Everyone knows that blog marketing a great way to build relationships with customers and associates, while establishing yourself or your company as a credible authority in your industry. But it is not enough to simply have compelling content. You need to have an eye-catching and visually appealing blog design, to stand out from the competition – and to keep your visitors coming.

These days, all manner of web pages from huge company sites to small business blogs are expected to add audio, photo, or video to their posts and homepages. Multimedia consists of pictures, videos or music. The real trick is adding multimedia that enriches your site, product, or brand without taking away from your company’s core message and aesthetic.. Every web design component of your blog should enhance your branding and remind your visitors of what your blog is all about.

For most blog hosting sites, the majority of multimedia is handled through embed codes. All embeds can be handled as simple copy-and-paste jobs using these resources. WordPress, Tumblr and any other half-decent blog host will have ways to add multimedia in their dashboard. Some of these are better than others. Tumblr tools are pretty intuitive whereas WordPress sometimes glitches when switching between HTML and visual formats.

Overall, a website without multimedia is like a cake without icing: pretty good… but not great. Multimedia provides the edge that most blogs need to keep visitors coming back!

Check out Mashable’s list of 26 places to find various pieces of free multimedia for your blog or website. Check it out here!

There are only two kinds of company newsletters: those that get read and those that get deleted.

Communication is a key element of good management, and a company newsletter is a cost-effective, productive way to communicate. Surveys show that company newsletters are an ideal way to enhance your firm’s image with the public, your customers and your employees. They are also a great way to increase your business through email marketing.

If you create a newsletter with an attractive newsletter web design with great content, then your company will be able to enhance its sales as well. It all depends on how the words are coined up and the way it is presented before the public. If a business is able to create a good newsletter design to compliment great content, then the newsletter has the ability to attract new readers as customers.

A first rate Newsletter design makes it easy for your prospects to understand what you do and the quality and value of your business offers. There are countless ways to layout Newsletter design. One way to enhance your design is to add graphics. Graphics are important for two reasons. First of all, studies have shown that people are more likely to read an article if it contains a graphic design such as a photo. That’s because graphics, along with headlines, are the first things that readers’ eyes are drawn to when they turn to a new page.

Secondly, graphics within a story are important because they provide much-needed visual breaks from solid blocks of text. A page containing nothing but row after row of endless text does not look inviting to read. However, a story that contains strategically placed graphics that break up the text into smaller, less-imposing portions looks more visually pleasing and will attract more readers.

As a professional web design company, at The Net Impact we know all the components to create an effective newsletter design. Our team will work with yours to create a newsletter design that is attractive and eye catching, while  fulfilling all of your  requirements. The basic purpose of your newsletter design is to give all information about the upcoming and new progress in business to your community.

Sign up for The Net Impact’s newsletter to get the latest web design news and tips!

The recent release of the highly anticipated iPad may just turn the web design world on its head. Whether you love the iPad, or hate it … the fact of the matter is that it has arrived and sooner or later we need to learn to design with it in mind.

So what should be taken into consideration when designing for the iPad?

*HTML 5- The iPad offers no support for browser plugins like Flash. If you are hoping to include video, animation or graphics on your site, it is imperative the site be designed using HTML5. HTML has long been the foundation for web development. Their latest version incorporates much of the elements previously only available via Adobe Flash. Luckily, websites designed with HTML5 are easily viewed on the iPad.

*Orientation:  The iPad has no correct way of viewing websites. That means you can view it either in landscape or in the portrait mode. But for the designer that means two completely different layouts for which to design. It is for this specific reason that the iPad highlights the need for smart fluid width design. Using a smart combination of CSS and Javascript the User Experience can be made to improve drastically.

*Contrast:  Because the iPad is a touch screen, it is important to build in a lot of white space and contrast to make the pad easy for visitors to use. After all, if they can’t click deeper into your site, you are never going to convert them.

*Test, test, test: while testing is an important component of any new web design, it has never been truer than when attempting an iPad friendly web design. There are already several sites out there that offer you the ability to take a ‘peek’ at how your new design will look on an iPad, a great tool is www.ipadpeek.com.

*Touch Screen: Primary method of user interaction with the iPad is and will be the fingers. The users will interact with our websites using fingers. So all those brilliant hover effects that were favorable for pointer-based devices, will be a hurdle in user experience on the iPad. Also the links can no longer be concealed in a text and left for the user to dexterously click upon it. We might want to resize the links so that the user experience does not suffer.

Having a customized social media design will always make you stand out from the rest of the world, the same rule applies on Facebook. Now designers can add HTML code to enhance their Facebook fan page presence to promote and build their brand on the social network.

An application which should be implemented by most of the fan-page owners is Static FBML which allows you to add new “application tabs” to your tabs or box which can incorporate CSS, HTML, Facebook’s flavor of JavaScript, FBJS, and Facebook’s mark-up language FBML. FBML has greatly expanded what is possible on Facebook Pages and, if you’re sufficiently skilled with CSS/HTML and, optionally, FBML, you can make some really fine looking Pages. Many people may be unaware of the advanced functionality FBML gives a fan page, such as creating and naming your tabs of boxes freely.

How to add static FBML to your Business Page:

1. Click “Edit Page” under the Page’s large avatar image;
2. Under “Applications,” under “More Applications” click the pencil/edit icon and select “Browse more”;
3. Under “All Applications” in the left column, enter “static fbml” (without quotes) into the search field and hit your enter/return key;
4. Go to the Static FBML application from the search results page (it should be the only result);
5. Click “Add to my Page” in the left column;
6. You have successfully added Static FBML to your Page.

St. Louis based companies, The Net Impact, a full-service Internet marketing and web design firm, and XG-ad, a full service advertising agency specializing in print advertising, combined services to create the website design for AIRHAWK, a comfort seating system for motorcycles manufactured by ROHO Group Inc. The website,www.airhawk.net, is powered by The Net Impact’s partner product, Auctori, a web content management system (WCMS) built for search engine optimization.

 The Net Impact worked with XG-ad’s Photoshop design files, making them web ready before placing them into the Auctori web content management system. The Net Impact then developed master pages for the Auctori web content management solution which makes AIRHAWK’s site enhancements quick and easy. The Net Impact created a form for AIRHAWK customers to submit their testimonials entitled ‘AIRHAWK Saved My Ass’, as well as different pages for product descriptions, retailer information, multimedia, events, press, and a ‘contact us’ form. To compliment AIRHAWK’s cutting-edge, yet professionally designed website, The Net Impact team also created a custom blog design for the company.

 

XG-ads’s print design and advertising experience combined with The Net Impact’s web design expertise created the perfect blend for this new, exciting and effective AIRHAWK website.

Typography is the most valuable asset of your blog. It doesn’t matter if you have a colorful blog design, an awesome online publication or a plain simple blog. The main focus always stays on the content and the readability of your text. That is where the importance of good typography comes.

Google Font API  is a new and innovative concept from Google that aims at providing a helping hand to all web design and development pros. Google Font API  helps you add web fonts to any web page.

If you use Google’s Open Font’s API, you have many advantages like:

1. Huge collection of Font Typefaces to choose from Google’s Fonts library.

2. All the bandwidth load is on Google as you are only using their resources in the API.

3. The speed is blazing fast as Google’s CDNs are faster than your site.

4. You can hotlink the font file so that there is a less file and bandwidth request.

 The world of web typography is quickly evolving but this evolution means that your web developement team and end users now have more choices than ever before.

Do you use any web font services in your websites?

Adobe has announced its new iPad-focused Digital Publishing Platform, which was used to create the recently released Wired App for the iPad. The idea is to offer an easy way for traditional media publishers to port their content to Apple’s tablet while abiding the company’s strict developer agreement. Although the iPad spurred the creation of the Digital Publishing Platform, it can be used to create content for other tablets and smartphones as well. With the ability to embed video, interactive images, slideshows and more, Adobe’s new solution seems like an attractive option for magazine publishers.

The platform combines InDesign CS5 with “additional Adobe publishing technologies” in order to produce what Adobe describes as a web design that is visually attractive, magazine-like experience for the iPad. This means that traditional publishers, accustomed to creating layouts in InDesign already, won’t have to move to an entirely different tool to create digital content. The strategy seems to have worked—Apple approved the app last week— it has largely been getting good reviews despite the large file size. Adobe will be releasing the publishing tech to Adobe Labs later this year, but you’ll have to have Adobe InDesign CS5 to take advantage of it.

PC in the City?

It’s an iconic scene: Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character in Sex and the City, sitting at her Mac computer and typing away her daily insights. Well, guess what? That Mac got ‘Carrie’d’ away and is now a PC. In fact, HP has an entire site dedicated to its Sex and the City campaign, and Sarah Jessica Parker is their latest spokesperson in HP’s latest advertisement.

In the highly anticapted summer blockbuster, Sex and the City 2, we will see the newly Mrs. Big stroking her fingers along the keys of something made by HP and powered–oh, yes–by Windows. The move is set to horrify Apple’s dedicated fans, who see the machines as the mainstay of the creative industry, web designers, artists and writers (i.e. fashionista Carrie Bradshaw) flocking to Apple’s machines. The theory, according to Apple, at least, is that Macs are for creative, arty types, while the PC is for accountants and office workers. Microsoft, desperate to change this image, has invested millions in the marketing campaign campaign for Windows 7 in a bid to make itself “cool”, while manufacturers such as HP have also attempted similar campaigns.

Now, normally product placement deals in movies wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but this is Sex and the City we’re talking about. In the original HBO television series, Carrie’s Mac was practically its own character.

In fact, for the first Sex and the City Film, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema actually put together a promotional site called, “Carrie Bradshaw’s MacBook Pro” that let fans explore a replica desktop of Carrie’s MacBook from the film. This included e-mails, IM conversations and other novelties.

If we had to guess, we’d say it all comes down to money. And while the first Sex and the City film was a great success, the entire movie industry is in cost-cutting mode, which means exchanging product placement for funding — not to mention a larger promotional campaign — might just trump fictional consistency. HP also has a history of targeting the fashion-conscious buyer. Since 2008, HP has partnered with designer Vivienne Tam to turn the standard HP Mini netbooks into digital clutches. HP has also sponsored the Lifetime series Project Runway.

After all, even Carrie Bradshaw has to make some concessions in a rebuilding economy. If the worst thing that has to happen is that a Mac gets replaced with a very attractive Windows 7 laptop, so be it. It will be quite a shock for devotees of the series to see the noticeable set piece change. I wonder what Steve Jobs would say.

 Do you think the movie producers did the right thing ?

Some people think they can just slap some text into a website and call it a day. However, there should be more thought put into web content. Information web design is one of the biggest sellers for your website. If it’s easy to read, easy to understand, and laid out in a way that is pleasing to the eye the greater the chance of visitors staying on your site and coming back.  

First thing to work on is your headings. Do they make sense? Headings are what grab the visitors and readers attention. Your headings should be in the correct order. It makes sense that if something is a main header then it should be called as such and a sub header under the main header should be smaller than the main header. By organizing your heading tags from H1 being the most important and largest to H6 being the least important and smallest, it shows your visitor a level of hierarchy within your site and also helps with search engine optimization -  grabs relevant content from your site. Organization is key to smart information design.

Next are the paragraphs within your pages, or the meat of the site. Is the text to small? Is the font easy to read? Many argue that you should use serif fonts as they guide your eyes, as for me, I prefer sans-serif such as Verdana, Helvetica or Arial. If you’re going to go the serif route I would suggest Georgia, Garamond or Times. Try to stay away from fonts like Comic Sans and Papyrus as they are very hard to read at small sizes and promote strain on the eyes. If you think about fonts in books, they aren’t crazy and swirly, they are fonts made for comprehension and relaxed reading. The other thing you have to look at is the size of the text. You don’t have to make the text larger than life but you do want to make sure the text isn’t too small for accessibility. One way to conquer this issue is to use “em” which acts almost as percentages instead of “px” which makes the text a permanent size. The reason for “em” is if someone who has a harder time reading the screen and has the resolution turned up or has the browser zoomed in, the text will grow with the resolution and won’t get pixilated.

You also need to pay attention to how the images and text interact with each other. If it looks like images were just thrown into the mix then a reader may pass it up. An image’s height should depend on text size and the line height. Look at how your paragraphs flow and measure the images height accordingly. Another addition to your text is adding quotes or call outs to grab attention. Organization of those should be organized much like adding images and sometimes they could be images.

The uses of grids like the 960 grid and baselines will help with keeping your font and content consistent throughout the site. Try not to use multiple fonts within your site as it could confuse visitors as to what they are reading and the purpose of the content. The fonts listed above are web-safe fonts and what that means is they are basic fonts in which everyone has installed on their computers. By staying with web-safe fonts you’ll know that your content is being viewed in the way you intended for every visitor.

SEO and typography play well together. Organized content will help search engines get the information it needs to put your site higher in rankings. In short you’ll always want your website to be accessible to as many people as possible. Just by following good information design and good typography techniques could open your website to visitors you never thought would come to your site.

Last week we did a post on HTML5 and the affect it’s going to have on Adobe. Well this seemed to stir the pot in the office amongst the flash developers and the front end developers. The argument last week was pointing the finger at Adobe for not being standard compliant and fighting a lost cause with Apple. So this week we’re going to argue the other side of the fence and stick up for Adobe for developing a way to deliver interactive content.

HTML5 has a while before it actually becomes standard and adopted by all. Adobe has given the design community a way to visually create interactive content through is program Flash Professional. HTML5 does not give a visual representation other than the browser which in turn could take forever testing unless you know exactly what you’re doing. With Flash Professional you have your creation right in front of you in one program making your workflow easier to manage. Flash is still a pain to use unless you know what you’re doing, but easier to teach yourself and learn. With HTML5 you need to know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create what you want.

A big plus to Flash is it gives you a good visual/wysiwyg canvas to web develop interactive content. Instead of having to have your favorite editor open along with the browser and whatever other tools you use for web development, you have just one window with everything you need.  That is where my idea to have an HTML5 export option in Flash comes in.

Also, I talked about how much a CPU hog Flash is compared to HTML5. On the Windows platform Flash isn’t as much of a CPU hog as it is on the Mac OSX platform. The reason for that isn’t because of Adobe; rather it’s caused by Apple not allowing the Flash Player to access certain APIs to the GPU accelerator on the Mac OSX platform. So, Apple is actually sabotaging the Flash Player on its desktop OS. As far as the iPhone is concerned, Apple has said Flash is a battery hog and from my experience owning an Android phone, it most definitely is. Reports have shown that Flash is better than HTML5 on a Windows PC and the opposite on the Mac platform. The only reason is that Safari uses the H.264 codec for running videos. Below are two emails arguing both cases and why one is better than the other.

Email:

“Given that HTML5 is only available in (some) of the newest browsers, I don’t find it likely that this will become a standard anytime soon (nor CSS3, etc.). It has a long way to go to catch up with the ~98% of internet users that already have Flash Player plug-ins. If you think about the large majority of users that are still using IE6, how long do you think it will be until 98% of the users have HTML5 capable browsers? Adobe has always been WAY ahead of anyone else in the field, and by time HTML5 is fully adopted (probably another 5-10 years), I am pretty sure Adobe will be above and beyond standards.

Flash wasn’t designed specifically for video (YouTube, etc.). Go to www.thefwa.com and try producing anything listed on there with standards (ain’t gonna happen). The idea of an HTML5 export would be awesome, but what it comes down to is that HTML5 cannot do everything Flash can.

And Apple is pretty arrogant in their decision to kill Adobe’s exporter support right before the launch of CS5, as many agree. I don’t think their intent has as much to do with standards as it does with control. I don’t think we’ll see Chrome or Firefox killing Flash support just because they are HTML5 compliant.”

Response to the Email:

“Once IE9 comes out every modern browser will support HTML5. Even IE8 supports some HTML5. Yes it will probably be a while before HTML5 becomes standard, but as HTML in general evolves, it will become standard, just like XHTML. The same goes for CSS3. I’m not saying that browsers will not support Flash entirely or that Flash is made for video only. What I am saying is that the more HTML5 evolves and the more browsers support HTML5, the less and less you’re going to see interactive Flash content. Flash is a CPU hog on all platforms, it may be less of a hog on one verses another but it’s still bogs down CPU power more than HTML5. I have seen the site you referenced before and there really isn’t much on that site I would think couldn’t be recreated with HTML5. Take a look at some of these HTML5 canvas examples http://www.phpguru.org/static/html5-canvas-examples. This will show how HTML5 can affect flash from an interactive standpoint. I don’t think Apple is being arrogant; they are trying to help evolve the web and adopt new technologies. HTML5 is more accessible across all devices and platforms and that is what Apple is trying to get across; making content accessible on everything. Yes, we have a while before IE6 is dead and everyone upgrades to IE9 but that doesn’t mean we have to stay in the stone ages until Microsoft realizes they don’t need to keep supporting a crippling browser.”

Despite our differences, we’re still friends and nobody got hurt. Every designer and developer has their own opinion on what should be standard and what is better.