by Scott Prindle

Introduction

This is the beginning of an article series that is focused on teaching you how to use the backend of our websites. We’ll be starting out with the simple tasks of editing content and moving to more advanced tasks as the series moves forward as part of the educational process. If you’d like to subscribe to these articles, please sign up for our Web@Work newsletter.

Some of the topics may address newer aspects of our websites such as responsive design layouts and content templates. Not all of our websites are capable of some of the newer fancy features and I’ll make note of this in each article so that you don’t needlessly read something that doesn’t pertain to your website.

If you’ve made a website with us in the past year or so, however, most likely all of these features will be available on your site. If a specific feature isn’t available with your site’s version, we’d love to discuss updating your CMS with the latest and greatest that our platform allows.

Our first article will be focused on introducing you to the basics of our websites and some of the terminology that as a web geeks use.

Your website and gaining access to under the hood

Your website is built on a content management system (CMS for short), a platform that allows non-technical users to manage a website and its content without the needing coding/programming knowledge. It operates much like a program on a computer does, but operates entirely in the browser from your website’s server and has features that make content editing easier for the layman.

When using a content management system, there will be a separation between what the public sees of the website and what you, the website manager, will see. This is what we term as the frontend and backend of a website.

The frontend of your website is any part of the website that is publicly viewable. Your website pages, blog articles, etc are all part of the front end of the website.

The backend of the website is the centralized part of the website where you manage it. It is not a publicly viewable area of the site, and is password protected in almost all cases. This term also refers to more of the backend that most clients don’t see (the server, the database, etc.), but whenever I’m referring to it, I’ll be referring to the behind-the-curtain application of the CMS.

Most of the time the backend can be accessed by going to a specific address in your browser (such as www.yourdomain.com/admin) and logging in using the account access information for your website. This will be specific to your website, and you can refer to your website records for this.

WYSIWYG Editors

Most content creation/editing on our platform will be made in what is called a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get”, and these editors purpose is to interpret how you interact with its interface and output it as best it can into code that will display as if you’d written the code yourself.

TinyMCE is the specific editor that our sites use and most of our articles will be focused on teaching you how to adequately use this feature, as most of a client’s time will be spent working in it.

Conclusion

On our next lesson, we’ll introduce you a little more on the backend of the websites, what the different sections of the backend are, what they do, and how you can utilize them. This is a beginning series, so if you have any suggestions for things you’d like explained, please feel free to email me, and I’ll make sure to incorporate your feedback into explaining things down the road as this series flourishes.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next installment.

by Scott Prindle

I get questions from clients from time to time asking about various costs for keeping their website up and functional, so I thought I’d put together a small blog article to explain what the specific components are that require upkeep.

There are three major components to a website that have a recurring cost, two of which we’ll be discussing thoroughly: domains and hosting. The third, secure hosting, is more relevant for e-commerce solutions to establish a secure connection with your clients to protect their data when using your server. It’s a rather complicated topic, so a detailed explanation of that will be relegated to a later article.

Domains

Domains are fairly simple to understand and I’ll use an analogy I’ve started using more and more the past few months. Admittedly, this is simplifying the concept, but a domain is sort of like your public listing of your address in the phone book. Normally, a phone book consists of your name, and your address. The purpose of this listing is that if someone is trying to find you, they look your name up and find out your address and/or phone number.

When you purchase a domain online, you’re basically accomplishing the same thing as that listing. Typing in your websites domain in a browser causes your computer to ask the almighty internet to look up your address in the internet phone book and send you to the right place.

What you’re paying for when you purchase a domain is the ownership of that name in the phone book (www.yourdomain.com for example) and the ability to change what the address is for that listing. No one else can change that address unless your registration expires, which you can renew to prevent that from occurring.

Hosting

Continuing this analogy, hosting is the address listed in the phone book. When people look up your domain, they find the address to the computers running your website, and when they go to the address, the hosting computers will serve the website to your visitors. It is where the files for your website are physically located (most likely on a hard drive in a large batch of server towers).

What you are paying for with hosting is the upkeep cost of keeping the computers running and serving your website up when people visit from your phone book listing (domain). The hosting company will make sure the computers don’t break or that anyone loses access to your website (most tout a 99.99% uptime rate, whether that’s wholly true or not).

What makes this separation great?

One of the great benefits of this separation is that it allows you to keep control over your website and how it is served to your visitors. If you’re not happy with a website host, you can always move to a new one and change the address in your domain’s listing to the new host’s address. It should also be mentioned that you can also transfer a domain to a different registrar, though the service quality is generally less important than the hosting.

Our Practices

At Print & Copy Factory, we tend to handle domains for our clients, and run all of our websites through our particular host of choice. This allows us for easier maintenance, managing the listing’s settings, as well as helping you maintain control over your domains for the long term, by notifying you of when the domain is near expiration.

If you’ve ever owned a domain, you’ve probably received a large number of emails about your domain expiring trying to get you to renew your registration. A number of these emails turn out to be different registrars trying to mislead you toward registering with your registrar’s competition. It can often be difficult to spot these, unless you’re used to seeing them or are able to remember the specific company that you are registered with (I can’t fault you for not). This is why we generally try to handle the renewal process for our clients, allowing us to keep a well maintained record and keep track of when a domain needs to be renewed.

Conclusion

That just about covers the various elements of a website’s upkeep and what you’re paying for with each type of service. As always, if you have questions, feel free to email me at scott@printcopyfactory.com

By Scott Prindle

Keeping your advertising materials at a high caliber of professionalism can be a difficult thing to accomplish, especially when it comes to presenting new content to customers that haven’t been created/proofed by a marketer. We’ll be sharing a quick tip to help your content look more professional through the technique of color matching your photos using Adobe Photoshop.

A Trip to Share

So, let us say that we’ve had a company hike over on Mt. Baker, and wanted to share a set of photos from the adventure with our co-workers (these are taken from my own stash). Here we have our set of images for an article explaining our escapades. Not too bad since they’re all of similar landscapes, but the colors/tone are different because they were taken from different angles, locations, and time of day.

Let’s Get Editing

The photos themselves don’t look bad, but you can definitely tell that they aren’t matching one another in tone and color. We can fix that with some simple changes in Photoshop, though. Why don’t you go ahead and open the four images in Photoshop.

Choosing a source image

Now that we’ve got the images loaded into Photoshop, you’ll want to look through them all and choose the photo that you want all the other photos to be matched to in color and tone. I went ahead and selected one of the full shots of Mt. Baker, as it has a variety of colors and with a solid balance of contrast and lightness.

Photoshop Match Color Tool

You’ve got your image set loaded in Photoshop, and you’ve chosen in your mind the photo that you want to match the rest of the set to. Great. Now let’s go ahead and start manipulating the photos to match the source image. Go ahead and navigate to the image you want to edit in Photoshop, and go to Image >> Adjustments >> Match Colors.

This will bring up a dialogue window that at first seems a little innocuous at first, but you’ll want to look for a dropdown menu labelled “Source” near the bottom of the window, and select the source image’s filename that you’ve opened from Photoshop. This will cause the image you are editing to adjust its color to the source image’s colors.

You’ll want to adjust the sliders according to your tastes, as settings for one photo may not work for another. There is no golden setting that will make things right, so a little play will be necessary. Anyway, after you’ve found the sweet spot, go ahead and click okay, and voila, you’ll have an edited photo that matches the color of the source image thanks to your efforts.

I should disclaim here that adjusting the images like this does not guarantee a great print result. You should note that the way your monitor displays an image doesn’t necessarily represent how the image will look like on paper.

After you’ve found settings to your liking, go ahead and confirm the changes, and you’ll have an image that matches the source image’s colors. Repeat this process for all the other images in the set, and you’ll have a presentation that has a level of polish that shows professionalism in your work.

Conclusion

And there you have it, the overall effect creates an effect of cohesion between the set of images that would not have otherwise been there before. And while with the majority of this article I discuss matching these photos together, you can use it for any number of projects, whether you use it on a set of images on a brochure, your website, a technical manual for your products or a large advertisement poster. One thing I did not mention is that while this process is useful for matching images together, you’ll still want to make sure that the set of images match in some way to the color scheme of what you’ll be presenting them in.

For example, if you have a bunch of orange tinted photos, they’ll starkly contrast on a blue pallete. Basically, color theory is still ever present, but you can use this as just another tool in your toolbox to make a coherent and well designed marketing piece.

Let me know if this article was helpful down in the comments below or by firing me off an email at scott@printcopyfactory.com

So you’ve got your brand spankin’ new website, and you’re wanting to get some traffic to it to drum up business? We decided to come up with a multitude of ideas to help set you on the right path. While there is some overlap with some of my previous articles, the refresh will be useful, as each aspect, especially in the online section, synergize very strongly.

Direct Mail

One of the more traditional methods of marketing, creating a direct mail piece allows you to advertise directly through conventional mail systems with a postcard advertisement of some sort, whether it’s to alert customers to an event, or a new special. It’s best if you specifically target your mailing database’s demographic to something that is relevant to your industry.

For example, say your business is a pet store and there’s a coming sales event going on at the store in the coming month. To advertise for it, you could specifically target neighborhoods near your business, and within those specific demographics you could further break it down such as  by houses containing a pet owner, or by income levels of the property. Targeting a specific demographic like that would allow you to cut down on the cost of the mailing piece, removing people from the list that would be unlikely to find your piece of advertising useful.  (We have a whole class dedicated to this topic).

Local Signage

A fairly cheap method of marketing, yard signs are a good way to get started on increasing local exposure to your website. You can create yard signs, flyers, bulletin board pull tag signs, for example, to increase spread the word; you can even place a sticker in the your rear-view window. As a side tip, placing these in areas where people would be interested in your services or field of influence will increase your sign’s effectiveness.

This strategy is great to get an initial batch of visitors to your website, and is especially effective if your business is oriented locally. On the other side of the coin, this form of marketing is limited by your geographical range of the sign placement, as well as the time involved with the placement.

Search Engine Optimization

Content is King! One of the more important aspects of content creation for a website is knowing how important it is to properly infuse the site with content that will relate to Search Engines (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) what your website is about, whether it’s lawn-mowing, cake-baking, or industrial excavation.

When you start thinking about your website content, think about what a customer would be visiting your website for. Ask yourself not what product they’re looking for, but rather what the solution you’re providing with your product or service is. If you cater your content to relate how you will solve your client’s problem, you’ll have a better chance of achieving stronger SEO.

You can do this by brainstorming words and phrases your customers would be trying to search when looking for solutions to the problem you’ve set your sights on optimizing for. For example, a website that sells hiking gear could list out all the products in their catalogue and approach SEO from purely selling their products. It’ll probably work, but it won’t be nearly as effective as if they also were able to convey through the use of their keywords and phrases that their products solved issues specifically related to hiking and how they solved those problems. If they were able to correctly convey that information to google, when people searched up how to solve those issues with hiking, then their hiking gear website would come up more often than just the straight catalogue site.

Now, this doesn’t touch the surface of SEO, and if you’re serious about working on improving your site’s SEO, I’d recommend researching the topic further. There’s a lot of intricacy to it, and it is constantly evolving, so it’s good to learn as much as possible about the topic. For example, searching a term like “hiking solutions” will output different results than “solutions hiking” (for the sake of clarity, it’s because the term in the front of the search phrase is given more weight than words at the end of the phrase). You might not know that unless you are familiar with the functionality of a search engine.

For more information on SEO, please check out SEO class and or read this introductory SEO article by SEO Moz.

Social Media

Taking advantage of Social Media can be a strong persuader of people to use your services. Create a public page on a social media site, and begin posting topics that are relevant and useful to your customer base. Don’t try and sell your services through these pages, but rather use it as a place to say “Hey, we think this information is really fun and useful. Oh, and by the way, if you’re interested, you can take a look at our products and services here”. Try and keep the type of posting to a 33% insights, 33% personal and 33% about the business.

This creates a no-pressure relationship that will naturally build stronger if the customer finds your content sharing intrinsically valuable. The power of Social Media kicks in when you have a number of these customers that value your social media efforts. When you make a post, you’re increasing the chances of others that value your content will share it, which is free advertising, as well as an implied endorsement of your products/services.

This can also be sweetened by rewarding subscribers through various promotional deal systems offered through social media websites, but that’s getting into a little more detail than is needed for an idea article.

Blogging

Blogging operates on a somewhat similar level as Social Media, but also helps greatly with SEO, and integrates strongly with both tools (this article being an example). We discussed earlier in the SEO section about how conveying to your customers how you solve their problems is one of the better ways of converting them to a customer, this is one of the better ways to accomplish that.

A blog is often a side-section of a website where companies post both formal and informal publications about topics related to their business and industry. It can be fun, silly, topical, or product related, but it needs to be informational, useful, and concise for your customers.

The reason why this is such a great place to develop your business’ marketing is that each article you post becomes a part of your website’s content that gets related to search engines. To use the hiking gear example above, you could make a post about regional openings of trails in the region, showing pictures of the trails taken by employees in their free time, and their experiences on the trails would be great ideas for content creation. This also works well as a way of sharing the company’s passion for their industry as well.

If you see a post online on another website that is related to a blog post from your website, you can make a comment on their blog describing your article and why it’s relevant to their article with a link.  The key is not come off as trying to sell or drive people there, but rather that you’re trying to share information to be helpful. A take-it-or-leave-it approach is especially important on the internet, as people quickly become dissuaded when they feel pressured by salesmanship.

Online Newsletter

Supplying articles and information rich in relevant content to your customers is a great method of establishing a loyal customer base. This can be done in a physical form, but you can capably make newsletters online for your customers. There are restrictions in regards to how one can send these online newsletters. You can find the guidelines for a well-operated newsletter at the Bureau of Consumer Protection’s website.

We tend to use a service called Mailchimp for our newsletters, as it helps automate the process of subscriptions and message delivery. We also offer to help perform newsletter creation and delivery for you at a nominal charge, but you are able to do it yourself with some tech savvy, time, and effort.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising, such as pay-per-click ads, are useful tools to supplement your more organic efforts at online marketing (SEO, social media, blogging). They are also more expensive from a monetary perspective. The other major drawback is that you can also spend a lot of money and not get a very big return on your investment unless you’re careful.

It’s best in this arena to start out small. Try making two variations of an ad on a small budget, and see how well the two of them perform. Make two variations of the version that performed better and see which of those variants worked better in round 2. You can repeat this process ad nauseum until you have a specific.

Conclusion

Admittedly, this is a bit of an exhaustive list, but it’s meant to give you ideas that you can implement right now to promote your business’ website. It barely touches the surfaces of these topics, however, but you can research these topics further on the internet or stop by and ask us for further help. We’re called “You’re Marketing Resource Center” for a reason, you know! You can learn more by searching these topics on Google, or by taking a look at our available classes in the near future.

By Scott Prindle.

The new timeline layout for Facebook gives you a lot more freedom to be expressive with your business page, but also comes with a new set of hurdles on how to effectively manage your page for customers. In this article, we’ll go over a couple of the new major items, and how to use them effectively.

Cover Image

The largest change on the facebook profiles is the advent of cover images. These are large masthead images that allow your business to establish your visual branding directly on facebook. It is not, however, meant to be used for promotional uses, such as deals, sales, etc, as facebook has structures in place already for promotions. Some of the big no-no’s include:

• No promotions
• No contact info, including phone numbers, emails, etc., which is meant to be placed in the about section.
• No call-to-actions or text trying to engage the user to interact with facebook’s user interface (liking and sharing for example).

These aren’t all of the guidelines, but the larger principles to go by for your cover image. To find all the details, visit Facebook’s help section on cover image guidelines for business pages.

No More Fan-Gating

Facebook used to have a rather nice marketing feature through the facebook apps that allowed you to hide away specific content based on whether the user accessing the page was a fan of the page or a new visitor. But with the new timeline, you’ll no longer be able to hide content on the homepage in the same fashion. This is to promote Facebook as more of a social network, and keeps people from feeling like they are being bombarded with ads everywhere they go on the site.

You’ll still be able to deliver subscriber specific content through the use of the tabs, though. Tabs are the new area for businesses to add in facebook apps, google map embeds, and other extras. Using these tabs, you can add fan exclusive content using facebook apps incentivizing visitors to like your page. The difference between the old and the new versions being that the user must make the leap to that fan gated content, rather than being presented with the gate from the get-go on the landing page.

Those tabs, however, have static locations (urls), allowing you to link directly to those pages from your website, newsletter, or other social networks. You can use this to your advantage by directly linking users to these fan-gated pages, rather than to the default landing page in order to convert them over to customers.

Pinning posts

You’ll now have the ability to pin specific posts that you’ve made at the top of your timeline, in order to put more of a focus on it. The post will remain at that spot for 7 days before returning back to its original place chronologically. This is great for posting your deals, or major upcoming business events.

As well, you can re-pin an event, and there is not a limit to the number of times that can be done. This will allow you to keep an event posting at the top of your page for as long as needed (provided you’re cool with some menial re-pinning).

Conclusion

This barely scratches the surface of your timeline’s capabilities, but these are just a few tips to help you better utilize your Facebook page to better cater content to your customers. Thanks for reading.

Further Information:

Facebook Timeline Marketing Tips and Ideas

Facebook Timeline for Business Pages – 21 Key Points To Know

3 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Page’s Visibility

5 Ways to Use Facebook Timelines for Your Brand

4 Marketing Tips for Facebook Timeline

So, I had a client this morning inquire about getting their website on the top of search results, which is a great question, so I thought I’d try to share some resources and information about it. Websites are seemingly straightforward at a glance but there are countless aspects to each that require a lot of considerations to make when building and utilizing them. I’d like to share some information on a couple of different topics, but the main point of each is to optimize traffic toward your website through Social Media and Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the major factors in how you are ranked in search results is the content of your website. If a website is not updated frequently, its pagerank will be lower, as a more up-to-date website tends to have, well, more up-to-date information. Having consistent content creation for your website gives search engines something new to parse each time they analyze your website for content, increasing your pagerank.

Not only that, but your website will contain a much larger repertoire of content that contains keywords. When a search engine looks at your website content, they’ll note these keywords and relate them to your website. So when someone searches for that keyword at a search engine like Google, you’ll be considered more strongly by the indexing robots because of that article you wrote about weather winterization for a heating or house-siding business, in example.

One caveat to this is that it is an organic process that occurs over time. You can’t expect to write an article and have your website instantly become #1 for all the tangential topics related to your business. This is because your website is indexed periodically by search engine indexing robots,  as it takes time to calculate where you’ll fit into the pageranks with the advent of new content. It is a slow process that will over time develop into a more lucrative return, given consistent effort and management.

Social Media

Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google+ are powerful tools for leveraging your business to customers, but how does one best utilize these networks to drive traffic to your website? You, as the business owner need to entice users to get involved, whether through special deals (facebook just rolled out an updated check-in deals mechanism on their website), offers, providing content, hosting events at your business, etc. But one great way to reach out to customers is through Content Creation.

Content Creation

Creating content for your customers that is relevant, interesting, and engaging is extremely important for using the internet as a business tool. Engaging your customers with articles that help them better use your products or services helps develop a relationship with them that only increases over time. Consistent content creation through the blog also allows you to pop up on Social Media news feeds by sharing the articles on your business page. This not only increases awareness of your business by popping up in a fan’s newsfeed, but also links people back to your website.

Your website’s main purpose may not be to blog, but the driving content will bring your customer to your website, which is the important consideration. If they read the article, that’s great, mission accomplished. They may not need your services at this time, but you’ve enriched their experience, which will increase the relationship between you and that customer. Not only will traffic be brought to your site, increasing chances of people to look at other things on your site, such as your products and services, but you’ll also develop a marketing team out of this customer base that reads your content.

This is the underlying strategy of Social Media Marketing. To entice your customer base through instrinsic value to do marketing for you– by sharing the content you’ve created through deals, articles, etc., but also the more basic sharing: word-of-mouth recommendations.

Some Last Thoughts

All of these tools are at your disposal as a means of increasing your business’ online presence, driving traffic to your website, developing stronger relations with your customers, and increasing your pagerank in search results. The main advantage of these strategies is that they are cost-efficient and sustainable, and all it takes is time and effort(I can hear the groans already!). None of them are a magic bullet that’ll solve all of your pageranking blues, propelling you into sky-high success, but when managed properly and consistent, these avenues of communication can be a powerful utility among your toolset.

By Scott Prindle

This is a piece written by Scott Prindle, our Web Specialist, to accompany our newly created newsletter, Web@Work.

Introduction

Copy writing is an essential portion of your website’s composition, which is one of the major reasons I decided to tackle the topic for our first newsletter. For those unfamiliar with the marketing jargon, copy and the associated act of copy writing is the collection of writing, phrases, mottoes, and slogans that is used to infuse a product, service, event, or person with reasons for the consumer to perform an action.

As such, writing compelling copy is one of the most important aspects of creating a website. It’s the content, the substance, the entire soul of what you’re trying to convey to your customers. When your site comes together without compelling content, everyone suffers. Users become disinterested quickly, leaving your site before you’ve made a sale. This is a situation we want occurring as infrequently as possible, so why don’t we take a look at some of the major pitfalls associated with writing in this frame of mind.

Typographical Errors

Let’s start with the most simple of things to prevent and correct: grammar. Everyone has a tendency to hate the “grammar nazi” in your social group from time to time, but getting them to proofread your copy can help you learn some rather grievous errors before you set them live on your website for your customers to see.

Jargon

This pitfall is rather subtle when you begin writing, but it’s something I fall prey to all too often, being a huge tech nerd. The dreaded jargon, necessary for talking about rather high-concept things, when presented to someone who is unfamiliar with them, they become confused, alienated, or unimpressed. This will make the user more likely to leave your site, as they can’t relate to the experience you’re trying to share with them.

Try to use plain speak as much as possible in a way that is clear and concise for your target audience without bogging them down with nomenclature (yeah, that word’s a no no, too).

Big Blocks of Text

This copy writing pitfall to avoid is also a somewhat counter-intuitive one to think about. When you’re wanting to describe your product, you’ll naturally want to elaborate in lavish detail all the nuances and thought and hardships and features and benefits and solutions that you’ve crammed into your products, services, and systems. This goes in tandem with Jargon for a number of reasons, but most obviously it is because even with all of those engineering doodads and tech specs and wonders of the modern man that were incorporated into your Bighugegizmo2000, your customers might not care. Why?

Reading all about it should be simple, concise. Be clean. Be Simple. Your customer will appreciate it. (You can probably appreciate that when you compare reading the first paragraph to this last line, when they say the exact same thing).

Call to Action

The last item for discussion is a bit of a doozy in that it’s a simple idea, but is very important to funneling a website visitor to perform a specific action, in your case, getting them to learn more about your product or service, and purchasing it on the site or at your store. A call to action is basically a visual or written indicator to draw the eye of the user toward a specific area of the site and “calls” them to perform a specific behavior. Follow this to get a number of text-based call-to-action examples, and follow this link to see a number of graphically-based call-to-action examples. Creating these can be a little tricky, but basically you want your copy to be leading toward an action, what does your service or product do to relieve your customer’s problems? Relay that information to them, and then give them a call-to-action to get it. You’ll see better rates on your website conversion because of it.

Conclusion

This is by no means a catch all to avoid every single error made while copy writing, but it’s meant to help with a few of them. I’ve included a few links below to share more extensive articles that will fill you in on a lot more potential things to consider when writing for your website:

Smashing Magazine – Five Copywriting Errors That Can Ruin A Company Website

Freelance Switch – Website Copywriting Sins

Web Designer Depot – How To Spot And Avoid Web Copy That Kills Websites

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to leave comments for future newsletter topics, feedback, etc. I appreciate it. As well, if you’re interested in our newsletter please following the link below to sign up.