You may have had a real world presence for years now, but when you’re beginning your online services, you have to consider your site as the company’s personal business card. It’s all about online Reputation Management, and it is the most efficient ways to set your company apart from the crowd.

The first step in conducting online reputation management is with the purchase of a personal web domain. When you’re looking into hosting services, you’ll have the option to buy a domain name from the service provider. Using hosting services can be very attractive, especially when looking at the bottom line figures, but you should also think how professional it would come across to your clients, and if they’d even care.

Various social media approaches have served businesses well by expanding their exposure and increasing their relevancy to a largely social media driven world. Many companies, businesses, and organizations alike have found that starting their own blog is an excellent way to get their message across to a group of interested parties that otherwise wouldn’t have been interested. Just as important as getting online, when starting a blog you also have to consider what kind of message you’re sending. If you’re just filling your blog with tons of links that direct users back to your business’ site, you’re not likely to be seen as an authority on any subject and subsequently will have a failed blog. Instead, if you’re starting a blog, put some extra time into preparing relevant and quality content that works both as a service to the public and offers your product to them in equal measure.

Using sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn will, most definitely boost your professional standing. People want businesses that they offer their patronage to to have a positive image. This gets to the whole crux of the online world. You have to first understand that people want to see you everywhere. Online presence is the key to success and not employing all of the Reputation Management Tools will translate into lackluster results.

You don’t want to simply be good enough and have a site. Having a fresh and relevant online approach has now become an integral part of a company’s brand, which has over time become just as important as the product itself. Soon companies will no longer be able to get by with only a real world approach. Our society is shifting gears and it’s the equivalent of still trying to stay connected with your clients using the telegraph when everyone else is using the phone. Approach your online brand building techniques with the highest regard.

Check out some of these online portfolio tools to help you promote your graphic design work.

CarbonMade

With over 42,000 artists and designers currently using its service, CarbonMade provides a great opportunity for you to design your own portfolio site in a JavaScript format. You don’t need any prior knowledge of coding or web design to use it, but you do get a clean canvas to use for your portfolio however you wish. It’s easy to use and update, and provides you with an easily recognizable and memorable web address.

Shadowness

This could be considered the “upscale” portfolio site. The Shadowness website itself is very sleek and sophisticated, and hosts some of the most talented and unique designers out there. While many people simply visit Shadowness for inspiration for their own work, some have signed up simply to be affiliated with such great artists and to receive feedback on their own work.

Coroflot

In this relatively simple portfolio site, you can upload your photos directly to your page. You can also write a bio in your About Me section and provide an email link to your page’s visitors who have taken an interest in your work. While the format for Coroflot is simple, it can improve your appearance on search engines, unlike a lot of Flash-based websites.

Behance

The Behance network is more than just an online portfolio tool. It is also a social networking site for graphic designers. Behance allows more than just photos; it is a multimedia site that allows you to arrange your work however you wish. You can share, comment on and collaborate on work with other artists in the network, most of whom are very open and willing to socialize with other artists, not to mention talented.

Viewbook

Viewbook can be defined in one word: simple. There isn’t much to this site, but it is enough for people who want their viewers to focus solely on their work. The free account allows for 100 images to be displayed, plus most of the features not on a paid account. It will also allow designers to embed their work from Viewbook on other websites and blogs to promote themselves.

While having an online portfolio is a key tool in helping get recognized, you can also increase your online presence through improving your appearance in search engines. Using companies like eVisibility can help your name become more prominent in search engines and help you become even more recognized as a graphic designer.

Or go a whole new direction completely and lose the plume:

What are your thoughts?

Love it or hate it, I re-designed the Chosen Development website. I was growing tired of the Organic theme that I had developed for it originally. Even though it was highly creative and artistic, it was too busy and the colors were too bleh. I decided to go with a VERY simple layout, color scheme and dark, web 2.0 style. This a typical style for me, but I’m proud of that. Chosen development consists mostly of the work of myself and my business partner, Shane and he loves the new design as well. I’ve also integrated our new Creative Brief Interview so that we can automate the initial research and gathering phase.

So check it out, and give me some feedback either way!

Identify your Audience

The absolute first step in the marketing process is to Survey and Explore your target audience to establish your marketing tactics. In this phase you’ll identify your Target Market by asking yourself.. Who specifically am I trying to speak to? and then compare that answer with your geographic, demographic, and psychographic analysis results. Then you will discover your Market Segmentation by defining how you niche the market to speak directly to the consumer you want to target. This is usually figured by looking at the geographic, demographic, and psychographic results, and then simply asking yourself.. What makes you stand out from your competitors in the target’s mind?

Geographic

I’m sure you’ve heard the term “Location, Location, Location!”, so identify that first. Often times defining your Geographic location of the consumer will affect your marketing the most, especially if your business is mostly offline or without a web presence (check out my web development business and our services if this is the case).

Demographic

Demographics are simply the basics that make your consumer such as age, sex, martial status, education, income, race, religion, etc. There are many websites that will easily allow you to research by city, zip and radius to help you identify the ideal demographic in each location.

Psychographic

After you’ve established Geographic and Demographic, you should then analyze psychographics, which are the he underlying things that make your customer who they are (sexual preference, specific religious beliefs, Lifestyle, how they view/carry themselves, etc).

• Chosen Logo Design
• How to Design a Logo Pt1
• Why logo design does not cost $5.00
• Would you buy a logo from Walmart

Many people want to know how to design a logo from start to finish. Let me address first, that logo design is not something that should be taken lightly and doesn’t come cheap. Not everyone can be as fortunate as Nike and get an effective logo for only $35. In fact, designing a highly effective logo takes expertise in many fields including advertising, marketing, and design.

This post is intended to help young and ambitious designers with resources to research, conceptualize, and design a logo. If you’re a business looking to hire a logo designer, you can hire me through my graphic design company, which offers full company branding as well as internet marketing and advertising.

Identify and Brainstorm

Before getting into the concept stage of logo design, you must first identify who your client is, what branding (if any) they have, and what demographic their business is targeting. These are all going to be crucial to the design and development of a logo.

To get started with the tools you’ll need to design, you need to identify the colors, fonts, icons, and images that will best represent the client. If they have a brand already you won’t have much difficulty doing this. However, if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to do some research just to setup your workspace in photoshop or illustrator.

Logo Color

Start with a color scheme and browse around for a while on colourlovers.com and ask yourself while you browse what is the demographic the client is targeting? I usually go by age, sex, and location to get started.

Age

Targeting Young Children and Parents
Start by looking at pastel colors (soft, chalky colors), because babies and children are viewed as fragile and gentle.

Targeting Children and Teenagers
Try heavy contrasts (neon pinks, greens, blues, black), just look at any typical teenager’s myspace and you’ll see what I mean

Targeting Young Adults
Try the primary colors with different lightness/darkness and contrast (light blue and white on dark blue for example)

Targeting Middle Aged Adults and Older
Try soft and dark (beige, grays, retro). Pretty much match the style that was popular when they were young adults

Location

Then look at demographic by location to determine an even narrower selection of colors, often times you have to think backwards of what society has taught you, and stereotype people. Cultures can be very different and have different trends and styles that are attractive. Compare Japan to the US for example, and you’ll see a huge difference in color preference and design.

Logo Shape

Next identify iconography. This is actually easiest to do with finding words that relate to the client. For example, pretend Nike needed a brand and the “swoosh” didn’t exist. In this phase I would identify words that relate to their business to use as a base for iconography:

Words Relating to the Company Name and Services:

• Running / Movement / Fast / Motion
• Sports / Tennis / Soccer / Football / Basketball / Baseball / Hockey
• Greek Gods / Victory / Active / Fast / Strength
• Shoes / Shirts / Apparel / Equipment

Finally identify font. Typography for a business is almost as important or sometimes IS the logo design. Occasionally this phase comes AFTER the logo design, but if it’s easy to identify in the beginning then do so.

Check back in to read the next part of the series How to Design a Logo, which will cover the actual Logo Design. For more reading on logo design, check out How to design a logo by Jacob Cass.

In the early design phase, I had a really vague idea of what I wanted my site to be, but I didn’t want it to be “typical” and I hadn’t really seen a site that matched what I was going for. I still started first by looking around at what I liked in other sites, and thinking of how I could incorporate that into my own. Then after the first week I happened to come across a theme that was absolutely gorgeous, by Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson and used it as my base for development. I love the grid, the structure and the User Interface that this layout has. My approach is once you’ve established your frame, UI, and grid; you can slowly add creative enhancements as you go (at least that’s my preferred approach, some designers and such may argue it, depends on the scope really).

After I applied the new theme, I began my breakdown approach by changing the color scheme, and re-adjusting some of the positions/sizes/padding/etc on the elements of the page. For example, I wanted larger font sizes, better font spacing, a different color scheme, etc. Once i had the theme, I started making the modifications to the style sheets. Most themes will use just one or two stylesheets, editable within WordPress itself under the Design tab, or within the wp-content/themes/yourtheme if accessing the site via FTP. Style are typically labeled style.css or separated into different layout styles like nav.css, type.css, posts.css and so forth.

HTML and CSS

For those of you that are just starting out, I want to go over some basics so that I don’t lose you further down the road. I’m sure if you’ve been reading anywhere on how to make a website you’ve seen the acronyms HTML and CSS. These are two extremely important pieces to front-end development. They define structure and how to present structure.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, which basically means it’s transferable content. HTML serves as the structure of a website. If HTML were part of a building a house, it would be the lumber, doors, windows, drywall, etc.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which means transferable/reusable styles. CSS serves as the display of a website. If it were part of building a house, it would be the overall blueprint and floor plan, as well as the paint, trim and furniture.

Hopefully my analogies make sense.. moving forward.

Using CSS to layout your site

So if you downloaded a theme and opened the main CSS files, you’ll see that some of it just clicks. Things like “background-color” are literal to what they’re styling. The hardest part to CSS isn’t colors and fonts, but more in layout like sizes, margins, and paddings. I’m not going to define all the style definitions, but like I said before, CSS is both the blueprint and the paint, so some styles relate to structure and some relate to skin.

The best way to learn CSS is to mess around. The basics that you need to know are elements, classes and ID’s. Elements are HTML defined content, such as <p> paragraph tags, <div> structure tags, <ul> lists, <h1> headers, etc. Classes can be attached to these tags like <p class=”redtext”> in HTML and to style that in the CSS you would define the paragraph tag with the class redtext be writing p.redtext { color: red; } in the style sheet. The period represents the class and the p represents what element that style is attached to. To style all paragraph tags we could simple drop the class and write p { color: red; } because then we’re simply targeting the paragraph element. This principles works the same with id’s which are represented with a # symbol. The difference between an id and class is that a class can be used multiple times in a single page and an ID can only be used once.

Homework

For this next week, try to learn some CSS basics. If you’re a beginner, work from a theme that someone already did the hard part of laying out, and just change colors or adjust sizes slightly and tweak it until your happy. Try and get the site styled with the colors you like and sizes you like. If it looks boxy and boring, that’s GOOD. We don’t want to focus on the creative elements more than we focus on the layout and structure yet.. that comes with time.

***Please direct all comments and questions through this blog post rather than emailing me, that way others can review and build off communication back and forth***

Prerequisites

There are two main phases to web development and they are the most crucial. An application or website needs to have a good User Inteface (UI) and remain highly reliable/functional. These two phases are usually labeled as Front-end development (which covers everything from Graphic Design to coding in XHTML, CSS, Flash, and JS) and Back-end development ( which involves a server side programming language such as PHP, ASP, or Ruby and a database such as MySQL, MS SQL, etc). I’m going to use this terminology often throughout this tutorial, so it’s best that you research these terms now if you don’t know what those technologies are.

Part 1: Design

Lets get started. First I want you to draw a design. You can do this however you want, a lot of people jump right into Photoshop and start designing. I personally like to bust out a pen and paper and sketch first. I like to get a feel for layout, grid, and flow before I get too heavy into a designed mockup. This method may prove useful for those of you who don’t know photoshop, as it will help you understand and learn the process of creative and UI thinking and give you a blueprint to reference if you design without a PSD to breakdown.

Spend some time on this phase. Like I said its the most important phase. Often times, in the professional world, a designer will create 3 completely different mockups or wireframes presenting the same content. This allows and forces the designer as well as the client to see and think with three completely different concepts and ideas for presentation. I recommend that you do such as well. After you develop 3 completely different ideas, sit down with someone else and circle things that you like and dislike about each and try to chose the one that best presents the concept. If you can or want, merge ideas from the other concept designs with the base that you choose. Then refine it like crazy. Many iterations are often necessary to reach a design that you’re completely satisfied with.

The next tutorial will follow in 1 week. This will force those who are following my posts in real time, to spend the amount of time necessary to refine. Feel free to leave comments, ask questions, or make suggestions in the mean time.