Owning a business revolves around providing a service or product that people or a group of people need. Typically, the greater the number of customers that know what you offer and the advantages of it, the greater your earning potential can become.

Building a relationship is about being approachable, accessible, knowledgeable and helpful to others. Just because you are building a relationship with a potential client does not mean that they have to become your next “best friend”. You want to establish a relationship in which your clients know that they need and want to rely on your skills to achieve their own goals.

The art of relationship building should be practiced with everyone, all the time. Bring a smile to people’s faces by saying “Hello” when you walk down the street. Try to send e-mails just to see how some of your acquaintances are doing. Continue to remind people of what you do and how you can help them.

Your goal is to sell your value to each and every person! The more people you meet and get to know, the better you’ll do. Typically, traditional marketing takes at least 7 contacts or views before your message registers in their consciousness. Once it does register, it only takes a matter of seconds for people to decide whether they want to buy or sell from you or not. When meeting in person face to face, you have a better opportunity to express your individual strengths and become memorable.  Always show people your ‘A’ game.

Your website can serve an unlimited amount of clients with relevant info about your business without you having to be present in person.  Once contact info is captured, communication is key.  Communicate with each lead on your website as quickly as possible. They may contact you today but can be gone tomorrow as people will typically choose to do business with the person with whom they actually build a relationship with first or better.

@Font-Face and Live Text versus Images

Traditionally in web design if you wanted to dress up your fonts beyond  Times New Roman or Arial you needed to jump into Photoshop and create that content as an image. While this looks great, search engines can not see this information as literary content, and therefore have no idea the subject matter of your site. Back in the day search engine ranking was not as sophisticated and therefore there were ways into tricking the search engines to ranking your page. This  is not necessarily the case anymore and therefore utilizing any and all methods of optimization is advantageous in making your website stand out from the crowd. Thankfully we no longer need to rely on only images to utilize non system fonts in our web designs and achieve visually stunning text. How do we do this? Face Fonts!

What is @FaceFont?

With the utilization of Face Fonts we are able to host non-system fonts on the web and allow users to access them while viewing out websites. With the combination of FaceFonts and new CSS3 text effects, we can achieve some very dynamic and stunning text styling.

Example

Two  great examples of websites that utilize live text well  are  www.findcalgaryrealestate.ca and www.polarissells.com

I want to use @face-font

The basic implementation of your css will look something like this:

@font-face {
font-family: 'YourFontFamily';
src: url('fonts/your-font-file.eot');
src: local('☺'), url('your-font-file.woff') format('woff'), url('your-font-file.ttf') format('truetype'), url('your-font-file.svg#webfontVGQMH9n0') format('svg');
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
}

The above code will have to be altered for your specific font and the file locations but that should get you started.

.FontClass {font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height:normal; font-family: 'YourFontFamily', sans-serif;}

This is how you can call your defined font in a basic css class.

For some great @FontFace resources and actual fonts check out:

http://code.google.com/webfonts – google host a number of fonts that you can reference directly off of their servers. Although this library is currently limited, as with all things google it will no doubt be the definitive force in the @facefont world in the not to distant future.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ – Font Squirrel allows you to take any font you have on your local machine and upload it to their website which then converts it into the proper formats, and gives you neat and tidy code for easy implementation into your website.

The Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Advertising

1. The desire for instant gratification. The ad that creates enough urgency to cause people to respond immediately is the ad most likely to be forgotten once the offer expires. Such ads are of little use in establishing the advertiser’s identity in the mind of the consumer.
2. Trying to reach more people than the budget will allow. For a media mix to be effective, each element in the mix must have enough repetition to establish retention in the mind of the prospect. Too often, however, the result of the media mix is too many people reached without enough repetition. Will you reach 100% of the people and persuade them 10% of the way? Or will you reach 10% of people and persuade them 100% of the way? The cost is the same.
3. Assuming the business owner knows best. The business owner is uniquely unqualified to see [his/her] company or product objectively. Too much product knowledge leads [them] to answer questions no one is asking. [Their] on the inside looking out, trying to describe [themselves] to a person on the outside looking in. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle.
4. Unsubstantiated claims. Advertisers often claim to have what the customer wants, such as “highest quality at the lowest price”, but fail to offer any evidence. An unsubstantiated claim is nothing more than a cliché the prospect is tired of hearing. You must prove what you say in every ad. Do your ads give the prospect new information? Do they provide a new prospective? If not, prepare to be disappointed with the results.
5. Improper use of passive media. Non intrusive media, such as newspapers and yellowpages, tend to reach only buyers who are actively looking for the product. They are poor at reaching prospects before their need arises, so they’re not much use for planting a reticular activator or creating a predisposition toward your company. The patient, consistent use of intrusive media, such as radio and television, will win the heart of the customer before their even in the market for the product. Tell them why; wait for when.
6. Creating ads instead of campaigns. It is foolish to believe a single ad can ever tell the entire story. The most effective, persuasive, and memorable ads are those most like a rhinoceros: they make a single point, powerfully. An advertiser with seventeen different things to say should commit to a campaign of at least seventeen different ads, repeating each ad enough to stick in the prospects mind.
7. Obedience to unwritten rules. For some reason, advertisers want their ads to look and sound like ads. Why?
8. Late-week schedules. Advertisers justify their obsession with Thursday and Friday advertising by saying “we need to reach the customer just before they go shopping.” Why do these advertisers choose to compete for the customers attention each Thursday and Friday when they could have a nice, quiet chat all alone with [them] on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday?
9. Overconfidence in qualitative targeting. Many advertisers and media professionals grossly over estimate the importance of audience quality. In reality, saying the wrong thing has killed far more ad campaigns than reaching the wrong people. It’s amazing how many people become “the right people” when you’re saying the right thing.
10. Event driven marketing. A special event should be judged only by its ability to help you more clearly define your market position and substantiate your claims. If one percent of the people who hear your ad for a special event choose to come, you will be in desperate need of a traffic cop and bus to shuttle people from distant parking lots. Yet your real investment will be in the 99% of people who did not come! What did your ad say to them?
11. Great production without great copy. Too many ads today are creative without being persuasive. Slick, clever, funny, creative, and different are poor substitutes for informative, believable, memorable, and persuasive.
12. Confusing reactions with results. The goal of advertising is to create a clear awareness of your company and its unique selling proposition. Unfortunately, most advertisers evaluate their ads by the comments they hear from the people around them. When we mistake mere response for results, we create attention-getting ads that say absolutely nothing.

Source:  The Wizards of Ads – “Turning words into magic and dreamers into millionaires”

Copyright 1998 by Roy H. Williams

2011 is an exciting year when it comes to online design options and solutions. Web technology is a constantly evolving and fast moving monster that can get away on you if you don’t keep on top of the latest trends and emerging innovations. We have been doing our homework and put together a list of some of of what we think is going to change the way many of us see and interact with the web throughout 2011.

HTML5/CSS3

The most exciting news for this year is by far the looming support of HTML5 and CSS3. While many of the major browsers already support these new technologies, the largest player in the browser game, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has yet to offer support. The upcoming release of Internet Explorer 9 will offer CSS3 and HTML5 support allowing designers to take advantage of all the greatness that these technologies have to offer. So, what does this all mean? I’m glad you asked!

CSS3
This little gem will give designers the ability to create visual elements and styles that were previously only possible through using images. Rounded corners, drop shadows, image transparency, text shadows and even complex colour gradients, to name a few. This is great news for both designers and end users alike. As designers it will speed up our development process, not having to spend as much time in graphic programs like Photoshop. For the user end, this helps cut down loading times that using  images would create.

In addition to graphical enhancements CSS3 also allows designers to do things like animation and transition effects that once took complicated scripting.

If your looking for some great examples of CSS3 best practices checkout this article.

HTML5
While HTML5 is still a ways away from being fully released (2022 to be exact!) there is still enough browser support to get excited about some of it’s new features. To some HTML5 has been touted as the “Flash killer”, namely for its video and audio support. HTML5 also helps coders keep their markup cleaner and meaner with the addition of smarter tags such as “header”, “nav”, “section”, and “footer” to name a few. Even though it’s still in the distant horizon, expect to see more and more web sites showcasing the power of HTML5!

Mobile

One of the fastest growing segments of the web is Mobile browsing. More and more users are visiting their favorite websites on their mobile devices such as iPhones, Android phones, and Blackberries to name a few. What does this mean for designers? Alot!
The current trends over the last few years has been larger and wider site designs that utilize the large monitors that most visitors now use. Mobile devices however require the exact opposite, having much smaller viewing screens. This has pushed designers to create adaptable designs that work on both large and small viewing areas.

Another hot trend is the development of mobile applications(apps) that offer specialized services and information strictly to mobile users. Redman has taken a lead with this trend and developed a mobile specific web app that streamlines the user experience and offers special services specific to the mobile users visiting our Real Estate clients websites.

Large Full Page Images

They say a picture is worth a thousand words right? Full page, high resolution image backgrounds are getting more and more popular, as they create a very enticing visual experience for the user and let the images speak for themselves. This trend will not apply to every web project and should be used carefully.

If you are looking to implement this on your site there is a great tutorial on implementing full page scalable backgrounds.

Collapsible Headers

Utilizing collapsible headers helps free up space in the coveted top content area of your website and allows users to toggle whether they want additional information to be visible or hidden. This has many great uses such as keeping things like social media, account settings, and other types of info from cluttering up your layout, but still giving your user easy access to its functionality.

Scrolling/Fixed Menu’s

One really cool trend that has been popping up around the web is the use of a hybrid scrolling/fixed navigation. These nifty little navigation menu’s will scroll with the page up until the point that they hit the top of the browser window. Once this happens the nav stays fixed in place and the website content scrolls underneath. This is a great way to make sure your users always have the site navigation right at their fingertips for ease of flow.

The End of Rollovers

Up until recently websites have been designed to be navigated with a mouse. This gives designers the ability to have all sorts of interesting things happen as the cursor rolls over elements. Anything from a simple text color change, to having entire content areas apear and disappear is possible. Sometimes issues can arise due to another web trend – touch screen navigation. Many mobile devices and even personal computers are starting to use touch screen technology for user navigation which leaves a big hole in a lot of web design. As touch screen functionality does not allow for a rollover state. As websites move towards flexibility and usability across different browser mediums and platforms, expect to see less and less rollover functionality in many modern websites.

Paralax Scrolling

Paralax Scrolling uses varying scrolling speeds on multiple layers of a websites background. Its a really unique effect and when used in the right situation can can add depth and  enhance the user experience when done right. Many visual trends, however, when used incorrectly take away from the user experience and distract visitors from your content. Remember to keep your audience and content in mind, as while this trend is hot, it is not going to work for every project.

2011 Web Trends Recap

All in all 2011 looks to be a very defining year for the future of web design and how we interact with our online environments. From Microsoft’s un-fashionably late support for CSS3, to the huge rise in mobile browsing, we expect to see the boundaries of website design and function be pushed further on a daily basis!