Blogs are marketing gold, but this is hardly groundbreaking news.
What is surprising is that many businesses are not capitalizing on these marketing opportunities as often as they should. Beyond the opportunity to get your brand in front of a new audience, there is another important reason to be marketing your product/services on blogs—it can improve your SEO.
The reason: the all mighty backlink.
As avid users of both Trello and Dropbox, we at Needmore were thrilled when Dropbox integration for Trello was announced. This is a really clever way that Dropbox lets other services use a chooser dialog box to attach files, and it eliminates the duplication that you might otherwise have if you were to attach random files directly to a card in Trello.
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We love to start the new year with a redesign, and this year we’re not going to disappoint.
Visitors will doubtless have noticed that we have a brand new, partly-finished website up. No, it’s not ideal. Yes, we’d love to show you a fully-finished, feature-complete site.
Heck, we’d love it if the page you were reading right now was using the grid structure we sketched out, but we’re not quite there yet!
Tell you what: we were seriously fed up with the old one. It was based on a template of questionable quality… goodbye to that. Most importantly, it didn’t show our nice new look, featuring a logo designed by our friends at Factory North, and we didn’t have a good way of showing all the nice things our clients have to say about working with (the five of) us.
We’ve been redesigning our site. What can I say. New year.
As the work has progressed, we’ve honed in on what resonates with us and what doesn’t. (We’ve done quick redesigns of our site a half dozen times over the past 9 years… but this time we are creating something that will last.)
The goal: timelessness. The advent of retina-quality graphics have reminded us that computer-based design can be beautiful. Not the kind of pseudo-beauty that you allow for, provided that the viewer’s imagination can “smooth out the pixels” or “compensate for the jaggies” or such. You really can make a website that holds up to standards higher than print.
This is Real Art.
When I asked the rest of our team in the Studio to draw a coffee cup, with no other explanation, what they all drew was strikingly similar.
This isn’t unique. If you go just about anywhere in the world, you’ll get similar results. This is because humans tend to view things in the canonical perspective.
…The canonical perspective still won out, even though when we see cats or very small dogs we are mainly looking at them from high above, not just slightly above. In fact the research shows that when we imagine an object we imagine it from this canonical perspective.
If you look at the Dock on your Mac or the icons on your phone, you’ll notice that designers tend to use this perspective too. It’s worth taking into account when you’re creating icons or geometric graphics, as people will tend to recognize the object quicker if it’s drawn this way, too.
…or, “our new website is coming along nicely!”
It’s been a great year. And, a delightfully busy one. Thanks to everyone we worked with this year. We couldn’t be more honored to have such wonderful relationships with such amazing people.
We had a blast getting the following projects off the ground. Whether working on a new project or a fresh redesign for an existing client, we love launching websites!
Stumptown Coffee Roasters
Löyly
Sea Urchin
Children’s Community School
Beals Design-Build
Better Together Bake Shop
Curly Tail Pug Rescue
Ultimate Choice
J&R Group
Salt & Straw Shop
Savoir Flair
Ute City Cycles
Vignette Brand Communications
We already can’t wait for 2013, and to show you what we’ve got up our sleeve next.
A big part of our job is to help folks look good. And our talents are often very well-suited to restaurants, so we think a lot about how our skills can complement this kind of a business.
We view the menu in a restaurant a lot like we view the website project. Prior to walking into your restaurant, your website might be the first thing your customers see. And until they order their food, they spend some quality time with your menu. So it’s worth giving it some extra care and attention.
Often the proprietor of a restaurant feels as though they don’t have the time or financial resources to make something terribly fancy. Often they will settle on a menu they can print from a printer in their shop, because they may need to update it on short notice, or they prefer it because it’s very affordable.
But a bad menu experience can really cloud a visitor’s opinion of a restaurant. If I think the menu is ratty, cheap, and ugly, I might have a similar expectation of the food. If care is not given to the menu, I might well assume the same is true of the food.
With that in mind, here are a fee humble suggestions from Needmore for your restaurant menu.
So I’ve had this phone for a week and I thought I’d share a few of my observations. I realize I’m late to the game, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d skip this generation. However, we just had a baby, and if there’s one friend you need around when you have a baby in your arms for hours, it’s an iPhone. Trust me on that one.
At this point, there is one feature that stands out more than the others, and that is the physical design. I adored the 4/4s design, and I had a hard time believing that Apple could do better. I found it very surprising that they had.
We need your help. We’re launching a website soon, and it needs just a bit of testing.
Volunteers would need to arrange to stop by tomorrow (Tuesday) or Wednesday afternoon. It takes about 20 minutes. For your trouble, you will recieve a warm smile, a firm handshake, and a bag of amazing coffee.
If you’re interested, write to ray@needmoredesigns.com pronto. Note that you will have to sign a simple non-disclosure agreement, binding only until the website goes up. Thanks!
