Amy’s mode of transportation.

Fonts are a big part of design, and typesetters are a rare set that take their jobs very seriously — remember the documentary Helvetica? All joking aside, fonts are a large part of our subconscious, evoking emotions that we may not realize until we sit and ponder the composition of a poster or sign. There are fonts that are standard in software, but have you ever considered creating your own font from your handwriting? Creating a font adds a touch of humanity to something that may have been sterile, especially when you are designing a poster for a show or adding some pictures to Facebook.

Many sites these days allow you to experiment and stretch your creativity by offering free ways to create your own font. We tested out some sites and came up with the ones we thought were best — some just have tools to create fonts, while others allow you to design your own. You choose a font and then the site guides you through the entire alphabet (uppercase, lowercase, symbols), you draw each letter using the font as a guide for size and shape. This doesn’t mean you need to follow their font to a T, so think outside the box and try something new.

Our new ArcStone office on a lovely Spring day.

1. IfontMaker - The best site we found. These photos were made with a font designed in IfontMaker, and were extremely easy to use. The app requires an iPad and stylus and includes step-by-step directions. The font was made within thirty minutes and could be uploaded into Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop.
2. Type light - Type light allows you to manipulate existing fonts and also create your own. Keep in mind that Type light is only for Windows users.
3. Font Constructor - This free, Mac-only font editor was created intentionally to give students a tool for learning about font construction through hands-on experimentation and training. Despite it saying, “Font Constructor is not only meant for students,”  it can also be used by graphic and type designers, along with anyone who wishes to create fonts.
4. MyScriptFont – MyScriptFont requires a printer for printing off their sheet. Once done, you fill in the squares with your handwritten font and upload it back onto their site. This was a little more clunky, but doesn’t require a tablet-type of device to use.
5. YourFonts - YourFonts is very similar to MyScriptFont, but it doesn’t have as many character options. Try out both, and see which fits your needs better.
6. Raster Font Editor – Raster Font Editor is a separate app, meaning you can use it directly via your portable storage device, such as a USB flash drive, or cloud storage app, like Dropbox, without having to install it. It’s not as opulent in features like some of the other sites mentioned, but it can be a preference for those that need only basic font editing features and software portability.

The site covers the early history of the “World Wide Web” project and gives introductory information on how to make use of what was then an unfamiliar and revolutionary invention. Using the ingenious method of “hypertext linking,” it allows users to easily navigate through a hierarchical structure of documents and easily find the content they need. You can find troubleshooting tips for the browser of your choice, whether that’s Line Mode Browser, Viola,  NeXTStep, or MidasWWW. You can even find ways to get involved and contribute to the World Wide Web project.

It doesn’t use any images, JS, PHP, CSS or SEO. It’s full of awkward grammar and questionable development practices. It’s not trying to impress, persuade or sell. It’s only there to share information about, well, sharing information. There is a certain beauty to that. And there is also a certain beauty to Les Horribles Cernettes, an ”all-female parody pop group” whose name translates to “The Horrible CERN Girls”. Les Horribles Cernettes found their way into the history books by appearing in the first ever image to be published to the World Wide Web. I’ll sign off with that.

Welcome to social media strategy, stripped down and simplified.

What is social media strategy?

Put simply, a social media strategy is the way in which you use various social media channels to engage with your audience, in hopes of increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, and ultimately drawing in more business. This can be done in a variety of ways, using a myriad of tools and mediums. The trick with social media is to have a goal, and work toward achieving that goal. Posting willy-nilly will make you active on social media, yes, but it may not bring you much closer to the aforementioned goals.

Create a Strategy in 4 Steps

Every social media strategy will be different. No two companies or organizations are alike. There’s no cookie cutter strategy for you to follow. Instead, follow these steps to creating a personalized strategy that works for your business or organization.

1. What’s your goal?

What exactly do you want to accomplish with social media? Is your goal to promote new products, show off your work, or just increase brand awareness? Once you have some specific goals in place, it’ll be easier to piece together the rest of your strategy. You can even have some numbers in mind here. How much traffic do you want to drive to your site using social media in your first couple months? Tailor your strategy to work toward those specific goals.

2. Who’s your audience?

You’ve most likely already identified an audience for your current marketing efforts. Do that same thing for social media platforms. Who are you trying to reach? Your audience should very heavily influence your posts. For instance, you probably wouldn’t make all very serious, non-playful posts if your audience is women in their 20s. The same rules across other marketing mediums apply here. Determine your audience for each platform you’re on – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. For more help here, read Social Media + Ideal Prospects = Love & More Sales!

3. What’s your brand image?

What do you want your social media profiles to say about your company? How do you want to appear to your followers? A good way to think about this is to dream up a list of adjectives about how you want your company to be perceived. Are you cutting-edge, fun, and intelligent? Or are you professional, trustworthy, and a little bit witty? Once you’ve created that list, you’ll be able to make your posts match that image.

4. What will you post about?

This is often the snag that people get stuck on when thinking about social media strategy. “Everything I post should be directly related to me, right?” Actually, that’s not necessary for every post. In general, people on Facebook and other platforms will “Like” or “Follow” you at first because, well, they like you. They’ve had a positive experience with you, or like what you do or stand for. Now your posts will show up in their feeds. So, success! Yes? Again, not really. Now, you want to engage them. You want their likes, their comments, their retweets, their shares, etc. If you post only about yourselves and use your platforms solely to advertise for your business or brand, you won’t hit your social media goals because your followers will get bored, and possibly un-follow or un-like you. Get inside your followers’ heads: What else are they interested in? What are they reading? Where are they going? In general, try to post a mixture of stories, images, statuses, and videos in these areas:

• Company/product news, promotions, and tidbits
• Industry news & updates
• Fan stories/posts/reviews
• Local news (if you’re a local company, to establish yourself in the community)
• The occasional “just for fun” things (if this aligns with your image)

Bonus: Dos & Don’ts of Social Media Strategy

Don’t auto post: It’s been found that using an automated posting platform decreases the amount of time that your post will stay in your followers’ news feeds. Also, fans don’t want to interact with the robot version of you.

Do consider the time of day: More people are online in the afternoon and evening. That doesn’t mean you can’t post in the morning, but it might not get seen by as many people. Just use common sense and experiment a bit – are your friends online on a Friday at 5 p.m., or are they out at happy hour?

Don’t have discussions online: Did a fan post a question on your wall? If it’s “bad” in some way, don’t delete it, but take the conversation offline. For instance, if a customer complains about your product, apologize, explain that you’d like to help in any way possible, and give a phone number or email address to contact instead.

Do post images: People want to see your face. Social media is more personal than other marketing channels, and your fans want to interact with you (and your business) on a personal level. So, post pictures from around the office, the job site, the warehouse – wherever. Make those at your company the social media faces of your company!

Need help with your social media strategy? My fellow web marketers and I here at ArcStone would love to provide some guidance! While these 4 steps will help you get started, there are many more aspects that we can think about when creating your unique social media strategy. Contact us to get started.

For many business owners, social media marketing feels like a puzzle: on the one hand, hundreds of millions of people are using social sites on a daily basis; on the other, there aren’t a lot of proven ways to attract customers from social media other than pay-per-click ads on Facebook or promoted posts on Twitter, which only seem to work for certain types of businesses.

So, how do you use your social profiles effectively… and do it without wasting your advertising budget? The answer is simpler than you might think – use social media as a source of information first, and lead generation second.

This isn’t actually an unconventional idea. Most Fortune 500 companies love that social sites can help them build a brand and improve customer loyalty, but they are even more excited about the fact that customers put so much information into their own profiles. By studying what’s there, they can learn a great deal about the market. You can too.

The first step is to identify your best group of buyers, that proverbial 20% that accounts for most of your sales and revenue. Then, study their social content to answer a few important questions:

What do my most important customers have in common? Sometimes, the links between important buyers aren’t as obvious as you might think. In the past, companies have spent huge amounts of money to determine the “missing links” between their best customers. With social media, you just have to devote a little bit of time.

What demographic traits can I use to identify good prospects? If you can’t find a trait that seems to bind them, at least look for generalities – things like age, income, job title, company size, geographic region, marital status, interests, etc. The closer you can come to developing a profile for your perfect customer, the easier it’s going to be to market to them later.

For example, our client Kerfoot Canopy Tours’ sweet spot may be people who seek adventure, are interested in ecotourism or outdoor sports or even families looking for something different. Try to get into the mind of your prospect. What else are they interested in? It’s likely that Kerfoot’s clientele is interested in fitness, nature, camping and travel. What kind of content or social media messages will resonant best with them?

What themes or ideas do they discuss the most, or seem to worry about most often? Sometimes, it isn’t something about the customers themselves that is most important, but the situation they are in, or the challenges they are facing. Again, the answers might not be as obvious as you would think, and a little time spent researching can pay big dividends.

Who else are they linked with, and where else do they go on the Internet? Studying these details can help you find out who your real competitors are, where linking or advertising opportunities exist, and even the types of relationships that exist between your customers, prospects, and other businesses in your industry.

Once you dig deeply into these questions, you can begin to understand a lot more, not just about the men and women (organizations) who keep the checks coming in every month, but also how and where you can find more of them. Very often, that information is worth a lot more than a few pay-per-click ads or extra “likes” would be.

Need help building a new website, developing an Internet marketing plan, or putting your social media campaigns together? Call or e-mail us today to set up a free consultation, and let us show you how we can help.

Either way, the folks behind this idea were definitely thinking outside the box. While you may not want to almost curse in your marketing efforts, you can still get inspired by their non-traditional ideas. So, get out there and ship your pants!

ArcStone is excited to announce our new product, the iGlasses. iGlasses will revolutionize the way people use their smart phones, and run into things. Unlike Google Glass, iGlasses uses your existing smart phone in an entirely new way. Our amazing new technology transforms your iPhone into a wearable eyesore that makes using apps, watching videos, and reading an up close and personal experience.

We challenged our design team to create an iPhone case that was both beautiful and functional, while integrating some of the most exciting new technologies. We have created the blackest, thickest, glossiest iPhone eyeglasses case ever.

Our technology team has created the easiest way to use the iPhone yet. With advanced eye tracking and voice commands, every aspect of your iPhone has been upgraded to take advantage of iGlasses, with only minor retinal bleeding.

The iPhone has been liberated from your pocket. iGlasses, everything you love about the iPhone, on your face.

More than half of all ArcStone sites are built in WordPress, including the one you’re looking at right now. WordPress is the most popular CMS on the web, and as of this writing, over 63 million sites are using it. With good reason.

For starters, it’s free, and it comes with a lot of essential features built-in.  This tends to speed up development and lower the cost of building a site. It’s flexible enough to provide a foundation for sites ranging from simple blogs and business “brochure” sites, to large news and e-commerce applications.  But best of all, it’s maintained by a thriving community of passionate volunteer developers who are dedicated to making it better with each release cycle. As a result, it’s never hard to find a developer who knows WordPress in case you ever need one.

WordPress began as a simple blogging platform (hence the name). The idea was to give users a website that they could easily create themselves without needing a lot of technical expertise. And if all you want is a simple blog, you can still create one in WordPress on your own today without writing a single line of code. It provides a beautiful admin interface so that all you need to do is log in, configure a few settings and start writing. The default design themes look great. And adding new features can be as simple as finding the right plugin, then clicking “Activate” and “Install”.

But with that ease of use comes a few limitations. WordPress has grown far beyond its original intended purpose, and new functionality has been added in a somewhat “ad hoc” fashion. There are good reasons for this approach – backwards compatibility being foremost among them. But, like a modern city with its ancient streets intact, the PHP codebase of WordPress can feel rather byzantine from a developer’s perspective. It can be difficult to navigate and as a result it’s not ideal for the most powerful, data-heavy applications.  For those kinds of sites, ArcStone uses a framework called Symfony.

Like WordPress, Symfony is free and maintained by a massive and passionate group of volunteer developers from all around the world. Unlike WordPress, Symfony can be used to build almost any web application you can imagine. If one were so inclined, one could even use Symfony to build a functional clone of WordPress. (Re-creating the WordPress community and its 24,000 plugins would be the real trick.)

Symfony provides powerful tools to the developer for creating new applications and handling complex database interactions. It is infinitely configurable, and is built from a relatively small collection of core “components” that can be used independently of each other. To illustrate: two other popular PHP web frameworks called Laravel and Drupal are  both built at least partially on top of Symfony components. The names “Laravel” and “Drupal” may not mean much to you if you aren’t a PHP geek, but consider that www.WhiteHouse.gov is built in Drupal and so are all of these. Laravel is still a bit too new to have many big names to showcase, but it’s generated a lot of excitement in the PHP community for its elegance and adherence to solid coding practices.

So why do Laravel and Drupal use Symfony components? Because they’re superb, that’s why. The Symfony community has taken a leading role in developing standards related to rapid application development, long-term maintainability, scalability, security, decoupling and a slew of other web development buzzwords. It’s a great framework and a pleasure to use.

It would be hard to keep on gushing about WordPress and Symfony without posting code samples, so I’ll leave it here.  Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick peek behind the curtains.

In other words, if Google doesn’t think your e-commerce store is reputable, then it doesn’t want to send customers there.

As with most changes to Google’s formula, this seems fairly straightforward and customer-driven. After all, most people don’t go to search engines looking for obscure online retailers, and the public tends to feel more comfortable with established Internet stores and known brands.

Beyond that, however, the issue of who will decide what “low-quality” means is an open question. Still, there are some assumptions we can make based on previous Google trends and algorithm changes. Here are a handful of steps you can take that will probably put your online store into the “safe” category:

1. Make sure you have a clear domain name. Long or confusing domain names may serve as a signal that you aren’t serious about branding, which in turn suggests that you don’t plan on being around for very long. Make sure yours is straightforward and easy to understand.
2. Use a simple navigation structure. Customers like it when they can get from one area of your store to another quickly and easily. Add contextual links to help guide your customers through your store. Additionally, having things like shipping details, a privacy policy, and customer service links are a good idea, as well, since they build your credibility.
3. Generate your own content.This actually ties into other Google updates, as well, but you should be sure that you aren’t posting content (like product descriptions) that comes from other sources, even manufacturers. Having your own details makes you seem like more of an authority, and easier for both Google and your customers to trust. It may seem like a pain to write unique product descriptions but your work will pay off.
4. Stay away from affiliate programs & spam. Because of the flood of low-quality websites that have traditionally been associated with affiliate programs, Google and the other search engines are very leery of them. If you are going to maintain an affiliate site, make sure it stands out as being one of the most informative. Google is fighting spam now more than ever before.
5. Maintain strong social presence. Search marketing and social media have been inching closer to one another for quite a while. With a strong social following, it’s easy for Google to see that you are a trusted and reputable company that backs its products.
6. Pay attention to your reputation. Google is working on ways of establishing good reviews from bad reviews. Monitor your reputation and provide good service. This will not only create a loyal customer base, it may impact your visibility in search.

Again, it’s too early to tell when Google’s next round of changes will take effect, or exactly how they will affect online stores. But, you can be sure that there are going to be two groups of the retailers immediately afterwards: those who are glad they stayed on Google’s good side, and the others who want to know how they can get their search engine traffic back.

Need help launching or improving your online store? Call us today to set up a free consultation and let our team of e-commerce experts show you what we can do.

Now that you understand the GUI, I’d like to suggest that for certain applications we may one day see it go the way of the punched card. In an article posted today on Wired, Ron Kaplan writes that it’s time for the GUI to make way for the Conversational User Interface:

Instead of pulling up an app like OpenTable, searching for restaurants, tapping to select time, and typing in party size, we can say, “Book me a table for three at 6 tonight at Luigi’s.”

It’s true that speech-based apps like Siri have already been around for years. And the much-hyped Google Glasses are intended to function completely via voice.  But Kaplan says that what we’ve seen is ”just the first generation … and only hints at what’s to come.”

Of course, the GUI can never completely disappear (famous last words?). Until the day comes when we can upload our intentions directly from our brains to our computers, we will always need a graphical interface for certain tasks. I could never write a line of code through anything other than a visual text editor. And I can’t imagine what it would have meant to write this blog post “conversationally.” Creating and editing content of various types, working with data, running calculations: certain types of work simply do not lend themselves well to a conversational interface.

But those aren’t the kinds of applications Kaplan is talking about. What Kaplan describes is something more akin to a personal assistant. It’s not something you would use to edit your spreadsheet – at least, not on a granular level. It’s more like something that knows which spreadsheet you want to open and who you want to send it to when you’re done.  A digital butler that performs all kinds of tedious tasks – tasks you didn’t even realize were tedious - and lets you focus only on the important stuff. Imagine that.

Make it fun.

A few years ago, Volkswagen began an initiative called “The Fun Theory,” which called on individuals from around the world to send in videos showing how they had changed peoples’ behavior simply by turning the responsible choice into the fun choice. Take a look at how making picking up trash fun might solve your litter problem:

You can find a handful of similar successes on The Fun Theory website. But this is only the tip of the iceberg in a general trend of “gamification” that has been taking hold in the past few years. Enterprising organizations are using “fun” to encourage all sorts of behavior. Researchers at Stanford created a game where users design their own RNA sequences that the scientists themselves may then use for experimentation in the lab. The game is called EteRNA (pronounced like “eternal” without the “l”) and if you like puzzles you’ll find it’s more than a little addictive.

In an Ethiopian village, children with no access to teachers and schools were given touchscreen tablets with pre-loaded educational games, cartoons and videos. Within months, not only were they spelling simple words and singing the alphabet song, but some of them had actually hacked the tablet’s Android operating system. 

New technology provides limitless ways of reaching your target audience and encouraging shifts in behavior. One of the best strategies for doing that is to make it fun. How can that apply to your brand?