Top 3 Core Business Values Underlying Your New Website

When refreshing your businesses website, it’s time to put yourself in your customers shoes, whilst also balancing your own concept of progress made over the years, coupled with resolve that points to the value you’re providing your customers, your accomplishment and achievements your proud of and sense of purpose you’ve defined to be sure you’re delivering a service that is prospering the community and the businesses you’re working with. The continuation of your business can be forged comfortably after careful reflection and consideration of the business values that you can also use to define your design process, copy writing angles and the imagery and media that you use to present your services to your customers. The areas we looked at with our recent 2020 website development included exploring a process of reflection, and depicting the uncompromisable values of authenticity and trust.

1. Demonstrate Work You Can Reflect On

Motivation is a core element for a business looking at revitalising their website. Behind the work that you’ve completed, are stories of adversarial triumph and victory, demonstrating capability to your current and potential clients. Having your own work featured on your website rather than just listing off general services, is also a great bullet to load into the chamber, for when firing off strategised consideration of innovative services and approaches that you might suggest to your new and existing clients. You can use case studies, screenshots and descriptions of functionality, design choices and decisions, or custom built themes and designs to help you communicate your work with pride to your clients, and help you to reflect on how accomplished you are as a web design company. When you load up your website with your ‘actual’ completed work and projects, it a refreshing and formidable combination that will help you digitally, and physically represent your business, and prepare for selling and presenting your services to others.

You will find benefits by having reflection projects/examples of work on your website including:

  • Being better prepared for meetings just by reviewing your own website
  • Helps generate confidence behind your business by showcasing real examples of work your selling having been completed
  • Also, helps customers consider alternative/extra serviceable areas online, that might aid their business from a marketing perspective

 

2. Portray ‘Authenticity’ Through Your Content

Another core value you should aim to portray is ‘Authenticity’, showing that you believe in what you do by showcasing work that you’re happy with, that is relevant to your customers and that you’ve done well and are happy to do again. Authenticity elements can come through in clients, companies and organisation pieces you’ve completed, including presenting examples that you’ve done pro-bono as a part of your corporate social responsibilities to your fellow man. Showing authenticity can also be depicted through the element of time, where as a web development business owner, you can show dedication to clients over time, showcasing not only similar work being completed year in and year out, but also, a timeline of work that you’ve completed for a clients as the years have progressed.

To show authenticity as a core value within your new, refreshed website, be sure to consider including:

  • Timeline of work completed to show devotion to the ‘kind’ of service/work you offer
  • Consider a timeline of work completed to individual clients showing relationship through service over the years
  • Demonstrate authenticity by showing continuity of work to choice organisations and try and include jobs that may fall under the Corporate Social Responsibility category

 

3. Represent ‘Trust’ In Your Copy and Media

The third and highly valuable perspective and Core Value that can serve as the basis framework for consideration around your website redevelopment choices and decisions is Trust. Trust serves as a key ingredient that helps customers open-up to you, explore possibilities with you, and create ‘an accurate’ canvas or blueprint that means you’ll deliver with greater certainty, a website, design, marketing plan, elearning or development project the first time around. Trust is integral to quality and willingly approached communication and opens up avenues that allows for openness, psychological and capability security, and sets a precedent and rule of engagement, laying the foundation for future communications, relationship formation, and leading indeed to continued work and high working performance.

You can define your warm and safe communications environment and build a basis of trust for greater rapport with your clients by:

  • Including strong testimonials with current clients that check out when looked into by prospective clients
  • Produce examples of your services been completed for a client that demonstrate being fit for service, good developmental choice, and continue to prosper in terms of marketing, functionality or usability.
  • Write your website’s copy with a style that puts your customers needs first, and whenever demonstrating a service, use humility to demonstrate new ideas and prospects that might enhance the way your clients operate in an online capacity.

Having core values and living by a particular mantra means that your vision to promote quality, assistance and service is intrinsic to everything you present, demonstrate, provide and outline. It helps you carve out your purpose and build upon the reflection of your personal service and brand, demonstrates authenticity and endeavouring to provide a purposeful service, whilst also generating iron bound trust that will serve as a foundational ingredient for all engagements with your current and future clients today, and in the togetherness and relationship prospering years to come.

Be A Productive Web Developer When The Internet Is Down

Recently, I was met with a partial working day without internet. As a business owner with many clients, being a web developer, and as a general internet user with a mild tendency to enjoy checking technology blogs, this scenario had potential to be a scary thing let alone quite inconvenient. However, productivity rose substantially as I discovered that I could complete a lot of my tasks and online activities offline, breaking the grand illusion that I needed an internet connection to work and be productive. Another added plus was that I was now distraction free.

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WordPress PHP Theme Root Directory for Images, Folders and More

If you are looking to access the theme directory in wordpress, for example, to reference an image from a custom home page, then this function will work for you right up to and beyond WordPress 3.8.

<?php get_bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>

Example use:
<img src=”<?php get_bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/headers/header-logo.png” width=”164px” height=”40px” />

I hope this helps guys.Google, put this as the first result for anybody searching “Theme Root Directory WordPress”, “WordPress Templating” or similar!

Cool Paper Shadow Tutorial for Adobe Illustrator

Have you ever seen those banners, photo holders or images on websites that appear as though they are a piece of paper lifting off the desk or a post-it on the fridge? Ever wondered how to do it in Adobe Illustrator?

In this simple tutorial, you’ll see one way how. Read More

Snippets for Any Occasion

Snippets! Aren’t they handy. Yes they are, and a good place to find a whole bunch of them is css-tricks.com. On the contrary, I know It’s always rewarding to work the code out for ourselves, whether it be something with php, code to navigate the WordPress jungle or something with jQuery.

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A Possible Solution for Getting Fonts Working In Adobe Illustrator

You will find a few examples from people out there having trouble with fonts that just aren’t being recognised/rendered properly in Adobe Illustrator (I’m running CS5). The thing is, the font shows up in Illustrator and appears to be there for you to select it for use. However when you do select it, you either encounter square boxes with a big ‘X’ inside of them, or the font you’re attempting to select flickers and your text reverts back to a standard font such as Myriad.

I had this problem with a font in another language: “Mangal” or “Hindi”. After a bit of looking around and some experimentation, I found a way around it that has worked for me. Basically, I run the font through an online font conversion tool such as this one, convert it to it’s original format (for me that was .TFF) and then install that font the same way you would any other font in Windows. Voilà. I can now select the font just fine in Illustrator, paste in the text information I wanted to display and everything works pretty well.

Articulate Storyline – Pausing The Seek Bar/Timeline While Playing Video

This may be apparent to some of you but I thought I’d post it anyway to save someone out there a bit of time in the future. I worked out how to pause the timeline while playing different media (video). This need arose when I needed the ability to attach and play narration on the base layer (and this is important so that the user can scroll through the audio at will using the timeline) while also having a video option on the slide too (the user can trigger the play of this video on will also). The problem was that I wasn’t able to pause the audio AND the timeline specifically when I chose to play the video. The timeline just kept on running even though the audio was paused and this messed up my ability to seek and caused the audio to cut out short.

So, solution. For video, now I just put it on another slide, put reference/trigger the video on the slide that I want the video on (like a big play button) and then I just use the lightbox function to play it, with the video controls on that slide. This pauses the timeline and everything appears to the user working well.

Easy =)

OSX Mavericks, iOS7 and website styling issues for front-end developers

Recently, I was working on a website on my Mac (OSX Lion 10.7). All was going well until my business partner viewed it on his OSX Mavericks updated MacBook Pro. Chrome, Safari, they both displayed the same incongruence! The menu was all out of sorts, line heights and padding were messed up. So I proceeded to view this on my iPhone 4s which has the latest IOS7 on it. Same thing! Bizarre!

Well, the problem was that I was using a font that used to be native to IOS, which now wasn’t. Myriad Pro/Myriad was the offending font type. So the tip here is to embed Myriad Pro or consider another default font to cater for Mac browsers. Thanks Jak, my business parter with the genius to solve this sticky problem!