ARK Squared Productions

One of the things that we’re always preaching about is consistency of your brand throughout your different marketing materials – and that includes online avenues as well. From your website to Facebook to Twitter, you need to make sure that you have a consistent image. One thing that I see far too often is people just using standard Twitter backgrounds and a poorly chosen headshot for their profile image. If you’re a small business person the different places that you interact with your customers, business associates and other important contacts are ALL important. We’ve talked about Personalizing Twitter a while back but I thought I would tell you how you can create and change your twitter background.

I’ve always been a fan of the Google Doodles, and I really like the interactive ones! Today’s doodle paying tribute to the 46th Anniversary of the original series of Star Trek doesn’t disappoint! You get to use the transporter, see them on the bridge, and smack a bad guy over the head! Lots of fun.

“It’s the most wonderful time, of the year…” I can almost hear the Staples commercial now! Kids go back to school, days get shorter and cooler (hopefully not too much!) and our excuses for our social media, blogging, newsletters, etc being sporadic go out the window! Thought I’d share a couple tips for staying on top of things and getting organized before what can be a crazy busy time of year really starts off.

When coming up with new blog topics there are a few ways I think of ideas. Sometimes educating, thinking of things that my clients or other web designers may want to know, or educating people on something I wish they knew that would make my life easier, or also sharing some things that drive me CRAZY that I wish people would not do – this is one of those types of posts. I wanted to share with you my top 5 things that drive me crazy that other, likely BAD, web designers do.

While thinking about what to write this week I was thinking about what sort of things have made my life easier as a designer, and the software that I use came to mind. I have been using Adobe products for over 15 years, and Macromedia as well before Adobe bought them, and the different they make for my final products designed for clients are huge. I don’t think that I could function as a designer without Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. So when my version from a couple years ago started to get very dated I was not looking forward to having to pay the huge amount for an upgrade – but then Adobe introduced Creative Cloud.

We’ve talked about Volunteering in the past and how great it is for Networking in our post Overlooked Networking Opportunity – Volunteering! But what about for the great experience it can give you? The amount that you can learn is phenomenal, and often you don’t have to pay a thing for it, in some cases even they pay for you to increase your experience.

We had a great open discussion this morning at my weekly networking group about social media, and many other topics too. But one thing that came up was how impersonal Social Media can feel and how some people in the group did not like it because of that. The discussion really reminded me of how important it is to make sure that you connect with people beyond online.

One of the biggest lessons that I had to learn as a business owner is that I am an expert. This by all means does not mean I know everything about my field, far from it, but I know more than the average person, thus, I am an expert. As dictionary.com puts it, an expert is “a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field”. It’s not saying I know everything just that I have skill and knowledge.

One thing that I hear all the time from business people is how busy they are. Almost like how many hours you work equates with how successful you are as a business person. I mean, you must be pretty important if your work world would fall apart if you didn’t work an 80 hour week, right? I have different views! I would say you must be pretty important if you can make the same amount of money and work only 20 or 30 hours a week – seems much more valuable to me, or at least you’re making more per hour! But really though, when did the shift go to spending tons of time at work instead of taking time to enjoy life being success?

When I’m out networking and doing my “elevator pitch” one of the things that I mention that I do to explain graphic and website design more is branding. What tends to come to most people’s minds when I say that is, “Oh, okay, she designs logos” – but it’s so much more than that! One thing that’s really important when designing is to develop your brand – a look, feel, colours, even a font that you use universally throughout all of your points of contact with your clients.