Alterian SM2 is a monitoring solution designed for brand marketers and public relations. It helps you keep track of conversations and the positive/negative feelings about your brand, customers, and competitors through different social media channels such as wikis, blogs, and photo sharing sites.

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By Eliut Avalos.

Many companies decide to create their own logo instead of looking for a professional to do it for them. For those who choose to take on this task, we’ve come up with some useful tips for producing a great logo.

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by: Monica Olivares and Emma Heald

Starting a new project is always exciting for a web designer. We begin inspired, determined to make the current project the most creative and artistic work we’ve ever done. Once we dig in, though, we’re often faced with the harsh reality that, maybe, our desires aren’t that practical.

Let’s start with our clients. Clients can swing between two extremes: the client who says “yes” to everything we propose, or the client who hates everything we show them. They might ask for continual rounds of revision, present totally new concepts in the middle of the project, and tweak and fiddle with all aspects of the design before they’re finally pleased with the end product.

Managing client expectations is key, and you need a deft hand to explain the practical considerations in web design without dampening a client’s enthusiasm. We all get excited by “flashy” websites, with all the bells and whistles. Clients will often show you examples of what they “love”: audio and video elements, animations, and bursts of color and heavy graphics. Our challenge as web designers is to maintain the visual “excitement” of the site, while making it practical.

For a start, sites need to upload in less than 5 seconds. Sophisticated and extensive imagery and animation is heavy, often making site response times unacceptably slow. We need to find a balance between visual punch and speedy response.

Then there’s the thorny issue of Search Engine Optimization. A really effective website will consistently be found near the top of the results list on any search using Google or other engines. Flash animations are incompatible with search engines. So that fancy Flash banner that welcomes clients to your site may actually be making you invisible to people searching for you on the web.

The best web design projects come from good communication between client and designer. As designers, we need to listen to the clients, and find out not just what they want visually, but also what they need their sites to achieve in business terms. Offering a web design solution that balances visual impact with strong content and business effectiveness is the best outcome for everyone.

The cooperative approach to web design, involving content experts, technical wizards, and clients as well as the designer, will produce a practical, visible site that generates high traffic volume and achieves business goals. Practical web design doesn’t have to be visually boring. It might not be Andy Warhol, but if people are visiting and clicking, does it matter?

by: The QUAXAR Team

We all know the Internet is saturated. There are endless websites, many of them offering eye-catching visuals and fancy add-ons. Standing out in the crowd is getting more and more difficult.

If you use a website to promote products or transact business, you have a lot at stake in the Internet game. With so many competitors clamoring for the public’s online attention, you have to make sure that your site is high on the web user’s radar.

One of the biggest “buzz-terms” of the moment is Search Engine Optimization.  If you haven’t seen the recent Pew study on search engine use, go take a look. As you might expect, use of search engines is increasing: up to 49% of web users use search engines on a typical day.  Search engine use is fast approaching that of email (60% usage), which is the dominant and most-used internet application.  The use of search engines goes up with education level, income level, and connection speed.  The correlation is reversed for age – younger users search more than older users.  And, oddly enough, men search more than women.

If you want to get people’s attention, you need to be found in a search engine. Search Engine Optimization helps web designers and developers ensure that the sites they create are found at the top of the list in the most popular search engines. You can even go a step further, and bid for a paid, high-profile search engine position (Search Engine Marketing, or SEM).

Of course, once you’ve brought a new user to your site from a Google search, you need to offer an experience that encourages him to stay there and do business with you. Many of the best practices for creating an appealing web experience will also boost your search engine rankings.

We’re going to highlight a few practical recommendations to help you make sure your website ranks high in search engine results, generates traffic, and keeps users engaged once they arrive at your site.

1. Optimization: The most commonly used tools for Search Engine Optimization are offered by Google. 67.25% of web users use Google for online searches*, so it makes sense to use what they offer. These include concentrating on keywords in title, text body, links and images; descriptive links and content headings; metatags on individual pages; and keeping images and Flash components to a minimum.
2. Titles: Titles on your site have got to be clear. If you use fancy fonts, or images that obscure the words in your titles or clickable areas, then people won’t see them. Titles should be short, simple, memorable, and relevant to the content they lead to.
3. Content and structure: As in every marketing process the most important thing is to speak to your prospect. Your site needs to talk to your prospective customer with clear and persuasive information and language.  Sites have to be logical and intuitive; web users don’t want to waste time hunting through the site for the information they need. Links to all the important content should be visible on the home page; this will also be picked up the search engines.
4. User Feedback, and Benchmarks: It is so important to find out what web users love or hate about your site, and to get a sense about what other sites are doing that is successful and effective. There are a variety of tools and options that let you collect user input that will help you maximize your site’s success:
   a.    Metrics. Tracking visitor behavior on your site is a very efficient and timely way to find out how well the site is working. The most common and useful metrics to analyze are: How many people visited? What pages did they look at? How long did they stay? What did they click on?
   b.    Surveys. You can create a specific survey to send to your user database, asking for feedback on their experience at your site. Questions you might ask include: Did you find what you were looking for? Would you come back to the site? What did you like/dislike about your experience on the site?
   c.    Blogs. There are countless ways to gather feedback from users once they are inside your site. Blogs, message boards, forums and rss feeds all allow users to post their comments about your site, the minute they think about it. You may find them being brutally honest! Content in these types of interactive areas are all traced by search engines, so encouraging users to leave comments can also improve your search engine rankings.
   d.    Benchmarks. It’s a great idea to do a comparative analysis of sites similar to your own. What is their navigational structure like? How often do you have to click to get to the information you need? How quickly does the site load? Knowing what everyone else is doing can help you make changes that get your site noticed over the competition.
5. Newsletters: A good newsletter can generate traffic to your site. Effective newsletters will choose subjects that interest your users, and are topical. They won’t be overloaded with images, and they’ll have a maximum of 5 subjects per newsletter. They should be sent on a regular schedule, and metrics will help you judge what subjects and format generate the most interest. Most importantly, your newsletters should be permission-based. Make sure the people you send the newsletter to have told you they want it, and that they have the option to stop receiving it whenever they want.

Using this multi-pronged approach to improving your site’s appeal will make sure that you’re visible on the Internet, and that once a user visits your site, they keep coming back for more.

*Hitwise.com