Nashville Web Design, Graphic and Logo Design

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.

The battle is pretty much over between Facebook and Myspace and Facebook took the title hands down. Myspace still has many millions of users but Facebook is the heavy-weight these days. So what does this tell us about the average web user today? It tells us (or me anyway) that people prefer a good user experience over complete freedom of expression through their own personalized web page design. Myspace gives you the freedom to create a completely unique webpage of your own, including custom images, Flash animation and control over styles via CSS (cascading style sheets). That's pretty much all the average user could ask for in a social networking page. But apparently most people don't care about complete freedom of expression through page design; they'd rather have a better user experience in a controlled environment. Of course Facebook's "better user experience" is just an opinion but the numbers seem to justify that opinion.

Another factor is that people who aren't artistically inclined can be intimidated when confronted with complete freedom of design. It could be that the average user felt that Facebook's simpler approach leveled the playing field. No longer are users forced to "compete" for the cooler looking page. With Facebook, everyone is playing by the same rules. It's more about the content than the unique presentation of information. Both Facebook and Myspace have powerful platforms for social interaction though Facebook is very easy to use and has much less clutter than Myspace which in my opinion is why it has become the leader in online social networking.

Earlier this week Nashville Interactive launched pisinc.org. Petersen Insurance Specialties is a Nashville-based insurance company focusing on providing solutions for entertainment industry professionals. The site was built using the wonderful WordPress for website development. The design speaks to the target demographic through relevant imagery. Check out the live site at pisinc.org or via the web design portfolio. Nashville Interactive also handled creation of the PIS logo as well. The logo can be found in our portfolio under logo design.

NashvilleInteractive.com has been redesigned! If you've been to the site before, you may notice that the look is actually similar to the last version (background image mostly) but the site is much more user friendly and has expanded to better represent where NI has been in the last year and also where we're headed. Notably the design portfolio has about 6x the content and is now sortable by category. For instance website design, logo design, artist website design etc. There's much more detailed info about services offered and a Q&A style about page. So have a look around and as always, feel free to let us know what you think.

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This past weekend, Nashville Interactive launched SpenshaOnline.com; the online home of inspirational musical artist Spensha Baker. The website design and development was handled completely by Nashville Interactive. I've said it before: creating an artist website design is always a fun project to work on. The creative freedom and ability to work with less "traditional" layouts allows the opportunity to stretch the creative muscles a bit.

The site was built using an Open-Source Content Management System so that the client has full control over their own online presence. Using open source software also means that there are no monthly licensing fees of any kind which often come along with bulkier proprietary systems.

For those Nashvillians who enjoy the finer side of spirits, there's finally a group for you: BoozeCamp Nashville. What is BoozeCamp Nashville you ask? Well it's a bit of an old-fashioned social network that revolves around great wine, liquor and beer. Events are held around Nashville at various venues and include tastings of great "adult" beverages as well as the company of good people.

Nashville Interactive designed, developed and is hosting BoozeCampNashville.com. A rather simple site overall but one that I've already grown very fond of. Perhaps it will even make the web design portfolio in the near future. Once again an open-source content management system was used for the backend of the site, allowing various administrators to control the content from anywhere with an internet connection. The site is an ongoing project with many improvements in the works so check it out and come back often to see how it's going.

Are you into horse racing and/or fantasy sports? If so you should check out the Winstar Fantasy Derby. Nashville Interactive handled the User Interface design and also had a hand in the development of the Fantasy Derby portion of the Winstar site. Once again, this project entailed working with some great people on a cool site. So, even if you're not a horse racing aficionado, you should check out the contest. It's completely free and you might even win a trip to see the 2010 Kentucky Derby! Mint Juleps and sun hats anyone?

Nashville Interactive recently designed, built and launched alwayssisterforeverbrothers.com. This website for the 2010 Always Sisters Forever Brothers Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, proved to be a great project to work on. The site design awarded Nashville Interactive the opportunity to use some pretty cool javaScript and front-end development techniques. The website features a scrolling "homepage" that creates a nice, cohesive experience for viewing the top-level content. Much care was taken to ensure that the browser back and forward buttons would work with this design and more importantly that deep linking to all the top level content within the scrollable sections would work across all the major web browsers.

The site utilizes WordPress as a content management system which allows the client to take full control of their website and in-turn the message they want to put in front of their audience. Empowering clients to control their website's content is good website design, and this sort of self sustainability is part of Nashville Interactive's primary mission.

Being in Nashville means that country music website design is a fact of life for most web professionals. This is definitely not a bad thing. Designing band websites is always a fun project for me. The nature of the work dictates that the aesthetic and layout can be a little outside the box. Although I love creating a nice clean small business website and as great as corporate website design is, having complete creative freedom every now and then is good for the soul. I recently designed a website for up-and-coming country music artist Jamie Tate. (Just the design work on this one). Most of my other projects at the time required a cleaner more "business-esque" look. This site design allowed me to step back and appreciate the occasional break from the norm. Creating unique, non-templated website layouts also allows me to subtly integrate some of these creative and unique elements into more "traditional" designs as well. The bottom line is that creating unique layouts for musician websites helps me keep the creativity flowing in other projects.

Nashville Interactive recently completed a custom Flash design project for the world-renown Gaylord Entertainment. The client wanted a Flash-based landing page that was tied in with email marketing campaigns. The end product was a completely customizable experience that included a photo slideshow with accompanying text for each image. The all-Flash landing pages are easily "re-skinned" with xml and image replacement making them extremely flexible and quickly edited. While I've become an advocate of more "traditional" methods for web development, I always enjoy diving into some custom Flash Design.

Nashville Interactive is proud to announce that we've developed and re-launched richardmarx.com. If you aren't familiar with Richard Marx's music (you probably are even if you don't know it), He's a Grammy Award-winning, #1 song-writing (13 of them), multi-platinum album selling artist.

The Richard Marx camp was in need of a new provider for website design and development services and Nashville Interactive is flattered to be able to help out. Richard's website was less than one year old when the need arose to redevelop the established website design on a new platform. Nashville Interactive was called in to rebuild the site. In order to avoid the all-to-common scenario of being locked in to a proprietary system, open-source content management technologies were implemented. Don't get me wrong, proprietary systems have their place but open-source is the preferred solution is this type of situation. The site is controlled and owned by the client and they can do with it whatever they wish. This is just one of the advantages of using open-source content management systems to develop websites.

Designing websites for musicians and bands is always a fun project for me. Seeing the response and interaction on artist and band websites puts a lot of things into perspective because the target audience is so engaged with the artist. I'm happy to provide the tools for the interaction and see my work bringing fans and artists closer.

I normally hate exclamation points though I couldn't help but use one here. Internet Explorer 6 user rates are down to 13% according to w3schools.com. The number of IE6 users has been falling by about 1% per month for the last year or so which is music to my ears. I'm officially stating that I will not support IE6 once the number falls below 10%. I've spent many, many, many hours dealing with version 6′s inconsistencies and I feel that it's time to move on. That being said, I think it's only right to offer IE6 support and testing for a nominal fee. (since I can't collect that money from Microsoft). By my calculations, IE6 should be off of my books by early 2010. Not a bad run for a browser released eight years ago.