Archimedia Studios

More Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

1. Placing Distracting Elements Like Animation or Flashing Items Near Important Content

Distracting elements can draw your viewer’s eye away from your content and make it impossible for them to take away your intended information.

2. Using Little Text Boxes With Scroll Bars To Deliver Content

This one is self explanatory if you have ever visited a site that crams all of its content into tiny boxes. After a few seconds of scrolling at most, many visitors will move on in search of an easier-to-read choice.

3. Choosing Overly Busy Or Colorful Backgrounds

A background that makes it difficult or impossible to read your content will not only drive visitors away but will also give them a headache.

4. Using Very Long Introductions or Animations

This goes back to the short attention span issue. If your intro is longer than a few seconds, many of your visitors will lose interest and move on to another site that delivers content more quickly.

5. Taking Minimalism To The Extreme

A minimalist approach can create a professional, polished look but if it is taken too far your website will appear boring and amateurish.

6. Using Mismatched Graphics

Choose graphics that follow a theme. Using graphics that span time periods, color schemes, or styles detracts from your content and your site’s credibility.

7. Including Too Few Graphics

Very long units of text unbroken by graphics can be as unappealing as too many graphics. A quality website has a nice balance of text, graphics, and other utilities to keep viewers interested and involved.

8. Choosing Graphics That Are Completely Unrelated To Your Content

Why is Graphic Design important to Web Design?

There are many pitfalls for anyone seeking to have a website developed. Your website is part of your “brand” and is usually the first impression that a prospective client, fan, or recording label has of you and your brand.  Thus, a properly designed website must go beyond coding, beyond the friend of a friend who says they develop websites, or the one person operations that hangs a “design shingle” on their front porch.

Graphic design must play a fundamental part of any web design. It not only is the creative spirit of your site but is critical to the overall branding strategy of a product, business or recording artist. Graphic Design  encompasses everything from back ground images, banners and button controls to color scheme, text style, and graphics.

An ideal graphic design can give a huge boost to your website by increasing its visual appeal, professionalism, brand value and usability.

Visual appeal is vital to web design because it promotes communication of ideas to your viewers by stimulating aesthetic senses and increasing a feeling of connection.

Effective graphic design also lends an air of professionalism to your site. Visitors are more likely to consider your content worthy of reading if the overall website gives an appearance of authority on the subject.

Finally, good graphic design increases the usability of your site. Web visitors often have little patience for complex or confusing sites and will move on fairly quickly. You can encourage viewers to stay on your site by using graphic design to keep navigation simple, making sure your graphics are content appropriate, and choosing eye-pleasing colors and text styles.

Branding Lessons from Lady Gaga?

It’s Lady Gaga lesson-time again. After all, she is a marketer who consistently goes viral. And her results ring loud: Gaga’s the first artist to hit 1 billion YouTube views. And she’s turned quite a handy-dandy profit: 11.5 million albums sold in two years, including through digital media (where she was 2009’s bestseller, with 15 million tracks sold). Clearly, she’s doing something right. Brand marketers apparently can learn a lot from her cinematic, but approachable, persona.

Lady GaGa’s Branding Tip;

Tell a consistent story. Define a character and vision. Make sure your strategic team knows it fluently and supports it.

Engage fans in conversation. Provoke, listen, react! But don’t just head-nod; offer quality content that people will appreciate.

Connect the content. Keep your story consistent across media. Build relationships with brands/content providers that complement your persona. Discovery is part of a relationship’s pleasure; your personality should be multifaceted, its glint reflecting where the light bounces.

Fish where the fish are. Free content should be spreadable! Take time to produce work that’s contagious: It’s your foot soldier. Let users embed, revamp, comment and share where they want. (This sounds like common sense, but it isn’t always followed.)

Reinvent business. Find a way to seal deals that makes long-term sense. Gaga leverages touring, merchandise sales and advertising revenue. She has sponsored MAC lipstick, designed headphones for Heartbeats by Dre, and is creative director of Polaroid. (She also used her online store as a 24-hour donation filter. For a day, 100% of the profits from Gaga e-merch went to Haiti. She promoted it through Twitter.)

The Po!nt: Write a “bad romance” a la Gaga! That is, find ways to stand out remarkably, and commit to them 100%. How else will you be heard in today’s world?

Are all those Facebook “likes” worth it ?

Want to get exclusive content on our brand Facebook page? “Like” us! Want to participate in our fun new contest? “Like” us! Want to take advantage of the discount? “Like” us!

This is the new hot tactic used by marketers nowadays to get their fan count up. They are constructing the “like” walls. A number of big brands, such as Macy’s, 1-800 Flowers, Bud Light, and Gap, practice it.

The logic behind this thinking is simple: We provide valuable incentives in return for the larger community on Facebook. Sounds fair, right? However, you are then faced with the dilemma: Do you want more Likes or do you want more advocates in your community who would have liked you no matter what monetary incentives you are trying to offer?

There are a lot of people out there who are looking to get a quick coupon or discount. After all, who doesn’t like free stuff? There are a number of businesses that offer a cool discount a day/a week on their Facebook page. It seems to work for them. But are they truly building relationships or are they just using their page to broadcast the deals and sell products? Unless you are prepared to offer your community a constant flow of coupons and discounts, the success of any single promotion will be short-lived. I would also question the quality of your fans and if they are truly present on your page. What you want is to build a community of advocates who truly participate, which means a consistent dialogue, smooth feedback loop, and your fans sharing their stories and their experiences with your brand. If you have a large community that is quiet—is it a good thing?

It used to be that un-liking a page was hard; it required several steps and was confusing. Now, it is as easy as clicking the unlike button. A number of brands reported a huge drop-off rate post-promotion. Consensus is that that drop-off rate is on average 50% after the promotion is complete. Meaning that those promotions don’t work. Meaning that you are diluting your fans and depreciating the value of your community.

So instead of “like-gating,” why don’t we provide our fans compelling content and relevant messaging? Why don’t we make it easy for our fans to interact with us and our content? Why not post happy holiday wishes, short trivia questions, interesting polls, and fun videos to help us say communicate our message and truly hear theirs? Why not make it easy and fun for them to share among their friends? And if we must build the “Like walls,” why not be very selective in how we do it?

If you are not creating valuable customer relationships, then does the fan count matter?

An Ode to Creativity

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. 
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
 While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. -Apple

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