At Washington Graphic Services, we believe your website and other marketing content = your brand. So, obviously, great content writing is critical. But what defines great in the field of content writing?

How your prospects define great content

People use search primarily to solve problems and find information. If your website has the kind of content which helps them to do this, they’ll love it. They’ll even recommend it to their friends. If they have a blog, they might put up a link to it.

How search engines define great content

Many people don’t know this, but search engines define it the same way you do. In fact, they define it exactly as you do, because to make money, search engines must deliver the best search result. But they have to go about it differently. Search engines have to use your code and your content to understand your website. And if they like what they see, they’ll rank it higher when they present their results. So what they look for content that seems like it will solve the problems and give great information to those searching.

Google and Bing and Yahoo are attempting to mirror what humans look for in search.

Right now, Google and Bing look for about 400 words content with contextual use of the specific key phrase that your customers type in. They tend to like linking, but soon they’ll punish those websites who are doing nothing more than what I call “link farming,” having completely unrelated directory sites link over to them. Google and Bing want the sites on the other end to have good content as well. Think of it as a credible person recommending another credible person. It carries more weight.

WGS brings the two together for search success

We will bring a great content writer together with a marketing-driven writer who will optimize the key phrases which folks are looking for are scattered through the copy in just the right formula that search engines want.

Google changes their search feature algorithms

Search engine rankings change; sometimes it the results vary from day to day, so WGS keeps working to make your site found. There really is no silver bullet. Just like in your traditional business, your online brand must change and adapt to stay on top. Washington Graphic Services is process driven an always looking for the best way to keep our clients on top. Content writing and management will always be the thing the search engines reward because it will be the thing your prospects (who are also Google and Bing customers) want and need.

By being strategically driven, WGS is in touch with what customers want in particular categories. Rather than just focus on the search engines, we plot and plan to get your website attractive to your prospects. And that’s just what Google and Bing are doing. By keeping our eye on the marketing motivations, we’ll marry up your content writing to your prospects, and Google and Bing will reward that.

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Great typography is more than skilled graphic designers being clever. Great typography explores the interaction between the look of type and what type actually says. In communicating a message, a balance has to be achieved between the visual and the verbal aspects of a design.

Sometimes, however, designers explore the visual aspect of type to a much greater extent than the verbal. In these cases, the visual language does all the talking. This article explores when the visual elements of typography speak louder than words.

Two distinct areas often come together in practice as there is clearly a very strong relationship between the conception of the words as a message and their transmission in visible form.

In professional graphic design, visual language refers to the meanings created by the visual appearance of both text and image. The term “visual language” refers to the character and significance created by carefully selected typography. Verbal language is the literal meaning of words, phrases and sentences.

We all have different cultural backgrounds and experiences that affect our perception of type one way or another. So, regardless of the designer’s skill and effort, a number of uncontrollable aspects remain, including the viewer’s perception, expectations, knowledge, experiences and preferences. And while accounting for all such unpredictable responses to type is impossible, awareness is critical.

In this ad, you are confronted with the familiar name style of one of the world’s favorite chocolate bars, the Kit Kat. The type style and letterform proportions and certainly the color, shape and angle all create an instantly recognizable connection with the Kit Kat brand — so much so that you would be forgiven for seeing the name Kit Kat before reading and taking in the actual written message. Your familiarity with the brand is an instant draw, and appreciating the change of message might take you a second look.

John Mier

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For all you trade show pros, you generally know what everyone else is doing in your industry. What colors the industry uses and prefers, if it’s high tech, heavy on audio visual, and what products they offer. If you are in the market for a new booth take advantage of this opportunity. Go bold!

Take the medical industry… it is swamped with light blue and clean white. Change your game without changing your brand. Add a bright color to your structure, rather than a sea of metal hardware. Get exciting graphics with intense colors or add eye-catching lighting. If the show or industry is already bold be the calm Zen-like booth, that welcomes a passerby to sit and relax. Have a bold structure with beautiful black and white graphics.

Lighting can change your booth alone. Don’t just add lights to your graphics or logo either, think beyond that. Move your eyes and mind lower to the carpet for instance. What was once standard gray carpet is now lit by blue lights from above that create a visual effect of moving water or even ice. Now look to your fabric graphics hanging from your structure, it looks as if it’s flowing in the breeze. This all brought to you from another visual lighting effect. All these options are available and DO make a huge difference in the way your new or old booth look. Simple additions like this, speak volumes to your prospective clients.

Customize your booth… it’s not as expensive as it sounds. You do not have to pick a booth out of a catalog anymore. You have options and any good display house should be able to offer you custom options for any budget. Give the key elements you want to hit in your booth and see how a designer can create a custom look that is sure to make your booth represent everything you are and more.

Don’t fit in – Stand out! You want to draw people into your booth, show them why this year they should be working with you. Let your booth do the hard part of starting the conversation, your sales team can do the rest.

– The Trade Show Booth Team

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This year 65 million U.S. adults are using tablet computers; next year the number will increase to 100 million and hit 150 million by 2014. And of the new tablets sold this year, at least 50 million will be iPads.

Apple Inc.’s iPad is changing the way consumers interact with the Internet—and as a result, changing the way consumers interact with e-commerce sites. Owners of iPads are a force to be reckoned with, and so far, the top e-retailers come up short when it comes to meeting the needs of the tablet shopper.

E-commerce and m-commerce design firms have examined the performance on iPads of the e-commerce sites of the top 10 e-retailers in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Based on its judgments on numerous criteria, including responsive design, adaptive layout, appropriate content sizing, minimal clutter, finger-swipe support, web standards compliance (including not using Adobe Flash, which does not work on iPads), tap-only navigation displays, tablet-optimized search and tablet-optimized purchasing.

“None of the sites surveyed offered dedicated tablet experiences, though most offered dedicated iPad or iPhone apps,” Alexander Interactive writes in its report. “All suffered from usability problems, and offer limited tablet shopping experiences in comparison to those offered by companies with dedicated tablet site experiences, such as Nike. Retailers should seriously evaluate investment in t-commerce site design due to the forecasted explosion of tablet usage in the next several years.”

Of the top 10 e-retailers studied, Amazon.com Inc.’s site was the most usable on a tablet The merchant redesigned the site to be simpler and less cluttered, with larger buttons that are easy for tablet users to tap compared with standard links or smaller buttons, Alexander Interactive says. The biggest improvement is a fly-out window that swoops out when a user touches Shop By Department; the menu’s bold text reads well on both PC monitors and tablets and the category links function correctly when tapped, which can’t be said for all of the top 10 e-retailers, the design firm says.

Predictive or type-ahead site search works well on Apple’s e-commerce site rendered on an iPad; this is important as it saves tablet users time typing on the onscreen keyboard, Alexander Interactive says. Apple, iPad’s maker, is a leader in design with tablets in mind, offering uncluttered pages; but it could do even better with a dedicated tablet site.

And Walmart.com enables customers on iPads to fairly easily use its e-commerce site, especially when an iPad user holds the device horizontally in landscape mode; in some areas the retailer has added extra space between links to better accommodate finger tapping. However, many of the site’s promotional areas use Adobe Flash, which leaves shoppers watching the message “Loading” on the screen, the firm adds.

Alexander Interactive points to the dedicated, tablet-optimized e-commerce site of Nike Inc., No. 78 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, as an exceptional example of what merchants need to do to be prepared for the onslaught of tablet shoppers.

WGS can create customized iPad sites that work exceptionally well on Apple tablet format. Give John Mier (202) 468-3649, a call today to generate your tablet site today.

John Mier

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One search engine optimization technique we perform on our clients websites is our in-house “Broken Link Checker”. This monitors your site and blogs looking for broken links and corrects them. This technique allows our team to verify links as well as compatibility issues. Major search engines will penalize your sites ranking due to this errors and your customers won’t think very highly of your business either. Once installed our team will begin to scan your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, other content which contains links. Depending on the size of your site this can take from a few minutes up to an hour or more. Certain actions can be performed once a broken link is found.

• “Edit URL” lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll), all occurrences of that URL will be changed.
   
• “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.
   
• “Not broken” lets you manually mark a “broken” link as working. This is useful if you know it was incorrectly detected as broken due to a network glitch or a bug. The marked link will still be checked periodically, but the plugin won’t consider it broken unless it gets a new result.
   

John Mier

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A good question to ask is if meta tags are still necessary. They used to be more helpful, providing important information to the various Internet browsers. As browsers became more sophisticated, they stopped needing a lot of hand holding. Other methods of SEO became more of a vital role. The “Free” area of search engines are becoming harder to access, especially if you want control of where and how you are listed.

Google does no longer use the meta keyword and they confirm this in their Webmaster Central Blog: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. Some search engines don’t use the meta tag information any more because many people abused it. In fact, meta tags may not represent the content of your site, but, it still doesn’t hurt your status with search engines if you make use of these little bits of information, and do so truthfully.

Without a doubt, content is the biggest contributor to search engine page ranking, so if you want to raise your rankings, make sure you have quality content. “Content is King”, a hard rule to remember.

All the reasons meta tags are and aren’t important to search engines is to answer. Search engines are fluid and how they operate and list sites is not static. WGS suggests various forms and SEO techniques to maximize your placement

Most clients are unsure why they need to have an ongoing SEO campaign. We tell them not having such a campaign will harm their ranking. Not be listed as good as you can is not an option for many businesses.

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More and more businesses and individuals are turning to blogs and social media as a means of communication with their customers and website visitors.

Do you already have a website and would like a matching custom blog design? Or maybe you’d like to set up a new custom wordpress theme website with a stunning, unique design?

Creating a WordPress or other content management (CMS) custom theme site is something we love to do. From design to coding and getting your site live, thanks to a large variety of CMS such as WordPress and Joomla, we can customize an already existing blog theme to reflect your own!

Let the WGS Team take the hassle out of creating your customized WordPress Theme…

Features that we can add to your site or blog:

• Dynamic Featured Gallery – Custom Coded to display your most important posts with thumbnails
• Auto Thumbnail Feature : No need to insert thumbnail for your magazine style blog as our theme will automatically pull and resize images.
• Search engine optimized – SEO Plugin Installed
• Rotating Banners – Easily add multiple banners and even PPC in sidebar and posts
• Contact Form – with captcha feature to prevent spam

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A good brochure must be clear and attractive to the intended audience. More importantly, a great brochure should quickly and effectively tell the viewer, what you are, what product or service you offer and then how to take action and contact/purchase your product or service. Think of the brochures that you or your friend kept from an event you went to, or a place you wanted to go. You may not have identified exactly what design aspect made it unique, but these brochures definitely captured the essence of the event or the company. The ability to embody the spirit of the client and the identity of the company in a mere paper brochure is what makes it memorable, and is proof of a good design. These brochures show exemplary creativity and excellent design…

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Clients ask us often, why do we need to spend so much continued effort getting in Google and Yahoo? The answer is Google and Yahoo is a constant evolving database and it is not constant. Your website exists to reach people and ultimately bring in customers. Unless you maintain your ranking on these websites they will be lost to your competition. Below are a few ways we currently program your site to get you listed in relevant keyword areas.

• What Are Meta Tags?
• The word meta means information about. Meta Tags were created early on to provide concise information about a website. Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information.
   
• Tags, Headline tags, meta tags:
• As a search engine prowls your site, it gathers information from the title, headings, content, and Meta Tags such as description or keywords. It compares the words within each of these sections and “ranks” the site dependent upon how well the information matches. Washington Graphic Services has the ability to analyze your site and how to maximize your meta tags.
   

It is important for website developers to understand that a default installation using templates such as WordPress does not contain the description and keywords meta tag data. Meta tags can be added manually, through changes to the Theme template files or through WordPress Plugins.

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