Web marketing & development company

I know I’ve written about all these ideals, but I am still implementing them myself. My head buzzes with “Do this” and “Don’t do that” and “Try it this way”. I must keep in mind the client's needs, make sure the website looks amazing and functions well, rephrase this sentence so that they don’t misunderstand, explain why they should want ‘this’ instead of ‘that’, think Positive! Positive! Positive!

Despite this mantra talk, the most important standard that I’m still training myself to uphold is confidence in my ingenuity. I know I’m a great designer and I love my job, but after so many nit-picky criticisms from clients, however constructive, I noticed that I began to limit myself, decreasing the imagination and experimentation of my designs, unconsciously thinking that because they weren’t used before, they won’t be used in the future. Very wrong.

An essential part of being a successful designer is to lean so close the edge of trends that you’re always on the cusp of innovation, always one step ahead. I was sticking too close to the client's expectations instead of testing the limits and pushing the envelop of design. Sometimes I would even build a tentative template with wild and crazy designs just to get it out of my system, then hide it away before I began working on the real template. I forgot that usually the client has unclear or unspecific ideas about what they want and that it’s up to me to present to them all the limitless possibilities that their website can go towards. If the initial design you present is too experimental for them, then make something else that is more traditional. Don’t reject it before even allowing the client the chance to decide if they like it or not. It’s always better to have too much than not enough.

This has been a growing process for me. I started out as a green graphic designer, mostly working in print and harboring very little experience with web development. I learned quickly, bit by bit, eventually establishing myself as a talented designer. And although I continued to expand my knowledge of the field, I seemed to have peaked, my projects quietly plateaued, neither rising nor falling. The change was so steady that I hardly noticed it. I did finally notice however, and after practicing everything that I’ve written so far, I was able to step back, as if viewing the larger picture and confidently return to my original goal: design great, innovative websites. And now I’ll get back to it, ever rising.

Being a graphic/web designer for a small, cozy firm is miraculous, awesome and sometimes a little bit daunting. When we get a new client and the contracts are approved, everything comes down to me and the following obstacles: What is the new site going to look like? How will the content be organized for maximum clarity and usability? How will it function? What will it say? How will visitors respond?

Now, I do not have the final say in many of these aspects, but they all hinge on how I decide to design the site. Because I’m the design expert, and the client hired us—and me—to create a new website that encompasses everything they do, I am required to uphold their trust and prove to them that we can do what they want. Their first bit of investment is presented through me with the designs I create for them.

See what I mean about the ‘daunting’ part?

However, I am only one person, and if a client is unsatisfied with my designs, the company will not plummet headfast into Purgatory. On the contrary, by learning what the client doesn’t like, I am more able to produce something that they do like. Like the old adage says: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” And again and again.

Like all growing businesses, improvement and efficiency is absolutely necessary for a company to succeed into the future. And it is especially important with today’s economic trends.

As part of a growing web development business, I have recently been bombarded with advice, recommendations and solutions to help improve my processes and interactions with clients when it comes to designing websites. This may seem like I’ve done things all wrong before, but it’s not true (I promise). In order to grow we must learn, which is what I’ve been doing in abundance.

Coincidentally, I came across an interesting but perfect resource, a book called “A Fortune to Share” by Vash Young. Published in 1931, “A Fortune to Share” recounts the mental and emotional trials of a young insurance salesman trying to make a living during the disastrous Great Depression and the grand fortune he came to inherit. This wealth that he unexpectedly comes into is not money or gold or jewels, but a treasure that multiplies the more you divide it and give it away. It is optimism, courage, dominion over business worries, patience, generosity, sincerity and most of all, honesty.

Even though this book was published two generations before my own, Mr. Young’s ideas still ring true. By focusing on the negative, you will receive only the negative. It will get you nowhere, it won’t make you rich, it won’t make you successful in business. Instead, think of change and evaluation as an opportunity to improve and grow. I’ve always found it exciting, refreshing, energizing to continuously learn and try to make things better and flow smoothly.

I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to draw realistic-looking clouds in Photoshop. I didn’t want to just slap on a picture of some heavenly fluffiness and have to mess with cutting, pasting and arranging layer upon layer of duplicated images. Neither did I want to make Mickey Mouse cartoon clouds that any preschooler could scribble up. I wanted to create something from scratch and have it look simple, believable and fresh.

So I did some digging and got lucky. I found this wonderful blog on, you guessed it, making realistic clouds in Photoshop. I’ll go ahead and say thank you to Abduzeedo: Abducted by Design and their help. They’ve made it super simple. Here’s the link: Beautiful Fluffy Clouds in Photoshop – Christmas Tutorial. It was exactly what I was looking for, so if you’re looking for something like this, then hopefully I’ve shortened your search. Just in time for the holidays, too! I’ll only briefly go over the main parts and let you read the blog and follow to your hearts content.

We are so very excited to announce our success in bringing three GHBA Houston's Best Awards to our clients! Poetic Systems' dedication to web marketing in the Real Estate industry in conjunction with Boe Creative Services has aided Friendswood Development Company and Houston Newcomer Guides in becoming some of Houston's Best. We are proud to have helped bring in: 

• Houston's Best Internet Marketing Campaign - Developer - Friendswood Development Company and Boe Creative Services
• Houston's Best Website - Developer - FriendswoodDevelopment.com
• Houston's Best Website - Associate or Supplier - HoustonNewcomerGuides.com

 We would love to thank and congratulate our clients for their patience, trust, and skill.

We would also like to congratulate a few of our friends in the Real Estate industry, including Caldwell Companies,  Partners in Building, L.P., and Bridgeland, L..P., all for being some of Houston's Best as well!

This particular post is directed toward guests that attended the Friendswood Development Company Social Media Event today.

We intend for this to be a more detailed outline of instructions for a few of the social networks and tools we mentioned in our keynote. Let's get started:

Facebook

1. Create an account at Facebook.com. If you don’t know how, your child or young friend does.
2. Fill up your profile with specific information about yourself. DO NOT only fill out work material – this is YOUR profile, not your company’s. It is important not to create a profile filled with fluff about your business, as visitors may be wary and see your intentions. Facebook can be fun on your own time too!
3. Look for and befriend your friends. Try to find people you’ve lost touch with. Find colleagues. Have fun!
4. Create a Page for your company/product. Fill in all of your company’s information. Remember to make the Page live when you’re done (look for a red link).
5. Upload pictures pertaining to your company/product – staff, events, etc. Add upcoming events if you have any.
6. If your company has a blog or news section on its website, feed posts from the website through the “Notes” section on the Page via RSS. Again, ask a friend or give us a call for help with this if you’re lost.
7. Become a fan of your Page and encourage your close friends to (if they don’t on their own). Keep your Page up-to-date with events and info about your company/product.

Twitterfeed

1. Sign up for an account TwitterFeed.com/users/new. You can either make a brand new account or sign in with OpenID by using one of your current accounts at Google, Flickr, Yahoo, Blogger, and so on (if you have one).
2. Add your Twitter account/s and the RSS address to your blog post. Often, simply the url of the page your blog is on will work. The process is very straightforward and takes you step-by-step through the process.
3. Track your progress! TwitterFeed allows you to see how many people are clicking on your link to your blog - the perfect way to measure its effectiveness.

Gravatar

1. Sign up for an account at en.Gravatar.com. (Super simple - just a few fields to fill out).
2. Add all of your email addresses.
3. Add pictures or one picture to each of your email addresses.
4.  Now when you comment on someone's blog that supports Gravatar, your picture will show up.

Resources/Further Reading

• Presentation Slides
• Social Media Basics by Daphne Hager
• Social Media for Real Estate 101

Tomorrow, Poetic Systems is taking a trip to the Lodge at the Heritage at Towne Lake for Friendswood Development Company's Social Media Event. There, Matt and I will talk about how Social Media, New Media... whatever you want to call it, will benefit those in the Real Estate industry if used effectively.

With over 500 Real Estate professionals planning to attend, we hope to spread the "good news" to a good chunk of the Houston Realtor community. We plan to discuss the concept of community on the Web and how being an active community member can only benefit your business. We will highlight the impressive growth in social networks and their usage and how it is arguably vital to Realtors' businesses to jump on the bandwagon. From Twitter to ActiveRain to their personal Websites (our specialty), we intend to provide substantial food for thought. Afterwards, some of our staff will be on hand to answer questions and guide guests online through the Social Media madness.

The event will also have some other great perks like food, a martini bar, a candy bar, a band & dancing, a showcase by Stubbs Cycles and Northside Lexus, and a giveaway of 20 flipcams.

View the event on Facebook.

There has been an enormously popular trend going around throughout websites, and design in general, but it’s mostly hoarded by Apple. The effect is the reflection, as if the object or image undergoing the effect is sitting upon a sheet of glass or any shiny surface. As I said, this is extremely popular so my little tutorial on how to reproduce it may seem (un)fashionably late. But honestly, I’ve only just learned it myself, so I’m going to share it with whoever wants to know.

First off, open a blank document in Photoshop, whatever size you want. Choose the image you would like to reflect and place or copy/paste it into a new layer of the document. It’s good to leave more room beneath the image than above it so that you get a good amount of reflection showing. Next, duplicate the image so that you have two of the same thing. (Three ways to duplicate: (1) drag the layer thumbnail to the new layers button at the bottom of the layers panel; (2) select the layer, select the move tool and hold down the ALT key while you drag the actual image across; (3) right click or control click on the layer thumbnail, select “Duplicate” and select the document you are in currently.)

I had an art project once to make a sculpture out a rectangular block of plaster molded from a milk carton. I had to be somewhat delicate with it to make sure it didn’t break into a million pieces, which is mostly the reason why the sculpture retained some of its blockiness. In the end, it had a good, interesting design, but you could still follow the lines around it and decipher its original form.

Now, my forte is not sculpting obviously, but the same principle can be applied to web design. You start out with a blank document and fill things in bit by bit, usually according to a grid. By the way, I recommend using the web-safe 960-pixel grid. Here’s a good article with instructions on how to build one in Photoshop: Web 2.0 Style Web Design. (If you follow this and come out with a grid only 940 pixels wide, no worries; there is a 10-pixel margin on either side.)

Okay, so now you have your basic but completely grid-ridden webpage, trapped in its milk carton block. How can you break out of it? One word: Expand. You don’t have to necessarily ignore the lines of your grid, but just allow yourself a lot of extra space to expand beyond the lines with dynamic graphics. Next, modify any elements you feel need to be accentuated. This usually pertains to the top of the webpage, since that is the essence of style that creates the foundation of the design for the rest of the site. I’ve included a few recycled examples so you have some clue as to what I’m talking about.

OYPRO is a commercial real estate business, but as you can see, its website is far from the usually boring real estate stereotype. It’s because of their creative use of the ‘earth-comet’ graphic that flows across the top of the page, diving over and under the other grid-savvy elements. Just this one interesting graphic pushed the creativity and uniqueness of the site up a notch.

One of an artist’s greatest fears is a white canvas. It’s the ubiquitous blank page for a writer, and the stark empty template for a web designer. The whiteness glares at you, forcing you to cover it all up with images, text, links, buttons, menus, miscellaneous boxes and whatever else. Before you know it, the canvas has become cluttered, the page now beyond usable function. What seems hard to fathom is that the nightmarish white emptiness is actually a good thing. It is the bright defender of user functionality, the shining champion of clean layout formatting. Let Dr. Negative Space rescue you.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Say you have opened an ominous blank document, containing nothing but white. Then you place your logo smack in the middle. And. . . stop! That’s it. That’s how it works. The lack of any other objects within range of that single element creates an undisputed focus on the element. Simple, huh? Negative space is any bit of space that is NOT occupied by other stuff, or positive space. Of course, this process gets a little more complex with the more elements you include. You can refer to Using White Space Effectively in Web Design for further understanding. It’s a good info source I stumbled upon that gives simple, clear explanations and examples dealing with negative space.

Accentuating and accepting white space can be hard to get used to. It dwells within minimalistic perspectives. Sorry to burst your bubble all you packrats and space saturation-ists, but this is where popular web design is thriving. The objective you must attain lies with your skills of organization. You know, like cleaning your place for company, and no leaving junk hidden under the bed. Refrain from redundancy or unnecessary repetition. Efficient functionality always trumps beauty, but it’s the smart designers who can achieve both. This requires employing only the absolutely necessary elements and content for each page, especially that of the homepage. Things like the logo/title and tagline, the main navigation system, and the basic product information and/or objectives classifying your site.

So what you can do is work from zero. Like in the example, you can start off by opening a blank document, then slowly and carefully add in the necessary elements. Maybe the logo can go in the top left corner, or it can be centered. The tagline can go anywhere around that. Try separating your content information into lists of a sort, with short blurbs about what each section is about. Drop in some photos so that your viewers can get a preview right from the beginning. Just use negative space to your advantage. The more of it you do use, the cleaner and simpler your site will look. If you don’t want clean and simple, then just ignore everything I’ve said.