Thoughts

Using Replace Color in Adobe Photoshop CS3

Posted on September 16, 2008 by sharphue

You’ve chosen the perfect image for your project, but the color palette doesn’t fit your needs. What can you do?

The Replace Color option is your solution. This tool allows you to change a specific color within an image quickly and easily. It isn’t hard to use, and you can save your settings and reuse them on other images.

Replace Color can be found under Image > Adjustments > Replace Color. Within the Replace Color palette are options such as hue, saturation, and lightness.

Suppose you have a photograph of stadium seats and you need to change the color from bright red to a cool blue. It only takes a few easy steps using Replace Color.

Before you begin, create a Background Layer Copy ( control > J for PCs and Apple > J for Macs) so the original is safe behind the photo in case something goes wrong.

Bring the photo into Photoshop. Make sure “Preview” is checked under the save option. This will show any changes being made to the actual photograph.

Go to Image > Adjustments > Replace Color. The Replace Color palette will appear on your screen with a few options inside.

Choose the Selection option. (This will show you what is being selected in the Preview box above. Masked areas are black and what’s chosen by the Eyedropper will be in white.)

Select the Eyedropper tool with a plus sign and use it to select the red tones in the image.

Click around on the seats with the plus sign Eyedropper until all of the seats appear in the Preview box. When everything is selected, move on to the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness options.

To change the seats to blue, work with the Saturation and drag the slider to the left. The image will show the color change if the Preview option is selected. You can also select a replacement color manually by clicking on the square color preview box.

When the seats are the desired color, choose “okay.” The original red seats have been changed to a cool blue in no time.


Posted in Adobe Photoshop CS3, Photoshop Replace Color, Photoshop tips | Leave a comment

Using Actions in Adobe Photoshop CS3

Posted on September 11, 2008 by sharphue

There is a user friendly tool in Adobe Photoshop called Actions that can be found in the window drop down menu.

The default list in the Action palette ranges from Sepia Toning to Save as a Photoshop PDF. Using Actions can save a great deal of time especially if you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again. Actions are great because you can perform an Action on an entire folder instead of performing the Action on each individual file within the folder.

Think of the Actions palette as you would a VCR. There is a record button, play button, and a stop button. To use one of the Photoshop Actions you simply push the play button and Photoshop will perform that Action.

For instance, suppose you have a photo of a flower that you would like to manipulate. Under the Actions menu you will find “Neon Edges” and decide that is exactly what the photo needs.

  1. Open the photo in Photoshop
  2. Open the Actions palette
  3. Choose “Neon Edges”
  4. Push play
  5. Save the manipulated image

If you want to create your own customized Actions it is quite easy.

  1. Open the file you are wanting to perform the Action on
  2. Click the new Action button
  3. Push the record button and begin doing things to your file
  4. When you’re finished push the stop button. Photoshop has recorded everything done to the file since the record button was pushed.

Suppose you want a suitcase photo to look like it has been watercolor painted with a vignette around it’s edges. Go to Filter > Watercolor and click okay. Then go to Filter > Lens Correction and add the Vignette to the image.

Photoshop is now ready to play your customized Action on any photograph or file you bring into Photoshop.

To learn more you can go to Http://www.adobe.com/support/photoshop or simply type in Photoshop Actions in Google and there are tons of websites devoted to helping people discover new ways to use Actions everyday!

Posted in Adobe Photoshop CS3, Photoshop Actions, Photoshop tips | Leave a comment

The Sharp Hue Toolbox

Posted on September 3, 2008 by sharphue

At Sharp Hue, Inc., we’re cutting edge and committed to excellence. One reflection of that commitment is the tools we use. We’ve worked to refine our toolbox to contain the most powerful and efficient tools. The resulting efficiencies are what let us build premium sites for reasonable prices. We want to be able to help every client, small or large, at a fair price.

The version control system which lets us have zero data loss is one part of the equation. Managed hosting with zero down time is another. Investing in the best software is a third.

We have lots of things in our bag of tricks, but here are the tools we think are the essentials for a designer’s toolbox:

  • Adobe Photoshop CS3 is our primary tool for the prototyping process that expedites communication between Sharp Hue designers and clients. This program also allows us to work efficiently as a team, saving our clients money and time.
  • Adobe Illustrator CS3 allows us to create vector graphics that can be used in multiple media without losing quality. This means that our clients can use the logos we create for them in their print, screen, and online materials, and even in signage and billboards.
  • Adobe InDesign CS3 lets us meld content, graphics, and design in the most natural way. We can produce fliers, brochures, and other print materials to meet the mosMicrosoft Visual Studio is our preferred development environment. We det stringent requirements. Our clients can also be confident that their visual identity will be consistent across print, screen, and online media, ensuring a recognizable and trustworthy impression among their clients and customers.
  • Microsoft Visual Studio is our preferred development environment. We develop as well as design, so our clients can have exactly what they want and need in a website. While we specialize in providing a custom experience at a reasonable price, our range of skills allows us to produce custom solutions when that is the best option for a client.
  • Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 is our web coding tool. We use the code-view approach to help us efficiently hand code all of our web sites with pixel precision. When we code a site, it looks the same on Mac or PC, Firefox or Safari, regardless of operating system.

Check our archive for posts containing tips for using these tools, or just call us to schedule an appointment and let us use them on your behalf.

Posted in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, Adobe Illustrator CS3, Adobe InDesign CS3, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Visual Studio, sharp hue, Version Control, Web Design | Leave a comment

Corporate Identity, Logos, and You

Posted on August 20, 2008 by sharphue

When you look at a wall of business cards like this, it’s obvious that very few of them will stand out and catch a viewer’s attention. When you hand your card out at networking meetings, conferences, and sales calls, and it goes into someone’s pocket or briefcase with all the others, it may blend into the collection in the same way.



Will your business card stand out from the pack? Does your web site, flyer, e-mail, conference presentation, or letterhead bring your company to mind immediately? One solution will make all these elements of your corporate identity memorable: a well-designed custom logo.

An excellent logo can be used in all elements of your corporate identity package:

  • Corporate Logo
  • Business Cards
  • Web Site Design
  • Flyers
  • Posters
  • Promotional Items
  • PowerPoint Template
  • Microsoft Word Template
  • E-mail Marketing Template
  • Brochures
  • Letterhead
  • Product Profile
  • Corporate Graphics
  • Brand Usage Guidelines
  • Signage
  • Billboards


The consistent use of a well-designed logo helps to make your brand immediately identifiable and to establish trust and recognition, as well as taking that all-important first step of attracting attention. A well-designed logo makes your clients and customers open that envelope, read that e-mail, and save that flyer, because they know right away that it comes from someone they’re happy to hear from: you.

What is a well-designed logo?

  • The basic principles of design apply to logos as much as to all other designs. Simplicity, unity, balance, repetition, and intentional use of color and theme are essential. With logos, less is definitely more. You want an immediate impact on your first-time viewer, and immediate recognition after that. To get these effects, you need a striking and memorable logo. A professional logo design is a worthwhile investment.
  • A logo should be meaningful, as well. The logo Sharp Hue, Inc. designed for our new Visual Cart system echoes the leaf shape of the main Sharp Hue logo, but we’ve put it in the form of a friendly shopping cart, because that’s exactly what Visual Cart is: a user-friendly new electronic shopping cart. When your logo creates the emotional and visual impact you want, your brand benefits. We work simultaneously with font, slogan, icon, and color, keeping in mind your target audience, to ensure that your logo does its job.
  • We’ve moved past just making a great design on paper. In order to get the maximum from your design investment, you’ll want to use your logo on all the visible products of your company. That means that you’ll need to have your design in formats that will work for online, screen, and print applications. Sharp Hue, Inc. designs with vector graphics and “pixel precision” to ensure that the design will work with a variety of media. It’s also useful to make certain that your logo is invertable – that is, that it looks good on both light and dark backgrounds. This level of versatility maximizes the return on your investment. When we design your web site, we work with your existing logo, or design a new one for you, and make sure that it will shine with your web site design.


When is it time to change your logo? This is not a step to be taken lightly, since you’ve put a lot of time and effort into making your logo well-known and recognizable. Still, it is often an essential step:

  • When your original logo doesn’t capture the image of your organization adequately. In this case, the sooner you change to a better logo, the sooner you’ll see better results.
  • When your original logo needs modernization. UPS has redesigned their logo several times over the years as have many Fortune 500 companies. The basic UPS shield remains and the color scheme is similar, so they won’t give up recognizability, but the new look is sleeker and more modern in appearance.

  • When your business has changed. If you have expanded your market, increased your offerings, or changed your delivery systems in exciting ways, it might be time to show those changes in new visual elements.

Check out the logo design page at SharpHue.com for examples of fresh, visually appealing logos. Does your logo measure up? To arrange for a professional custom logo design, to make your current logo available for multiple media formats, or to design a web site that complements your logo, contact us today at logos@sharphue.com.

Posted in corporate identity, effective marketing, logo design, professional logo design, sharp hue | Leave a comment

Web Site Content Tips from Wikipedia

Posted on August 6, 2008 by sharphue

On the web, content is king. Excellent, dynamic content lures the search engines to visit your site more frequently, turns your casual visitors into regular readers, and gives your web site authority that can improve your rankings.

What kind of writing does it take to achieve these goals? Consider Wikipedia as an example.

Nearly any noun you type into a search engine will have Wikipedia on the front page of results. Tattoos, nanotechnology, Guglielmo Marconi, pilates – almost anything you search for, there Wikipedia will be.

How is Wikipedia getting those results? And how can you get a similar effect with the content of your own web site?

It’s often more cost-effective to have your content written professionally, especially when delays or diversion of staff from other tasks make the opportunity costs of in-house writing high. Sharp Hue, Inc. can provide professionally-written content designed to be effective for both the people who visit your web site and the search engines. Our knowledge of the best practices for search engine marketing and our objectivity allow us to find the words that will accomplish your purposes, faster and more effectively than you can do it yourself.

If you really want to write your own copy, though, you could take a leaf from Wikipedia’s Manual of Style. Where Wikipedia’s style manual differs from the one you’ve had on your shelf since college, it’s often a good SEO move.

Here are some examples:

  • “If possible, an article title is the subject of the first sentence of the article… If the article title is an important term, it appears as early as possible.”


When you type a word or phrase into the search box at Google or Yahoo, the search engine looks for pages that start out with that word or phrase. Whenever possible, use your keywords right at the beginning of your page.

  • “It is not useful and can be very distracting to mark all possible words as hyperlinks. Links should add to the user’s experience; they should not detract from it by making the article harder to read. A high density of links can draw attention away from the high-value links that you would like your readers to follow up.”


While you generally want as many links as possible coming into your page, outgoing links from your page need to fulfill a specific purpose. Wikipedia’s point about the effect on human readers is very important; it’s also true that search engines will decide that your page is less important than the ones you link to if you use links out to do the job your own page ought to be doing.

  • “Using color alone to convey information should not be done. Such information is not accessible to people with color blindness, on black-and-white printouts, on older computer displays with fewer colors, on monochrome displays (PDAs, cell phones), and so on.”


The manual happens to be talking about color here, but this is just one of the many places where they make an important point: think about your reader’s experience. Usability is one of the essential factors in designing your web site, and that includes the text.

We’ve looked at examples that have to do only with online writing; most of the rest of the Wikipedia style manual is similar to the paper style manuals on your bookshelf. Is that less important for optimizing your site for search? No. Google considers pages with writing errors – poor spelling, punctuation faults, bad grammar – less trustworthy than well-written pages. So will your human visitors. Even when you write your own content, you should consider having it edited and polished up by a professional.

Sharp Hue can assist you with all aspects of your web design, from concept to content. Call us to schedule a demonstration of our new product called Visual Cart, an e-commerce system built around writing good content that is friendly to both search engines and people.

Posted in sem, seo, sharp hue, tips, web site traffic, website content | Leave a comment

Three Keys to Getting Results with E-mail Marketing

Posted on July 23, 2008 by sharphue

E-mail is now the number one means of communication for business in the United States: last year, according to Forrester Research, e-mail messages outnumbered all other forms of business communication combined. No wonder. E-mail is the fastest and most economical method of direct communication. At the same time, “e-mail fatigue” caused by stuffed electronic in-boxes and increasing spam can lead to quick use of the delete button before messages are even read. The same Forrester report found that today’s computer users are 47% less likely to read all the e-mail they receive than those surveyed in the year 2000.

What does this mean for e-mail marketing?

Quite simply, your e-mail marketing has to reach a higher standard now than in the past. It has to embody the three Es:

  • Ethical
  • Effective
  • Economical






Ethical

You may not be thinking in terms of ethics when you plan your marketing campaign, but you are certainly concerned that your prospects – or their e-mail service providers — will banish your mass e-mailing to their junk mail folders. At Sharp Hue, Inc., we’ve found that ethical e-mail practices are the best defense.

Buying an e-mail address list or harvesting e-mail addresses from third-party sources seems like a quick and easy way to generate leads, but it is ineffective. When recipients don’t recognize your name, they are likely to identify your communication as spam before they even read it. If enough people identify your mailing as spam, you can face consequences: suspension of your account, for example, or identification of your e-mail address as a source of spam, making it useless for future contacts.

Instead, restrict your e-mail campaigns to those who would actually like to hear from you: your current customers, people who have signed up for your mailing list at your web site or in your office or at your vendor’s table, people who’ve shaken your hand and given you their cards.

Then make sure that your mailings include an opt-out sentence: something like “To unsubscribe from this newsletter, click here” or “If you’d rather not be included in future mailings, click this link.” Don’t worry that making it easy will lead people to unsubscribe. Research has shown that being given a clear choice actually encourages people to stick with you, since they know that you will respect their wishes.

Effective

There is nothing to stop you from sitting down with your e-mail program and shooting off a quick paragraph to all your clients telling them about your upcoming sale. However, considering all the e-mail they receive, your message will need to catch and keep their attention, and they need to recognize that it comes from you.

Sharp Hue designs e-mail campaigns, whether for newsletters, company news, or special offers, that are visually recognizable and compelling. We can prepare a design template for you that allows you to produce your own content, manage your own lists, and keep track of your own results – while maintaining the professional image that gives your clients confidence. We can also do it all for you, which can be a great option when the opportunity costs of diverting your own staff to the task are high.

Another factor in the effectiveness of your email is how it looks to recipients using different computers or browsers. You may have had the experience of sending a document to a colleague who uses a Mac when you use a PC, and finding that the document looked quite different. This kind of difference can show up even when it’s just a matter of using Firefox or Internet Explorer. We can make certain that your mailing will look the way you want it to on your client’s screens, no matter what computer, e-mail program, or browser they use.

With the amount of competition you have for your clients’ attention, the most effective e-mail campaign will involve the best quality e-mail. Make sure your communication is useful and enjoyable for your clients, and they will be glad to hear from you.

Economical

This is the first criterion for many businesspeople. E-mail marketing is quite simply the least expensive form of direct marketing available. Printing and mailing a black and white newsletter to a list of 5,000 prospective customers, assuming you get it camera-ready yourself, will cost you in the neighborhood of $3,000. An e-mail newsletter to the same size list, through Sharp Hue, would be nearer $600 for design and $100 for delivery.

Since all Sharp Hue e-marketing services include design and setup, and all are tailored to your needs, the total will vary, but the difference in the size of your investment remains significant.

Even when you choose to go for direct mail, QED Market Research reports that following up with an e-mail push has been shown to increase conversion rates by as much as 50%, providing a significantly higher return on your investment.

Sharp Hue custom designed e-mail templates allow you to send your own e-mail campaigns for $5.00 per campaign and two cents per e-mail address, with no monthly fees. The intrinsic savings of e-mail marketing can allow you to choose the full-service template design option without straining your budget. Additionally, campaign reporting capabilities like opens, clicks, and bounces give you instant insight into the overall effectiveness and ROI of each e-mail campaign you send.

Watching the three Es will ensure that your e-mail marketing is fruitful, not a victim of e-mail fatigue. Now is the perfect time to begin your e-mail marketing, or to sharpen up your approach to make it more satisfying. Contact Sharp Hue to plan your ideal strategy.

Posted in direct marketing, e-mail, e-mail marketing, economical marketing, effective marketing, sharp hue | 1 Comment

Funnels, Conversion, and Google Analytics Goals

Posted on July 9, 2008 by sharphue

A well-designed website encourages visitors to take action: to make purchases, to sign up for a newsletter, to subscribe to a blog. Your site should funnel visitors smoothly toward completion of these actions, without frustrations or distractions.

Is your website doing its job? The first step in building a better funnel is to find out what your visitors are doing now. The Google Analytics “goals” function makes this easy.

At your Analytics account page, you can click “edit” to set up goals for your web site.
Google Analytics measures the success of goals by tracking when readers visit a particular page: the “thank you” page after they place an order or leave contact information, for example.

It is essential that there be a page that shows that your visitor completed a goal. It may be one of your goals that visitors call you or come to your place of business after visiting your site. That is not the kind of goal Google Analytics can track. Analytics can tell you when visitors go to your contact information page or look at your map, though, so that may be a way to approximate that goal. If there is no page associated with your goal, you will need to design a page that will allow you to measure it. Sharp Hue can assist you with this.

You can set up as many as four goals for one Google Analytics website profile, and each goal can have up to ten steps. So a goal for leaving contact information might just show that the visitor reached the “thank you” page. This would count as a conversion.

A goal for shopping might show these steps along the way:

  • Visit the catalog.
  • Go to the shopping cart.
  • Provide billing information.
  • Provide shipping information.
  • Check out.
  • Reach the “thank you” page.

These steps are called a “funnel” because they act like a funnel, narrowing visitors from those who are just browsing to those who are interested in your products or services, to those who are actually ready to make a purchase.

When you add these steps to your Analytics goal, you can see when potential shoppers leave, and you can adjust your web site accordingly. For example, if your shoppers visit the catalog, put items in their cart, and enter their credit card information, but leave at the shipping screen, then there must be something about the experience at that screen that is losing you customers. If plenty of visitors make it to your product information, but few go on to the sign up page, then the product information page may need changes.

It was exactly this type of information that led to the development of Sharp Hue’s Visual Cart e-commerce system. By analyzing the experiences clients had with their e-commerce solutions, we were able to design a very smooth experience that is adaptable to many different business goals. You can use the same kind of data to fine-tune the parts of your visitors’ experiences that are specific to your web site.

While each website profile can have four goals, you have the option of setting up a second profile for a website so that you can add more goals.

The goals function at Google Analytics also allows you to discover which pages of your web site inspire visitors to take action. Once you have your goals set up, you can look to see where visitors were before they reached the page you’ve specified as demonstrating conversion. You can tell which of your pages helped your visitors make up their minds to request more information. You can see which keywords led just to browsing and which led to conversion.

You can even set up your goals using dollar amounts. For e-commerce sites, or sites with paid subscription, you will have solid figures to work with. If you are measuring the dollar value of a visitor’s decision to leave contact information, you may need to do some calculation. For example, if you know that one percent of those who subscribe to a free newsletter will hire your firm, with an average commitment of $1500, then each subscriber can be assigned a dollar value of $15.

Assigning dollar goals allows you to keep track of the return on your investment. You can compare the value of your newsletter to that of your blog, or of visitors who reach your web site in different ways. Knowing whether your pay-per-click visitors bring in enough value to justify a PPC campaign compared with an e-mail campaign, for example, allows you to allocate your marketing dollars to best advantage. If a redesign of your web site or a change in your newsletter would increase the rate at which your subscribers converted to customers, it would be worth the investment. Seeing your goals in dollar amounts can help with these decisions.

As always, Sharp Hue can help you with understanding the powerful information Google Analytics provides, and designing your web site to make best use of that information.

While each website profile can have four goals, you have the option of setting up a second profile for a website so that you can add more goals.

Posted in analytics funnel, analytics goals, google analytics, seo, sharp hue, site optimization, web site conversion | Leave a comment

Understanding the Google Analytics Dashboard

Posted on June 26, 2008 by sharphue


“What does it all mean?” is a fine philosophical question, but not what you want to be thinking when you check your Google Analytics every day.

You can get more out of Google Analytics when you understand just what it analyses. Your starting point is the Dashboard. This gives you an overview on one page. Let’s look at the elements.

There are four (five if you have an Ecommerce Overview) large graphs on the page. These give you a quick idea of how things are going with your web site. When you click on them, you can find much more useful information. We’ll examine these in future posts. We’ll also look at the Comparing function and the help links later.

Below the main graph you will see six measures of site usage:

  • Visits. When Google says “visitors,” they mean individual people (or at least individual computers) while “visits” counts the event of someone coming to your site, either for the first time or on subsequent occasions. You want this number to increase steadily.
  • Pageviews. This counts the number of times anyone looks at any page on your web site. If one visitor looked at eight pages and eight visitors looked at one page each, this measure will count both as eight.
  • Pages/Visit. This tells the average number of pages one visitor looked at during one visit. You could calculate this yourself from the previous two numbers, but Google does it for you. Depending on the goal of your site, you may want different results here, but generally, more pages per visit is better.
  • Bounce Rate. When a visitor looks at your page and leaves without exploring more, that visitor bounced. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who only visited one page before leaving. In general, a lower bounce rate is better.
  • Avg. Time on Site. This number tells in minutes and seconds how long the average visitor spent at your site before leaving. You want this number to rise.
  • % New Visits. This shows what percentage of this month’s visitors are new. If you are new to Google Analytics, many visitors will show up as new even though they may have visited before. Over time, this will correct itself.

Apart from the large graphs mentioned above, there will also be a chart called “Content Overview.”Content Overview lists the most popular pages at your web site, and the number of times visitors have looked at each of them.

In order to get an understanding of how this information can be useful, let’s look at a couple of real-world examples. We’ll examine the information from the Dashboards of two different sites:

» Site A, the website of a family therapist, has had 42 visitors this month,

» Site B, a business blog, has had 4,107 visitors this month.


Site A’s owner sees an increase in traffic as a priority. Site B is happy with the steady increase in traffic he is seeing over time. Even though they have very different amounts of traffic, both can use the information from the Dashboard to develop strategies.

Site A has a 40.48% bounce rate; her visitors look at an average of 4.88 pages on each visit. This is good news, and shows that her content is useful to her visitors. She sells books from her web site, so she wants visitors to spend time browsing.

Site B has a bounce rate of 89.16 and the average visitor looks at only 1.2 pages. However, since Site B is a blog, it is to be expected that most visitors will read just a post or two, bouncing away to other links. In fact, many of them bounce away to the business the blog belongs to, providing traffic second only to Google. Lowering the bounce rate is not a priority for Site B.

Site A’s most popular page is her home page, which is the result she wants. While she wants people to read her articles and buy her books, her home page brings clients to her office. The Content Overview chart lets her make sure that her home page remains the most popular page.

Site B’s most popular pages are posts from the past, which visitors find through the search engines. These pages continue to send traffic to the business web site through links, so they continue to be valuable.

Site B’s owner makes sure to keep the links and information on past posts up to date. He also should make sure to keep writing posts good enough to be popular; the Content Overview lets him track that.

Site B has many readers who subscribe through site feeds, so he knows that some readers of his home page will not show up at Google Analytics. He can track these readers in other ways.

From these examples, we can see that different kinds of web sites should see different numbers on their Dashboards. The information allows web site owners to adjust their web sites and marketing strategies to reach their goals. There may be general guidelines (for example, just about everyone will want their total visits to increase), but there are no hard and fast rules about what numbers you want to see on your Dashboard.

Sharp Hue can help you understand what the numbers on your Dashboard are telling you about how your web site fits into your overall business plan, and develop strategies for reaching the goals you have for your web site and for your business. We will be glad to meet with you to discuss your specific needs.

Visit us again next month for more on the best ways to use Google Analytics in your business.

Posted in bounce rate, dashboard, google analytics, pageviews, seo, sharp hue, site optimization, unique visits | Leave a comment

What Google Analytics Is, and Why You Should Care

Posted on May 1, 2008 by sharphue

As a businessperson, you know the kind of traffic you have in your physical shop or office. You know your conversion rate and how it compares with others in your industry. You know what people will be looking for at different times of year, when the busy days and hours are, and what kinds of seasonal ups and downs you can expect.

Wouldn’t you like to have that information for your web site?

Often, webmasters offer you charts of domain statistics that just don’t give you the information you need to plan your marketing strategy. Sharp Hue uses Google Analytics instead. This is a sophisticated set of tools for collecting and analyzing data, custom tailored to your site.

Here are just some of the things Google Analytics tracks for you:

  • the number of visitors you have each day and how long they stay at your site
  • the geographic locations of your visitors, down to the city
  • how your visitors found you – did they type in your web address, come to your site from a referral or a link someone emailed to them, or did they find you through a search engine like Google?
  • when people usually come to your site, including the hour and the day of the week

Sharp Hue can e-mail regular reports to you, so you can decide how to adjust your strategy in light of the kinds and sources of traffic using your site.

Let’s consider a few examples of ways in which you can use this information to increase your traffic and fine-tune your business plans:

  • Sharp Hue clients can expect steadily increasing traffic. But Google Analytics can also tell you whether you have returning visitors or not. A profile of two-thirds returning and one third new visitors is good for business – you will have new people coming in, but keep those valuable repeat customers. If you don’t have many returning visitors, then you may need to make changes in your content or in your fulfillment process. If you don’t see many new visitors, then you need to improve your Search Engine Optimization strategy.
  • Google Analytics lets you see spikes in traffic: days when you have an unusually high number of visitors. Perhaps it is the day after you send out newsletters, or the day before purchasing deadlines. You can also compare those spikes in web traffic with spikes in traffic in your physical location. This information lets you see how well your offline marketing efforts affect your web site traffic, and how your web site traffic affects your physical traffic.
  • Another way to use Google Analytics is to watch the geographic locations of your visitors. If your web site is designed to bring people to your physical location, but your web site traffic is international, you need to adjust the strategy you use for bringing traffic to your web site, even if you are happy with the number of visitors. Changing the words you use to include more local references, telling more local directories about your web site, and increasing the offline marketing of your web site in your local area would improve that situation.

We’ll be bringing you more information about specific data tracked by Google Analytics in future posts in this space. Sharp Hue can also work with you directly to help you understand what your Google Analytics data means, and to develop responses that help you meet your goals.

Posted in google analytics, seo, sharp hue, site optimization, web site conversion, web site traffic | Leave a comment

Strict as it Gets

Posted on February 22, 2008 by sharphue

Google.com has 51 errors; CNN.com has 37 errors; SharpHue.com has 0 errors. These results were returned from the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) web site Validator tool.

So, what’s the big deal? Honestly, most web users don’t have to bother knowing. On the other hand, businesses that pay for web development should be happy to hear that thousands of dollars in future savings is in it for them! At Sharp Hue, “0 errors” displays our commitment to achieving the best in our industry. We believe in practicing standards and want our clients to know that we constantly strive to be The Experts.

The recently redesigned SharpHue.com was validated for XHTML 1.0 Strict – a standard that is as “strict as it gets”. Simply put, XHTML is an intelligent cross between XML and HTML designed to drive standards based development. Both formats are important to web developers and therefore web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox were designed to “parse” both formats. Unfortunately, this flexibility has led many web developers to play loosely by the rules. This practice, if not halted soon, will result in costly re-development of code to correctly display on mobile devices and get noticed by search engines.

It should be noted that the Web Browser is a complex piece of software and only a few firms (Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, etc.) play in this arena today because it is very expensive. One school of thought is to build a browser exactly by the “Book of Standards” (i.e. Firefox), and the other is to build a browser that intelligently deals with slipshod coding practices (i.e. Internet Explorer). The disparity is democratic in effect because it has allowed geeks and non-geeks alike to publish billions of web pages over the past decade. Unfortunately, most of those pages will never be compatible with the mobile devices we will rely on to interact with the web in the future.

The good news is that consciousness about these issues is far more widespread than it was just two years ago. Since there is not a deadline to fix the issues, like there was with Y2K, the solution will take time but will eventually be noticeable. After the transition to standards is in full gear, we will all benefit in our daily lives from the new possibilities that will be imagined. Check out Google Base for an idea of how standardizing something like data sets can be very powerful and useful.

In 2008, the companies that are paying attention to the importance of standards, like Sharp Hue, are getting involved with promoting standards based development with their clients. The notion that web sites should be usable and accessible is really at the heart of this effort. The recent launch of Sharp Hue V2 and the new SharpHue.com is all about supporting this growing movement for playing it smart with web development today before things get out of hand in the future.

Posted in firefox, google base, HTML, internet explorer, sharp hue, W3C, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web Design, web development, web standards, XHTML, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XML | 2 Comments