Plan a Flash Application

Purpose, Audience, Treatment, Specifications

Some of us like to jump right into Adobe Flash and start designing. This is where a lot of developers waste time and money. Have a plan.
The first thing to do is decide what you and your client are looking to accomplish, a purpose. This is a good way to keep anyone involved in the project on track.
Secondly, determine your audience. This is very important. If it is being designed for children, you may want to include animals with moving parts whenever the cursor is rolled over an animal. After all, you can't aim to hit a target if you don't know where the bullseye is at.
Next, decide how the application will be presented to the user: Tone, approach, and emphasis on the different multimedia elements in the application.
Fourth, create a flowchart and storyboard to start placing the elements together in line with your ideas. Specifications include the arrangement of elements and the functionality of each. A flowchart will help to pinpoint any aberrations in navigation scheme before work begins. Planning out the user interface of an interactive project is important because employing design guidelines becomes more crucial. Such elements here to scrutinize are optical balance, unity, movement, and simplicity.
After all of this be sure to test the application for consistency and user control functionality.

E-Commerce Web Design Tips

I recently have undertaken an E-Commerce website, and begun to research effective strategies I would like to share . . .

1. Image accounts for a lot, and when your potential customer is checking out your products or services online, they want to do what they would normally do in the store (or as close to it as possible), online: For your business, this means taking excellent photography that shows your product in different contexts, or environments, and at different angles.

2. Let your customers know they are secure before they get to the 'Pay Now' purchase page. You can do this by signing up for a $2 a month SiteLock badge (the site conducts security constantly monitors your site to ensure your information is not being compromised), or if your website has another method, make sure it is posted on the homepage of your website somewhere along with subsequent order pages.

3. Your website: Clean + Professional = Trustworthy. Simple as that.

4. Link to your businesses contact information from every page, and make that link easy to be found.

5. Streamline your checkout process: Don't ask for someone's information before they have agreed to make a purchase. Then have options to 'Log In' for a repeat customer, or is a new customer, check a box if they want your site to retain their information for future purchases. Then have another check box to be added to a mailing list.

6. Offer some form of guarantee or a discount. Be sure to make this pronounced on the product page.

7. If the word 'FREE' is ANYWHERE pertaining to a product, make it bold or easy to point out to a page onlooker.

8. Give your customers more than one payment method to 'checkout' with.

9. Don't confuse your buyers: Place a limited amount of information on each subsequent page leading up to checkout, so they will be focused on what they set out to do: Purchase your product! If they see an advertisement and click on it, or a link to a news article of interest, they may not return!

10. Lastly, give your customers navigation tools when checking out and a 'progress bar' on each checkout page to let buyers be aware of where they are at in the checkout process.

Any suggestions would be of aid, as a website viewer.

Webpage Critique for Louisville Detailing . . . HELP!

I began a

new webpage

yesterday for a client. Louisville Detailing is a local car detailer that offers a load of other services besides those that a regular car detailing shop offers. I am thinking about outlining that on the front page somewhere. After all, it is

common practice to place all points that differentiates a certain business from it's competitors on a webpage

. All content, even links are currently from existing website, so if you critique, please do not pick on that. I am looking for suggestions for what, as a client, someone would look for to be on an 'auto detlailing' webpage. What would make YOU want to get your car spiffed up for a hot date? What would make you want to get a crummy decal off of your car or have someone else shine your rims and tires up? My thoughts are pricing right off, but I have placed that on the 'detailing' page considering they do have many other services. So, besides that. . . . The webpage can be found here.

Webpage Layout and User Friendliness

Users traverse a page on a web site in only a few basic ways. It is easy to follow the flow of what we, as designers, envision for a page, instead of really focusing on our audience and the true functionality. Functionality goes beyond aesthetics. This includes screen resolution, browser capabilities, and designing for alternate client environments. As far as layout is concerned, for a usual informative site such as a periodical, it is usually a paper-based reading pattern. The paper based reading pattern follows a left to right, then down, and left to right zig zag. A secondary pattern is screen-based, which is more landscape oriented: How you would view something on a television. This is a circular pattern, beginning center top proceeding to follow a clockwise motion back around. This must be considered when designing content for location placement.

Does your business need to go social media crazy?

Experts squawk about Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, YouTube, designing websites, and a whole litany of online and social media possibilities, but not all of them make sense for every single business.

When it comes to local advertising, small business owners must seriously consider how to concentrate their efforts. While we all must utilize the internet and social media to some extent, what will be most effective for one owner, may be a waste of time for another. By reflecting on some key issues, devising a successful local advertising strategy becomes less about what everyone else says and more about what you truly want and need.

Tips on Formatting Site Content for Your Audience

Using headings, lists, and a consistent structure will help to unify your symmetric main ideas, while declaring  them from those of other levels. Make line by line reading sensible and summarize, so the onlooker will know in an instant if it pertains to what is of interest to them. You have to think about how a user intends to interact with the information on your Web page.  Is a reader more likely to read or scan your pages? This will be useful in determining whether or not you arrange your page in a paper-based pattern or a screen-based pattern. Use a grid to format your content. You can choose to do this by using HTML tables and setting the cellpadding property to '0'. Tip: Be sure to create CSS documents to guide the formatting on your Website, it will be a lot easier to edit later!

For more, go to my new website.

Louisville Detailing SEO Work

Before completion, I already had Louisville Detailing's Website on the first page of Google results for 'Auto Detailing Louisville KY'. I enhanced the content, the unique keyword and description identity of each page of the site, and tagged the images and text appropriately on all of the pages. I also targeted this specific keyterm throughout the whole site. Having a consistent theme helps in the authority the site has, including the backlinks and crosslink compatibility.

So what works? A conglomerate of different elements intertwined to create a theme visible to search engines!