Vessel Of Beauty

Graphic Design & Illustration

A Guide for Setting Up a High Value Product eCommerce Site

Written By: Greggory Mullen - May• 14•12

According to the article, “Exploring E-Commerce” that was published on Entrepreneur.com, 64 percent of businesses that sell online reported that the Internet has increased business revenues. Based on this trend of increasing Internet revenues, most business professionals see the writing on the wall and are allocating more of their marketing budget to eCommerce. Critical considerations that need to be analyzed prior to setting up an eCommerce site include security concerns, Content Management Selection (CMS) and strategies for gaining credibility and customer trust.

CMS

Content Management Systems (CMS) are of paramount importance for any company that is serious about conducting business online. Wether you sell luxury mattressess or costume jewlery, a strategy for maintaining product catalog data, recording transactions, applying payments and compiling marketing and production data for analysis is to employ a CMS to integrate all of these important business functions. By selecting the best CMS for your business, a business professional eliminates many of the stumbling blocks that discourage executives from expansion to the Internet.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the important factors to be evaluated prior to selecting a CMS suitable for your business model is how well the system operates as a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool. Since Internet customers are attracted via search engines, it is critical that a business site is set-up to maximize traffic to your site. Website traffic is the lifeblood of Internet sales and responds to established search engine optimization strategies established to boost your audience via articles, blogs and keywords.

Product Testing

Testing demos of different CMS products is highly recommended to determine compatibility with your company’s IT management goals. Decisions should not be based on price since paying more does not guarantee that you are getting a better product, as decision-makers are often persuaded to believe. CMS packages are often oversold with many technical goodies that are useless for most companies. There are also many free CMS options to consider. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Silver Stripe and Cushy CMS are some of the more popular free tools available.

Security Concerns

It is critical that companies protect consumers by establishing and maintaining security measures to protect customers’ sensitive financial information when they order online. The more expensive the items purchased, the more important it will be to win the trust of consumers before they will be willing to purchase online. Carefully selecting payment partners with proven security systems is one main step a company can take to protect customers. PayPal and Google Checkout are two trusted giants in the industry that consumers seem to trust. By offering payment options that consumers have used in the past, companies getting into eCommerce can make it easier for new customers to feel comfortable shopping with them.

Earning Customer Trust

The higher the cost of a product purchased over the Internet, the more important it is for a company to offer superior customer service. Being available to answer questions and communicate with the customer is key for larger expenditures. A high-ticket customer responds to a “relationship sale” and will purchase when they feel like they have checked out your business.

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Basic Web Design

Written By: Jade Sampson - Apr• 30•12

I’ve just developed a string of web sites for one company. They have more than just a few fingers in different pies and what they wanted was a small collection of web sites, all geared up to serve the particular market that they were targeting. Several were informational, two were eCommerce (one books, one related to kitchen equipment) and they also had a review site (click here to see what I mean by ‘review’ site).

All were built on the same platform, with lots of individual coding and design going into each web site. What’s amazing about web design is how much variety you can inject into a site, just by introducing small lines of code and inputting a tweak here, a tweak there, in the style sheet. As an example – fonts. Both sizing, type and color.

You can insert a standard format, keep it Times New Roman, size 12, black. Or you can alter the code so that the font appears differently on each page or post. As an example inputting:

<font color=”red”>I’m red!</font>

will cause the font to turn red. Equally you can insert the word ‘blue‘, ‘green‘ or whatever you choose where the word ‘red’ appears and you’re going to get the corresponding color show up. You can also ‘tell’ the site to make the text bold, italic, underline or even appear crossed out, by using what’s known as ‘tags’.

Again, to give an example or two, this is the tag that creates bold font: <b></b> . This one: <u></u> is for underlining. <strike></strike> gives the old crossed out look and <i></i> turns the font into italics. Of course the little HTML snippets shown here are basic levels of web site code but they’re important to know, none the less.

Web design is less complex than most would think. It’s more to do with learning a new ‘alphabet’ if you like, than it is about learning lots and lots of boring code. Once you learn the basic structure, what all the different tags, symbols and so on mean, it’s surprising how the rest stats to fall into place.

To give yourself a good overview of web design and coding, check out this site:

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How to Design Your Own Website – Artisteer

Written By: Buddy Valdez - Apr• 11•12

While we would all like to have the money to engage a professional graphic designer for our business website, the reality is that many of us cannot afford it!

If you build your site on WordPress (always the best choice, in my view), then one solution is to use a ready-made theme.  There are countless free themes out there – the only problem being that you’ll end up with a theme that thousands of other sites are already using.   You can get something a bit more exclusive by buying a theme – but there are snags there too! 

Most paid themes come with lot of customization options – you may be able to change all the colors, change the header image, add sliders, etc etc. The trouble is, the bigger the admin menu inside your theme, the more bloated and slow-loading the theme is likely to be.  And Google doesn’t like slow-loading sites!

As a creative person, I have never liked the limitations of themes anyway – so when I discovered Artisteer, my eyes lit up!   An example of an Artisteer website can be seen on this blog of belly dance DVD reviews.

For me, Artisteer presents endless opportunities for my own creativity, because I can choose my own colors, images, fonts, everything – but I do that offline, and only upload the theme once it’s complete.  

For people without an artistic bone in their body, Artisteer still works – because for each element, you can just hit the “suggest” button and it will give you suggestions.  A really cool feature is that you can upload a header or background image, and then ask Artisteer to create some suggested color schemes based on that image.

Even if you choose one of Artisteer’s preset color schemes, there are so many opportunities to make your own choices about header, background, layout etc, the chances of anyone else making the same choices is remote. So you will end up with a totally unique design, unlike anyone else’s – the perfect result!

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Designing Your Website

Written By: Buddy Valdez - Dec• 19•11

When it comes to the look of your website, it’s important to remember that first impressions count a lot. Just think about the thoughts that came through your mind as you searched for things on the net. If you searched for legit work from home jobs or Vector Marketing scam and came across a site that was unorganized and had a totally irrelevant header, you might have just clicked the back button. If having a good look website seems like something only people with a programming background can pull off, don’t worry because things have gotten way easier.

If you run your website on a WordPress platform, you could easily have access to thousands of templates that you could use to make your site look nice and professional. Most of the time, all it takes it for you to choose the template that you want and upload it onto your site. You may have to change or customize the header but there are even templates that make customizing headers a cinch.

The exact theme you pick will depend on the topic of your site. There are certain color combinations that will work better though with each other though and you can find sites that have tools where you can put in one color and it will show you colors that compliment that color.

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Designing For Your Audience In Advertising

Written By: Buddy Valdez - Dec• 02•11

Creating a quality website design, logo or brochure has as much to do with the layout as it does to do with know your audience. Trying to sell the best wrinkle cream to women using a black and grey color scheme isn’t going ot happen. However using some fresh beautiful and feminie colors would likely prove to be far more productive then a blah color scheme.

When you’re hiring a graphic designer, or if you’re a designer yourself working on your own projects the first step to creating the perfect layout and design is knowing who your target market is for this piece.

In the example above, if you’re trying to sell a wrinkle cream then you want to not only ensure that you’re using the right color scheme, but you want to have images of your target audience.

For example, if you’re target customer is women in their mid and late forties then avoid using a picture of a women in her mid twenties with perfect skin. This isn’t going to make a women who’s in her mid forties feel like you know what she needs.

Another important aspect of design and layout is your copy. While the graphic designer isn’t always responsible for filling in the sales copy on a website, brochure or other advertising piece it’s important that they create a prominent place where you can list your primary benefits to your customers.

Remember customers don’t by features, they buy benefits. Benefits that solve their exact problem to be exact. So put your big three or four benefits prominently on display where they’ll be read and the reader relates to what they read.

Now, just to play devils advocate here, you can spend hours, weeks and months developing a direct mail piece, website landing page or other piece of advertising and be completely wrong. So it’s worth while to always be split testing your ads, layouts, images etc. To find the best performing combination.

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Choosing The Right Graphic For Your Business

Written By: Greggory Mullen - Nov• 06•11

When you are choosing a header or logo for your company, it is very important to choose a graphic designer that will create something right for your company. For example, if you are looking for any kind of graphic for your site about Christmas gifts, then you might not want to choose someone who specializes in finance logos. You would be better to look for a graphic designer who is used to doing more traditional designs.

That is not to say that you should completely rule out anything too contemporary, but when we think of Christmas we think more of traditional things such as gifts under a Christmas Tree. This involves using traditional colors, perhaps red or green, and making it feel festive.

The best thinbg to do though is to ask for some sample of work that a designer has already completed for another client, and then decide if this is something that you like. Then discuss whether or not this might be the sort of the thing that might suit your brand and site.

Do not be afraid to give something different a go, it is important to do what you feel will benefit your business. Sometimes it is good to try something new.

 

 

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The Perfect Roasting Pan is a Thing of Beauty

Written By: Barbara Blake - Oct• 29•11

When you walk into a home for a family dinner or celebration and you smell the turkey or ham baking, you can’t resist walking into the kitchen to see where the aroma is coming from. You turn on the light and peak in the oven to see a 24-pound turkey cooking away in the perfect roasting pan.

What is the perfect roasting pan? Well the material that it’s made out of determines how evenly your roast will cook most high-quality roaster pans have a lot of 18/10 stainless steel in them. I know that the highest rated roaster pan on Amazon is a Calphalon roasting pan and it has an aluminum core surrounded by 3 ply 18/10 stainless steel.  I also think that using a roasting rack makes the roast or chicken cook more evenly as well. The bottom doesn’t sit in the grease and has a better texture. Of course some people think that the roast will lose flavor without that grease. I say make delicious gravy from it.

It always amazes me that roasting pans that are made to withstand high heat for long periods of time can be constructed with stay-cool handles. As well as I know that they work, still use by big baking mits to take the roasting pan out of the oven.

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Online College and Legitimate Degrees

Written By: Dara Norman - Oct• 28•11

It’s very difficult to discern which online college institutions offer legitimate college degrees and which ones only offer a degree that is acknowledged by the online college itself.  A good way to discern a phony school offering watered down degrees from a legitimate college offering a real education is by checking their credentials. 

 Often, online degrees are not going to be legitimate if the school is for profit.  Also, if you find that the college you are interested in does not offer federal financial aid, it is highly likely that they are not accredited by any federal or government entity.  If they’re not accredited, the degree will be as worthless as the paper it’s printed on.  Many of the phony colleges offer low rates and offer degrees in an extremely short period of time.  This should be a huge red flag for any potential online college student.  If the school is offering a degree in half the time and half the money the university is, it’s because it’s not legitimate!  Beware of online colleges that are only trying to make a profit by selling you a phony degree with little education.    

 If you want to earn a legitimate online college degree, find an online program through a college that is part of the university system of your state.  The degree will always be a real degree and you won’t have wasted your money or time. 

 

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