centre{source}

You know what I am talking about - all those email lists you have signed up for but you never read them. You even have a separate email account just for that. You had to get those offers for that weekend trip to Las Vegas you will never have enough time to go to or for some reason you wanted to get alerts when a friend posts a survey on your Facebook page as it happens.

Continue reading "No it’s not personal but at least its not spam"...

I’ve seen this a few too many times now – a business starts talking about interactive strategy. They become convinced that they need to do more with the web to leverage the power of their brand and find new customers. (Yes!) They start to understand that people are starting to spend more of their free time on the web than in front of most other media. (Bingo!) They learn that people are more familiar with how to use a search engine than they ever were with setting a VCR clock. (Huzzah!)But then we start talking interactive: using social networking, integrating with social media, optimizing for universal search, utilizing web productivity tools. You know, the fun stuff. The homeruns. The exciting fresh kind of ideas. And we start seeing some eyes glaze over, and that hesitant “Now what is Twitter again?” question.

Continue reading "Ready for Interactive? Take a Tour 2.0"...

Pay per click, cost per impression, return of investment(ROI), and conversion rates are some typical buzzwords you will hear while devising an online advertising strategy. Add Click-to-Donate to that list. This is not new but a reemerging trend from the late 1990s. Click-to-donate provide users the ability to give back to the cause of their choice.

Advertiser’s can reap the benefits from creating positively associated relationships. These relationships create and appease the social awareness that prospective consumer may be looking for. The hard part is what goes on in the boardroom where these advertising/marketing decisions are made. “How much are we spending and What is our ROI?” These questions arise from the lack of concrete returns.

Continue reading "Click-to-Donate"...

One of the most difficult things for me is color coordination. Picking the right color combinations for the right task or job at hand is not all just having a good eye. You can mathematically get the right color sets. If you are not a designer this can be daunting and can make your application or website be a complete flop. I know a few online sites such as http://www.colormatch.dk and http://colorblender.com can help you make the right choices. I wanted to throw a spotlight on Adobe Kuler. It has a variety of delivery methods to the user. An Adobe Air application, a Mac OS X widget and http://kuler.adobe.com are all available. The website provides an image upload where color combinations whether it be analogous to complimentary colors. Upon arriving at the right color theme set it will give you a full complement of HSV, RGB, CMYK, LAB, and HEX information. The widget and Adobe Air application are both great for viewing and downloading user created themes.

Content is king, right?It takes great content to both 1) optimize your website for high organic rankings on search engines, and 2) communicate the concept and benefit of your business to your web traffic.

Great content is keyword-focused, frequent, and direct. It’s also brief – probably even more brief than you’d want to assume.

This study on web usability highlights some startling facts for those long-winded writers among us (myself included):

Continue reading "Writing Content? Think Brief."...

• Users tend to spend a baseline of about 25 seconds on your page if they’re actually reading content. In that 25 seconds, they’re reading about 104 words.

We’re proud to say that centre{source} was named as one of the ten most dependable web design firms in the southern US in the April 2008 issue of Entrepreneur magazine! This is our second year to be selected in this list, which is compiled by Goldline Research.

We always strive for excellence in delivering results to our client, and we’re thrilled to be recognized for our work.