EvoBloggito

Video: How to Add Your Business to Google Local Business Center

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 26, 2009; Category: Marketing, Search/SEO, Video; Tags: Local Search, Marketing; No Comments

This video from fall, 2008 is a pretty good explanation of how to add your business to Google’s local business center to appear in Google local search results and Google maps. Well worth the nearly 8 minutes of your time. Kudos to Small Business Web Guru for making this clear and concise video.

Researching the Cost of Yellow Pages Advertising

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 26, 2009; Category: Marketing; Tags: Marketing, Yellow Pages; No Comments

It’s been exactly 3 weeks since I called Dex to inquire about Yellow Pages advertising, and was told they would have a “specialist” call me within 2-3 days. I’m still waiting for that call. Frankly, I’m puzzled about why it would take a specialist to read from a price list. Two possible explanations spring to mind:

1. Yellow Pages pricing is very, very complicated, or
2. Yellow Pages pricing is so breath-takingly high that Dex needs someone to call me back who is specially trained to deal with price objections, or perhaps to keep me from jumping from the ledge until the firetrucks arrive.

But that’s just speculation; we need facts. To be fair, someone from Dex may have called me. At least 3-4 times every week, I hear from people calling from somewhere on the other side of the globe, and many of them want to put me in a phone directory of one variety or another. As soon as I hear the words “yellow pages,” I interrupt to tell them I’m not interested, thank you, and hang up. Perhaps one of those callers was my Dex specialist. So, I will call Dex again and prepare to listen more closely to those calls over the next few days in order to get the information I’m after.

Where we’re headed with this is a comparison of advertising/marketing approaches for local business in Santa Fe: local radio, local newspaper ads, Yellow Pages, and online (website and blog). It won’t be an ROI comparison (results vary so widely, depending on so many variables), but an out-of-pocket expense comparison. Of course, that comparison will be detailed here on EvoBloggito.

Your Business Website as a Garden: For Show or Food?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 24, 2009; Category: Blogging, Business, Marketing, Search/SEO, Zeitgeist; Tags: Local Search, Marketing; 2 Comments

People have gardens for different reasons. There are flower gardens, usually out front where passersby can easily see them, which are meant to provide enjoyment or present a certain "look" to the neighborhood and to the people who live there. And there are vegetable gardens, which provide food.

If your vegetable garden is a hobby, and you don’t depend on it (i.e., nobody goes hungry if the tomato plants die), getting the kids to water it and pull weeds is a chore in itself. If your garden provides a significant portion of the food that ends up on the dinner table, however, watering and weed-pulling are a lot more interesting and engaging. You can be proud of a nice flower garden, but you can live off a well-managed vegetable garden.

Business websites and blogs are like that. If a website or blog is just for show, and/or disconnected from the marketing functions, no one takes a lot of interest in keeping it filled with fresh content and making sure it engages the company’s customers. These are the websites that often fall into the "set-it-and-forget-it" category: the gardening equivalent of plastic flowers, which show their age as they collect dust and their colors fade in the sunlight. On the other hand, a business website that’s continually updated with new features and timely information is like a well-cared for flower garden which is trimmed, watered, and kept fresh with new plants. People can tell the difference, with gardens and with websites.

Traditional websites are like flower gardens. They’re meant to impress people and tell a certain story about a company, to both its customers and employees. The best ones impress people, but even the badly done ones succeed in telling a story, if not necessarily the one a company had in mind. Blogs are more like vegetable gardens. They can lead to increased visibility, prospects, and business if they are worked diligently and intelligently. In my opinion, most companies need both, and they would benefit by caring for them with adequate time, attention, and resources.

I hear frequently that maintaining a website, writing blog posts, and taking part in social media is "just too time-consuming," and sometimes, "too expensive." Probably so, if you treat those activities as "hobbies" rather than as an integral and critical part of marketing in 2009. If you recognized that, done well, those activities could result in more customers (i.e., putting food on the table), you’d see it as time and resources well-spent.

Online marketing, like gardening, bears fruit when you to view it as a serious pursuit worthy of your time and effort. Until then, you should probably expect a bigger than necessary marketing budget and increasingly mediocre results.

Web Designer, Web Developer: What’s the Difference?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 18, 2009; Category: CSS, Design/Development, Usability; Tags: CSS, Design/Development; No Comments

The terms "web designer" and "web developer" can mean just about anything, depending on who’s using them and why. I’m going to make a case for definitions that indicate two different skill sets, with each offering different services (perhaps with some minor overlap on occasion). Hopefully, there will eventually be widespread agreement about the differences and areas of overlap in the designations. In the meantime, there’s a comment form at the end of this post that begs for your disagreement with (or support for) my opinions about these terms.

Web Designer

Web designers are first, and foremost, designers. They might be able to tinker with javascript to make an existing jQuery plugin look or behave the way they want, and they might be able to copy and paste and rework some minor php, but they’re unable to write their own functions. And databases? Fugeddaboudit!

However, web designers are experts at CSS, Photoshop, and XHTML. Given half a chance, they can bore you to death with discussions about how to clear floats or when (or if) it’s appropriate to use tables. They understand web typography, color, spacing of elements, navigation, directing eye-path, enhancing user experience and accessibility, and have at least a working knowledge of information architecture.

Assuming they’re good at what they do, when they complete a website, it looks good, it’s easy to navigate, the information is readable, and the site’s look and feel supports and enhances the content. Web designers are sometimes referred to as "front-end developers," but in my mind this term indicates some expertise in javascript.

Web Developer

Web developers offer significant programming services and database development in whichever flavors they have chosen to master. At a personal level, they may or may not also be web designers, but usually not. Few people are competent at both design and programming (I don’t know a single expert programmer I would hire as a designer).

I’ve also found that the term "programmer" means different things to different people ("designer" is subject to interpretation also: everyone who owns a copy of Dreamweaver or InDesign calls themselves a designer). Some people who press buttons in .NET call themselves programmers, even though they are unable to write even the simplest functions. As a result, when they’re part of a web team, the rest of the team adapts to the needs of the software, instead of having the programmer adapt to achieve the desired result.

At a company level, a web development company may be comprised of people who, individually, could not offer both design and programming at professional levels of competence. I consider myself a web designer. My company is a web development company because my business partner has very strong complementary skill sets in programming and database development. We’ve always joked that, while we can accomplish a lot together, individually we’re kind of pathetic. At least I think she was joking…

The Optimal Line Length Principle Applied to Web Design

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Jun 16, 2009; Category: CSS, Design/Development; Tags: CSS, Design/Development; 6 Comments

The other day I pointed out some of the differences between web design and print design. It started me thinking about some of the things I learned as a print designer that are also applicable to web design. One of the most useful is the Principle of Optimal Line Length. It states that, for any given font-size of a multiple-line block of type (like a paragraph), there is a range of line lengths and line-heights that most people consider easily readable.

Those 3 attributes—font-size, line-height, line length—are inter-related.* Change one, and you may need to change at least one of the others for most people to consider the text readable. In simple terms it means that, the wider the line length, the greater the line-height must be. Or, the bigger the font, the wider the line length. Or, the greater the line-height, the bigger the font.

Below is an illustration meant to demonstrate the relationships between the 3 attributes. In the top section are 2 blocks of text, each with 13-pixel font-size and 16-pixel line-height. Too my eye (and this is why it’s called a principle, not a rule that has formulas and ratios), the wider lines look too tight and dense. However, with the same font-size and line-height in a much shorter line length, I think it looks very readable.

Below that is a section that includes the same font-sizes (13 pixels) with a line-height of 22 pixels. Further below that section are font samples that also have a line-height of 22 pixels, but a font-size of 18 pixels.

So how does this apply specifically to web design? Because of my awareness of the principle, I always consider the line length as well as the font-size when specifying line-height. Also, I never create "fluid" layouts that expand the width of an area that contains text, because sooner or later, the expanded or contracted line length will make the text unreadable (in my and many other people’s opinions). I love IE7′s (never thought I’d be say I love anything about IE) and Firefox’s "scale-up" feature, because when a viewer wants to make the font bigger, it makes everything bigger (line-height and line length), preserving the optimal line length relationships.

Because it’s a principle rather than a rule, designers have some latitude in which to exercise their judgment. As a web designer concerned with readability, I look for the "sweet spot," in which font-size, line-height, and line length allow people to read multiple-line text blocks comfortably and easily.

*Only 2 of the 3 are actually "attributes" in CSS, and I’ve used the CSS hyphenation for them, which may not be "correct" according to Webster’s Dictionary or your high school English teacher.