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https://kennbivins.com creative thinker and do-er Tue, 11 Apr 2017 12:47:49 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 How Our Design Process Evolved In The Past 10 Years https://kennbivins.com/how-the-design-process-has-evolved/ https://kennbivins.com/how-the-design-process-has-evolved/#respond Tue, 11 Apr 2017 12:47:49 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=11947 People rarely ask designers if they work in “print or web” anymore, a question that used to be the norm. These days a product manager design falls under two big umbrellas: screen design, and designing for off screen. Where inputs used to almost always be a keyboard and mouse, today’s designers have so many new...

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People rarely ask designers if they work in “print or web” anymore, a question that used to be the norm. These days a product manager design falls under two big umbrellas: screen design, and designing for off screen.

Where inputs used to almost always be a keyboard and mouse, today’s designers have so many new technologies and tools at their disposal that interaction design is no longer constrained by the dimensions of a screen or the click of a mouse. We’re wearing designs now, activating them by using our voices, and getting immersed in their augmented and artificial realities.

It’s no surprise then that the design process itself has also evolved, and so too have the opportunities for designers.

1. Designer Specialties Have Changed

The first big shift is in the nature of a designer’s role. As designing for digital became more popular, designers began to specialize in certain aspects of the design process to align with different design milestones including wire framing, prototyping, visual design, interaction design and so on. Now, many of these specialties have merged into one and the process has become less segmented.

This has allowed designers to go from quick high-fidelity designs to a final design product in less iterations and time. Things like research, mood boarding and wire framing have merged into one step, so too has the visual design process including interaction and prototyping. In turn, this has influenced the very nature of a designer’s role and the responsibilities each designer has.

2. Screen Design is the New Print Design

Designing for screens is the new normal, and designing for off the screen is the future. There are so many new domains where the products designers are designing don’t necessarily have a traditional interface, instead using human components like touch and voice to interact with designs. This has presented new challenges for designers and the design process.

Even the way designers prototype has had to shift. If you are designing a concept for an iPad, for example, it’s no longer sufficient to show a mockup of the concept on paper. Clients want to see the interaction in motion. They want to feel and touch it before it’s built.

3. New Tools to Streamline the Process

Just as the design process has influenced the designer’s role, this in turn has also influenced the tools in which designers use. It used to be very clear which products were for which parts of the design process, but now designers want a more holistic approach to a full design system.

4. Pros and Cons of New Design Processes

In addition to being a faster, more iterative design process, having a single designer own more parts of the design process can create a more unified output, one that tells a more cohesive story. This can bring increased integrity to a design because there aren’t as many hands in the pot, so to speak, so fewer designers are leaving their personal mark on the design.

Unfortunately though, this also means designers are working more in isolation in the sense that there is often less direct communication. This has created a bit of a silo effect in some organizations.

It’s also created a need for more tools for designers to communicate design decisions. Tools such as Slack and similar platforms have helped designers “get feedback in the browser” from team members and stakeholders. The need for these tools has become imperative to the design process, yet they are also born as a result of the fact that the design process has changed.

It’s a domino effect that is actually quite cyclical in the way these different components of the design process influence one another.

5. Adaption is the Key to a Designer’s Success

With all these new processes and technologies, it can be overwhelming for an aspiring designer to figure out not only where to start, but also where (s)he fits in. Don’t worry though. Most tools can be learned with enough work and experience.

One of the most important skills you need to have as a designer for today’s challenges is the ability to adapt and the ability to be able to learn to understand the domain if you are not familiar with it.

The best way to do this is to fully experience the design process from ideation to product shipment, either via an internship or an opportunity at a company that values the design process.

6. Discover Your Own Golden Formula

Experiencing the design process is just one half of each designer’s individual golden formula. The second is conducting a personal evaluation of what your interests and passions are. What type of design do you want to do? What are your goals?

It’s a refreshing take. With so many tools, technologies and different design jobs out there, it’s important for young and seasoned designers alike to remember that you have a say in the path you take and the tools you choose to embrace.

If this resonates with you it might be time to revisit step one of the design process by hitting the drawing board. How can today’s design processes help you to achieve your dreams?

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/how-the-design-process-has-evolved/feed/ 0 Tips And Tricks To Solve Common SEO Problems https://kennbivins.com/tips-and-tricks-to-solve-common-seo-problems/ https://kennbivins.com/tips-and-tricks-to-solve-common-seo-problems/#respond Mon, 10 Mar 2014 19:55:11 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=294 If you want your businesses to see a boost in sales or to give your brand a better position in its market, maximizing your digital marketing campaign is one great way to go. After all, businesses can pull a higher ROI from their cheap blogging and social media activities than they can pull from a...

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If you want your businesses to see a boost in sales or to give your brand a better position in its market, maximizing your digital marketing campaign is one great way to go.

After all, businesses can pull a higher ROI from their cheap blogging and social media activities than they can pull from a big ad-buy campaign.

No doubt, SEO plays a significant role in this.

To become more competitive (in terms of getting a higher share of the target audience), more focus must be put on improving the online visibility of your properties through search engines such as Google.

According to a 2018 report by HubSpot, at least 61% of marketers say that “improving SEO and growing organic presence” is a top priority in their inbound marketing campaigns.

For this, it’s vital that businesses be able to drive better results using the right strategies. Noting the impact it provides, it’s safe to say that SEO can be a powerful channel for driving revenue and business expansion.

But just like other digital marketing channels, SEO has its own range of problems to deal with. If you want to get ahead of the competition, it is crucial to identify and resolve these seo problems early on.

Using the right approaches, you can prevent common SEO problems from damaging your online efforts.

Let’s look at some of these problems and the practical ways you can do to resolve them.

404 Errors

Nothing turns off a site visitor more than clicking a link only to be redirected to a page with the number 404 plastered over it. Indeed, 404 errors are a bane to brands that want to build a strong online presence. These errors can increase bounce rates significantly and, as a result, diminish your search rank.

Fortunately, just like the common cold, a 404 error can easily be treated. First thing you need to do is to list down all the broken links you have in your website by testing the pages in your navigation menu.

Once you have identified the affected destinations, you can now update these broken links. For best results, you can perform a thorough site audit yourself, or you can save time by hiring an SEO consultant to do it for you. Not only will you be able to locate broken links, but you can also identify other SEO-related issues as well.

The simplest trick in this case is to change the URLs of the affected links so they can direct users to a relevant landing page. On the other hand, if you’re using WordPress with Yoast as a plug-in, you can update your links automatically through 301 redirects.

Missing Alt Image Tags

Nowadays, it is recommended that businesses include images in their blog content. Some, however, just place an image while overlooking the alt attributes.

Visuals provide greater value for businesses that want to educate and influence their audiences. The lack of alt attributes such as meta-tags and titles can diminish the value of your content.

After all, alt attributes provide context to your content. Other than that, alt attributes can also give your products and services even greater visibility on Google image search results.

Solving image tags is easy. If you’re using WordPress, you simply browse through your image gallery and manually enter the data you required on each image. Make sure to use the title of the corresponding blog article as the title of the image.

It can be a time consuming process, but it’s worth it!

Unoptimized Content

Over the years, Google has updated its algorithms to provide search visitors with the best experience. Value is important, and Google is making sure that vendors with a considerable presence online can help audiences find what they are looking for.

For this reason, Google has become a lot stricter, requiring businesses to focus more on creating value for their audiences and penalizing anyone still trying black hat operations.

If your SEO efforts are not doing well in terms of generating higher organic traffic, then there’s something in your content that Google doesn’t like. Performing a full content audit can help you identify website issues that are pulling your site ranking down the drain.

Once you have done a content audit, it’s only a matter of making sure that the content you churn out:

is between 500 to 1,000 words;
has images with their proper alt attributes;
makes proper use of H1 and H2 tags;
contains both outbound and inbound links to relevant landing pages; and
is readable and has the right keywords that people are looking for.

A good rule of thumb here is to consider providing value to your audience and making sure that what they read on your website can help them decide whether to buy something from you.

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/tips-and-tricks-to-solve-common-seo-problems/feed/ 0 3 Easy Website Tweaks to Convert More Visitors https://kennbivins.com/3-easy-website-tweaks-to-convert-more-visitors/ https://kennbivins.com/3-easy-website-tweaks-to-convert-more-visitors/#respond Sat, 07 Sep 2013 14:03:47 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=303 Not all marketers have the time and resources to go through a full website redesign process. Here are a few simple but proven techniques that you can implement today and optimize your website’s conversion rate. Call to Action Button Color This is one of the most important elements of your website. The “Call to Action”...

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Not all marketers have the time and resources to go through a full website redesign process. Here are a few simple but proven techniques that you can implement today and optimize your website’s conversion rate.

Call to Action Button Color

This is one of the most important elements of your website. The “Call to Action” button is the button that guides your visitors to the desired business goal, like signing up for a trial, downloading a whitepaper or contacting sales.

There is no real best practice about using a specific color across all sites and businesses. If someone tells you there is, don’t trust them. CTA buttons are like road signs that tell people which is the right way to go. As such the most important thing to have in mind is that they need to be in contrast with their surrounding. A good way to determine contrasting colors is to use a color wheel. For example, if you have a background that is in the “Blues” spectrum the corresponding color for the button should be from the “Reds” spectrum.

Another thing to remember is that no matter how logical a color change might look, always A/B test any changes to validate your assumption.

Pop-ups

For many years there was a certain stigma to using pop-ups on your website because it was thought that they ruined user experience. But with the proliferation of A/B testing and the ability to validate efficiency, more and more companies are starting to revive pop-ups as means to increase conversion rates.

The key to success with pop-ups is context. Forget about homepage pop-ups. Wait until your visitors have browsed a bit, so you can determine their intention.

Communicate Value on Sign Up Forms

The sign up form is the hardest and most important hurdle you need to take your visitors over, so you need to get it right.

You can always experiment with removing form fields, but this way you are capturing less important business information which will limit the segmentation options for post-registration initiatives like email marketing or sales follow up.

That’s why a more suitable tactic is to increase the desire of people to sign up.

For a newsletter form this can be done by adding a summary of all the useful resources you will receive if you leave your email.

For forms that ask the visitors for more information, like trial forms, you need to put a bit more work in. Things to consider adding, in addition to the benefit of signing up, are social proof like testimonials and things that address anxiety concerns.

Following those three simple techniques can get you closer to meeting your marketing goals. But remember, always test new things against current versions to make sure there is an improvement.

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/3-easy-website-tweaks-to-convert-more-visitors/feed/ 0 Tips for Promoting Your Business and Creating Your Brand https://kennbivins.com/promoting-your-business-and-creating-your-brand/ https://kennbivins.com/promoting-your-business-and-creating-your-brand/#respond Wed, 04 Sep 2013 12:43:56 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=1499 Adams also came to understand how important it was that his carefully crafted photos were reproduced to best effect. At Bender’s invitation, he joined the prestigious Roxburghe Club, an association devoted to fine printing and high standards in book arts.

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You may have worked hard to find the right design and platform for developing an eCommerce website and are ready to get out there and start selling your products. But without promotion and building up a brand, you could be missing out on a lot of revenue for your business.

Branding

Branding is an important part of building up your business. It creates recognition for your business, gives your advertising more of a foundation and can be a trustworthy quality for customers. That level of trust can lead to more referrals, generating new customers, and build a confidence within the business for employees.

A big part of SEO is promotion and building brand awareness. You may be wondering what you can do to make undertaking such an important task easier and more effective.

Here are some tips for establishing brand awareness and promoting your eCommerce website:

Paid Search

An effective way to start promoting your business quickly is to use paid search. By using paid search, you can move higher on results pages in a shorter amount of time. It can also build brand awareness that can help your organic results and lead to purchases through organic searches.

Reviews

Reviews are very important for building a brand. There are many ways you can use reviews. First, you want to make sure that your website allows visitors to leave reviews. Contact popular bloggers or paying customers and ask them for reviews on your products. Get your business listed on Yelp and other similar review sites. You can even write blog posts reviewing your products, as long as you do so in an unbiased way.

Content and Links

In online marketing, content is king. You have to produce content regularly to keep improving your SEO and reach on search engines. Once you have produced content, make sure to share it often to build links. Links and content are the most important factors to building your organic ranking on Google and other search engines. With our eCommerce SEO services, we make sure your link structure is built for strong SEO results and focus content on the keywords you want to see better in search results and more shares to create backlinking.

Stay Consistent in Branding

As you start to establish a brand — a logo, a design, a voice for your content — make sure to stay consistent in your branding. The most popular brands in the world are recognizable instantly and it may be because of a logo, a slogan, a jingle, anything that makes it unique and separates it from the competition. In building your brand, identify your vision for your brand, define a target audience and start promoting your brand and growing through outreach.

At VamTam, we have worked with a number of clients on branding at different levels. Messages in Metal rebuilt their brand with a new logo and we created a custom design to match it to better fit his brand.

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]]> https://kennbivins.com/promoting-your-business-and-creating-your-brand/feed/ 0 Could Your Business Use the Help of Cooperative Marketing? https://kennbivins.com/could-your-business-use-the-help-of-cooperative-marketing/ https://kennbivins.com/could-your-business-use-the-help-of-cooperative-marketing/#respond Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:22:46 +0000 https://byra.vamtam.com/?p=12448 Louis J. Erickson co-founded the company with me in 2000. We each own 50% of the company. I am the Chief Executive Officer and he is the Chief Operations Officer. Louis and I have been best friends for over 30 years.

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Benefits of Co-Op Marketing

When money is tight, it’s important to exhaust all possible options for your business. Even if your business thrives, there’s nothing to gain but excellence from implementing smart business practices. Cooperative marketing is a way for manufacturers and their retailers/distributors to form a bond of mutual gain. If your business works with a manufacturer, it’s important to consider this as an option. Depending on your sales, your hookup may be willing to literally “hook you up”. Let’s talk about why.

So, you’re probably wondering, “what mutual gain could I find with my manufacturer other than the already in place factor of them providing me with products and me selling them?” Well, it’s an extension of exactly that. With cooperative advertising, your manufacturer will chip in a portion of advertising costs, whether SEO, PPC, or print, and you’ll both benefit from the increase in sales. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your manufacturer will pay for all of your advertising, but, depending on your relationship, it very well could!

Are There Downsides?

Short answer: Yes. In some instances, you’ll be dealing with a manufacturer that has a restrictive program. Although it’s important to factor co-op marketing into your advertising budget, it’s also important to understand that this could limit the style of your advertisement. It’s also possible that your manufacturer won’t chip in as much as you’d like, but hey, free money is free money. Overall, the positives massively outweigh the negatives, which is why this is a prevalent tactic for most retailers in most industries.

What Are My Best Chances?

Cooperative marketing always goes to the retailers that are diligent and communicative. You need to stay on top of your advertising methods in order for this to happen; let’s discuss a few useful tips. For one, you should always be carefully documenting the amount purchased from your supplier. You want them to know that your relationship is truly symbiotic. That means, if you want to try out a new or risky ad, you need to first ask for approval from your manufacturer.

A huge issue, and we cannot stress this enough, is to not tough this out alone. Advertising is an industry in and of itself for a reason; you need professionals to help you. Without their help, you risk utilizing poor tactics and dealing with the fallout. Hot tip: Always keep your business’s name as the focal point of your advertisement. You’re not trying to sell your manufacturer’s products as much as you are your own brand. That way, people will come to your brand for your manufacturer’s products, and the win-win of cooperative marketing will be standing right before your eyes.

If your manufacturer doesn’t have any sort of co-op program, that’s no reason to back away. You can still pitch your campaign; many businesses will be receptive to the idea of further sales. In a way, they’ll still be paying for their own advertising through your business, so don’t hesitate to ask. Lastly, always follow up. Make sure that they know you’re serious about your business; they’ll be less inclined to dish out money to anyone who isn’t actively trying to acquire their help.

What Could I Use It For?

Well, the obvious use would be towards your advertising and any creative expenses. It’s important to consider this an actual factor in your entire marketing plan; you should be including the expenses that you’ll gain through cooperative marketing (when you know what they are) when making advertising decisions.

An obvious choice would be to dive into a hard-hitting SEO or PPC campaign, but that’s not the only option. If you’re considering putting up a billboard, why not find out if your manufacturer will pay for it? Looking to post an ad in a magazine? Contact your supplier. The beauty of co-op advertising is that it’s incredibly versatile, helpful, and will absolutely increase your sales for a smaller price.

Need Help?

Maybe you’re already aware of the benefits of cooperative marketing, but you don’t exactly know where you’d like to put your money. Byra is a digital agency that operates on success, and we’d like to bring that success directly to your business. A fantastic way to spend your suppliers offer is on an aggressive SEO campaign. Once you’ve climbed the ranks in organic search results, you and your manufacturer will see the rise in sales. Byra has the best SEO experts around, as well as content writers that can craft the beautifully written language to promote your brand.

We don’t just focus on SEO; you can utilize us for PPC or even email marketing. No matter what you’re looking to do, Byra works with all things eCommerce. Use our writers to draft a beautiful social media or email campaign, or utilize our PPC experts to drive your products all over the internet through AdWords. With Byra, the possibilities are endless, and with cooperative advertising, all your options just got a lot cheaper! If you’re interested in boosting your sales, contact Byra today.

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