I am currently working on a new website for hosting. Along with helpful frequently asked questions, Node Hosting will have three affordable plans to suit everyone’s needs from basic to custom.

I’ve been gaining interest in learning more about how to better market business’s websites. Thought I would start with books I can find at the library first, after all they are free! I came across “Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites” by Kevin Potts. It was a quick read because most of the information in the book was just review. But he did have a few quotes I liked on how he could explain situations to someone that does not have to know much about web design.

Avoiding Corporate speak - about writing better copy for the web

Imaging walking into a pastry shop, asking for a Boston cream doughnut, and getting the following response from the shopkeeper: “That particular confection, with its falsely historical nomenclature of alternate-desert elements and synergistic relationship with first light beverages…” You would probably leave. As you walked down the street looking for a Dunkin’ Donuts, you’d wonder how that bakery ever stayed in business.

The goal of copy should be to open dialog with your target audience with plain language to not intimidate them.

Reading Level
I thought it was interesting that most TV shows are written at an eighth-grade reading level to appeal to everyone. “TV is written by professionals who know how to speak to a board demographic in a common language.” It is common to assume your audience is more educated than they really are. People do not want to think too hard when reading, especially on the web where it’s easy to just click somewhere else.

Corporate Blogging
I did not realize how popular corporate blogging has become, he recommended a few books and websites on the issue:

Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care

buisinessblogconsulting.com - Advice, tips and best practices for corporate blogs

Technorati.com - Recognized hub of all things blogging; tracks millions of blogs

RSS for the website
There can be multiple RSS feeds on a website, which I did not think about before. Places where a RSS fed could be helpful would be on the careers page, corporate news, e-commerce (promotions, sales, new additions), support, and of course the blog. Keeping readers completely up to date will only generate more and more sales.

The Lowe’s design changes again ever so slightly. We’re getting closer to Christmas, it’s in the air!

Kim Myles from HGTV is even helping out this holiday season.

If you hover over and click the elf peaking around the top left corner, he'll take you to the Black Friday page.

I started reading another Sitepoint book, Online Marketing Inside Out. I always enjoy reading books and emails from Sitepoint.

Click to download an excerpt from the book “Online Marketing Inside Out” by Brandon Eley & Shayne Tilley.

Press Releases

I was intrigued to learn about press releases (on page 8). I wouldn’t have thought to send out press releases, I thought it was just a thing of the past. In the book it states, “Start now! You simply cannot write too many press releases.” There are many different opportunities to send out a press release, a new service/product to announce, case study on how you helped a client, won an award, customer testimonials, and many more. Adding hyperlinks, photos, audio, video and buttons to social media facilities will further take advantage of it being online and further attracting the audience.

Modern Monitoring of Press Coverage (page 27)

When other people are writing about your company, you would want to know about it right? Monitoring what is said on the web is like keyword research, things to consider tracking are: company name, key employees’ names and phrases you want to rank well in. You can use RSS feeds, Technorati (blog search engine), Google Alerts, Trackur (social media monitoring), Twitterverse (type a word and you’ll see every time it’s been mentioned) and many more mentioned in the book to monitor online press coverage.

To learn more about online marketing you will have to purchase the book on Sitepoint.

With some experience optimizing web pages for SEO under my belt, it was great to learn more about SEO from workshops at work at Lowe’s. A company called Resolution Media came in to share their knowledge and show us how to improve our site on many different types of pages.

Resolution Media gave us a list of tips for 10 Design Best Practices for SEO, I thought it would be helpful to share. I’m sure some of this will just be overview for some of you out there.

10 Design Best Practices for SEO

1. Avoid Splash Pages because of slow loading time and no crawable text
2. Avoid Flash/Javascript menus because links aren’t crawable and they don’t pass on link popularity
3. Don’t overuse Flash, images, etc.
4. Change generic Anchor Text to be more descriptive
   • Click Here for Kitchen Appliances instead of just Click Here
5. Write informative Title Tags
   • Lowe’s Home Improvement: Buy Kitchen Cabinets, Paint, Appliances and Flooring instead of just Lowe’s Home Improvement
6. Describe images with detailed ALT tags
7. Use CSS to give spider cleaner code to crawl
8. Avoid embedding CSS/Javascript
9. Use Header Tags for
10. If you use Flash/Javascript, utilize Progressive Enhancement

Lowe’s launched the new holiday design today. See images below of the design for the new homepage. (Click images to see a larger version.)

The homepage becomes interactive.

It’s almost a complete redesign of the entire site. Notice how the background is no longer blue? Just to remind you what it looked like before, see the image below:

The left navigation was removed to allow for more space in the design and I think it makes it less busy. There is definitely more of a warm homey feel to the new design with the warm tan background and subtle areas of red and other fall colors. It introduces Christmas, but without it being too overpowering since it is only October.

Check out the site for yourself before the design changes: www.lowes.com.

Got the job at Lowe’s as a Web Production Designer a month ago. Just wanted to share some of the things I’ve been working on. I’ve been working on illustrations, cropping photos, getting things ready for the web and exporting XML files. Only problem is it’s only a 2-month+ contract, so I will be looking for new employment very soon.
It’s been very exciting learning how a large company like Lowe’s works. Everything is organized down to a tee! Everyone knows what their job duties are and what they should be working on at all times, it definitely makes a change. I always hear how people don’t like working in cubicles. But I don’t think it’s all that bad. I like hearing what’s going on around me and it’s very easy to talk to people since they can never close a door.

I have been neglecting to write for a while. With the new job, then a family death and buying a new house — my time was very limited. I’m glad that things are starting to settle back down. Since buying a house, I’ve been obsessed with getting it to look how I’ve always dreamed. I don’t think my husband really understands why I have to design everything I get my hands on. In the next few weeks I should be finishing up some of my recent interior design projects and ideas, and will post them up.

In the meantime, I just wanted to feature some of my best work from my job since I started.

cgtextures.com- CGTextures strives to be the worlds best texture site. Making textures should be about creativity, not about spending hours looking for the right image on the internet. I hope that by supplying good quality textures in an organized manner, your everyday work will be easier and more enjoyable.

stripegenerator.com - Tired of pixel-by-pixel painting, trying to create seamless stripes textures? Here we are! Enjoy using stripe generator! Unleash your personal style, experiment and download the tile. You can use it directly in your css file or as pattern in Photoshop®!

pandora.com - When was the last time you fell in love with a new artist or song? At Pandora, we have a single mission: To play music you’ll love - and nothing else. It’s my lazy way of listening to free music when all I have is a computer.

thinkgeek.com - ThinkGeek started as an idea. A simple idea to create and sell stuff that would appeal to the thousands of people out there who were on the front line and in the trenches as the Internet was forged. From programmers, engineers, students, lovers of open source, to the masses that helped create the behind-the-scenes Internet culture. ThinkGeek started as a way to serve a market that was passionate about technology.

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My design education in primarily in print and identity design, but I have had a strong interest in web design. Having a website on your business card is almost more important than having a phone number, in my opinion. Landing my exciting new job as a web designer, I am getting to challenge myself in becoming a more creative web designer. Among my first projects, was to redesign three websites for waterfront communities. The print materials were previously outsourced to great graphic design firms in the area. So I had a lot of inspiration to pull from, I was basically transferring the identity that was created into web. I have actually surprised myself in how good things are turning out, and I’m getting great feedback.

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First, I looked in housing magazines to find development’s ads for the web addresses. As I was bookmarking my favorite developments’ websites, I started noticing some trends and items that interested me. These websites are selling expensive waterfront communities, with the general audience being well-off and over 50. So they need to look the part.

I wanted each website to be distinct, but have general similarities. My ideas were for all of the websites to have an area for large interchanging pictures, add a favicon (icon beside the web address, that shows up in your bookmarks), texture/depth/transparencies/patterns, match their print materials, show a forecast for the location, and have a more user-friendly site infrastructure.

I can’t wait to make these sites live! Here are the existing websites: Water Ridge, Summerhouse, Cutter Bay. You can be the judge if they need updated by my new designs.