At Big Big Design, we are great fans of great coffee, so it should be no surprise that we’re also great fans of Cummings Candy and Coffee, a historic family-run shop right on Main Street in downtown Butler.
We’re also good friends with the owner, Barry Cummings. So we were thrilled to have the chance to work with him in designing and building the shop’s website.
Cummings combines local tradition with a progressive attitude, and we wanted to reflect that in the design of the site.
We worked with a deep, warm color palette, which we named French Roast. And we integrated historic photos and new images of the shop’s one-of-a-kind interior.
I’ve known Susan Courtad for several years, ever since she enrolled in Fat Plum’s Book Boot Camps to get feedback and guidance on the novel she’d been working on. She’s a smart and funny writer (and a fabulous person), so when she started blogging last year I wasn’t surprised to find she’s a smart and funny blogger too.
This year, as she wrapped up work on that novel and prepared to query agents and find a publisher, she decided to move her blog from the free WordPress hosting to her own website, where she could have greater control of the content. She asked us to create a site that would fit her writing and her personal style, as well as the theme of her novel.
To give the site a distinctive and unique look, we called on the talented illustrator Rachel Arnold Sager. Rachel took the juggling concept (a major theme of Susan’s novel, which she’d reinforced on the blog) plus a couple of recent photos of Susan, and created a sassy, sexy, fun character who’s doing her best to keep everything under control and (mostly) succeeding.
The new site — One-Woman Show — is also flexible and resilient, so Susan can add new pages and features as needed — such as when her novel is published and ready for sale!
If your business or organization focuses on local clients and customers, the most effective way to make sure they find you on the Web is to get listed on online map services, like Google Maps, MapQuest, and MSN Live Search.
These free business listings are an easy way to get your website to show up in searches — and they’re far cheaper than any search engine optimization available.
Listings take just a few minutes to create (although they take a bit longer to activate). Read on to find out what you’ll need, where to go, and what to do.
Meet local marketers and enjoy the downtown scene.
When: Thursday, June 12, from 5:30 to 7:30p
Where: Six Penn Kitchen, 146 Sixth Street, Pittsburgh
Who: Anyone, plus members of the American Marketing Association’s Pittsburgh chapter
How much: $20 for food, two drinks, and unlimited mingling
Enhanced mingling is courtesy of The Famous Grouse, Scotland’s oldest working distillery, whose reps will be on hand with samples of their exceptional single-malt whiskeys.
These events were great fun last summer, with a lot of marketing and general socializing. I have to miss this June mixer, but I hope you will check it out. And I look forward to the other mixers later this summer.
The excellent blog of SmallFuel Marketing is full of great information about how to do better marketing for small business. But iif you don’t have time to read through the whole site, you can at least check out this article on the whys and hows of small business blogging:
The big picture of blogging for business goes something like this. In order to be successful with business blogging you’ll need to put in a good amount of time. Blogs need to be updated regularly, most people say between 3-5 times per week, so there is a lot of writing involved. Also, blogging is a very social activity. This means that you should read and comment on other blogs, as well as network and build relationships with other bloggers. In summary, it takes time and effort.
The result of your efforts, however, can be truly outstanding. A well-designed and frequently updated blog can boost your website to the top of search results (blogs are awesome from an SEO perspective), it can draw in thousands of visitors, and it can help build your image as an authority. A successful blog can serve as branding, advertising, networking, and sales all rolled into one. And they don’t even cost much.
The article is full of links to other useful resources too.
Bottom line: While a good blog requires time and effort, it provides excellent return on that investment.
Creating a terrible website seems to be a common goal on the
internet. I’ve seen it accomplished many times, so I thought I’d make
it easier for everyone and post the ultimate guide.
From the time a visitor enters your site to the time they exit,
there are plenty of effective techniques to annoy them. So in this
article, I will identify 28 points to remember during a website
development and how to execute them properly. Feel free to bookmark
this and use it as a reference when you’re in the mood to frustrate
visitors.
I can add a few tips:
29. Don’t provide any way for site visitors to contact you. Why should you bog yourself down with what they think?
30. List every page in the main menu. Long menus are exciting and give the site visitor many options — probably too many options to choose from. Give them the challenge of searching through everything you could think of! It’s like a word search puzzle on-screen.
Jonlor Developments is a custom builder and architectural firm based in the Pittsburgh area. The president, John Rizzi, wanted a website that would showcase the beautiful homes they’ve built through a photo gallery.
John had a clear idea of how the homepage of the site should look: a full-page photo of a Jonlor home that’s styled like a French chalet, with brief text overlaying it.
We were able to design the page so that the text all remains available to search engines, and to create a layout and look for the rest of the site that shows the gallery in its best light.
I posted this video on my personal blog, My Brilliant Mistakes, a few days ago, and got a lot of response from my writerly friends. It’s funny because it’s true!
Actually, it really is true. The person in the video is writer Dennis Cass. His first book has just come out in paperback, and although he’s a social media neophyte he’s trying to figure out how to market his book — no easy task.
So he made this video, posted it on his blog, told a few friends, and it went viral. Today, his paperback is ranked #297,848 on Amazon; that’s not Oprah-level, but it’s quite respectable. He succeeded! See how easy it is to master the Web?
Of course, it’s not really easy at all to master the Web. But it is easy to build successes and build upon what you’ve done, and to extend your reach. Cass himself wrote about this on his (new) blog, reacting to the response he’s received and all the new worlds that are opening before him.
Substitute internet stuff for the car stuff and this is how I’ve been
sounding to people for the past two days. I know: it’s genuinely
embarrassing. But I can’t stop. Even when people are telling me that I
should be embarrassed. Even when people are saying, “Yes, Dennis. The
internet is amazing. It’s 2008. We know.”
I
don’t know why it’s taken me so long to absorb this message. I’m hardly
a Luddite. I’ve used Amazon to sell used CDs to guys who live on Army
bases in Canada. I’ve written stories about machinima. When I balance
my checkbook, I use Quicken; I don’t tie knots in yarn. But for some
reason it took this silly little YouTube video for me to truly
understand. Like I think I get it now. Technology isn’t a tool; it’s a
religion, right? Is that what we’re doing here?
But Cass isn’t the only one who feels like he’s just now “getting it.”
Just this morning I gave a talk to business executives, providing an overview of blogs and other social media and highlighting how it might affect their business and customers. Near the end, one of them said, “Here I thought I was all up on the latest stuff, and I’m finding out that I’m a couple of generations behind.”
The thing is, new technologies arrive daily, on the Web and elsewhere. You don’t need to go chasing after every little one, though. (For one thing, you’ll have to choose between keeping up and getting your actual work done.)
What’s important is that you remain open to new ideas and give some of these new gadgets a try. Stay alert and keep exploring. At the least, you won’t be left completely in the dust, and at best you might be the next thing that everyone forwards to everyone they know — just like Dennis Cass.
Kathie Shoop’s blog Housewife Cafe was one of the first blogs we built, back in 2005. Kathie has been blogging ever since, as well as continuing to write fiction and publish articles in various places.
As her writing has taken a new direction, she felt her blog was ready for a new look and a new name. The new name would be KShoop.com.
She tasked us with creating an open, friendly design that would incorporate an old black and white photo she had of bookshelves her grandfather used in college. We liked the thought of Kathie’s writing sitting on bookshelves, so we made the photo the background for the design. For the color palette, Kathie suggested the colors of a homey upholstery print she likes.
The two ideas seemed to work just fine, and why wouldn’t they? A comfy upholstered chair makes a great partner to sturdy bookshelves.
The overall look is modern, but it has a feeling of history as well, which suits the historical fiction on which Kathie is currently working. Just as importantly, behind the scenes WordPress offers key features that make blogging easy. We hooked up Kathie’s Flickr account too, so she can post and blog about photos she takes.
At Big Big Design, we are great fans of great coffee, so it should be no surprise that we’re also great fans of Cummings Candy and Coffee, a historic family-run shop right on Main Street in downtown Butler.
