Creating Your Logo:

Often, your logo is the first thing to make an impression on potential clients. This alone makes it a must to have an eye-catching and memorable design.

There are a few rules of logo design that many designers agree upon. David Airey, graphic designer, outlined the four major rules:

1. The logo must be memorable.
2. The logo must be describable.
3. The logo must be just as effective in black-and-white as it is in color.
4. The logo must be scalable down to a quarter-inch in size.

These rules ensure that potential clients will be able to remember (and describe) your logo after seeing it once and that your logo will work on any number of collateral or design projects of all shapes and sizes.

Take a look at some corporate logos that won the 2006 Best of the Best contest for logo design. Do these logos fit the four rules above? Or do some interpret the rules differently, and, if so, why do they still work?

Using SEO to Your Benefit

Search. Engine. Optimization. Three words that can make or break your company’s online search engine results.

Wikipedia defines SEO as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via search results.” This is important because the higher a site is listed in the search results the more searchers will visit that site.

The best description I could find of how Google works is here:

“Google indexes pages on the Web by using what are commonly known as “spiders”, ‘crawlers,’ or ‘robots.’ Google’s famous search engine spider, GoogleBot, uses links on web pages as a sort of freeway. It travels from site to site by following links. When Google finds a new web page, Google will “crawl” the code on the page and transport it back to its datacenter.”

The Web Developer’s Journal has these and other tips to help optimize your company’s search engine results:

1. Fine tune the TITLE tag to increase traffic to the site. Make sure it includes keywords that potential visitors will be search for on engines like Google.
2. Create gateway pages that are specific to the focus of each site.
3. Ensure that your web site technology won’t confuse the search engines.
4. Search the search engines to see where your web site is listed.
5. Learn more about how search engines work.

To get started and submit your web site to Google, go here.