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The harsh reality is that scrimping on a professional logo can actually end up costing more money in the long run, because a business can suffer due to the poor professional image created by a badly-designed logo.

Logos are an indicator of a business’s professionalism. If a business’s logo is either poorly executed or non-existent, it can make the business look amateurish, to say the least.

The Importance of Logos
Brand logos are a fundamental element of online marketing that cannot be taken for granted or overlooked.
In some ways, a professional logo is more important to a small business than a larger one, because they are not as well known and have to work harder to drum up business. Online, a good logo is even more important.

A quality website designer will use a company’s logo to influence a website’s color scheme, as well as other visual elements. This approach gives a website a distinctive, cohesive appearance and provides an immediate sense of comfort to visitors.

A Poor Logo Means a Poor Design
Businesses with poor or non-existent logos fail to provide this crucial starting point for a web designer, which can often result in a generic looking site that fails to enhance the business’s image and credibility. When it comes to choosing between two similar businesses, the one with the professional image will win the customer over every time.

While smaller businesses clearly don’t have the budget of a large firm, a professional logo, in the hands of a professional website designer, will result in a professional-looking website design.

A logo is an asset worth investing in.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. Graphic Design All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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The landing page of your website fulfils many functions. It’s like the front door to your website.

A website’s landing page should do the following:

• provide users a snapshot of the company’s product or service
• feature a visual design that conveys professionalism and trustworthiness
• provide links that support the structure and content of the overall site
• offer content that reflects attention to detail and dedication

Because a landing page needs to convey so much, it is important to get it right. So, there are five rules to consider when designing a landing page.

1. The inclusion of media. A landing page should always include a picture or video, because a visual representation of your product or service helps the user to see what you have to offer. It also helps to break up text which, when to dense, can scare a user off. Of course, the picture or video should be relevant to the website and the business that it represents.

2. Avoid Clutter. Make sure that the topic of the landing page is focused, keeping links to a minimum in the body text of the main content area. Use designs to frame your content and to fill in blank spaces, but keep them simple and unobtrusive.

3. Use perfect grammar and spelling. Nothing will turn users away more than spelling errors or poorly constructed sentences. Users often attribute spelling and grammar errors to the author’s lack of skill, expertise and authority.

4. Build effective link structures. Make sure that users recognize where the links on your page are located, what they link to, and how they relate to the links around them. Effective linking is the cornerstone of good navigation, particularly when it coems to landing pages.

5. Use colors wisely. Colors have an effect on users.

• Blue conveys trust and reliability.
• Red is exciting, but can also be a warning to stop.
• Black can be evil, but also modern, or stylish.
• Yellows and oranges are fiery, flashy, and bold.
• Green is natural and calm.

If you take your time and pay attention to all these simple rules, you will go a long way to creating a landing page that is professional, inviting and effective.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. web design company All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Congratulations on winning our January contest.
To win February contest just like dzine it on faebook at www.facebook.com/dzineit ]]> http://www.dzineit.net/news-blog/index.php?entry=entry120130-104111 drive more traffic to its website, increasing the chance of attracting qualified leads and potential customers.”

The benefits of blogging have already been proven. For example, a recent study showed that the average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t blog.

Obviously, the greater the number of visitors to your website, the more popular your pages, and subsequently your business, becomes.

Another study found that 69% of businesses attributed their lead generation success to blogging and 57% of businesses claimed to have acquired a customer through their company blog.

Blogging is a great way to provide information to readers, relative to your company’s product or service, helping them to trust and form an interest in your company.

Consider the following tips for the creation of a successful company blog:

Offer Great Content!
By creating useful, remarkable blog posts, companies will attract an audience that is looking for new information related to its industry. Posts should be written in such a way that they position the company they represent as an authority in their industry.
Use Social Media!
After posting a new blog entry, it is important to update all social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with a direct link to the post. Also, by placing social media share links at the end of your blog post, you make it easier for readers to share your entry on their own social media accounts.

Allow Comments!

Always allow readers to give feedback on posts. While many companies are hesitant to leave this option available, for fear of negative feedback, it gives the company the perfect opportunity to address concerns directly while utilizing positive feedback.

Use Keywords!

When proper keywords are included in a post, it helps the blog entry get found by the search engines. Proper keyword placement and usage helps the SEO value of the blog, and subsequently the website it is associated with.

Update Regularly!

In order for a blog to be successful, posts should be published approximately 2 to 3 times a week. A continuously updated blog shows audiences, and the search engines, that its authors are experts in their industry.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
]]> http://www.dzineit.net/news-blog/index.php?entry=entry120127-203813 ]]> http://www.dzineit.net/news-blog/index.php?entry=entry120127-164358
For major search engines, it’s all about offering users the most relevant and fresh information available. That is why we have come up with five tips to boost a company’s online marketing campaign, making it easier to obtain and maintain a reasonable rank on Google’s search results pages.

Just because a business updates or makes corrections to its web pages on a regular basis, doesn’t automatically mean that its website’s freshness value will increase. In fact, Google determines a website’s freshness the first time it crawls its pages.

The goal of the recent freshness update was to deliver the most recent or current information to users when they enter a query into the Google search engine. It does this, in part, by searching for pages that are time stamped, indicating when the information or the webpage was created.

Time-stamping is crucial for businesses that want top spots in Google’s search results, because this factor alone underlines the importance of presenting and maintaining up-to-date information on websites.

To get the most from Google’s freshness update, business owners should consider incorporating the following five strategies to their online marketing plan:

1. Publish press releases consistently. Businesses should use press releases to keep visitors up-to-date on the latest news about their company and their industry. Since press releases are time-sensitive, Google will respond accordingly, but business owners should publish new press releases weekly to maintain a good rank.

2. Create a blog. Using a blog to publish interesting topics related to a business’s industry is a great way to keep that business relevant in the eyes of the search engines. The blog should be updated regularly and contain link bait tied to the company’s website.

3. Utilize social media. It is important for businesses to utilize Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for marketing. The best part is that followers and customers can help a business’s “freshness” campaign by adding comments or content and promoting the site through social sharing.

4. Find your place on Google News. If a business’s press releases are published correctly, they will appear on Google News and this can have a huge impact on a website’s ranking in Google.

5. Contact a trusted website marketing firm. Most SEO and online marketing firms will offer website audits free of charge and can be hired to help a company ensure that social media channels, word-of-mouth marketing, reputation and consumer sentiment monitoring and SEO are being properly managed and maintained.

As you implement these strategies to improve your website’s freshness, you should also make sure that you are using time-stamps correctly.

Google recommends the following format: YYYY-MM-DD.

Businesses should also update their website’s XML sitemaps every time they publish new information.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
]]> http://www.dzineit.net/news-blog/index.php?entry=entry120126-173820 Mobile marketing has become the new standard in small business marketing, because it offers the opportunity to reach local customers who’re on-the-go. In addition, local mobile marketing can save businesses money when compared to other types of marketing.

The bottom line is that customers aren’t sitting at a home computer any more, searching for local businesses to patronize. If your Web presence is geared toward traditional Internet surfers, you’re likely missing out on lots of business opportunities.

In order to leverage the new wireless world, businesses need to fuse their local marketing efforts with mobile marketing.

Consider the following six tips on starting a local mobile marketing campaign:

1. Make your website compatible. A business’s first step should be to optimize its website for mobile phones. Now, it is easier than ever to make your website small screen-friendly. If you use WordPress, there are several free and premium plug-ins available to make your site mobile compatible.

2. Join mobile directories. By getting their website listed in a few mobile directories, businesses can easily place their websites on the map, so to speak. Google Places offers one such opportunity.

3. Create a mobile website. At some point, every business will need two versions of their website. Now is as good a time as any to get started.

4. Build traffic through location-based app marketing. Many small businesses use apps like FourSquare, Yelp and even Facebook to attract mobile customers.

5. Consider mobile advertising. Local mobile advertising through Google is an inexpensive way to reach more customers. Businesses can even target multiple mobile devices, from high-end Smartphones to standard cell phones.

6. Connect via QR codes. Quick Response (QR) codes are becoming increasingly popular and are cropping up in magazine ads; on websites, billboards, lawn signs and t-shirts. Once a mobile user scans a business’s QR code, it is easy to connect with them in real-time, sending coupons, event announcements, feed updates, and more.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. internet marketing All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
]]> http://www.dzineit.net/news-blog/index.php?entry=entry120125-153823 technology with the ultimate goal of increased student productivity, enhancing the learning experience and fostering a creative environment. Some examples of technology in the new “smart classroom” include one-to-one iPad/tablet deployments as well Google Chromebooks which are optimized for the Web and rely completely on cloud computing.

Each year, the education market is a major target for software and hardware vendors. According to Forrester, “tech vendor strategists are attracted by the "edu" opportunity — a large and fast-growing user base and increasing reliance upon technology by governments, educators, parents, and students.” In addition to technology solutions, there is also no shortage of resources such as trade shows. At last year's EduComm 2011 event (now called UBTECH), more than 300 education-focused providers came together to discuss leadership, education technology, 21st century learning spaces, virtual and online environments and recruitment and retention.

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The goal of the Obama administration’s reform plan, which went into effect last year, is to streamline, consolidate and better coordinate the operations of about 2,000 federal Web domains and 24,000 federal websites. An additional goal is to make the websites more accessible and search engine friendly.

The 56 agencies involved in this particular program have already stopped creating new pages, have conducted inventories, eliminated some sites and pages, and have come up with reform plans. However, some of these blunt cuts, with the elimination of websites, links and content without careful attention to search engine impact, may actually decrease visibility and traffic.

Making wholesale changes to a website, without considering search engine optimization and existing search engine presence, will result in loss of value for a website.

Those managing this government initiative need to ensure that new website configurations align with search engine ranking factors for major search engines including Google and Bing, because if a website is full of search engine optimization issues, the website will miss out on hundreds of thousands of visits.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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dzine it has been warning clients of the security risks associated with open-source designs for the past five years and, in most cases, our staff recommends against the utilization of an open source framework to build website applications.

Large company websites, developed using free open-source software, are popping up everywhere. In fact, website development firms have become breeding grounds for websites developed using the three largest open source content management systems.

Open source content management systems (CMS) are good starting points for small to mid-sized websites because they can help to lower development costs dramatically. However, large websites, particularly those that store personal credit card information, should never be built using a free open source platform.

In the case of Zappos.com, the illegal, unauthorized access was the work of hackers and the company has since reset customer passwords and has urged customers to change login credentials on any other sites for which they use the same password and username.

If your website’s core programming functions are open source, anyone can learn the programming code that runs your site, including hackers. In fact, hackers are constantly discovering new exploits to these open source platforms and they often post these exploits on public forums for other hackers to use. The result can be devastating.

Zappos.com uses Drupal's Free CMS, which has been known to have exploits because of public access to the system’s core programming code.

When it comes to large websites, no amount of savings on a development project is worth putting your customers’ personal information at risk. Avoid using open-source platforms at all costs and if your website is currently built on an open-source framework, contact a website development firm that can offer personalized application development services to redevelop your site.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. website development All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
]]> http://www.dzineit.net/news-blog/index.php?entry=entry120120-120757 computer graphics (CG) professionals almost everywhere you look. From Hollywood blockbusters to high-tech video games and television programming, CG professionals, running state-of-the-art equipment and software, are capable of producing stunning, life-like visuals and grandiose special effects. According to estimates from Jon Peddie Research, today’s CG industry is showing new invigorated vitality and potential. Specifically, the industry will exceed $100 billion by 2014. Additionally, in the last five years alone, the field has enjoyed a stable seven percent growth rate.

One CG professional, a San Francisco-based freelancer named Clayton Douglas, has worked in a wide range of environments -- spanning big FX houses to small boutiques. Douglas' specialties include compositing, 3D animation, video editing as well as stereoscopic work. Working out of his home office, Douglas found the need to be able to access both of his computers easily and without issue. "This was my main goal in finding a KVM switch. Specifically, I needed one that would allow for dual monitor support for both of my machines," he noted. Clayton decided on the CM0264 from ATEN (www.aten-usa.com).

Leveraging the performance of the CM0264, Clayton noted that he’s been able to streamline business operations and focus more time on CG and motion graphics projects for films, commercials and Web. For Douglas, the ATEN CM0264 is a no-brainer when it comes to KVM switches. "It provides stable cross-platform switching and works with just about every device under the sun!" he concluded.
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The adjustments add three new features to Google search. Including ‘personal results,’ ‘profiles in search’ and ‘people and pages,’ aimed at providing users with results tailored to their specific preferences.

Data from a user’s Google+ account, as well as other Google accounts, are used to assemble the search engine results pages (SERPs).

While personalized search results are nothing new, the most recent changes have major implications for SEO leveraging and content marketing. Personal results will now include content shared on Google Plus, along with typical results and listings.

The new format creates SERPs that are visible only to individual users, partially based on information found in their Google+ and Picasa profiles. These personalized SERPs will include general web listings, results with preferential ranking because of a user’s activity, and results with preferential ranking because of social connections (like Google+).

From a marketing standpoint, the inclusion of personal results amplifies the significance of social media marketing substantially. Encouraging users to share content has essentially become as critical as any other piece of social strategies for businesses using Google Plus.

Of course, if a business is not currently using Google+ as part of its Internet marketing strategy, now is the time to take the plunge.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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