SEO Web Design by BardicMedia.com

Viral Video is all the rage these days, and we’ve blogged a lot recently about how easy it is. It still takes time to produce, edit, and upload video. This week we’ve been bogged down producing some videos to upload… Note to self: REMEMBER to always budget three times the amount of time for new technical processes and projects. The Flip Video Camera we recommend here is truly a breeze, compared to other methods we tried, but it took a few trial and errors before we got the first video uploaded properly. Now it’s got some strange watermark that seems to be added by YouTube.

Before you spend a dime or hours of your time playing with video titles and graphics, READ THIS:  you could have a funny viral video promoting your site on social media spaces like Myspace and Facebook in less than 10 minutes for FREE. If you are in a rush to get your viral promotions going, there’s a cool tool that let’s you start out using videos that someone else produced. This free viral video enhancement tool called BubblePly lets you add your own pictures, text comments, and even clickable hyperlinks overlaid on top of existing videos from popular sites including these: YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Hi5, Blip, Bolt, Break, CNN, CollegeHumor, Comedycentral, Dailymotion, Flix, GoFish, Grindtv, Grouper, ifilm, JibJab, LiberatedFilms, Metacafe, Podtech, ScotVid, Stupidvideos, Travelistic, Virginmedia, Webshots.

The creativity you employ to link your site, blog, product or service to an existing video on one of these sites could create a viral sensation, if done well. For example, maybe you find a really funny video that your customers would forward around because it’s an “inside joke” for people in your niche. Or maybe its a popular “Seinfeld” moment that everyone remembers and can help you bond with your audience around a key problem that your product or service solves. How about that episode with the infamous car stink used to sell a car ionizer air freshener? Linking that in a clever way to your product could inspire others to forward your “ply’ed” version of the video around to colleagues and your viral campaign has begun.

At the bare minimum, you can at least start the process of getting into viral video. Use this tactic to let your visitors show you exactly what they will respond well too, BEFORE you start producing videos. Experiment with different content, styles, and approaches to see which ones bring traffic and conversions. You may save yourself a lot of trial and error, and leave more time for marketing.

When someone enters keywords into their favorite search engine, they are trying to do one of two things:

1) solve a problem
2) answer a question

By “pushing” out content in the form of blogs, podcasts, white-papers, articles, and instructional videos, you “pull” in customers looking for solutions or answers. Buy providing quality free content that helps them with the problem they are looking to solve or question they seek an answer to, you pre-sell yourself or your company. This pulls the prospect closer to you and shortens the decision-making cycle for them to choose to do business with you.

While this is a well-know tactic that many have blogged about before, there is an art to designing campaigns that effectively use this approach to gain permission to continue these conversations in a way that results in increased business. While most businesses can launch a blog themselves, it takes a trained marketing professional or lots of trial and error to leverage the value of these “push” content efforts. The best approach for most businesses is to budget for development of a Web 2.0 marketing strategy by a consultant who has experience with website conversions. Maintaining a blog, podcast, or article series can be very time-consuming, so to get the kind of ROI you have been hearing all the buzz about with these tactics, you need a plan to attract and retain an audience for this communication.

Social networks that are now the backbone of Web2.0 allow your prospects to locate you and your website by the principle of “birds of a feather flock together.” Tags are small clusters of keywords that allow members of these communities to locate others interested in a similar set of subjects to network with, usually by adding people to their list of friends or through groups that share a common interest. If you or your company are well represented on networks like linkedin.com, facebook.com or myspace.com (which one you use most will depend on your industry), then you are also pre-selling by showing who you are associated with. You want to use profiles in these spaces to demonstrate affinity with thought leaders, innovators, and other impressive people and organizations in your industry that help to convey your style of approach to solving problems and finding answers.

Social Media Marketing is the official term for using what has become known as Web2.0 or social media to promote your business. Understanding what this means for your business starts with revisiting how you see the web. One of my favorite books on the evolution of online spaces is Cluetrain Manifesto. It’s where I first began rethinking the web and began to understand that the web is really a set of clustered conversations. Back in 1997 when our small team started designing websites, we saw the web as a series of billboards or brochures, a one-way communication. What Web 2.0 means for your business is the arrival of tools that make it easy to transform your “brochure-ware” or web 1.0 website into a dynamic tool for engaging in a conversation with your community.

The “community” of website visitors you attract is made up not only of your customers and prospects, but also of peers and possible joint venture partners, bloggers, reporters, and other people in a position to influence the opinions of your customers and prospects, and even your suppliers and vendors. You get to start a conversation with them that will not only bring you more business, but it positions you to attract exactly the kind of customers you want to work with the most.

The best practices for font usage on the web are a little different than for print. Although controlling fonts in a web page or blog is more limited and involved than in a page layout program, there’s a lot you can do to make your text layout look good.

For most purposes on the web, you’ll use sans-serif fonts. Sans-serif fonts for the body of your articles is probably the best way to go, since these are the easiest to read, especially those like Verdana which were designed for the screen.

Serif fonts can be used in the right size and color. The Washington Post uses a serif font to good effect for their main articles, giving the site a classy, serious look, but notice how everything else on the page is sans-serif. This keeps the page looking clean. Another use of serifs is to turn the print design maxim: ‘Serif for body text, Sans-serif for headers’ on it’s head. Since we’re already using sans-serif for body text, try a tasteful use of serif for headers, subheaders, or pull quotes.

Capitalization, small caps or title case can help make headers stand out when using the same font for both headers and text. Define the capitalization and font-weight in your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS.) Other cool font tricks include bolding a smaller font size for mini sub-headers and captions, and highlighting key words and phrases within an article to help the reader – just create a span class in CSS using font-weight or color. If you want spacing between paragraphs, don’t just add an extra return, define a top-margin in the paragraph tag in the style sheet. Alternating line-spacing for different sections, different information types and for navigation can make things clearer too, as can plenty of white space.

Avoid using too many text graphics for headers just to get to use a fancy fonts – search engines can’t see them. This goes for navigation, too. Those sexy roll-over nav-items with changing color graphics aren’t really helping anything, and there are some cool effects in CSS to achieve a similar purpose. Just be careful, don’t overdo it. Remember, keep it appropriate to the subject. If you’re a realtor you might not need to get too fancy with fonts, but if you’re a rock band, go for it.

Click here to learn more about using Cascading Style Sheets to control fonts in web pages.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have become the industry standard for controlling the appearance of fonts.

Think of CSS as a control panel for all the fonts on an entire web site. CSS allows you to quickly change fonts, colors and other attributes globally. Not only can you create a more custom look and feel, even in wordpress templates, but your pages will load faster. The cleaner code in your html page – minus all those font tags – is easier to work with.

You can learn the basic of CSS in the book “CSS: The Definitive Guide,” published by O’Rielly or try out an online web design class. www.killerwebdesigncourse.com is a course that does a thorough job of covering what you need to know.

A good visual editing program for writing clean CSS code which will validate is Top Style Pro. There’s a free trial version for the PC on their website.

Fonts for the web can be a scary subject, but the best design practices are really pretty simple.

First, you should be using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) in your web pages. Believe me, your life will be better for it.

When starting a project, figure out what you want the page to look like in a graphics program with good type tools. Photoshop will do. Determine what font colors, header sizes, line-height, paragraph-spacing and other attributes will look good for the type of web site. Once you know what you want, redefine the paragraph and header tags in your Cascading Style Sheet to recreate your design. Set the font to what you want, but give several choices, because not all fonts are loaded on every computer. For example: p { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } lets the browser choose which font to supply based on the user’s system. Now that you’ve redefined the tag, you can specify the font family, color, size, line-height – even letter spacing and margins – for your default paragraph in all your pages, before ever having to create custom styles.

Use only web-safe fonts. This limits your options, but also limits the damage you can do. Be creative with less and you’ll have a nicer final product.

Click here to learn more about best practices for font usage in web design.