Do you love today’s Google Doodle as much as we do? What a gorgeous illustration of Victorian society for Charles Dickens’ 200th Birthday, the details are lovely. Every time I look at it I find something you didn’t see the first time.

We’re holding another round of Level 1 workshops in a couple of weeks

December 5th – 14th (Monday & Wednesday mornings). 9 am – noon. The workshops will be held at Oscars Pub in Sherwood Park. The series covers:

• Website
• Blogging
• Email Newsletter
• Facebook

If you want to attend, register now! There are a maximum of 10 places available.

If you want to join us, but you’re just starting out and the $325 fee for all four workshops is more than you can afford, enter to win a free place in this series of workshops,  or any that we run in the new year! This prize is available through Stephanie Passuto Photography‘s 500 fan giveaway. When Stephanie reaches 500 fans on her Facebook page, she’ll open a new prize every day.There are some other great prizes too, so head on over to her page and take a peek!

 If you want to enter, head on over to our Facebook page, and ‘Like’ us and Stephanie Passuto Photography’s page. When you “like” the photo containing the prize you want, you’re entered. Stephanie will draw winners randomly once she hits 500 fans. If you know a small business owner who would benefit from this, please pass the info on to them.

Good Luck!

If you’re like most of our clients, you’ll need photos for your website or brochure at some point. When you need photos like:

• Generic People Shots
• Landscapes
• Abstract Patterns
• Nature Photography

Stock photo sites can be a better option than shooting these photos yourself. You’ll want to make sure the quality is high, but if you’re a small business or nonprofit, you might not want to incur the expense of hiring a photographer.

Free Sites

To get you started, here are a few free sites:

stock.xchng

Free Images

Free Digital Photos

You might also try searching Flickr for Creative Commons licensed content, where you can use the image, provided that you use the ‘Share’ function on Flickr so that a link goes back to the photographer. That way, he knows who has used his work and gets credit fr it.. Go to Flickr and select Advanced Search, then choose “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content. If you are using the image commercially, also check “Find content to use commercially“, and if you want to modify the image, check “Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon.” When you find an image you like, click the ‘Share’ button above it and use the HTML code to embed the photo on your site.

Of course, the quality of these photos isn’t always the best, and there’s no guarantee that you will find an image you like, so another option might be to look at paid stock sites. There tends to be higher quality images here, but there are costs involved. Most stock sites work on a credit system, where you purchase a package of credits and each photo is assigned a credit value. You’ll often find that multiple versions of the same photo are available, from a small photo with a low resolution, which would be suited for placement in a brochure or as a supplementary image on a website, to a large photo with a high resolution, which is what you will need if you plan to print a wall-size poster, for example.

Be aware that the price of an image is often directly related to the perceived quality of it. Well-lit images with generic imagery that would suit a variety of uses will command a higher coin.  If you look at the image and think that it would make a nice wall print, chances are it has a high price tag!

Paid Sites

Here are some paid stock sites to get you started

Fotolia

iStockPhoto

FotoSearch

Corbis Images

Getty Images

Taking Your Own Photo

Your third option is to take the photos yourself. While this might not be ideal in all cases, if you know what you want, and you can recreate the scene you’re looking for, it might work for you. When taking your own photos, using a high-resolution DSLR camera with a quality lens will produce photos that give you the most flexibility. Set up using a tripod (low-cost and highly flexible ones like GorillaPod are a handy option). Consider the light when you take a photo – be aware of where shadows are falling, and don’t shoot against a bright background if you can avoid it, as your subject will be very dark. Some of this can be corrected in software like Photoshop, but don’t rely on this – make sure you get the best photo you can the first time. If you are taking photos with people in them, and the person(s) in your photo could be identified, please be sure to ask their permission to use the photo.

Ownership

The resources we’ve provided here are all going to give you images that you are legally allowed to use in your marketing material. But, time, and time again, we’ve come across people who have used Google Images or grabbed a photo that they like off another website. These people are stealing someone else’s work. Please don’t be like them! Just because a photo is online somewhere, doesn’t give you (or anyone else) the right to use it. Unless you can be 100% sure who the photo belongs to, and have asked them directly for permission, please don’t take photos from Google Images or other websites to use in your own material. It’s immoral, and it can land you in legal hot water.

We hope some of these resources will help you find what you need for your next project. How do you find photography for your web & print projects? Let us know in the comments.

The internet is the single most important marketing tool there is for individuals and growing businesses. Customers are searching for you online, but can they find you? If they find your site, what you offering them? Why should they choose you instead of the thousands of other companies just like you? Having a blog can give you the upper hand. Don’t miss out! Read on to find out what a blog can do for you.

Establish expertise - By blogging on what’s going on in your industry, you can establish yourself as someone in the know. Your customers will be confident in your ability, and you’ll find that more people are interested in your services when you create a recognizable brand.

Build community – Readers can comment on your posts. Over time, as you respond to them and they to each other, those opinions and comments will keep ideas flowing. They might even give you some great ideas for your business! You can also comment on related sites (and leave a link back to your site) which is a great way to meet people with similar interests. As an added bonus, incoming links are great for your Search Engine rankings.

Invaluable PR for minimal cost – Blogging is part of any good internet marketing campaign. Write posts that get noticed and you may find your site being recognized on social networks, by your peers, or in the press.

Keep customers updated – Post about what you are currently working on to give your customers a feel for what you can do for them. Blog content is easy to update, so keep your site current and you’ll keep your audience.

Show your personality - Write candidly about the things that are important to you. Your customers will appreciate getting to know you personally. You’ll connect with people who want to work with you because they identify with what you write. After all, your customers want to work with someone they like and respect.

Share information in multiple ways – Blogs don’t have to be all text! Use a podcast (audio), photos or video if that suits your topic. Mixing it up will add interest for your readers. You can use services like YouTube and iTunes to get these to new audiences.

Get noticed - It’s hard to cover everything in your brochure or website. You can never explore every possibility, but by blogging about topics related to your business and offering your opinion on what’s going on in your field, readers will come to know what you’re about.

Want to learn about how to blog for your business? Find out when we are running blogging workshops in Sherwood Park/Edmonton. If you’d rather have someone manage your blog for you, ask us about our internet marketing service.

Here at Chemistry Communications, we build most of our websites into Content Management Systems (CMS). Our chosen CMS is WordPress, and this is what we use for most of our sites.

What does a CMS Do?

Content Management Systems allow anyone with a computer and an internet connection to make changes to their website on the fly. Simply log in to your CMS using your web browser and your provided username and password, and you can use an interface much like a word processor, to change the text and images on your site. When you’re done making changes, click Publish, and your changes go live. Easy, right?

We give all of our clients a tour of WordPress and show them how to use it, but for the most part, they pick it up right away, without specialized training, because the interface is so intuitive.

With a CMS, you can:

• add & change text
• add & change photos
• create new pages
• add & edit links
• maintain a blog
• have multiple users

…and more!

Why doesn’t your site have a CMS already?

Content Management Systems are relatively new technologies, and I’d hazard a guess that if your website wasn’t built within the last four years, (and sometimes even if it was…) it’s probably not using a CMS. A lot of sites are also not using a Content Management System because it tends to cost a bit more and require a professional to code your site for a CMS. If you were on a very tight budget when you created your site (or if you built it yourself), that’s another reason why you might not be using one.

Does your site need one?

Most likely, yes!

If you have your own website, shouldn’t you be able to add to it and make changes as you please? Of course you should! A CMS will make this possible for you, no need to wait for a designer or developer to do this for you.

If you don’t update your website as often as you should, because it is difficult, or because you have to get a web developer’s help, then your website’s content (and you customers) are suffering because of this lack of a CMS.

If you want to grow a site, perhaps by adding pages or new features, that’s also easy to do using a CMS. You don’t need to do a redesign, just add pages as you need them, or have a new theme coded if you’re tired of the design. Your content stays as it is.

What are other website owners doing?

Well, WordPress powers over 14% of  the “top 1 million” websites and is the most popular CMS on the internet. It even powers some very popular sites, like Ford’s Company Blog, Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, Mozilla, and Ben & Jerry’s.

If you’re ready to take ownership of your website, or if you need a site and want it to be accessible and easy for YOU to use, get in touch.

We’ve just finished a website project that was a little different than most, because this one was a nicely done site to begin with, subtle use of animations, good content, well organized, lots of nice features and so on. So why did we have to redesign it?

Two reasons:

1. The clients had no access to their own site. Everything was as their designer had left it over a year ago, they couldn’t even change a few words on their own! They had to ask him to make their updates, wait for them, then pay for even the smallest change. An integral part of a successful business site is frequent, quality updates, so this just wasn’t working!

2. Their site was entirely designed in Adobe Flash, or more specifically, a piece of software that emulated some of Flash’s capabilities and created Flash files, but which couldn’t actually be edited with Flash. The only way this client could have updated their own site was to buy this software and figure out how to use it, something they didn’t have the time to do.

There’s another couple of problems with Flash. You may have heard about Apple’s recent decision not to support Flash on the iPad or iPhone. If you were to view a Flash-based site on these, you would see nothing but a blank page with a question mark on it. Not good! Search Engines don’t index Flash sites well, so if your content is inside and Google can’t get at it, your site doesn’t rank well. For a business site, it’s really important to be easily found in search engines, so we had to take care of this.

Luckily, the new site we produced stayed close to the original site in design and function, we just built it a different way so that the client could make updates, it would index in search engines, and was visible on mobile devices.

There are many other reasons why a website should be redesigned. Here are some other issues we commonly run in to:

Lack of Updates
Many sites, like the one we just worked on, don’t get updated because the site’s owners can’t easily update it. If your website isn’t working on a Content Management System (CMS), it should be. This way, you can make changes to the text and images, and even extend the functionality of your site on your own, quickly and easily.

Intro/Splash Page
Unless there’s a really good reason for it (like you need to restrict your site to a certain age group, or warn of adult material before a user gets into your website), a splash page is not a good idea. Users hate them and will often leave before they even get to your site’s content. Search engines can’t get past them, making it very difficult to rank well. Most of the time, they serve no real purpose but to place a barrier between your visitor and the information they came for.

Usability Problems
There are many possibilities here. Some of the most common include: difficult to use navigation, unorganized content, no easy way to get in contact, long registration forms, hard to read text, and so on. If it’s difficult to use your site, visitors will leave.

It’s Outdated
The web is an ever changing medium, and users have come to expect certain features. If your site was built in FrontPage in 1997, it’s obvious to your visitors. If the site was built using Word, ExpressionWeb, iWeb, Website Tonight, Intuit Web Software, Wix…or any of the other software tools that are intended for very basic starter sites, it show, and your site isn’t giving you the power you need.

Check your Copyright date – it’s one of the first signs that your site isn’t current. Other things you want to avoid are using frames/tables for layout, slow-loading page, and websites that are aligned with the left edge of the browser window so that there’s a big white gap on the right side.

Design is a big one. Even if you don’t think design is important, your visitors are judging you by it, so it is! Have a look around at other sites and get a feel for current design standards and trends. You don’t have to overdo it, but try to make sure your site has a modern feel. Chances are, if your site has had the same design for two years or more, it’s time for a change.

SEO Problems
And there are many, like bad coding practices, poor title/meta/alt tags, choosing the wrong keywords (or not writing your content with keywords in mind), poor architecture and more.
If your site isn’t showing up on the first few search engine results pages for related keyword terms, you need help with SEO, period.

Missing Information and/or Lack of Quality Content
Frequent, quality updates are so important for two reasons. First, if your visitors come back to your site after their first visit and there’s no new information, they know there’s no reason to come back. Second, your search engine ranking is affected in part by how current your content is. Stale sites lose their ranking quickly. Missing information will simply frustrate your visitors. Make sure they can find what they are looking for by using devices like good navigation, search facilities, FAQ, sitemaps and so on. Also make sure your site’s content is well-written, free of grammar & spelling mistakes, and easy to scan.

You Designed it Yourself
Sorry to be harsh, but chances are if you designed your website yourself, you need to call in outside help. You might say “But, I get compliments on my website all the time!” Sure you do… from your friends and family (whose job it is to pump you up), and people who don’t know the web, or who have worse websites than you do. It’s the people who aren’t making these lovely comments (who are leaving your website before they bother to get in touch with you), that you should really worry about! If you don’t have design training, it doesn’t look as good as you think it does. People who design their websites themselves often do so in freebie webpage builders or in software that wasn’t meant for professional design, and it’s obvious just to look at these sites. If you designed the site yourself, it’s very likely that you’re too attached to it – get some perspective from someone who knows the web.

Your Competitors’ Sites are Better
Of course, you can’t worry about everything your competitors do, but you should keep an eye on them, especially online. If your potential customers compare you to them based on what they find on your website, what will they find? If your competitor’s site has a better design, improved content, or higher search engine rankings, you need to level the playing field.

If you don’t know what’s wrong with your site and think it might need a redesign, or if your site looks anything like that scary thing at the top of this post, contact us about a new site. you really can’t afford to wait!

Craving some attention? Read on to find out 7 ways you can get some eyes on you without having to launch a full scale PR Campaign.

Write it Out - If you’ve got big news, like an upcoming event or launch date, or if your business fills a newsworthy niche, write a press release. You can do this yourself or hire someone like me to do it for you. You can then send it to newspapers and other media outlets and distribute it online using services like PRWeb which could result in an article about your business getting into print.

Be Aware – Set up Google Alerts for your name, your Company’s name and other related keywords. The service will send you emails whenever you are mentioned online. This will keep you up to date about what’s being said about your industry and how it relates to you. It’s such a simple step yet many people don’t do it. You can’t respond people’s opinions of you if you don’t know what they’re saying!

Get Social - Social Media is being adopted by companies large and small as a way to directly communicate with peers and customers. Sites like Twitter and Facebook can be a goldmine for contacts and low-key communication.

Be Direct - Don’t be afraid of journalists, they will often be glad of a story idea! Don’t be pushy, of course, but if you think you’ve got something they’d genuinely be interested in hearing about, contact them. Take a couple of minutes and Google search the journalist or news outlet you’re interested in reaching (You’ll probably want to try your local paper first…) and you’ll likely find email addresses for writers on staff. Shoot one (or a few) of them a quick email – give feedback on a story, tell them about your company’s big news, or suggest a story idea. If you’re genuine, show personality and they are interested, they’ll respond.

Go Viral - Create a short video or advertising feature about your business. Make it something people will want to show their friends. Upload it to video sharing sites like YouTube and promote it within your own circle. If you do this well and you can get people sharing it with their friends, your reach is limitless.

Get Chatting – Is there a conference coming up that you could speak at? Are there special interest groups in your area that could benefit from the information you could give them? Use sites like Meetup.com to find out what events are happening in your area and contact group administrators who might be interested in you to ask if they’d like you to give a short presentation to their group. You can also join some groups who have similar interests as you do in order to meet new people and expand your network.

Share it – Could you demonstrate what you do (or a portion of it) to a group? Hold a workshop or seminar and record it on video so that you can also share your skills with the online community. If you’re a good teacher and the information is valuable, you’ll establish yourself as an expert and clients will seek you out.

Have any of these ideas worked for you? What do you find are the best low-cost PR opportunities? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!

They are the fastest growing business segment in North America and the UK, account for 70% of business start-ups worldwide, and have huge spending power. What are you doing to catch their eye?

Woman owned businesses are cropping up everywhere, and it’s no secret we ladies do like to shop. Women also have a huge influence on the spending power of dependent children, which accounts for billions of dollars every year on products and services that you provide. Here’s how to get their attention:

Give them a reason to use your product over a competitors by appealing to them emotionally. Even in today’s uncertain economy, women will still purchase household items, clothes and essentials for themselves and their kids.

Provide items that apply to work and home and you’ll have a wider appeal.
The majority of women-owned startups that opened in the last year were home-based. In these cases, home life and work life blur.

Tell them the truth or they’ll look for someone who will.
They are teetering on a very close work/life balance, especially if they have families. They don’t have time for pushy sales. Tell them what they need to know and why it matters to them, but be honest. Women have BS detectors much more sensitive than men do. They’ll see right through gimmicks and false claims. 

Don’t pressure them.
Women tend to be more cautious about debts and risks than men are. Don’t push them with pressure sales tactics. Make them feel comfortable or they’ll want to walk out the door.

Concern yourself with their image – they do!
Women will go to great lengths to look good, because looking good makes them feel good. Make sure your product, packaging and service materials are esthetically pleasing. They notice attractive packaging, and good design will make them pick a product up.

Marketing to women is in the small details.
Have you ever been to one of those bath & body stores where you receive a cup of tea on your arrival? There’s a shop like that where I live and it sticks in my mind because it was nice to feel welcomed and cared for. I purchased products there, and, naturally, I’ll be back.

This segment of the market is huge! Give them the attention they deserve and you’ll stick in their mind. Next time, make sure it’s your product they take home.

How much waste from your office ends up in a landfill?

If you’re concerned about how green your workspace is, here are a few small changes that will make a big difference.

Only print what you really need – Save some trees by keeping documents digital instead of printing and filing them. You’re less likely to misplace them that way too! You could also use recycled paper in your printer to lessen the impact when you do have to print.

Recycle - It’s easy once you get set up. Pop a bin under each desk to catch the paper waste, and recycle plastics and containers in the lunchroom. You could also set up an organics bin to use for composting.

Purchase items locally – It’s easy to go online and make purchases from anywhere in the world, but consider how many miles a product will take to get to your door. Can you buy it locally? If you can, you’ll be helping to reduce carbon emissions, and supporting your community.

Offer incentives – Do you have many employees who commute to work every day by car? You could set up a bonus scheme where staff members who car pool, use public transport, walk or cycle are given a reward for their efforts.

Set up smart – Keep the environment in mind when you buy your furniture. Recycled materials are being used to make furniture and supplies. Green design is also becoming very fashionable, so you’ll be impressed by the style of the products you find. Ecowork is a great resource for beautiful and sustainable office furniture.

Environmental consciousness is contagious. If your employees, friends, family and customers see that you’re taking your environmental impact to heart, it will encourage them to do the same. Spread a little green by putting these ideas into practice.

How green is your office? Do you have more ideas for creating a sustainable workspace? Share them with us in the comments!