Smack Happy Design

Using social media for business marketing is a relatively inexpensive but very effective method of spreading the word about your work. If you manage to get the right connections on Twitter, you can actually have these connections do the advertising for you. At the very least, you will have a cheap means of communicating a few updates to your customers. Whatever your aims are, here are a few but simple tips to help maximize Twitter for your business:

Getting a little informal
Using twitter for businesses rarely works if you are overly intent on marketing alone. People rarely read tweets that so blatantly aim to advertise or promote something or someone. While it is unavoidable to get into tweeting good things about yourself or your company, it helps to blunt such an obvious method by getting a little personal in your tweets. If you want to tweet about something, hang back a bit and read it all over again. If you come across as gimmicky or something a salesman would say, drop the whole tweet and rewrite it from scratch.

Tweet something useful
While getting a little informal helps to draw readership, posting about useless personal stuff will turn off the readers. Nobody will read anything that they consider a waste of time, so make sure your tweets are relevant, informative or helpful to the readers who follow you on Twitter.

Balancing responses
Replying to comments is a double edged sword. You can either strike up a very interesting conversation and use social media for business, or you can rile up your readers against you and use twitter for arguments. Think carefully before you respond to a comment if you do not want to end up damaging the reputation of your business.

Keeping track
Internet search tools keep track of what people say about your company, and these are powerful tools to help you gauge just where your business stands in the wider world. www.search.twitter.com is a good place to start if you want to keep track of your company’s reputation around the world. There are other sites and applications that let you check your company’s standing, just look and ask around for them.

Indirect tweeting
Indirect tweeting, or having others tweet for your company, is another double edged sword when you use Twitter for business. They can paint a pretty picture of your company, or they can blast your reputation to bits if left unchecked. This is particularly true of employees, whose posts about their company could not only affect reputation but internal security as well.

Be careful
The last but definitely not the least tip is to be very, very careful when making an official post on any social media site like Twitter. Most everybody can follow you on your Twitter profile, including competitors, and can use the information you provide in ways you would not like it to be used.

Keep these hints and tips in mind, and you’ll be able to use Twitter for business marketing that is cheap, effective and fun as well. Just try not to get addicted to tweeting, okay? So go get tweeting now!

Should your web site design have a fixed width or should it be liquid and expand across the entire browser? I know this question has been asked and answered many times on the web, but I need to throw in my own two cents.

There are certain cases where a liquid layout may be appropriate. One example would be Google Analytics with their large, scalable graphs. When you have something that scales that well and can take up the whole page, you may as well do it.

However, most sites do not need all that space. Here are a few arguments against the liquid layout.

• Readability Its difficult to read text any wider than 40-60 characters. It becomes very hard to follow the lines and wrap around to continue reading.
• Awkwardness Another negative effect of the liquid layout is the unnecessary sparseness it creates. On very large screens the page elements end up miles apart. As a designer, I don’t think that looks very pretty and it can feel very awkward.
• Creativity A fixed width allows designers more freedom to get creative without worrying about stretching their design. This can sometimes result in less coding and more interesting layouts.

The only argument I can come up with for a liquid design is that it fills the whole screen. But like I mentioned above, if you don’t have enough content filling the space, that might not look so great.

There are cases where a liquid layout is appropriate, but in general I vote for a fixed width.

In just a few days it will be Valentine’s Day. To celebrate I made a nice e-card and sent it to my clients, family and friends. Sending out a custom card on the “off” holidays is a great way to get attention, remind your clients that you’re thinking of them and hopefully spread the word about your services. Sometimes it can even generate some new business.

View the animated card

A friend recently asked me to take a look at his site and give him some suggestions on how to improve his searchability or search engine exposure. Here are a few of things I recommended:

• Search engines don’t like meta tag redirects. If you set up a page to attract search engines and it redirects to some other page 4 seconds later, the search engine will not be fooled. It will disregard the original page.
• Listing all of your keywords at the bottom of the page is a big no-no. You need to write a few paragraphs of text and mix your keywords in. The people who make search engines know about those word blobs and so they make the engines avoid pages that have them.
• A blog is good if you can fill one up. Blogs give you a reason to update your site, and the fresher the content the more often a search engine will crawl your site.

These little things aren’t much, but they will definitely make an improvement.