Nashville Web Design, Graphic and Logo Design

Nashville Interactive recently launched a fresh website redesign for country music artist Amanda Nagurney. Amanda needed a website that reflected her maturing career and that could be updated easily. The solution was a self-hosted, open-source content management system. This means that Amanda controls her own website and doesn't have to worry about being locked-in to proprietary software which often involve fairly hefty fees for hosting, ongoing maintenance and licensing. We're very proud of this one turned out. A great example of a self-managed musician website design that is flexible and allows for easy content management. Check out Amanda's new site at amandanagurney.com

Alice Tan Ridley first made a name for herself singing in the subways of New York City. She also wowed judges on the popular TV show "America's Got Talent". Alice went from the subway to the big stage and needed a website to reflect the progression of her career. The website design draws inspiration from her days of singing in the subways, using fonts and design elements from the NY subway system signage but also reflects the new heights she's reached as well. The project included design and development of a full site built on a content management system for easy updates. Check out the new website at alicetanridley.com.

Nashville Interactive is proud to present elliotroot.com for your viewing pleasure. ER is a great up and coming group with "roots" (pun semi-intended) in Kenosha Wisconsin. These guys are not your typical Nashville artists. Great music so visit the site and have a listen (and check out the design while you're there).

Nashville Interactive is proud to have had the opportunity to venture into the horse farm website design world with a recent project for Rising Star Ranch. RSR is a Tennessee Walking Horse Breeding Farm located in Shelbyville, TN. The project entailed website design and development and a complete overhaul of their existing site. RSR needed a flexible way to easily manage content including keeping their stallions, news and classified ads up-t0-date. The solution was a WordPress website design. WordPress is a great Content Management System for small to mid-sized website development. You can check out the brand-new Rising Star Ranch website design here: www.attherisingstar.com

Nashville Interactive recently designed, developed and launched bebelmont.com. A website that helps students, alumni and faculty of Belmont University tell their real-world stories. The site has some really great features including ajax-based post sorting on the submissions page, a nice carousel of recent posts on the home page and a robust submission form allowing users to submit their stories, photos, videos and audio files. The website is one of the primary focal points of the beBELMONT campaign which will include TV, billboards, print and online advertising. Check it out at bebelmont.com.

A long time since the last post here at NI. Things have been very busy all spring and summer is shaping up to be just as great. Nashville Interactive has been lucky enough to work on a bunch of great music venue websites and a few fair and event websites as well during this time. These numerous, sub-contracted projects include The Orange Peel (Asheville, NC), Headliners (Louisville, KY), Hat Factory (Richmond, VA), State Fair of West Virginia (uhhh), Allegan Co. Fair (Allegan, MI), Flavor! Napa Valley (CA), Legendary Cherokee (NC), and a few others. Website design was done for all of these sites as well as key front-end development.

So back to the point… Arenas are dead. Going to see an artist in a smaller, more intimate setting is where it's at. The state (and county) fair is where it's at. Helping these people shine and achieve goals via websites is also where it's at.

Perhaps a bit late, but in light of the great year that has just passed, we thought that a short recap and a quick run down of Nashville Interactive's goals for 2011 is in order. First of all, thanks to all the great clients that helped Nashville Interactive have a great 2010. We had the opportunity to work on over three dozen web projects including websites for Diddy, Rajon Rondo, Kenny Perry, Justin McBride and too many more to list here. The Nashville Interactive website design portfolio was beefed up quite a bit in 2010 and we hope to have the same success in 2011. While not all of the goals that were set for 2010 were met, the large percentage were (but if you meet all of your goals, you're not setting your sights high enough).

We won't bore you with all of the company goals for 2011, but we can say that they include a website redesign of NashvilleInteractive.com, growing the business (of course) and providing a much more robust offering of website design services and marketing & advertising services for our new and existing clients.

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This week marks the launch of three websites which Nashville Interactive has played an integral role in. We were lucky enough to be involved in the development of NBA star Rajon Rondo's new website, as well as the design and development of TaiganFinds.com – a blog devoted to finding that great online boutique shopping deal – and design and development of SmartGrow.us – a site where users can purchase organic growing materials (made of human hair!).

While Nashville Interactive can't take credit for the sleek design on Rajon's new site, we're still proud to have been able to perform the build via an open-source content management system to help assist the record-breaking Star. The site has some great features for fans with more to come in the near future as well. Check it out at www.rajonrondo9.com.

Taigan Finds is a blog that features fashion news, style trends and great shopping finds at Taigan.com – an online shopping site with exclusive access to high-end boutique retailers. Nashville Interactive worked closely with the Taigan marketing department to produce TaiganFinds.com. A site that looks and feels as refined as the boutique shops which it features. The blog features some great social network integration to help aggregate content more effectively.

If you're into gardening, plants and Mother Earth, you'll want to check out SmartGrow.us. SmartGrow is a line of organic growing products made from human hair! I know, It may sound a bit icky at first but if you think about where most other traditional fertilizers come from (think cow pastures), it's really not bad at all. Plus the product is 100% all-natural and biodegradable. Nashville Interactive provided a much needed face lift to the SmartGrow site as well as a fully integrated online store to improve the buying experience. Ecommerce website design and development is almost essential these days as more and more users flock to their computers to handle their shopping needs.

So all-in-all a very busy week (and several weeks leading up to it). There's much more website design on the horizon so stay tuned by subscribing to the NI RSS feed or by signing up for email updates.

Internet Explorer's market share has been falling for several years now, while browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome are growing in popularity. From a web designer's perspective, This is a welcome migration. Internet Explorer (IE) has long been the bane of our existence due to its lack of support for web standards. For every site built, a designer or web developer must spend hours getting IE6 and IE7 to play nice with their code. IE8 has made many improvements but still doesn't natively allow for some of the simpler things like rounded corners or a decent drop shadow. Much of this is slated to change for IE with the introduction of IE9 which has decent HTML5 support and better support for CSS3 and other web standards.

Perhaps Microsoft is just finally waking up and smelling the reality of the web these days with their extensive enhancements to IE9. Or, perhaps this is all in an effort to gain back their dominating web browser market share, which was as high as 90%+ at it's peak.

In many situations, people will use what's readily available to them regardless of how well or how poorly it gets the job done. This is especially true in situations where users are less tech-savvy and don't feel comfortable, don't care or don't have the knowledge to change their browser's default search engine. I'm sure a very significant portion of web users fall into this category. All search engines are available in all browsers but some browsers come with a default search engine already set. Regardless of the reason for Internet Explorer's dominance in the past, that dominance is waning while Microsoft is taking part in a well-marketed battle with Google for a portion of the online search business. Could this desire to gain a foothold in the search market be the reason that Microsoft is implementing a bigger, bader (not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good) IE9? If Users migrate back to IE9, Microsoft's Bing search engine stands to cut into a significant portion of that valuable search business from Google. The great search wars are far from over but Google is obviously winning very big at this point. We'll have to wait and see over the next few years if Bing can hold it's own in a market where the other players are well embedded. Either way, at least we're getting some signs of a better IE.

The children are our future. Teach them well and let them… benefit from your volunteer activities. Nashville Interactive recently designed and performed a large portion of the front-end build for the newly launched schoolvolunteers.org. The site is a tool used by volunteers and coordinators to log and track hours as well as for posting and finding new volunteer opportunities. The target demographic for this particular website design dictated that the site have a very quick load time while retaining a professional and branded look. The site uses sparse and well optimized images and relies on web-safe fonts and css backgrounds for most of the design. The target users are also almost exclusively using various versions of Internet Explorer, including our old friend IE6. This meant that backward compatibility was a must for this project. The site is a great resource for a great cause and will be a great resource for users.

The summer of 2010 will go down as one crazy summer of web design. Nashville Interactive has been very busy with some great projects that will hit the web design portfolio soon. Being busy with nice, air-conditioned office work during a very hot and humid Middle Tennessee summer isn't a bad thing at all. Since the real heat started in June, Nashville Interactive has played an integral part in over one dozen website design projects including work for music mogul Diddy, professional golfer Kenny Perry, country music artist and professional bull rider Justin McBride and Nashville School Volunteers. There's plenty more on the horizon slated for the fall so hopefully we'll be able to find some time for football and leaf raking. Stay tuned for design portfolio updates in the near future…

If you're into professional golf, you're no doubt aware of the excellent play (and demeanor) of Kenny Perry. Mr Perry is a 14-time winner on the PGA tour and a really down-to-earth guy. Nashville Interactive was recently contracted to perform the development of Kenny's site, and we're very proud to have been awarded this opportunity. Working with the provided design, the site was built on an open-source content management system to allow for user update-able content. The site contains tons of great info about Kenny, his interests and what he's up to so stop by kennyperry.com and see why Mr. Perry is one of the most popular golfers on tour.

In the first post of this series – Building an Online Presence – Part 1: The Website – I discussed the importance of having a well designed and user-friendly website as the first step in creating a solid online presence. In this post, I'll give you my thoughts on social media and how it can help build a brand that your target demographic will identify with.

Pick The Proper Vehicle For Your Message

If you own a small town butcher shop, you probably don't need to post on Twitter every 15 minutes. (I can see the gruesome tweets as we speak!) Your clientele has probably never heard of Twitter and they could probably care less about how many pounds of sausage you just ground anyway. On the other hand, your customers are probably much more likely to log on to the local newspaper's website to check the weather, classified ads or read the forums. Your valuable time would be much better spent focusing your advertising and marketing efforts on local business websites such as your local newspaper's website. Being an active member of the discussion forums on these sites will benefit you much more than Twitter and Facebook ever would. For instance if there's a cooking forum on a local online hot spot, you could answer meat related questions using the business as your username/identity. Just be sure to speak in a tone that is familiar and comfortable to your demographic. There are many different social vehicles to get your message across including, Linked In, blogging, message boards, Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many many, more. Remember to pick the outlets that your users actually use.

Speak The Language of Your Target Demographic

Everyone and their brother is on Facebook these days and it's a great way to keep your brand in a potential customer's mind. However, you can't just throw up an Acme Widget Corp. facebook page, post once per month and expect to see results. Users want something of value and if they're going to spend five minutes interacting with your brand online, do you really want them reading irrelevant internal company news? nope. Ideally, potential customers would be engaged with the brand through an appropriate message that evokes the desired feelings and responses. For example, if you're running an animal rescue and targeting animal lovers (who are generally a kind-hearted folk), you'll want to tug at the heart strings a bit more. Post relevant content about the injustices happening in your town and stories about beating all odds. Another scenario would be that of a large company selling wholesale rubber gaskets. You can bet that your target demo is going to be a bit more responsive to blue-collar humor and they'll be looking for something to brighten their day (I can't imagine that the world of rubber gaskets is terribly exciting without a little help. Though everything is relative I suppose!). Perhaps in this situation, you might post a joke of the day or even tweet about how Doug just tried to use a 3/4″ gasket at the convenience store by mistake.

Don't Tweet Too Much, But Don't Let Things Get Stagnant

There's a fine line between being active with social media and being obsessed. Conversely, if you're only updating your status or engaging in forums once every two months, you loose customer/user interaction and interest. Some users will update their Twitter status or their facebook photos every 15 minutes. I have to wonder how much a person can get done while constantly thinking about and looking for their next tweet or kitschy photo status update. On the other hand if you're too busy to interact with social media on at least a semi-regular basis, then perhaps you should focus your marketing efforts elsewhere or hire someone to help out. There are many freelance copywriters and social media experts who will help out on an hourly basis.

The ROI of Social Media

Return on Investment (ROI) of social media is often a hard metric to track. You may spend 20 hours per month focusing on social marketing and not see a single lead. The key thing to remember is that your brand is in front of people and when those people need your services, you'll at least have a portion of their mind share. You can always track click throughs and keep track of referring sites that lead users to your website and ultimately to your goal whether that is an online purchase, user education or anything else. Having proper analytics running with assigned goals is a crucial part of measuring the ROI of your social media marketing efforts.

Keeping all of these things in mind when working with social media in your marketing plan will help you successfully market your brand to your target demographic in a very valuable and personal manner.

Up next: Building an Online Presence – Part 3: Knowing The Competition. Subscribe to the RSS feed or signup for spam-free email updates to get notified about new posts immediately.

What does it mean to have a good online presence or "web presence"? It means having a firm grasp of how your target demographic uses the web. It means taking that knowledge and putting it to work in your favor by utilizing the tons of online resources that are available to you. Recognizing which of these resources will benefit you the most, is key to a solid online presence.

In this series of posts, I'll be discussing thoughts on how to create a better online presence through various channels.

Start With Your Own Website

The vast majority of people I talk to aren't happy with their website (the ones that have websites anyway). Web users are much more savvy than they were even 3 or 4 years ago. Even less "savvy" users know the difference between a good website and a terrible one. People are much more likely to respond in a good way to a well designed website. Aesthetics are important but website design involves much more than making a site look good. It also involves Information Architecture, User Interface Design and User Experience Design. What the heck does all that mean? Put simply, it means that when users come to your website, they get where we want them to go and they feel comfortable enough to hang out for a while. This is hard to achieve when your site has no continuity in it's presentation of information, navigation, links, styling etc. Would you enter your credit card information to make a purchase on a website that looks like it was built in the late 90′s using free templates that have been hacked together? Would you put much stock in a company that isn't willing to spend time and effort on their own website? Probably not.

Hiring the right person (or people) to design your website is key to building an online presence that gets results. Although your nephew may be able to put a website online and he works for peanuts, is he really the best person for the job? (Nothing against using relatives for web design. I have relatives too!) Do your research and figure out who will work better for you. More often than not, smaller web design shops hold advantages over larger agencies: agility, speed and quality of service.

Some things to look for:
- the designer's/company's portfolio. Are there example projects that fit your vision or is there evidence of being able to create many different aesthetics? Is there a wide breadth of work even though you don't see something exactly like what you have in mind?
- available services. Is there a wide range of services available that can fit potential future projects like print advertising, logo design, SEO/SEM, marketing, etc.?
client testimonials. (if available) Are there happy clients singing the praises of this potential website provider?
- SEO services. A website with no traffic isn't a good tool. Can this company/person get your site found via search engines? Did you find them through a search?

All of these will help you get a feel about whether or not they're a good fit for your project.

Up next: Building an Online Presence – Part 2: Using Social Media. Subscribe to the RSS feed or signup for spam-free email updates to get notified about new posts immediately.