According to Entrepreneur.com, one of the most demanding trends for 2010 has to be Local Business. The small mom-and-pop stores are making their comeback in this economic crisis. As the article shows, that for every $100 spent at a local business, $68 comes back to the community. On the otherhand, $43 would recurculate from national business chains.

The Shop Local mentality is the backbone of this new trend. Not only is the trend for the local farmers markets, but for local goods and services. The community has been pulling together and would even prefer to buy local, even if the price was a few pennies more. Small business have taken notice of this trend, and we begin to see the trend of the small business online presence. More and more businesses are looking for Local SEO services. This is a much easier target to show up on page one for.

Are you a local pet groomer?

Having trouble placing for the word “pet groomer”?

By adding the area that you provide service for, you find it much easier to get to number one for your services, “pet groomer chicago”. And trust me, people are searching locally.

The traffic is there!

Have you thought about your website? Is your site reaching your intended customers? Is your website suited for the different needs of your company? Sometimes, in a mad dash, companies slop up a website or get a 10 dollar an hour company to make their site and wonder why they did not get the sales they hoped for. Your website is like having a well respected and well trained sales man or woman on your team. They will talk to your customer, they will solve problems for your customer, and they will provide service to your customer. You start to see the pattern here. So why would you pay your top sales associate a few bucks when it is so vital you have them treated like a king, or queen

I have seen businesses rely solely on their online sales. Like a finely-tuned establishment, the orders are taken online, sent to distribution, and delivered. Depending on the structure of your business, your website may be more than just a single entity commerce site.You may require a B2B site, perhaps an internal site, or micro sites. You now start to see your online website as more of a mini empire of your business. Your online presence is pretty important.

So let’s break this down even simpler. You will want to take down your business to style, content, technology, and future updates. No matter what you are trying to sell or offer, it really boils down to these points.

• Style – This is very important. This is your company’s branding, your business colors, style, theme, and identity. You must be consistent or you WILL confuse your market. Is your company ultra conservative, but your website looks like a rugged Abercrombie & Fitch store? When approaching your web design, think of styles you like or of other sites that had design features you liked as well. Keep in mind your brand.
• Content – This is also key. Great copywriting can take a boring site and produce sales. What are you trying to tell your audience? Content is often overlooked, but it is vital to keep it current and about your company. There are many amazing copywriters out there; it is often wise to hire someone who specializes in it.
• Technology – Ah, I am very excited about this category. Technology has been changing at such a rapid rate, that businesses have plenty of amazing tools to help their business. For example, the iPhone and iPad have opened many doors with custom made applications catering to one’s business. Even web related technology is changing. You can utilize features as submitting leads to your phone and update CMS from your mobile device. You can even capture emails before a visitor leaves your page. Just make sure you keep your technology relevant. Just because falling snow might look really cool on the web, doesn’t mean it’s going to help boost your yoga sales. Just food for thought
• Future Updates - This is something to keep in mind at the beginning stages of your site creation period. Will you maintain your text updates yourself? Will you hire a team or a staff member to make these updates on your behalf? Will you need a design to make graphic updates? You might even find the need for an on staff developer for constant tweaks to applications. If you are a DIY’er, you might find a cms system suits your needs. If you plan to hire a developer for your updates, it is good to have your site built on a well-known platform that many developers are available to make core updates. I find that custom built websites might be great and creates job security for the developer, but the business owner is out of luck when it comes to hiring another team member.

So how does your current site stack up? Feel free to contact us if you have any further questions with these items.

Happy Surfing!

Where to begin with fonts… Fonts have been a discussion between the graphic artist and the web developer for years. The end-user usually doesn’t know if the website has Helvetica, Arial, Broadway fonts. Most may hear those names and not even know there is much of a difference.

System fonts are lovely to a developer. There are a list of predefined fonts that all PC and Macs will have installed with the operating system. System fonts require no additional coding by the web developer. It is as simple as calling the name of the font family on the stylesheets. There are many perks to using system fonts. For one, system fonts do not require any special code to work. Many of the embedded (non-system) fonts require additional code. These additional steps can bog down a web browser, can have issues in cross-browser compatibility, and can cause issues with SEO. The system font families do not have these issues. Definite perks for these font families.

The non-system fonts, on the other hand, have really nice appeals to them. Non-system fonts in the past were added to a site with images, but new methods of adding these font-families can now create a dynamic non-system font usage. This is great for CMS system where the site’s text will change constantly. Next, do you really want to look the same as everyone else? Some business yes, some may not. Using non-system fonts can make your site completely stand apart from your competition. Depending on the industry and the font, there are statistics that font-families will help increase your ROI. I would only recommend this route if you have the means to test different font-families for your industry.

Look to the future, CSS 3 is going to help change all of this. The @font-face tag is not new, but CSS 3 is trying to standardize this tag. In order to use a non-system font, you would first call the tag ‘@font-face’ and then you can reference the font-family anywhere in your stylesheet after that.

Example:

Non-system font family Magenta

 
@font-face {
	font-family: 'MirageRegular';
	src: url('Magenta_BBT-webfont.eot');
	src: local('☺'), url('Magenta_BBT-webfont.woff') format('woff'), url('Magenta_BBT-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'), url('Magenta_BBT-webfont.svg#webfontJdmZM5lL') format('svg');
	font-weight: normal;
	font-style: normal;
}
h2.fontexample { font-family:"MirageRegular"; }

You will notice in the code above the different font sources. Until we can get all browsers to play nicely, we, as graphic designers/developers, must accomodate for both. So each font type above is meant for a different browser.

To the future!