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!

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!

The study consisted of gathering 51 major online retailers last month and asked them to project their online sales for the holidays.

The study also showed that 40% of the companies surveyed planned to market the holiday sales before Halloween. Another 40% will begin the first week of November.

The research company, comScore Inc. predicts an overall increase in all holiday sales from 4% last year to 79% this year.

To top off this holiday rush, the National Retail Foundation also forecasted that 4 out of five web retailers plan to offer free shipping through the holiday season. This would only apply to web purchase. Time to break out the holiday marketing campaigns and brace yourself for a online rush.

Happy Shopping!

1. You’re Famous
   

   With sites like YouTube and twitter, we are finding more and more overnight celebrities emerging. The most popular that recently comes to mind is Antoine Dodson, the famous bed intruder. These platforms allow all of us to become superstars.

2. Streaming TV/Movies
   

   Netflix had it right, with introduction of streaming movies. They have also incorporated streaming to the TV through popular gaming consoles as well. But this is not the only site to catch on; we are seeing sites like Hulu, Apple TV and Netflix’s Roku box as the forerunners.

3. Privacy?
   

   With social sites becoming more popular, privacy seems to have gone out the window. People are writing every little detail of their lives on these sites. When they are going on vacation, who they like, what stars they follow, it is all out there for the world to share.

4. Mobile Payments
   

   Mobile is hot right now and it’s only getting bigger. The mobile wars have just begun, leaving the consumer the real winner. Sites are becoming more mobile ready and e-commerce stores are no different. So mobile payment processing is the next likely star. Watch out for payment gateways to go mobile. PayPal is already getting ready for this trend.

5. GPS- are you there?
   

   The latest smart phones come standard with GPS technology. More and more devices are made using your current location as its guide. Want to know what restaurants are around you right this second? There is an app for that.

6. Net Books/Net Devices
   

   iPad anyone? I have personally seen an increase in iPad development over the past few months. Businesses are not only taking their websites to mobile, but creating special applications that work well with their business. Watch out for more iPad applications.

7. Augmented Reality
   

   This is probably the biggest trend we will see, and not the most talked about. Augmented reality is an amazing technology that utilizes GPS and mapping data to overlay information, on let’s say your mobile device, while you’re walking around. It is something straight from Sci-Fi movies of the past. If you are walking down the street, you can scan your favorite restaurant and have hours, and menus pop up on your display. It is something to watch and see if it helps the end-user or just gets in the way.

Stay tune for more updates as we head to the New Year! Happy Surfing.

Have you gone through a site gallery? Did the page refresh between every single picture?

The user of JavaScript and AJAX have made the quick single page load of the gallery a much more enjoyable experience. It doesn’t stop there though. Have you ever gone to a web site and noticed a popup, with the background darkened out? Another useful tool to draw attention to a single piece of data was the creation and use of the Lightbox/ Modal Box. Form validation, menu animation, accordions, the list goes on infinitely. It has become the job of your imagination with what you will do with this technology.

There are some downsides. If there is too much JavaScript, you may find your web site will slow down incredibly, even error out or completely stall out. With machines becoming faster, this isn’t as bad as it used to be, but shouldn’t excuse sloppy code. Even the Google Chrome Browser prides itself on having a clean JavaScript engine, which is boasts as speeding up processing time.

Previous versions of WordPress required a plug-in or custom code to make your own shortened link that is hosted on your site. Or you would have to copy your link, go to bit.ly, and manually create a shortened link.

The idea of using your own domain in the shortened URL helps alot with branding your site. If you haven’t noticed, one Great feature of the new WordPress 3.0 platform is the URL shortener (shortlink) feature on your posts.

No extra plug-in or manual process required!

You can even keep your domain in tact. This new feature creates a new link on the fly as you create your new posts in the admin.

The new feature can be seen when you create or edit an existing post. See image.

You can see what I have done with this link here: http://www.kiwi9.com/?p=334.

You can create similar outcomes on your blog by upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. If your domain is long, you might still find the need to use 3rd-party services like bit.ly, but at least now you have the option to create shortened links under your domain.

Happy Blogging!

Did you know that every little detail about your website helps to get you indexed in Google Search?
Google looks at the quality of the content on your website to what you name your web pages to how you lay out the HTML. It is important that if you do decide to do your own SEO that you understand some basic principles of HTML. A good place to start your own SEO efforts is at Google’s Blog directly. Google supplies an SEO Starter Guide for the do it yourselfers. The starter guides was created to help you understand the content of your website and how to optimize your site for Google Search Engines. It is a “must have” for SEO gurus.

When you hire a company to handle your SEO, you should make sure they understand the latest trends in Google as well SEO standards. Did you ever notice the emails late at night, from some off-shore company, claiming to get you to number 1 in Google? Or promising you high rankings in Google? Be ware of such companies. If a company can provide great SEO services, you should be able to easily find them and not the other way around. Mass submitting emails to random websites, is an attempt to sucker one out of a million into their “SEO web”.

Kiwi9 provides SEO Services, please feel free to contact us for a free quote.

WebP has many similarities to the current JPEG format. Google’s development team found a way to compress the image quality to such a compact size that it actually speeds up load time over the web. This is a 39% reduction from its JPEG counterpart.

Check out and compare the difference between JPEG and the new WebP formats at google’s gallery.

WebP is based on open source technologies. This gives the new Google format a chance in the browser image world. New browser patches are in the process of being released to get Google Chrome up to speed. The browser will support the new image format. Soon after we can look to Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and Microsoft to catch on. This may take a while to catch on. The future of the web is turning to a faster more compressed version of graphics, video, and code. We will just have to wait and see what impact this new webP format will have.

To read more on Google’s WebP image format, you can check out their post on Chromium blog. Check out more from us at Web Design Chicago.

I know what your thinking, “Sure that is all well and good, but we have work to do and cannot be bothered with such trendy time wasters!” Well, I understand you if that is your stance on using social media for your business. However, if you have no time for social media you can assign that task to a team member, or you can hire a company to manage your social media.

Dell computers has sold more than 3 Million dollars worth of inventory from one Twitter account! That was nearly a year ago! It definitely makes you look at social media a little bit differently. You can reach your target audience quickly and on the cheap. Taking all of this into account please realize that Dell was employing “Social Marketing” via social media. Many people think of Twitter and Facebook as a means to tell people what you had for lunch or how your day went. While that is true, using social media to brand your company or to connect with users has shown to increase sales and customer loyalty.

People shudder at the fact that companies want to sell to them online. Those same people pull out their credit cards with glee when marketed to in a friendly and social way. Oh yeah, the times are a changing my friend and you better get hip to technology or you can watch your competitors do it and take all your online sales.

The best thing you can do right here today is to educate yourself on both of these social media power houses and ask yourself if it is right for you and your business. Do people who purchase your product or service use social media? You bet your bottom dollar they do!

Need help with your fanpage? Next time you are searching for web design chicago, get in touch with kiwi9 to help your online presence and build your social media portfolio.