Zero To Sixty Marketing

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Stop Turning Website Visitors Away – 10 Reasons for a Redesign

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People still judge a book by its cover. We all do, whether intentional or not.

The same thing happens day in and day out on your website. It’s a visible representation of your business online. If it’s amateur or outdated, it leaves a bad first impression. It may even leave your audience wondering if your business is trustworthy.

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Make Sure Customers Trust Your Email Address

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A Tale of Three Woes

Using an email address other than your domain name, or one that promotes your brand, makes completing the sales cycle tricky.

In this day and age of independent contractors and sales agents, it can be bothersome trying to figure out who is who selling what on behalf of who. Poor branding efforts dilute a clear sales channel, and that’s not good for the consumer. If it’s not good for the consumer, it’s not good for your company, plain and simple.

Let me explain why: [Read more…] about Make Sure Customers Trust Your Email Address

A Web Site Makeover for Sprue Brothers

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Here’s another example of the design process … Web site design, this time. We’ve just rolled out a new Web site home page design for Sprue Brothers Model LLC. Sprue Brothers is an online hobby retailer for scale model builders. The “sprue” in the business name is significant. All plastic scale modelling parts arrive on a frame called a sprue. The store’s logo reflects this and now so does the Web site.

Before and after screenshots are below:

Before Website Redesign

Before Website Redesign

New Website Screenshot

New Home Page Design

My husband (and team member), Gerald, came up with the idea of sprue borders. Our graphic artist, Scott, took the concept and ran with it. I put it together as a working Web site. Despite a few technical glitches, this was a fun project that came together quickly. It’s also one that will continue to improve over time. Gordon, we hope your new landing page serves you well.

Have you looked at your Web site lately?

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Making Their Mark

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When I was first contracted to create a logo design for Via-Cell, their idea was a genie, possibly emerging from a lamp, holding coffee, food, and other goodies that can be ordered “via” their “cell-” phone and web-based system. I went to work sketching what I hoped would become the next Chester Cheetah, Tony Tiger or Michelin Man.   [Read more…] about Making Their Mark

It Could Happen To You: Vacation Twitstakes

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It Could Happen To You: Vacation Twit-stakes
It was early fall, 2009. Our family was enjoying an incredibly beautiful view of the mountains in northern New Mexico. Antelope, elk, buffalo, trout of every kind; magical cloud shadows intermittently cooling the frugal warmth of the altitude, and then…
all of a sudden…
DID I LEAVE MY AUTO TWEETS ROTATING WITHOUT ANY CONTROL??
YES. Yes I did. I had a brilliant plan to test a group’s response to my various tweets for a 12 hour spell. Two and a half days later, I realized I had forgotten to turn it off before I left town. Something that rolls off my tongue when explaining how easy and effective auto-tweets can be for businesses everywhere desiring to reach audiences that vary their attention spans between hours of the day, immediately became an opportunity for me to lose my entire reputation due to the risk that I had become–Twitterspam.
AW, CRAP.
No wireless in the cabins we were occupying. Since my husband, the Greatest Fisherman Of The Mountain, was quite a ways down stream (yet with the car, go figure) when I came to my realization, I had to bum a ride from a local to the civic center several miles away and work out my wireless muscle to see if I could remedy this mess.
Guess What I Learned About Tweet Automation?
NOT easy to remedy!! I use Social Oomph Professional for keyword research on the businesses I’m interested in following, and also for their somewhat simple method of rotating tweets. They allow several tweets to be posted in a certain format that causes random, rotated tweets that only need to be drafted in once, and from there you can schedule the frequency and pauses as necessary. Sounds groovy, right?
Trying to get a wireless connection in the back seat of a Ford Taurus with the excruciatingly bright, early morning sunlight–defying your ability to even see the screen let alone follow instructions, made for an irritation much like I imagine the chaffing of the buttocks after an eight-day, showerless excursion into the Arctic. But I digress…
Once in, having never been in this situation before and assuming an ‘off button’ would exist, I realized with trepidation that alas, it did not. EVERY SINGLE SCHEDULED TWEET, even though they were in the same family of tweets, had to be deleted from the text box where they originated, and from the published posts that had already gone out.
After an hour and a half, I was able to go through each and every one of the 22 published tweets and get rid of the origin, and then the published tweet. My logic being there would be nothing

It was early fall, 2009. Our family was enjoying an incredibly beautiful view of the mountains in northern New Mexico. Antelope, elk, buffalo, trout of every kind; magical cloud shadows intermittently cooling the frugal warmth of the altitude, and then …

all of a sudden …   [Read more…] about It Could Happen To You: Vacation Twitstakes