Content Management Systems – Why Use One?

October 12, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Web Design

There are a few reasons why using a Content Management System (CMS) can be a good fit for your company.  Many of the most popular CMS’ were designed for blogging, such as WordPress for example, but have since become much more versatile and able to do far more than just blogging.  Let’s go through a few different reasons (of which there are many more!):

Interactive:

A natural first reason that a CMS can be useful, particularly one such as WordPress that was designed for blogging, is that it can allow you to easily interact with your customers or potential customers.  You can generally easily add a blog to a website in a CMS, you can also leave different pages open for comments as well.  This can add some great dimension to an otherwise “static” webpage.

Easy to Use:

Another reason CMS’ are very popular is because many of them are incredibly easy to use.  I’ve often told my clients “If you can use webmail like Hotmail or Yahoo, you can use WordPress.”  You don’t have to know any code like HTML, granted basic understanding of coding can come in handy, to do blog posts, updates to your content, changing pictures, etc.  But publishing a blog post with photos, embedded YouTube videos, etc, is really not too much more difficult that writing it out in Word.

Cost Savings:

The advantage of a CMS being easy to use is that it can also save you a lot of money.  Because you would be able to do many of the updates on your own you could save a lot of money otherwise spent on a Web Designer.  This way you can do basic updates to content, publish blog posts, update photos, etc on your own and then only need your web designer when it comes to the larger changes.  Additionally, there are many plug-ins available to do many tasks from Calendars, to slideshows, Event Booking, etc, which can save you money having one custom built for you by simply using an already existing plug-in.

Great for Search Engine Optimization:

One thing that helps a website rank well with Search Engines is fresh and regularly updated content.  Search Engines HATE stale, unchanging content, so being able to easily update content works to your advantage SEO wise as well. There are often great plug-ins available to help with SEO as well.  That being said, when you are editing, changing or adding additional content you need to make sure you keep in mind what your keywords are for your website so you don’t delete them by accident when you re-fresh content, or make sure you incorporate them in new content.  If you don’t know what your keywords are, or need to have some found for you, make sure you speak to a SEO expert!

Easy to Change:

A final point I want to mention is that with most CMS’ making site-wide overhauls and updates is much easier to do.  The whole site is generally based on a template so if you edit, change or even replace the template you can quite quickly have a very different look to your website.

There are many more benefits to a good CMS, these are just a few of the ones that I generally highlight to my clients or contacts.  A very important thing to keep in mind though is that not all CMS’ were created equal!  Some are very easy to use, some are near impossible to use and negate many of the points mentioned above.  We’ll touch more on that in our next post where we’ll be talking about how and when to get out of a bad CMS.

Content Management Systems – What’s the difference from straight HTML & CSS?

October 04, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Web Design

When I started out on my own in ARK Squared just over a year ago and doing my networking one of the things I would constantly be hearing from other designers was how they use WordPress or other Content Management Systems (CMS) for making client’s websites – and I didn’t understand why you want to use one.  Now, after having implemented WordPress for many of my own client’s projects I understand!  It did take me a while to really understand the difference and why one can be better than the other.

All the websites that I used to make while growing up or learning about designing through different courses I took all taught just the straight HTML and CSS.  You essentially write the code and then uploaded the files directly to the server.  So you could make whatever design you want, whatever layout you want, with no restrictions but your own imagination and ingenuity.  The huge advantage to this is that you are not restricted by any templates or certain ways that you have to code in order for the chosen CMS to function properly.  You make your template and then publish it.  For a basic website it can be much faster and easier to maintain, or for a very large website it can allow you more freedoms throughout the site.

The downfall of doing all the code yourself/through your designer is when you want to start doing anything interactive.  If you want to do a blog, have an events calendar, do online registrations for an event or even just have a message board the implementation of that can take a lot of time and thus expense, when many of those features are easily incorporated, often as a plug-in, with a CMS such as WordPress.

What a CMS does is give you an online interface that allows you to do updates, additions, blog posts, etc to your website.  It uses an interface not entirely dissimilar to online webmail, think Hotmail or Yahoo for example, to do your editing.  Depending on your CMS, you have the ability to choose from an incredibly large amount of templates that already exist or an experienced designer can design a custom one for you using your company logo, colours, etc.  Interactive items like those mentioned above are also easily integrated into your site as well; much more easily than with a non-CMS website.

So before you decide on how you want your website designed, whether or not you want to use a CMS, think about the different features you want.  I recently heard an analogy used regarding making a web-based product for an organization, building a website is not dissimilar to building a house.  If you don’t make your plan, blue-prints, or hire a good contractor to manage the product you’re doomed to failure before you even get to building your foundation!  So make sure you know what you want, plan it out well and then you should be able to get the end product that’s right for you!  Stay tuned for more information about CMS’s vs. HTML/CSS in the coming weeks!

The Wonder of Google Docs

September 27, 2011 | By Adam Kouwenberg Posted in Technology

A brilliant tool for collaboration that I have recently started to use more and more is Google Docs.  First launched in August 2005 and expanded to include the Spreadsheet in June of 2006 Google Docs is a great way to share projects that you are working on.  Recently in our office we have needed to have a few “living” documents, documents that we have needed to have multiple people in multiple locations working on the same parts.  In the past you have had to save the document, forward it around, make some more changes and before you knew it there were 15 revisions out there and some one just made major revisions in both version 14 and 15.  With Google Docs not only do you have only one version but multiple people can be working on the same document at the same time, with the changes being reflected in real time!

Not only does this work well for sharing a document with others around the world, but it also works great in a small office.
When proofreading a document, or even writing meeting minutes.  With the live updating of the document, you can truly have a collaborative experience.

Have you ever needed to have a form filled in that you wanted to have a number of people fill in, then share the results with others?  Using it like a survey for example.  Google Spreadsheet has a form generator that you can customize to your needs, distribute to who ever you want, even embed it on your own site, and then you can share the spreadsheet  as a read only, or fully editable.  For fun I have created a simple Google Form  – that you can find HERE and you can view the back end spreadsheet HERE that updates live.

The more I use Google Docs the more I learn and discover.

What is your favorite aspect of Google Docs?

We will do a follow up post on Docs in a few months, once we play with it some more.  I keep finding cool things, and it is hard to narrow it down and focus on just a couple of features!  Please share your favorite bit, or ask us for more detail on a particular function and we will happily dig into it and learn more and report back!

Jitbit Macro Recorder

August 18, 2011 | By Adam Kouwenberg Posted in Technology

So this post is a bit different from some of our others.  Generally on the ARK Squared blog we discuss graphic design, web marketing, audio visual services and the like.  But today we will actually look at a piece of software.

I recently had a need to automate a few repetitive tasks on my PC, really out of sheer laziness. One of the pieces of software often needs the same task repeated over and over again.  Each cycle of this task requires close to 30 keystrokes, and I needed to repeat this process 120 times. So faced with 3600 monotonous keystrokes I went looking for a way to simplify the process.  I came across Jitbit Macro Recorder, a simple and clean tool for automation.

I found using the recording function a great way to create a base macro, and it is very simple to edit the sequence of events.  A great function included in this is the ability to build in repeats, including prompting the user for the number of repeats.  I like the fact that once the script is running you can easily pause or quit the script with just a couple of keystrokes. The one thing with the repeats that I would like to see is that once the script is running it to count down the remaining repeats on the status bar.

Now, I know that I am not the best software reviewer, and I have not used many features including the great ability to create .exe files of the scripts (standalone programs that can be used on computers that do not have the software installed) but I have another, albeit selfish motives.  I was intrigued by a note on the download page of the software.  The developer is offering the $40 software for free to bloggers in exchange for any kind of review and a backlink to their website.  The more I thought about this, the smarter I realized it was! Not only are you getting more people using your software, but more importantly you will be increasing your presence on search engines.  One of the way that sites like Google rank your page is by finding out how “popular” you are on the world wide web.  How many independent sources are referencing your company?  Along the lines of one of our posts a few weeks ago, any press is good press, and having your site being discussed and linked to from other, and importantly – independent sites.  It is easy for you to create all kinds of links off you own pages to yourself, but search engines like having “social justification” or a burden of proof that people are talking about you.  Think along the line of trending topics on Twitter, the higher the trend, the more likely that you are going to have either heard of it, or read about it, or are interested in learning more about that topic. So, why not give away some of your product in exchange for a review?  While all reviews may not be positive (in fact I think it is good if you have a few negative ones, I personally always read the bad reviews, and often determine that the review is being unreasonable, or perhaps they have a valid point for their situation, which is not applicable to mine) you get your name out there.

Now, back to the review of the software.  I would be happy to do a more thorough review of the software, with screen shots, and perhaps videos etc, but I need some encouragement!  Post a comment, ask a question, give me some feedback!  Let me know what you would like to see! I will be using Jitbit Macro Recorder a lot in the next month or so to simplify my life , so far I really do love it, it just works!  I hope to be able to provide a more thorough review as I think of more and more ways of using it.

So to pull it all together:

  1. If you are looking for a great, easy to use piece of software to automate task Jitbit Macro Recorder is the Bee’s Knees
  2. Want to build your search engine ranking? Ask others for reviews, links, Facebook likes, Twitter follows etc.  The more you get yourself out there the better
  3. Free stuff is great! (Thanks Jitbit for the free software!)
  4. If you find this useful, let us know!
Next week we will get back to our regular business related posts, currently working on how to use online tools to simplify your  business, specifically looking at some of the wicked cool features of Google Docs.

Leads List Generating With Google Squared

August 09, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Technology

All business to business companies know that one thing you’re bound to spend some time on is learning about different companies so you can target them as a potential client.  For example, if you’re a carpet cleaning company looking to make a connection with different carpet installation companies you might want to know some of the companies in your area and how to contact them.  Generally that meant either spending a lot of time on the internet looking things up, make lots of phone calls, or pounding the pavement – but overall a large time investment.  Well, Google has a great product that can do a lot of this work for you – FREE!

Google has made a great product called “Google Squared”.  And what this site does is VERY handy.  Basically you type in your request, what area you are targeting, and it makes up a list for you.  So continuing on in the carpet cleaning example above, they might do a search for “Flooring Companies, Coquitlam, BC”, and what it does is creates a list of companies in Coquitlam, their website, addresses, email addresses, etc, etc and presents it to you in a nice table format.  You can then decide if you want different columns or not, add your own columns, and there you go – a customized contact list all ready to go!  You can even export the file or export it to your Google Docs (More about Google Docs next post!) It even tells you where it got the information, and if it thinks the information may not be accurate.  This search even listed if the company was BBB accredited!

So how does Google do this?  It basically is using its own search engine to compile the information for you.  From the companies’ websites, to their Google Places page, to any directories they may have signed up with.  It searches the web and complies it so that you don’t have to spend hours doing it all by yourself.  And who hasn’t made a spreadsheet like this on their own and then realized that when they went to use it they wished they’d added another column of information?  This lets you add it in seconds instead of taking hours of work!

Anyhow, a very handy Google tool that’s not very advertised that we thought we’d share with you!  If you want more information feel free to contact us or visit their Google Squared site at: http://www.google.com/squared.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

We’ve recently learned that Google is phasing out their “Google Labs” of which Google Squared was part of – so Google Squared has unfortunately been shut down.

As Google says:

“As part of the phasing out Google Labs, Google Squared was shut down on September 5, 2011. Any saved Squares have been deleted.

“We will continue to use Google Squared technology to improve search, as we have already done with question answering and related searches. We hope that you have enjoyed using Google Squared as much as we enjoyed building it.”

So it sounds as though some of the squared technology has been incorporated into their searches, but we’ll see what happens!  Another casualty of the ever changing internet!

All Press is Good Press, But is it Smart Press?

August 02, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Marketing

We all know that getting mentioned in the Press is free marketing, and helps build your brand.  As Brad Paisley says in his song Celebrity “the more they run my name down the more my price goes up”.  But how to you make sure it’s working for you and not against you?  We can’t control if the media wants to report our mistakes, so how do we make that positive?  One word – Engage.

There are two ways I want to talk about Engaging regarding handling what the media says, responding to press about ourselves, and that of our competitors.

For ourselves, we all have times where there’s a disagreement with a customer/client, but what do you do if they decide to start commenting on twitter, or if it makes it into your local paper perhaps?  Ignoring it does not make it go away, and can make you look like you don’t care; bad idea.  You need to address it.  If you can fix the problem that’s often the best solution, but if you can’t ensure that you do a public (of the same nature/medium) apology and if you can give examples of good that you’ve done that relates to the situation that can help as well.  Make sure that you engage in the situation, not just throw your hands up and do nothing.

For our competitors, see if you can make the situation work for you, especially if they decide to not deal with it!  A great example of this I heard once at a seminar.  A man had his flight cancelled, problems with the airline, etc, cannot entirely recall the situation, but what happened is the important part.  He started tweeting about it from the airport and the airlines’ competitor, who intentionally follows and keeps track of competitors’ mentions, saw the complaint, offered the man a good deal and better treatment and got him flying to his destination – within minutes!  And I can imagine gained very favourable tweets from that man as well!  Now, we can’t all be on top of things by the minute, but that type of response to your competitors “oops” can gain you new, and very loyal, clients!

Overall we just need to remember to engage, take a front seat and be in charge of the situation.  Don’t just sit by and say oh well, make sure you’re actively part of the press that your company receives!

Colors – Importance and Choosing

July 26, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Branding, Marketing, Web Design

When starting a company, or doing major changes or a “facelift”, there are many choices that you need to deal with and one that can often be “back-burnered” or not focused on are color choices for the company. 

We’ve mentioned before the importance of your logo, images, etc, and a major part of that are the color choices you make.  If you are a massage therapist for example, you’re not going to want to stress someone out by having bright red be one of your colors.  It needs to be something you devote some serious thought to.

Here is a basic list of the major colors and their common meanings, feels, etc:

  • Red: action, confidence, courage, vitality, warning, health, and in some cultures luck
  • Orange: vitality with endurance, change
  • Yellow: wisdom, joy, happiness, intellectual energy, deceit, cowardess, hope
  • Green: life, nature, fertility, well being, growth, money, stability
  • Blue: calmness, responsibility, spirituality, truth, peace
  • Purple: Royalty, magic, mystery, creativity, imagination, romance
  • White: purity, cleanliness, virtue, goodness
  • Black: power, elegance, formality, death, evil, mystery, stability  
  • Gray: conservative, formal, sorrow, security, maturity, moody, depressing
  • Brown: earth, order, convention, dependability, reliability, steadfastness

As you may notice most colors have positive and negative associations, so you have to be careful as to how you use them.  Often the meaning of a color changes depending on how light, dark, rich, etc, the color is.  A great example of that is blue.  A light blue tends to be more light-hearted and playful where a darker blue is more corporate and professional – totally different feel just by adjusting the saturation of the color.

A major thing to keep in mind, particularly for companies doing business around the world, is to ensure that you research the meaning of the color in different countries.  A color like red may mean luck in one country but danger in another, and some colors can be offensive in some cultures as well. 

There are many great sites out there that list color meanings, just type “color meanings” into your search browser and you’ll find a wealth of information at your fingertips!  A couple great sites that I have found in my travels for helping decide your color palette are:

Adobe Kuler: This lets you say if you want complementary colors, compound, monochromatic, etc, and you can drag points around on a color wheel and then it tells you the hex number, RGB and CMYK values of the colors – WONDERFUL!  I have used this site so many times!

Color Scheme Designer: This site does similar to the Adobe Kuler site, but does not provide RGB or CMYK values, only hex value.  But what this site does that’s really cool is lets you select menu options that show you what the colors would look like for different color blind people. A very cool thing to know if you want to worry about that!

Color Palette Generator: This site will generate a color palette for you from a photograph.  So if you have a picture you really like the colors in you can upload it here (as long as it’s less than 300×300 pixels) and it will list 9 colors and their hex values for you.  There are a few sites that do this type of thing, this one seems to work well.

Overall just remember that color decisions are not something to be taken lightly as they, partnered with your logo, graphics, etc, will be the face of your company.  So make sure you’re not just using a color because it’s your favourite but ensure that you do the proper research or hire a professional, like us at ARK Squared, to help guide you through the process.

Opacity for Backgrounds with CSS 2

July 12, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Web Design

One problem that I can across recently while designing a website for a client was trying to make the background opaque without making all of it’s contents, or “children” opaque as well.  I was pulling my hair out, scouring the internet trying to find a solution that did not use CSS 3 but CSS 2, because I wanted it to be very compatible with any browser.  I tried a whole bunch of things and finally came up with a solution that worked – so I thought I’d share it as a resource for others who have had the same problem!

This is an example image of how the site was looking:

 Opacity using CSS to div

Obviously very washed out.  The images looked pale and boring, and the text really didn’t stand out – my client was not happy with that!  So what I did allowed the site to look as I had intended:

Opacity using CSS 1px x 1px background image

One of the big challenges that I had was that there were a lot of background images in a whole bunch of different div’s already, and of course with CSS 2 you can only have one background image per div, so I had a limited selection of places to work with.  What I ended up doing was making a 1 pixel x 1pixel image that was the colour and opacity that I wanted, saved it as a png-24 because I wanted to ensure that it kept the transparency I desired (png-8 or gif only allow pixels to be fully transparent or full colour, no partials!), and then set it as a repeating background in the div I wanted to have the opaque background – and voila!  It worked!  My other previous ideas either had the background not lining up at times (especially for a very small window) or would not extend consistently when the box re-sized – but this attaches itself to the entire div no matter how small, large, etc it is.

Anyhow, an “ah-ha!” moment that I thought I would share because I couldn’t find it listed anywhere as an idea to try!  If you use this idea feel free to let me know, I’d love to know my idea worked for others as well!

Linking Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook

July 04, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Social Media

When it comes to Social Media for Business the biggest thing I always here is “I don’t have time for that”.  So a common thing to do for Social Media is to link them all together.  So for example, I post a “tweet” on Twitter and it then automatically gets sent to both my LinkedIn Account and Facebook Page.  There are some that think that this is the best thing since sliced bread, and then there are others that think they should not be linked together.  Let’s examine these two arguments…

The “pro-linking” camp, of which I am a part of to a degree, like being able to easily stay active on all three mediums with essentially only having to do one.  This can save a lot of time not having to think about three things all the time or having to remember to post in all three places, or decide how to say things, etc etc.  I also find that being relatively new to all three mediums not having to stress out about all three at the same time can be nice.

That being said, I am also careful about how my accounts are linked.  You can essentially link all three to each other any way you want.  You can have it set so when you comment on linked in it tweets for you, when you post a link of facebook your twitter followers or LinkedIn connections see it also – all having the potential of getting very confusing!  Another thing to think about is that in all three mediums the restriction on the amount of characters you use is different, so what may be a perfectly fine post in LinkedIn may get shortened awkwardly in Twitter.

What I have chosen to do is have only one set of connections.  When I post to Twitter it pushes my tweet to both Facebook and LinkedIn, but that’s it.  So if I do any comments in either Facebook or LinkedIn that’s the only place they post, they don’t get posted to any other places.  I’ve chosen this because of a few reasons; Twitter has the lowest character allowance so I know if I can fit my post there it will be fine on the other two places.  I also find that Twitter is the most basic medium as well, you only get to post comments, you cannot embed video or anything more complex – you can include a link to those, but not have them directly in the post.  Finally, I also am not a super frequent “tweeter” – the most tweets I think I have ever done in a day is 7; and usually I average only 2 to three a week.  Because of that I know that I am not going to overwhelm my facebook fans or my LinkedIn connections.  I think if I get more active in Twitter I would think about disconnecting it.

That leads nicely into the thoughts of the “anti-linking” camp.  The most common reason that I have heard for not linking your accounts is that there is an entirely different audience for all three.  I personally think that can very much depend on the company, some companies have similar fans/followers/connections on all three mediums.  But regardless, a very valid point.  Another reason is that you don’t want people to start ignoring you because they see the same message everywhere.  If someone followed you on more than one medium and noticed that your posts were the same them may start to ignore your posts – which obviously you would not want!  This is why if you are someone that tweets a lot you may not want to connect your twitter to your LinkedIn stream for example; it may be too much for someone on LinkedIn.  A final reason for not linking is that your LinkedIn connections may not understand Twitter – so if you comment with “#” and “@” in your tweets, or start using Twitter lingo like “FF” or the like, which makes perfect sense to those on Twitter, you could confuse your LinkedIn connections.  A perfect example of a great reason to not connect and just do two posts instead.

A great tool for those that cannot decide is a Social Media managing program, such as for example.  Using something like that you can make a post and decide what medium(s) to post it to.  It can also be an easy place to make a tweet, copy and past it back into the comment window and then take out the “Twitter speak” and adjust it for posting to either Facebook or LinkedIn and post it again – all in the same place without having to hop around to different windows.  You can also schedule posts in advance as well which can save much time if that was your reason for connecting your accounts. 

Some thoughts to consider when you’re getting ready to dive into Social Media!  Overall just remember to not overwhelm your followers or you can generate “blindness” to your comments!

LinkedIn Applications

June 20, 2011 | By Anna Kouwenberg Posted in Social Media

Last post we talked about ways to get your profile completion percentage up, this post we’ll be focusing on some different applications available with LinkedIn.  These of course are just a few that I will highlight – there are so many out there to choose from!  The thought here is to show you the potential of the applications and introduce you to them and then you can all go wild!

The one application that I’ve been using so far is the WordPress application.  A couple other ones that I have heard great things about are both the Amazon Reading List application and the Creative Portfolio Display application.

The WordPress application is simple and effective.  Essentially, if you have a WordPress blog, through their site or your own, you can use the application.  It connects with your blog and takes a summary of your posts and lists them in a little window.  It offers a nice little teaser to grab people’s attention and get them to read your blog.  I would recommend having this pretty high up on your profile – it would be a shame for people to miss it because they didn’t scroll down far enough!  Right after your summary is a popular place for this one.  Depending on how many recommendations you have it can go after that as well, but not if you’re so popular that it would hide it really far down the list!  If you do not have a WordPress blog there is also another application called Blog Link that you could use as well.

Another popular application is the Amazon Reading List Application.  This allows you to highlight books that you’re currently reading and share that with others.  It can be a great conversation starter!  Think about this example, you are planning to meet someone over coffee for business so you do your homework, check out their website, their different Social Media Profiles and notice their reading a common book – how convenient of a conversation topic would that be?  Very handy, if you’re an avid book reader of course!

A final application – one of those ones that I’ve always wanted to use but never remember to find the time to do it – is the Creative Portfolio Display application.  They actually summarize it really well on their application download page: “After installing the application, upload your portfolio in the Behance Network, a free online platform for creative professionals. You can create an unlimited number of multimedia projects and can select which projects are displayed on your LinkedIn profile.”  So for all those creative folk out there you really have a way that you can showcase your work visually instead of trying to describe it in your summary – after all, “a picture is worth a thousand words” as they always say, so we can save people a whole lot of reading!

Those are just a small sampling of the many applications that are available for use through LinkedIn.  There are many, MANY more from file sharing applications, to different Social Media integration (we’ll touch on that more in the next post!) and showing where you’ve been travelling even!  Really a lot to choose from and I would highly recommend using at least a couple on your profile to not only allow you to stand out from the crowd a bit but also to add some interaction capabilities to your profile.  After all, the whole point of these different Social Media platforms is to be social right?

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