Flash focused sites (full Flash sites):
Moodstream (brainstorming tool)
Uniroyal Fun Cup (racing game)
Chipotle (restaurant)

Sites with Flash elements (not full Flash sites):
Atlantic Vegas (only the game selections are done in Flash)
American Academy Casablanca (home page has a Flash photo gallery)
Conference Torquay (home page has 3 small rotating Flash photo galleries)

To use Flash or not?
There are few things to consider when thinking about using Flash on your website: your budget, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and your industry type.

Consider your web design budget
A standard website can cost you anywhere from $500 to $3000 and that doesn’t include Flash. There are many factors that go into the price of a website, but Flash would be considered an added feature and therefore would cost you hundreds extra. So, when considering including Flash on your website, first take a look at your budget and see if you can afford it.

SEO and Flash
There are a couple of reasons why you would like to have a Flash site for your business, it grabs visitor’s attention and it’s interactive. On the other hand, you might not want to have a full Flash site for your business because they’re made up of graphics and graphics are not search engine optimized (SEO). It is very important to have your website be SEO friendly, but that’s a different topic. Your website can of course have Flash elements like those shown in the examples above.

Is your business in an industry that’s ready for Flash?
The type of industry that your business is in has also a factor of how much Flash on your website you should use (if you decide to use it). For example, if you’re in a Health Care industry your website doesn’t need any Flash, but you may still use Flash elements minimally. The main reason for this is because the visitors that would come to your website would not typically wait for the Flash to load, they just want to get in, find what they’re looking for and leave. But if you’re in the Arts and Entertainment industry, than it would be good for your website to have at least some Flash in it. I would at least suggest for your website to use a Flash photo gallery. When people come to an entertainment type of website, they are more interested to interact with your website and take their time to view things such as slide shows.

So before you consider to have your website designed in Flash, first thing about your budget, your search engine ranking and your industry type.

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What we couldn’t have possibly imagined just a decade ago has become a reality: everything has moved online. We shop online, we do our banking online, we play online, and we even socialize online. In addition, research shows that when making buying decisions, the first place people go to for researching their options is the Internet.

Which brings up the question, if everything takes place online these days, and especially if you’re an online business, should you still use printed marketing materials such as brochures as part of your marketing strategy?

Why printed marketing materials are still valuable

The short answer is yes. Marketing is never about just one medium. It’s always a mistake to focus on just one aspect of marketing and to neglect the others. A good marketing campaign utilizes many different mediums to generate many different leads, then nurtures them until they are ready to become customers.

So, while “online” is really hot these days, the physical world still exists, and there are enough potential customers who, after the initial online research, expect to see printed material. These people typically find it difficult to trust a business if it’s completely virtual. They need to know that you have a physical address, a phone number, and that they can see a brochure or other types of printed material before they commit to you.

If you ignore these consumers, you have just lost a segment of the population that could have been interested in your solution.

No doubt, when you plan your marketing budget, you need to pay special attention to online components, including your Web site, your blog and your social media accounts. Ideally, you want to have a great logo, and you want your logo to appear on all online venues (main site, blog header, Twitter background etc.)

To keep your brand highly unique and identifiable, you should also have the same logo appear on your business cards and on any printed marketing materials such as brochures and flyers.

How to create an effective brochure

Now that we’ve established the importance of brochures and of other printed marketing materials, here are a few handy tips for writing and designing an effective brochure:

1. Make it visually appealing. Design is extremely important when it comes to brochures. If the design is boring or cluttered, people won’t bother to read your text. Look for a small business graphic designer who has a lot of experience and can show you samples of their previous work. Better yet, make sure they have positive testimonials on their site, or on a third party site.

2. Focus on benefits rather than on features. Prospects don’t care about your product’s features. They want you to answer the question, “what’s in it for me?” and your brochure needs to be able to answer that question, or it will be tossed!

3. Keep it short. Do you really need a 10-page brochure? Generally, short, catchy brochures with a large font and a clean design are better than long, tiresome, technical brochures.

4. Make it personal. Write your brochure in a direct, conversational tone – as if you are talking with a person face to face. The more personal and direct your tone is, the easier it will be for prospects to connect with your message.

5. Include a call for action. Every marketing material should include a call for action, and this is true for brochures as well. A call for action can be as simple as ending your brochure with the sentence “Need ____? Call today” and your phone number. The idea is to present the pain, your business as the solution, and to encourage the prospect to take immediate action by calling you.

Whether you have a physical location or fully operate online, your small business marketing strategy should include online marketing materials AND printed marketing materials. This combination will make sure you don’t neglect an important segment of your potential market.

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Content

• Catch the web browser’s eye with content that is interesting and unique. If visitors see something that piques their interest, they’ll stick around and check out what else your small business has to offer.
• Make regular updates so people have a reason to return. Provide links to new information from your homepage, or offer email updates–returning visitors will appreciate the ease of seeing what’s new.
• Ensure that the people who find your site are interested in your content by optimizing for the right keywords.

Design

• A professional-looking website inspires confidence in your product or services, encouraging people to trust your website’s content and consider browsing your site worth their time.
• Organize your content in a way that makes it easy to browse. Provide your visitors with a natural path through your website, so they continue moving and checking out new pages.
• Avoid Flash intros and other design choices that will make your website load slowly. People often have limited patience and will move on without waiting for your page to load.

Interactivity

• The Internet is growing increasingly social, and people appreciate websites that provide ways to interact. Comments, ratings, and polls all encourage users to become more invested in your site, and can also help you learn valuable information about their experience.
• Include internal links whenever they’re relevant, so visitors keep discovering new parts of your website. Avoid outbound links on your homepage–you don’t want to direct visitors away before they even have a chance to see your site–and have them open in new tabs or windows so your website stays open.

Keep these principles in mind, and you’ll find that your website visitors will stick around longer (a lower bounce rate) and return often, resulting in higher conversion rates and improved visitor response.

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• 7 Great Tips For Obtaining Success With Your Website (slideshare.net)
• Keep Your Website Visitors Coming Back (lazerpromotions.com)
• You Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners (alistapart.com)

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If you’ve missed the discussion, you can download the transcript Designing Your Business Website Transcript

Read my interview with SmallBizLady at Website Design Basics for Start-up Businesses

Find out what is #SmallBizChat

How to Participate in #Smallbizchat

Follow me on Twitter @DesignLeap

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Working with Balsamiq Mockups lets you focus on the structure/wire frame of the software or website that you’re developing. The great thing about it is that it looks like you’re sketching, but it takes less time and it’s so much easier to “erase” and replace an item. When you present a sketched wire frame, your team takes the focus away from colors and perfection. The sketched look lets everyone focus on the most important aspects of your project. For example, when I use Balsamiq Mockups for website design, it’s easier for my clients to focus on the placement of the navigation buttons and the arrangement of other elements on the page without concentrating on the gradients, colors, or try to choose “better” images at this initial stage.

Overall Pluses

• Sketched look, everyone feels more comfortable giving honest feedback.

• Faster than using pen and paper and your artistic skills aren’t criticized.

• “Sketch It” a feature that turns any image into a sketch, this is really cool and impressive.

• Works with keyboard shortcuts, makes working much easier and faster.

• Over 60 controls to choose from, plus there are plugins and updates added on Tuesdays on the Balsamiq Blog

• Easy-to-use control panel where you can further size, adjust, group and perform other various functions.

Some things to Adjust
• When importing an image perhaps have options on the import for image to “fit to window”, “scale proportionally”… Currently the image gets skewed (auto fit to window).

• Similar auto fit to window issue for the Cover Flow, but I haven’t noticed that there’s a way to adjust after important, so may be this is something to add.

• In the icon pop-up box, it would be great to add a Social Media category to find all the popular social media icons faster. Also, may be have an image import right in here that makes images “icon size” right away.

More website critiques

Balsamiq Mockups is a great software and there’s a lot that it can do, so visit www.balsamiq.com try a demo and buy your copy, because it will save you a lot of time when working on your software or website project.

If you’re reading this review and want to add more suggestions, please add your comments below.

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What was wrong with that website?

Well, there was nothing about the website that said, “We sell flowers”. I don’t mean literally, but when a visitors arrives to your website, they should almost immediately know what the website is about. On top of that, this website was built all in Flash, meaning there’s no way for search engines to crawl the pages of this website. Not having the website search engine friendly is a huge loss for this small business.

Is cutting corners worth losing your business image?

The design of that flower shop website wasn’t professional, it looked like a job of a student who’s still practicing design skills. Shouldn’t the beautiful flower arrangements that this shop sells be represented in the same professional quality website? Your website reflects your business image, many will see your website without ever meeting you. Many who visit a poor quality website will reflect that what you sell will be poor quality also. Do you want to make a sale or do you want to lose that visitor for good. It’s really important to have a quality website that delivers what your customers are expecting to see. Unless you’ve done business with that person before, you wont win a visitor over with a poor website where it’s hard to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

Before hiring a Web Designer

It’s to your business’s best interest for you to do a little “homework” on what’s involved in a website design. You don’t have to become an expert, but you should understand the basics. Don’t be afraid to ask questions! Any Web Designer that you choose should be able to answer your website design questions or at least find the answer and educate you on your options before proceeding with the design. In the case of the flower shop, the use of all Flash was a poor choice; this is where the Web Designer should have educated the owner not to go this route.

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In Photoshop, a checkered background represents transparency, when you save your work, the checkered pattern will not show. The only way to remove it, is to add an actual background on the layer under your image.

Checkerboard pattern in Photoshop

Background removed

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The two must have things to having a website live on the Internet for everyone to see are a domain name and a hosting account. Let me explain what those are and pointers on few other things that are needed to get your website online:

1. Domain Names
   A domain name is what you call your website. It is also referred to as an address or a URL. This is what the user will type in the browser to find your business. You must use a unique domain name that no-one else is using. The Internet is built using many large computers, called servers that know how to talk to each other using special addresses, called an Internet Protocol addresses or IP addresses. When you create a name like MyBusiness.com you need to register the domain name so that:
   • No-one else can use it
   • The internet servers will know how to find it by assigning an IP address to it

There are many organizations that will register the domain name for you, but we use and recommend startlogic.com.

2. Domain Name Extensions

By convention, a .com address is a commercial business and is the most widely used in the world. Other conventions used in the U.S. are .edu for educational facility, such as a university, .org for an organization such as not-for-profit organizations, and .gov used by government websites. After .com, .net and .org are the most memorable extensions. Different countries use different conventions, generally used to indicate their country. For example check out www.google.ca (Canada’s Google), www.google.com.mx for Mexico’s Google, and www.google.co.uk for the United Kingdom’s Google.

3. Hosting a Website

Some organizations only give you the name – they don’t give you a space for your website. Lets compare this to a P.O. Box. When you just get a domain name it’s like getting a P.O. Box address, you can’t actually move your stuff in there. The whole purpose to have a business website is to attract visitors to your products/services, for this hosting is required. Some companies will both register your domain name and host your website. However, domain and hosting providers can be different for one site. Again we use and recommend startlogic.com for your website hosting needs.

4. Building a website

Registering a domain name and signing up with a hosting provider does not necessarily mean you have a website live online. What you have is a space for your website to live online. Let’s take an example of a physical retail store. To have an actual brick and mortar retail store, you need to lease a space, so once you sign your lease you can move in your products and organize your store. Same goes for a website, domain name is your address, hosting is your space and now you need to build a website for your customers to view your products/services. There are two ways to build your business website. You can learn how to build your own or have a professional web designer do it for you. Building your own is the most cost effective way to put up a website but it means you have to spend time to learn something about building and maintaining it, that means taking you away from your business duties. Having a professional web designer create your website will assure you that your website is built right, user friendly and free you to work on your business.

5. Working with Design Leap

Choosing Design Leap to build your business website means you have a one-on-one relationship with a professional designer to guide you and answer all your questions while developing a business website that is targeting your ideal customers. This is the way to go if you’re looking to save time and money in the long run.

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3. What is your Business Image Worth?

When you have a business, you want your brand to be recognized in everything that you do. Having your business on Twitter is no different. By creating a custom Twitter background you will instantly stand out, bring credibility to your brand and leave a lasting impression to your visitors.

There are no set rules on how your background needs to look or what size it needs to be, but here are some pointers on what to do to keep that professional image.

• Keep all-important information on the left-hand side of the page.
• Always include your logo.
• Include your actual photo, this way you bring more trust and can result in more followers.
• Use colors that are similar to your brand to keep consistent.
• Use relevant images/graphics.
• Do NOT hard sell!
• Do list links of your websites, blogs, and other networking site where you can be found.

How to determine what size to make your Twitter background

The best way is to look at your website’s analytics program and see what are your visitor’s browser screen resolutions. Take a look at the top two and based on that, you can choose what would be the best size for your background. Keep in mind that the smaller the resolution, the less space you have for design.

The best approach to designing a custom Twitter background

Create everything in layers (it’s easier to make changes when you’re working with layers). This does not mean that you need to have Photoshop to do this. There are many free alternatives to Photoshop that perform just as great. I am recommending the “Phoenix” by Aviary.com as it’s very similar to Photoshop.

• Your first layer should be the main image, color or gradient that will serve as the pallet for your design.
• Next few layers don’t have to be in this order. You can start with the top banner that’s where you can add another color or gradient. This is where the Twitter logo and menu will sit so keep in mind the visibility when choosing colors.
• The last and most important step is to add your information to the left-hand side of the page and it’s best if you place this on it’s own layer.

Use one of these templates as a guide on proper placement of your information

1024 x 768 Template	1280 x 800 Template

Quick tip: Do NOT place important information below 600 pixels in height no matter the screen resolution size. This is because some users might have extra tool bars on their browser window, which pushes all the information down.

After you download the background template, open it in the design program of your choice and use it as bottom layer to server as a guide for you to place your information. When you’re done with your design, delete the layer with template. Save your design as GIF, JPG, or PNG format. Then go to your twitter page and follow these steps:

• Select Settings
• Choose the Design tab
• Click on Change background image
• Upload your image
• Make sure that tile background is NOT checked
• Save changes

That’s it you’re done!

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