Social Media For Graphic Communications -Aarkstore Enterprise

Social Media For Graphic Communications -Aarkstore Enterprise

Strategy Summary Report—The Hows and Whys of Social Media. This 63-page report defines social media, the growing importance of using media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others to network and communicate with present and prospective customers, offers third-party estimates of the growth of the importance of, and spending on, social media by marketers in all industries, and offers specific advice for companies in the printing industry.

Table of Contents :  

Introduction: Why Should You Care?
Jumping On

What Are Social Media?

Just a Fad?

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

About the Present Report

How This Report Is Organized

For More Information

Section 1: Yelling in All Directions at Once
Social Network Advertising Spending

Social Media Usage Among Marketers

Reasons for Social Media Usage

Challenges to Social Media

Return on Investment

Print Providers and Social Media Activity

Onward

Section 2: Web Sites and E-Mail
Web Sites

What It Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What it Costs

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

E-Mail

What It Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What it Costs

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Section 3: Blogs and Podcasts
Blog

What It Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Podcast

What it Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Section 4: Twitter and Other Microblogging Sites
Twitter

What it Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Other Microblogging Sites

Section 5: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Other Social Networking Sites
Facebook

What it Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

LinkedIn

What it Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Section 6: Social Bookmarking and Folksonomy
Digg

What It Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

Best Practices for Inbound Marketing

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Other Social Bookmarking Sites

Wikis

What It Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Section 7: YouTube and Other Online Video Applications
YouTube

What it Is

What Is Required to Get Started

What Does It Cost

How Printers Can Use It for Their Own Purposes

How Printers Can Offer It to Their Clients

Section 8: Conclusions and Recommendations
Six Social Media Questions

Question 1: What Do You Want to Accomplish?

Question 2: What is the Best Social Media Channel?

Question 3: What’s the Competition Doing?

Question 4: What’s the ROI?

Question 5: Who in the Organization Should Be Responsible?

Question 6: Where Do We Go From Here?

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off!

The Last Word

Appendix: Resources for Further Information
Books

Magazines and Web Sites

Interesting Web Links

About the Analyst

Table of Figures
Figure 1: Outbound Marketing

Figure 2: Inbound Marketing

Figure 3: Online Social Network Advertising Spending Worldwide, 2008-2011 ($ millions and % change)

Figure 4: Reasons That U.S. Executives Use Social Media, July 2009

Figure 5: Biggest Obstacles to Making Social Networks Work

Figure 6: Professionals Worldwide Who Measure the ROI of their Social Media Programs, August 2009

Figure 7: Is Your Company Active in any Social Media? —All Print Providers, September 2009 (Multiple Responses Permitted)

Figure 8: Will Your Business Be Offering Social Media Management

Capabilities as a Billable Service for Your Clients in 2010? —All Print Providers, September 2009

Figure 9: Will Your Business Be Offering Social Media Management

Capabilities as a Billable Service for Your Clients in 2010? —All Creatives,December 2009

Figure 10: Is Your Company Active in any Social Media? —”Marketing

Services Providers,” September 2009 (Multiple Responses Permitted)

Figure 11: Will Your Business Be Offering Social Media Management

Capabilities as a Billable Service for Your Clients in 2010? —”Marketing Services Providers,” September 2009

Figure 12: The WhatTheyThink Web Site; Note the Keywords in the Title Bar.

Figure 13: Note That WhatTheyThink Turns Up as the Top Google Hit for

“Printing Industry News”

Figure 14: Daily E-Mail from WhatTheyThink Provides News, Information, and Commentary

Figure 15: WhatTheyThink’s PrintCEO Blog

Figure 16: Podcasts are Audio Programs that Can Be Subscribed to and Downloaded Directly to iTunes

Figure 17: Podcasts Can Also Be Streamed Directly on a Web Site

Figure 18: Two Twitter Feeds

Figure 19: The American Printer Facebook Page Provides News and Headlines

Figure 20: The Saratoga Film Forum Facebook Page Provides News and Updates on Movies Being Screened

Figure 21: One Useful Feature of LinkedIn Is the Ability to Ask and Answer

Questions of One’s Network

Figure 22: Digg is a Popular Social Bookmarking Site

Figure 23: Adding Automatic “Digg” Buttons to Content Makes It Easy for Readers to Share It

Figure 24: Social Bookmarking “Share” Buttons

Figure 25: Wikipedia Is the World’s Most Famous Wiki

Figure 26: Genesis Press Video on YouTube

Figure 27: Top Business Objectives for Social Media

Table of Tables
Table 1: Comparative Estimates: U.S.

Marketers Using Social Media, 2008 % 2009

Table 2: Top Priorities in 2010 According to Senior Marketers Worldwide

Table 3: Comparative Estimates: Leading Metric Used by Marketers to Measure Social Media Marketing Success, 2009

Table 4: Is Your Company Active in any Social Media? —By Employee Size, September 2009 (Multiple Responses Permitted)

Table 5: Will Your Business Be Offering Social Media Management

Capabilities as a Billable Service for Your Clients in 2010?

—By Employee Size, September 2009

For More information please contact :

http://www.aarkstore.com/reports/Social-Media-for-Graphic-Communications-39351.html

Web Design Tips for Graphic Designers New to Website Design

For graphic designers who are new to web design this article will provide some very useful tips to optimize your websites and images to maintain a visually dynamic website without slow load times.Everyone should want a website that is attractive, engaging, and easy to navigate. More often than not, you can spot websites that were created by graphic designers and sites that were created by programmers. Generally speaking a website created by a graphic designer will be visually engaging but is probably not Search Engine Friendly, while a programmer’s site will be set up beautifully with CSS streamlined for Search Engines and quick load times. For obvious reasons the best websites are usually created by a team of professionals working in tandem. It sure seems to me that most people designing websites have an “either or” attitude, either it looks good but loads slow or you focus on code and appear more generic. I’ve seen plenty of websites that contradict this thinking and I personally believe every website should be visually stunning and streamlined for search engines and download time. Every year less people are using dial up to connect, however there are too many to ignore. I really don’t worry too much about dial up users anymore, because most of the websites I design are targeted at fairly web savvy searchers. However, just because I don’t worry about dial up doesn’t mean that I can neglect to streamline my websites for its users.This article will provide some quick and useful tips on how graphic designers new to web design can optimize websites and images and still keep them looking hot. If you’re just starting out then you’re probably not going to know a lot about CSS. No worries! Just start designing your layout in Photoshop. A good document size to start with would be 950 pixels wide by 600 pixel high set to RGB at 300 dpi. When you’ve created the layout that you want you are ready to slice up your document and export it as an html document with an image folder. 1. In Photoshop you can use the slice tool and manually create slices organized in rows and columns for Dreamweaver or drag “guides” where you want to slice your page and just click the “slice from guides” button at the top of the Photoshop menu bar. Note: you can combine slices by shift clicking multiple slices then holding down the control key and clicking to select combine slices. (You can define your text and background colors easily in Dreamweaver).The image below is an example of how I sliced this Photoshop document up.

a. Hold down shift + option + command + s to export the slices. Click “Save” and then select export html and images.b. Open all of your images in Fireworks and resave them at 80% quality and jpg format. Now you have nice looking images that have a small file size and are easy to load.2. Another quick tip is to learn to set up your web pages using .php includes. The basic set up for a php page is a “header”, “body” and “footer”. In a nutshell what we are doing is breaking one complete html page into three separate html files and letting the server put them back together as one complete page. Why would we do this? We do this, because there are many beneficial advantages to creating your pages this way. For example if your navigation is in the header document and you need to make a change to your navigation you only need to do it once, not for every page. Also the server loads your images once and not for every page which makes your site quicker to load and use.a. In Photoshop you proceed the same way using the slice tool or guides to  create slices organized in rows and columns for Dreamweaver. Except this time you are turning the one file in the example shown previously into (3) separate files. Break your main Photoshop document into three sections, a header, the body, and the footer. Label each Photoshop document accordingly. Samples shown below.Header File:

Body File:

Footer File:b. Hold down shift + option + command + s to export the slices as html and images for each of the three Photoshop documents.c. Your head document named: “header.html” change to “header.php”d. Replace the   and information found at the top of your “index.html” page with this simple code: include(“header.php”);?>e. Replace the / tag found at the very bottom of your page with the following footer include.include(“footer.php”);?>Note: Re-save the “body” which is your index.html as index.phpNote: You will need to upload these files to preview the entire page, but on the positive if you use these same header and footer tags on the rest of your pages your website only needs to load the header and footer images one time making  your site display much quicker. This idea works with background images as well (if you re-use the images they only have to load once).Reference #1: Here is what the basic html looks like in the header.html file: These brackets {} used in place coding of actual code for placement purposes only. {html} {head} {title}Your Title Goes Here{title} {table} {table}Reference#2: Here is what the basic html looks like in the index.php file: {?php include(“header.php”);?} {body} {table} {table} {?php include(“footer.php”);?}Reference#3: Here is what the basic html looks like in the footer.php file: {body} {html} When you upload these files and images the server will put them together as one complete page. Now you can create new pages and content and keep your header and footer information the same using the header and footer includes.

You Can Use Html and Graphic Way in Website Designing

Those few who decide to give designing a try themselves generally start out with a website template. Even an easy but elegant site wants some tweaking to be done and rather than be at the mercy of web designers. A basic knowledge of how html and graphic design works will go a long way in designing a website you can be proud of. Color choice should also be dictated by other, less obvious goals, for more details visit to www.killer-mini-site.com when designing or re-vamping a website. In designing your website, you should be conscious of all the components that go into successful development and how to use them to your most excellent advantage.When designing your website, remember to get as much meat or substance to the top of your code just below the tag as you can. As a substitute of designing a sale-oriented website, all they’re trying to do is designing a “thing of beauty”. A company specializes in building, designing, for more details visit to www.killer-mini-site.com  implementing, managing and maintaining corporate website to boost sales of your company. It’s not designing the website that counts but how the website is designed.You are designing a website for a client and are confused by the terminology, you may want to bring it to their attention and help them rework the copy, So that all their customers understand it. Design depends on individual taste and designing a website from a first draft that the client will like from the start, can be a real challenge.There are some very important things you must do SEO-wise while designing your website. The first step to implementing a website is to design the directory structure. Designing for color-blind browsers although designing a website for the colorblind will not limit your color palette, you’ll need to be wary of the color combinations that you use. Layout is particularly important in designing your website.Business owners and marketers have a tendency to think in broad terms about their marketing objective by focusing on ones such as “generating traffic” or “designing a website. It always happens that html editors write clumsy tags, especially when you amend the webpage layout again and again during your website designing process, which may possibly deter search engines from reading your web page and in turn poorly affect your search engine ranking. Building and designing website is not as difficult as you think.In summary, there is much to consider when designing a website. Color choice should also be dictated by other, less obvious goals, when designing or re-vamping a website. When designing your website you must make allowances for the lowest possible common browser.Database templates also facilitate you to make changes to your site much more easily, and help you change certain elements without recreating the entire page from scratch.

How to Use Html and Graphic Way in Website Designing?

Those few who decide to give designing a try themselves generally start out with a website template. Even an easy but elegant site wants some tweaking to be done and rather than be at the mercy of web designers. A basic knowledge of how html and graphic design works will go a long way in designing a website you can be proud of. Color choice should also be dictated by other, less obvious goals, when designing or re-vamping a website. In designing your website, you should be conscious of all the components that go into successful development and how to use them to your most excellent advantage.    When designing your website, remember to get as much meat or substance to the top of your code just below the tag as you can. As a substitute of designing a sale-oriented website, all they’re trying to do is designing a “thing of beauty”. A company specializes in building, designing, implementing, for more details visit to www.google-friendly-page.com managing and maintaining corporate website to boost sales of your company. It’s not designing the website that counts but how the website is designed.

You are designing a website for a client and are confused by the terminology, you may want to bring it to their attention and help them rework the copy, for more detail go to: www.html-branders.com. So that all their customers understand it. Design depends on individual taste and designing a website from a first draft that the client will like from the start, can be a real challenge.

There are some very important things you must do SEO-wise while designing your website. The first step to implementing a website is to design the directory structure. Designing for color-blind browsers although designing a website for the colorblind will not limit your color palette, you’ll need to be wary of the color combinations that you use. Layout is particularly important in designing your website.

Business owners and marketers have a tendency to think in broad terms about their marketing objective by focusing on ones such as “generating traffic” or “designing a website. It always happens that html editors write clumsy tags, especially when you amend the webpage layout again and again during your website designing process, which may possibly deter search engines from reading your web page and in turn poorly affect your search engine ranking. For more detail go to: www.instany-squeeze-page-mastery.com.Building and designing website is not as difficult as you think. In summary, there is much to consider when designing a website. Color choice should also be dictated by other, less obvious goals, when designing or re-vamping a website. When designing your website you must make allowances for the lowest possible common browser. Database templates also facilitate you to make changes to your site much more easily, and help you change certain elements without recreating the entire page from scratch.

What Website Allows Users To Make Graphic Design Images For Businesses?

I found it one time but I can’t remember the name. You can create your own profile and either submit designs like logos, business cards, and website designs or create criteria for your own company. The person making an offer decides which design they like best and pays the designer for it.

What are the Benefits of Graphic Design and Why Should You Care?

If you run a business and you have any form of corporate identity then you should care very much. How you present your company to your chosen market is fundamental to its success.

The graphic design process is crucial to any business, making it stand out head and shoulders from the competition. Whether it is the design of an entire corporate campaign or the creation of a simple company logo it still has to work effectively for you. There are four critical elements that should be seen in every logo design:

• It must be describable

• It must be memorable

• It must be effective without colour

• It must be scalable

Fairly obvious really but how does your logo stand up to these criteria? How does your company identity stand out from the competition?

Ask yourself why something is designed in a certain way. Consider why a particular colour is chosen instead of its opposite. Why use this font? Why include this particular graphic here? A good designer will think through every detail of a design and only include elements that will add to the design and re-enforce the brand.

Once your business is up and running you may think that any form of corporate identity will act to represent the company, visually creating a brand by default. Think again. If you look at the large corporations you will notice that their brand strategy stands the test of time for many years.

Many companies never change their logo design dramatically but only make the smallest of changes to keep the design looking modern and refreshed.

Benefits:

• Professional image

• Considered and long-lasting design strategy

• Make your company look bigger

• Stand out from your competition

• More effective

By Ben Smith
– Website design somerset- Professional Website Design Weston-Super-Mare

How Using Proper Graphic Formats is the Secret to Good Website Design

How using proper graphic formats is the secret to good website design

There are many different file formats that website design companies can use for site design. However, every specific graphic format has its own function and use and it is a part of good website design to use them judiciously.

Properties that these formats have:

In terms of common properties of these website design graphic formats, there are five main types. These are namely:

-       Compression: This refers to the ability to store an image in a smaller file size. This employs using special algorithms to measure pixels as single items.

-       Transparency: This varies the opaqueness of an image from being totally solid to being totally see-through or transparent.

-       Progressive loading: In this case of website design, a part of the image is loaded first. However, it is not decided on the concept of alternating rows. This allows the picture to get loaded quicker.

-       Interlacing: This is much like progressive loading, except that the odd numbered rows of the image appear first, followed by even numbered rows. Users can see images quickly using this format of website design.

-       Animation: In this case of website design graphical formats, various still images are moved in quick succession to make it seem like they are moving. Most animated GIF images work on all browsers as they do not need plug-ins for them.

File formats available:

There are three main graphic file formats in website design. These are GIF, JPEG and PNG. One of the oldest formats is GIF and it helps loading images quickly. They have only 8 bits of color and have interlacing and transparency incorporated in them. These are the most common forms of graphics in website design and images look good in such formats. JPEGs are compressed files and have a 24 bit color capacity. In situations where you need high quality images in website design, a JPEG format works well. Compression elements of JPEG files can be easily controlled by a website design company. The download speeds for such format files is faster and in cases of complicated drawings, the overall quality is excellent. In PNG graphic formats, there is support for 24 bit color images. Both interlacing and transparency is incorporated in such images. Such images also can have a description alongside, for use in search engines. Compared to JPEG images, PNG images look much better and hence are preferred where high quality images are needed. Plus, it overcomes the restrictions of an 8 bit color image in website design.