Eye of the Chicago Web Designer
The woodlands in the Chicago area are quite spectacular in the spring, I don’t think I have ever seen so many natural spring flowers …a treat for the eye of the Chicago web designer
©: 2012 Chicago Web Designer
Need a logo in a hurry?
Working to a deadline can be a challenge especially in the design world. The last thing you want is for those creative juices to dry up and the dreaded “creative block” to descend. Fortunately I work really well in a time crunch and when a client called on Wednesday calling himself “Panic Man” saying he needed a logo and business cards for a new business venture by Friday, I assured him it was completely feasible.
He had a really good idea of what he wanted in terms of design and color. I created a range of logo design options and then fine tuned his favorite one.
And here is the finished logo and business card. I also created a stepped up page of business cards so they could be easily printed at somewhere like Kinko’s as a stop gap measure.
So if you are looking to get a logo designed in a hurry give me a call 847-607-8679.
© 2012 Chicago Logo Designer
Local Search Directories offering free lisitings
Gone are the days when people would use the trusty old “yellow pages” to search for services they require. Now the first port of call is the internet and many times will turn to an online local directory such as Yelp.
Does your business have a local search presence? Getting listed in local online directories can help the overall ranking of your site and give you more opportunities to connect with potential customers.
There has been a real growth in local directories over the last couple of years and generally getting listed in them is easy…although quite time consuming.
Here is a list of 43 directories that offer FREE listings.
- Google ( view our Google local directory listing)
- Bing ( View our Bing local listing)
- Yahoo ( view our Yahoo Local listing)
- Yelp ( view our Yelp profile)
- Merchant Circle ( View our Merchant Circle listing)
- Linkedin ( view Indigo Image profile)
- Yellow Pages ( yp lisiting)
- White Pages (local lisiting)
- Local Pages( listing)
- SuperMedia (listing)
- Mapquest ( view listing)
- Local ( view our Local Listing)
- Think Local (listing)
- City Slick ( view our listing)
- Show me Local ( listing)
- Insider Pages ( Chicago web designer listing)
- Manta(Manta Listing)
- Volta.com (Indigo Image Volta Listing)
- Zip.pro (our profile)
- Twibs (listing)
- Localeze (listing)
- Localdatabase (Chicago web design company listing)
- Yellowwise (listing)
- MojoPages ( listing)
- Tulapo (Indigo Image profile)
- Best of the Web (profile)
- Yellowbot(Listing)
- Yellowee (listing)
- City Squares (listing)
- Kudzu (listing)
- Brownbook (chicago web design profile)
- Match Point (listing)
- Hot Frog (listing)
- Zoom Info (listing)
- Magic Yellow (listing)
- UScity
- Yellowbook
- City Search
- Yellowassistance
- Localdex (Indigo Image-Chicago web designer listing)
- Business Journal
- US yellow Pages
- City Search
If you are looking to increase the visibility of your business in local search give us a call to see how we can help: 847-607-8679
© 2012 Chicago Web Designer
Tips for Making your blog images more search engine friendly.
If you have just started blogging, or even been blogging for a while here are a few tips that will make your images more friendly to both the search engines and your site visitors.
Before you upload: Optimize your image
- Scale
Scale your photographs to the exact dimensions which you wish to use them, don’t rely on your blog to re-size your photos, they will download much faster if they are scaled pre upload. - File size vs quality
Ideally your photographs need to be small in file size but in great quality, large files can take a long time to download frustrating your readers and driving them away. - How?
- Most image editing software will allow you to easily optimize you images to be web ready, however if you don’t have access to anything suitable try Pic Monkey . It will allow you to crop re-size and add text and graphic overlays
Rename your images
Most camera will name photographs some like D03456, an arbitrary number that means nothing. Re-name your photographs so they encompass the following.
- The content of the photograph
- The content of your blog post
- A phrase that someone may search
e.g You are about to write a blog post all about how to make some rope pencil pots.
The image below is named rope_pencil_pots.jpg, which reflects the composition of the photo, the content of the blog post and could feasibly be a phase that someone would use as a search query. Each word with an under score _, but is perfectly OK to separate with a hyphen instead (rope-pencil-pots.jpg)
Why?
When search engines visit you site they are unable to “see” a photo of a rope pencil pot, all they understand is the code (HTML) powering the site which in this case looks like this.
<img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_lBtkHUaGZQ/TxhQ30_6TJI/AAAAAAAAA78/YYvdehrboig/s320/rope_pencil_pots.jpg" width="320" />
By giving the photo a meaningful file name it essentially helps the search engines ” see” the photo.
You have uploaded your photo now what?
Add an ALT tag to your photo
What is an Alt Tag?
Alt stands for “Alternative text” and adding an alt tag to an image further enhances the ability of the search engine to understand the content of the photo.
In the case of my rope pots my alt tag would be
alt=”rope pencil pots”
As you can see the phase I am using is the same as the name I gave the image file.
How To Add an ALT Tag
The ease in which an alt tag can be added to a photo depends on which blogging platform you are using, WordPress is much easier than Blogger.
And because this is difficult to explain in words I have made a video which covers adding an Alt tag to your images in both Blogger and WordPress (and just in case you are wondering the accent is English!)
Is it worth the effort?
And here is a little test to show you this effort does pay off. Click the link below, it is the Google image search for Rope Pencil Pots …now look at what they have listed as the first image!
Google Search for Rope Pencil Pots
And just in case you are interested in making some rope pencil pots for yourself check out a tutorail over at Creative in Chicago
©2012 Chicago Web Designer
New WordPress websites for Life Celebrant Ruth Hasser
Launched today are two new wordpress powered website for celebrant Ruth Hasser.
Ruth has two sides to her business, weddings and funerals, or life tributes. As you can imagine the target audience for each is very different.
A first generation site, designed and developed in 2009 for her wedding business, served her well and really helped grow her client base as a lead generation tool.
“Last year at this time, pre-website, I had one wedding scheduled for 2009. By the end of the year I had done 25. Right now, I already have 17 weddings scheduled, and I have been receiving an average of one lead per day since the beginning of January- outstanding!”
But like all tools they need to be refined to offer maximum effectiveness, so this second generation site offers social media integration allowing her clients to connect with her via Facebook and YouTube and we took the opportunity to move the site to the more robust blogging platform WordPress. This has the added advantage that Ruth now has full editorial control of the content of the the site. Ruth was happy with the look and feel of the first generation site so we kept the design the same but did increase the width to accommodate the most common screen resolution.
A website dedicated to the funeral side of her business is a new endeavor. We kept the brand image the same as the wedding site but used different imagery and a more muted color palette.
Switching from Blogger to WordPress can be a little daunting for a client and there is definitely a learning curve. As well as training we also provided Ruth with a set of screen cast videos which outline how to do the most common updates such as publishing a new blog post and uploading photographs.
© 2012 Chicago Web Designer
in: Blogging, Social Media, Testimonials, Web Design Projects, Wordpress
New WordPress websites in progress
I have been working recently on a number of custom WordPress sites.
The first is a double project for Ruth Hasser, a St Louis celebrant. Ruth wanted to move her current site over to WordPress so she could take advantage of the content management (CMS) it offers. She also needed a new site for the funeral and memorial side of her business.
We have kept the design the same for the wedding side of her business ( she loved it so why change it) but designed a slightly different look for the funeral site, with a more muted color scheme and different imagery.
Both sites are in the final phase of production and will be launched shortly.
The second custom WordPress site is for a Chicago group, The Humble Catholic.
This site will serve as a community allowing users to upload prayer requests, affirmations and suggest stories, all driven by the excellent blogging capabilities of the WordPress platform
The site is just going through some final testing and client review.
©: 2012 Chicago Web Designer
A distraction for the Chicago Web Designer
Sitting beside me as I work on this grey dreary Chicago day, is a vase of beautiful tulips. Nature does a wonderful job of creating color palettes and my eyes keep drifting from the website I am designing to these beautiful blooms. I had to photograph them to capture the fabulous colors.
Anything interesting on your desk today?
©: 2012 Chicago web designer
Moving from Blogger to WordPress
I am working with long a long standing client at the moment to convert her website to be powered by the WordPress platform. Her current site is constructed of static HTML pages and a blogger powered blog but the conversion will put everything under one roof and give her much more control of not only her blog posts but the rest of her site too.
Pros of using WordPress?
- CMS: WordPress is a powerful content management system and gives you complete control to update the content your website yourself instead of relying on your web designer.
- Design: The design options in WordPress are limitless. There are plenty of free templates around but with some technical knowledge a completely custom look can be created and you are not limited to using an identical template across every page on your site
- Pages: With a self hosted WordPress installation there is no limit to the number of pages you can have on your site, pages can be easily ordered, sorted into menus and even hidden. The look and feel of pages can also be changed by apply a different template to the page.
- SEO: Compared to blogger WordPress offers much better SEO ( search engine optimization) functionality. Using a plugin like ” All in one SEO”, enables each blog post to be given a search engine friendly title, description and set of keywords. The same functionality can also be applied to pages
- Users: You can set up administrator, editor, author and contributor accounts, which allow different users different levels of access to the site.
Cons of Using WordPress?
- The main con of using WordPress, for a client, is the learning curve associated with the administrative dashboard. It is definitely more complex than Blogger but we offer comprehensive training on posting, editing and uploading images/files etc.
Ready to move?
Do you have a static web site or blog that could benefit from power of the WordPress platform? We can make the transition as seamless as possible. Contact us today for a free evaluation of your site or blog/
10 things you didn’t know about the Chicago Web Designer.
I recently had my personal blog, Creative in Chicago, reviewed in an anonymous review process. The reviews were great but it did get me thinking as to how much I share about myself. In general I like to keep my personal life to myself and am not one to share what I had for lunch on Twitter or announce my exact location via Foursquare.
But in the essence of giving a little more of myself I thought I’d share with you today 10 things you never knew about the Chicago web designer!
- First off my name is not Chicago Web Designer, it is Zoe Feast. It is amazing how often it is mispronounced. I recently received a phone call from someone asking to talk to Zoo Fest!
- I originally come from the UK but became a US citizen in 2009 . I have yet to lose my English accent despite living in the States for over 15 years.
- I am passionate about what I do and love the ying/yang aspect of my job; putting on my creative hat for the design part and swapping it out for a technical one when it comes to coding a project. I sometimes dream about coding which is the geek in me surfacing.
- If that wasn’t geeky enough I have a degree in Physics and a Masters in Engineering.
- My favorite type of project is building brand imagery from the ground up. Everything from a logo, to establishing a color palette and typefaces then putting it all together in an engaging website. Fun!
- I moved to Chicago 18 months ago and live in the North suburbs. For the first 6 weeks of so I was completely reliant on my GPS … Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, Deerfield, Lincolnshire, Highland park and the other North Shore suburbs are now my friends!
- I am most productive in the morning and dynamic weather such a thunderstorms or wild winds really help me focus my creativity. Weird right!
- I work on a PC not a MAC
- A friend help me come up with the name of my company ” Indigo Image” . We were eating curry at the time.
- I cook from scratch nearly every night. I have eaten horse, kangaroo and ostrich but never snails.
The Eye of the Chicago Web Designer
I can’t help myself, it seems it is not enough for me to be creative during the day designing websites, logos and the like. My creativity spills over into my spare time too. The outlet for my endeavors is my personal blog “Creative in Chicago” which is just sky rocketing along.
Here is one of my latest creation, a piece of String Art where the negative space does the talking!
© 2012 Chicago Web Designer
