Although Facebook was not really created for businesses, it has become a huge asset to companies now. Facebook has incorporated a lot now to help businesses market themselves out the the public in fun and creative ways at little or no cost. In this post I will discuss how business owners have various options in order to be effective in Facebook business marketing.

Fan Page versus Profile Page

The average Facebook user uses Facebook for personal communication and not business. I am a user and a business owner personally. I do not like mixing personal life with business life, so I highly believe as a business you should create a fan page. If you are an official representative of your company you should create an official fan page here.

Creating a Fan Page is so much better for a business than creating a personal page for one. One you can use Facebook Markup Language (FBML) or Facebook Apps, and the fan page is so much more interactive. Your Facebook Fan Page should be created under your primary login. If you do not want to have a personal account you can still create a Facebook page by following the steps after you fill out the relevant data.

Identification

So what should you title your Fan Page, well if you don’t want to use your business name, make sure you come up with something creative.

Once you get 25 fans of your business you can set up a username and makes it easier to access your profile. Once you get your username make sure you apply it to your Facebook Fan Page and not your personal profile. This is real good for Search Engine Optimization. For instance my business is “Wahha Design.” My facebook page looks more professional as http://www.facebook.com/wahhadesign instead of the same name with random numbers behind the username.

How to Make Your Page Stand Out.

So now that you have created a fan page how can you make it look amazing? Well first off upload a profile picture. You have 200pxx600px space to use. You can do a lot of fun things with that small space. Also make sure you fill out any relevant information about your business. Make sure you put contact info for your business, website, and your business history. To see smart use of a profile picture check out the page I created for the Wilmington Sea Dawgs.

If you want your business to stand out even more on Facebook consider getting some one like Wahha Design to help you with Facebook Markup Language (FBML). This involves installing code and apps on your Facebook and you can create minisites on your Facebook page. Check out some of these pages:

Reeses shows you a great example on how you can integrate other social media into Facebook. Their landing page has it so you can see that they are on YouTube also.

JCPenney’s was the first Facebook page to incorporate full on shopping from Facebook. Who would of known that JCPenney’s was that far into the modern day marketing.

Conclusion

So now you have some basic ideas on how to get started and some minor advanced features. So get out there and get your Facebook page on the roll. Next blog I will post more examples and some marketing ideas that will attract customers and fans to your page.

If you ever need help please do not hesitate and contact us.

1. There Will Be a Need to Understand and Optimize for All Form Factors

Now that smart phones are becoming more and more popular developers will have to take the future of web browsing in consideration. Some reports are stating that come 2012 that 60 percent of web browsing will be done through mobile phones. Do I agree with these reports, not at all.

We have phones, and now tablets coming into the market. Each of these products we may have to create different style sheets for and make sure all websites work across these platforms.

Developers will have to consider font size, screen sizes, different coding structures for websites to work correctly. I see a lot more work in our futures just to build one website.

2. There Will Be Breakout, Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools

Now that the iOS/Android market shares are doing well , the time has never been riper for a great mobile framework, SDK or IDE to come to light.

Maybe, sometime in 2011, we will see some tools come to light with helping us develop apps — including tablet-specific or forked OSes. I am sure Adobe will be coming out with something to help more along the lines, along with other major companies that deal with web building.

3. Investment in Cloud-Based, Collaborative Development Tools

We’ve seen some interesting starts in community-based, online coding. There are a few collaborative code editing apps, some of them with real-time capabilities.

We’re looking forward to seeing more and better apps for cloud-based, collaborative coding in 2011 — something like a better Wave, created specifically with hackers in mind. This will allow for better and faster work to be generated by an increasingly decentralized hacker community. It’ll also pave the way for improved on-the-job learning and open-source hacking.

4. WYSIWYG Tools Get Better and Grow

Besides with WordPress I rarely use a WYSIWYG editor. Now, my clients who I create websites for and have a less understanding of hand coding use it all the time. I know specifically Joomla’s coding is just plain ugly when using an editor.

My hopes for 2011 is that these editors produce a nicer code and are more user friendly and I will not have to have to fix problems all the time that the WYSIWYGs create.

5. We’ll Keep Building “Touchable,” App-like UIs

Everyone loves being able to just touch the screen. Now that we are getting more and more futuristic in technology look to seeing UIs increase. People like seeing Apps like Facebook apps, or CNN apps, football apps, etc.

There are so many websites and app ideas that can currently make money. Now that cell phones and iPads are out on the market look to seeing more useful UIs being developed for people.

6. There Will Be a Higher Standard for Web and Mobile Security

A lot of websites and programs were hacked this year. Some very crucial to our government and businesses. Look for web security to step up.

Mobile Security will probably be stepping up too. Celebrities like Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus will be happy when they can take nude photos of themselves on their phones with no worries of people getting to them.

7. Third-Party App Development Will Plateau

Web apps for big companies have already been built and only small improvements seem to be made only when the site itself is updated.

More people will be creating third party apps to help people out with daily tasks. A large amount of money can be made if you find a good third party app to create. See 2011 to be the year that people really realize this and apps will go wild.

8. Ruby Will Get Some Cool Optimizations and Tools

In my opinion, Ruby is the best for building apps. If you are not already set in a way like using PHP or other coding for your apps, Ruby is the way to go. It’s interface is pretty to use already, but be prepared for it to become even easier to build apps.

9. NoSQL Technologies Will Stake Their Ground

NoSQL will just be getting better and stronger this year. Don’t worry people, MySQL will not be gone or be replaced for a long time. It may be a good time to read up and see what NoSQL can do for you.

10. Open-Source Software Will See Unprecedented Growth

Open-source coding has brought us great things like Facebook and Google. A lot of sites have become more and more open source so people can customize it to their needs. Wait and see as these past few years have only been the beginning.

Watch out for this to be a boom of year in third party open source programs and people coming out with many new start up companies.

So what do you all think that 2011 will bring us? Do you think mobile apps will be a huge focus? Like to see everyone else opinion on the matter.

If you already know SEO this may not be for, but it is not bad to always refresh your knowledge. This is the basic to just get started and get some knowledge on what is SEO. You have or are interested in having a website and you are wanting to be found on the internet. You have to optimize your website and/or blog to get noticed on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

SEO is a process and it takes time and effort. I will be giving you a step by step process so you can have a better understanding of how this all works.

What is your purpose?

You need to figure out what your website is going to be all about. What are you hoping to accomplish with your site. Are you hoping to build it for a charity, provide input to a hobby, educate others, or try to make money?

You then have to decide what your target market is going to be. The best way to do this is put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Is there an age group or social status you are hoping to reach? Are there certain magazines or hobbies your audience would read? In the end you want your website to be useful to them.

Website Checklist

Here is a very basic checklist that can help you start on how to put a website together.

1. Market research/business plan
2. Secure a domain name
3. Make sure you have a business license if you plan on making money
4. Get a business bank account
5. Pick a host provider
6. Decide what your budget is for website design, recommended to hire some one if you don’t know what you are doing.
7. Have the website designed and developed

Research, Research, Research!

The best way to save some money is to research your market yourself. If you are wanting to pay some one to do it that is fine too, but be prepared for the time to be included in your fees. Research is a large chunk of time for marketing companies. So what should you research? Well how about the market you are wanting to get into. It will be also good to think of the “keywords” you are wanting to use that would relate to your product or service. Is your product or service in high demand?

Make sure you research your competition if you have any. You will want to know what your profit potential is too. The more and more you research and have prepared the more you will save money and time.

The Jist of SEO

So What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the long way to say it, you can see why they shorten it.
So what does one need SEO for? Well search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing send out little crawlers to check out your website and make sure it has any relevance to what people are searching for.

Make sure you get indexed in search engines by having good content on your website and make sure your content has keywords that will describe what your website is about. You will want to make sure you content is not the same as a competitor but will make you stand out from that competitor.

There are several factors to SEO that affect your page rank. Any company that promises you they can get your to be number one on Google is not legit. There are no promises with SEO. I can say I would try my best to get you to the top, but there are no promises. Some factors that decide your rank are: Target market, keyword research, backlinking, tracking results, and having a good competitive analysis.

Warning do not try to trick search engines as they are getting smarter and smarter. If you just list your keywords on your website, some search engines are penalizing you and will lower your ranks. Make sure your content makes sense!

Welcome to SERPS

SERPS stands for search engine results pages. In order to have success on the internet you will need to make sure your site is indexed with the the proper search engines. It is very important to have good content on your website and that your content contains the keywords that describe that particular page or website.

Note: Your rank on Google and your rank on Bing or Yahoo may all be different.

What Affects your Page Rank?

So how can you improve your page rankings?

A big one is the title of your website and the description of your website. The title is displayed at the top of the websites. As you can see my title says “Blog of Wahha Design.” The description of your website does not matter as much and shows up on the search engine site as what your website is about and gives a brief description.

If you have links to other company or organizations links, this will help your page rank. It also matters how popular those companies are too. Another factor is even how long you have your domain registered for. Search Engines will take you more serious if you are registered for five years instead of two years. You should also make sure your website flows and is easy to navigate when people go to it. These are are just some of many factors that factor your page rank.

What are key elements to have on your site?

If you are planning on making money on your website either by providing a product or service, make sure you have these factors included:

1. Make sure you have a personal business phone number for customers to call.
2. It is good to list a physical address to look professional.
3. Find a way for customers to contact you whenever they can either through an e-mail or phone, etc.
4. Think about joining the Better Business Bureau and participating.
5. If you are taking payments online, make sure your website is secure!

Social Networks are Important!

Social Networking sites are so important to today’s market. Websites like Facebook and Twitter have just been all over. Most of these social networks you can promote your business for free.

Why Hire a Professional?

So why would you hire a professional to work on your website and do your SEO for you. Well, SEO takes a lot of time itself as you can see in this blog post and how many factors are gone into it. SEO has become so popular that there are specialists just for SEO. Majority of your web designers and developers should be capable of helping you out though.

Top 5 Web Design Trends 2011

It is now the end of the year and 2011 is fast approaching us. Some of this years big design hits were large headers and footers, creative social media icons, and big picture backgrounds. So what does 2011 have in store for us? Well labelmedia listed what they believe will be the big design trends of this upcoming year.

1. <header>More Accurate Semantics<header>

With the arrival of HTML5 and it's army of more accurate structural elements expect to see an increase in new sites being pieced together by more logical mark-up, as opposed to divs and spans alone. All future and current browsers will handle these new semantic elements just fine, even if they don't technically 'support them'.

“What about IE?” I hear you cry. Of course IE doesn't handle unrecognised semantic elements well, but this handy script from Google takes care of all of that. It's a little bit ‘hacky’, but when was working with IE not?

http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js

In addition to the new HTML5 semantic elements, there is also the newly emerging ARIA specification from WSC which better explains to assisting technologies what structural semantic elements actually are. e.g. This div is actually a banner or this input box is actually a search box.

ARIA or WIA-ARIA is relatively well supported across browsers, however, because of it's on-going development it – like HTML5 – is not as-yet fully supported.

Resources:
HTML5 for Web Designers' – Jeremey Keith – Must Read
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ – Full HTML5Spec
http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js – IE Hack

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/aria-and-progressive-enhancement/ – Great ARIA Article

Inspiration:
http://www.sushimonstr.com/
http://www.lesmads.de/blogs/okcool/

2. In loving memory of Georgia (1993 – 2010).

Now with @font-face a lot of fonts are dying out including the ever loving Georgia. A lot of serif fonts are now taking over and are more acceptable then they were years ago. Our blog here uses @font-face for our blog and our official website. @font-face allows users to attach a font file in their css and declare it so they are able to use whatever font they feel like.

Resources:
http://code.google.com/webfonts – Google font API

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator – @font-face generator
http://typekit.com/ – web fonts as a service

Inspiration:
http://madeforyoubyarms.com/
http://37signals.com/

3. Get Real.

People and businesses these days want to show off real-time data. This is being done through social media and custom made widgets for sites. It seems real time data can attract clients to certain businesses when they show off what they can do.

Resources:
http://37signals.com/
http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/

Inpiration:
http://yesiamprecious.com/
http://busterbenson.com/

4. Responsive Design

This year we saw the introduction of 'responsive web-design' into the web-designer's vocabulary. In-short: responsive web design uses fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to produce more 'layout agnostic' HTML pages. This means that one design can gracefully adapt to different screen sizes and devices. Some would argue that this 'one-design-fits-all' approach ignores context. Mobile users will require different information from desktop users, and while I would agree that responsive design is not the best solution for 'mobilizing' a site, I think these people are rather missing the point. At the end of the day a lot of what we can do as designers is limited by budget. Should we be afforded the luxury of a client with a large budget, and a requirement for 'mobilizing' their site, then we should look to approach these various devices independent from each other. Essentially the information will remain the same but the Information Architecture and user experience should be tailored to the user's requirements, whilst also taking into account how the user interacts with the device.

Most of the time clients will already expect you to be able to have their website working on all forms of media. Price fluctuation and increases will most likely have to take place on web design and development services due to the increase of media types and sizes. When creating extra CSS for mobile devices, it takes extra time. So do not forget to fit this factor into your budget and estimates.

Resources:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ – Must read
http://lessframework.com/ – Handy Tool

Inspiration:
http://colly.com/
http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/responsive-web-design

http://thinkvitamin.com/

5. Take a break

White Space has been creeping up on websites and in my opinion is great. It is nice to have a fair amount of white space so your site is not so cluttered. Sites seem like they will be allowing more white space and looking more like press articles this year.

Resources:
http://vimeo.com/17084428 – Explains it all

Inspiration:
http://www.vimeo.com/13768695

http://www.notpretty.net/who.html
http://bobulate.com/
http://buildconf.com/

I found this funny infographic which seems to be very true. The clash between web designer and web developer. I know some companies think a web designer and web developer are the same thing, they are not. This is a common misconception when you read job hiring posts. A company will ask for a web designer when they mean web developer. The two are completely different jobs.

Web designer normally meets with the company that wants a website. They will then talk to the designer give him so good ideas. The designer will then take your ideas and put it into a creative way and have you a print model to look at. The web developer comes in when the print model/ look of the page is completed. The development phase is where the website is built. Web developer has to use his coding language to make your site come to life in front of your eyes.

Now it does help that a web designer knows code in my opinion. You then can know what your web developer’s limits are. Is the developer good with back end and front end. Sometimes front end developer and back end developer are completely different jobs too. Then you also have a database developer sometimes.

I was originally a web designer myself. My creative juices flow through me during that phase. I also am very good with programming and mathematical equations. This is where my development brain comes in. I was forced to learn the coding language because of the common misconception of a web designer is the same as the development.

Well check out the infographic and let me know if you all agree with some of these.

I don’ know how many people go out and do this, but I do know some and I have been guilty of this too lately. With the tough economy and jobs being loss people need to vent. A lot of people are now turning their venting to Facebook.

A federal agency has just declared Facebook posts are legally protected speech, even for employees who write negative things about their employers.

The National Labor Relations Board said that a recent Facebook related termination was unlawful.

Dawnmarie Souza, used some vulgar language to deride her boss on Facebook. Several of Souza’s co-workers joined in on Facebook, also making negative comments about the supervisor. Souza made these comments on her own time and on her own computer.

An NLRB representative told The New York Times that company social media policies that prohibit making negative remarks about one’s boss or company online are actually in violation of labor laws that protect employees’ right to talk about things like wages and working conditions.

Therefore, Souza’s boss may not have had the right to fire her for saying bad things on Facebook.

Please be careful though and do not take this as a blessing. If the company determines what you say about them on Facebook is on their time and being done on their property they will have every right to fire you. So make sure you say that your boss is a @$$hole on your own time on your own computer on Facebook.

So what does everyone think? Are you going to still watch what you say? Or just say nothing at all? Here is the smart thing to do, DON’T ADD YOUR BOSS TO FACEBOOK!!!! DON’T ADD CO-WORKERS! It makes sense people.

Here is some great inspiration for people to look at. It truly shows people thinking out of the box and creating unique logos for companies. Have you created a logo lately that you would like to share that you think incorporates the company’s image pretty well?

Art Farm

Eat Innovations

Freedom

The Color Cure

Culinary Zen

Human

Diamond Bookstore

Elena Alexxeva

class="spacer_" />

CFO

CityCliq

href="http://www.rajasandhu.com/" class="external" rel="nofollow">

LoveClip

Illusion

Steps

Water Drop

Big Shift

Enough

Antisocial Network

src="http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/smart_logos/17.jpg" alt="" width="615" height="450" />

Fit

DJ Loop

Pause

Curious

Studio 45

Code Fish

Bsided

Lochness

Wave

Version 2

Blend

Coffee

Logotomy

Shift

Cinema Café

Twins

One To Love

Families

Zip

Wine Searcher

Elefont

Are you getting married soon? Well if you enjoy being crafty and making your own or creating your own invitations check these out. These are very inspirational. My younger sister is getting married in less than a year now, and she sure liked them. She stated she saved the comic book one for me for when I get married for a good idea. Unfortunately that could be very far away.

Beach Theme

Tea-Towel Invite

Circus

Coca Cola

Comic Book Cover

Flip-Flops

Worldly

Dancing Dots

DIY Wheel

DIY

Cartoon

Travel Theme

Iceland

Fox and the Hare

DIY Box

Save the Date Photo

Lady in Red

Maine

Tree/Growth

Hearts & Squares

DIY

Handmade

Custom Button

Pacman

Puerto Rico

Demolition Derby

Letterpress Pomeroy

Rock Poster

Scout Books

Set Sail

Original post was from Web Designer Depot

With all the hype with social media and how well businesses are doing with it, it is now a necessity pretty much for businesses. A good designer/developer will make sure that your company is able to have a website that can integrate such social media into the site. When designing a social media icon you need to think about what your current theme or website is going to be. What kind of company are you designing for? What are the colors you are using in your website? You also need to think about size, location.

Here is some websites that show you great examples of social media icon integration. It was put together by the wonderful Web Design Ledger.

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