All businesses need a website these days to survive. The internet is essential for all business transactions. Building a website, however, isn’t enough. That’s because there are so many sites on the internet. You need to learn how to drive traffic to your website if you want to survive. You can’t however just concentrate on getting visitors to your site. You need to make sure that you keep visitors on your website too. Continue reading
AuthorLiz
Using VistaPrint for Customised Promotional Items
If you have a brand already and a professional logo has been designed for your company brand but you have grown tired of the usual printed media methods such as a plan business card, flyers, online or via billboards, as well as their overall costs. Then a good solution for your business is to use VistaPrint to create customised promotional Items featuring your design.
They have affordable rates and the more quantities you buy from them per order the greater the discounts, and you most likely will get free shipping over a certain order amount.
Once you have uploaded your logo, and/or design you can then have that printed on mugs for use around the office (or to give out to customers), pens to hand out to customers instead of boring business cards, and a wide range of other promotional items that may enable your business to stand out from the rest, as it boasts your company logo, and/or design.
Designing a WebSite Using a WordPress Theme
If you are a web designer who has dabbled in a bit of web programming or web development, as you have designed and built a few sites. You may have found it to be a bit time consuming and effort consuming using the same approach for larger sites, when working with the small non-eCommerce sites where your project is for a simple website or web blog, when a simpler solution is required.
If this is the case then considering using WordPress as your content management system, and create a custom designed theme using the underscores theme frame work as a base to build your’re theme on.
This way you don’t have to worry too much about the heavier programming as most of the work has been done for you with the CMS, and as it’s not an eCommerce site it won’t need the extra functionality weighing it down.
Underscores is a lightweight frame work that literally gives you a blank design campus to work from but includes all the CMS functionality required for the site to work well.
What is Concept Design?
Concept design is part of the overall design process, which can take you through from brainstorming ideas to manufacture. As with all parts of the wider process, concept design is integral in shaping the finished product and allowing designers to communicate their ideas with customers or investors. It allows a new product’s potential to be fully considered.
Many people would consider concept design to be one of the most creative parts of the process. It involves establishing the new product’s purpose by working out the problems that the product will solve. Often, this part of the process is highly collaborative and will involve making mind maps and putting together lots of notes and ideas before proceeding.
Once an initial concept has been decided upon, it’s time to come up with something more concrete. The next step of concept design will involve fully rendered images that are complete and ready to be showcased to the customer/ investor. These will look at the product from many different angles and consider its full functionality.
To conclude, concept design is essentially the widest view. It is coming up with ideas, and beginning the process of making them into a reality.
Why You Need a Solid Design Strategy
All good designs start with a good strategy. It’s the first stage of producing an excellent product that has everything it needs behind it to succeed. If you don’t plan properly from the very beginning, you can run into all kinds of problems with legalities and copyright as well as with the design itself.
The first stage of a design strategy is to evaluate the design plans. This is vital to the overall success of your product. This is the stage at which you will be able to investigate similar products and carry out your market research. This will show you how unique and innovative your product is and will give you a good idea of whether or not it could succeed in the current environment.
Following this, the next stage is essentially about coming up with initial concepts and ideas. It’s like a brainstorming process – it will give you the opportunity to formulate ideas and to begin to form some more in-depth plans. Do remember that nothing is set in stone and it can always be changed. However, it’s important to have plenty of ideas to fall back on and to have clear strategies underpinning all of your plans.
Even if you know your products and individual market inside out, it’s important to call on a professional design agency when initially planning out any designs. They will be able to help you formulate a strategy that has everything it needs to succeed. They can provide professional advice regarding your initial ideas and concepts from a strategic point of view.