effort to save me wading through such a huge amount of unwanted rubbish!

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St Louis web designer: Tip of the week.

As a web designer I spend many hours online. One of my daily tasks is a quick review of my email spam folder to make sure nothing is there that should be in my inbox. The spam is then deleted..in the last month my deleted spam was 1525 emails!

While this task takes a few minute to complete it is nothing to the task of sorting through the junk that comes via the mail man. In these days of identity theft I shred all “You have been appoved for our fabulous credit card” applications and sometimes I have up to six a day.

..and then I discovered optoutprescreen.com.

Visit this web site and you can opt out of offers from credit and insurance companies. It works!