Martin Mustafa is the owner of new Massage Business “Well…” Create Design Studio provided him with Graphic Design services for his publicity postcards, a pop-up banner and we designed his logo. Here is what he had to say about the experience of working with us:

“Upon a friends recommendation I had the pleasure of working with Charlotte and David from Create Design Studio. 

I was very impressed from the initial telephone conversations to the outline meeting and subsequent draft designs.

In all matters my vision was taken in to account and the designs were fantastic and went beyond my expectations. I can wholeheartedly recommend the team at Create Design Studio and would not hesitate in using them again.”

Create Design Studio are committed to making a success of your project, whether it is a website design, brochure, flyer or branding suite. By understanding your customers and your needs we come up with individual solutions at the right price. Please contact David and Charlotte from Create Design Studio on 01962 737989.

A common mistake that many business owners make is to pigeon hole their website under IT. In actual fact designing a successful and profitable website has very little to do with IT,  today web design is about good old sales and marketing, IT just makes a website run NOT sell.

Learn to think of your website as more than just code and make the most of the potential of the web to find customers and make sales.

Is your website working effectively to grow your business?

A great website is like a salesman working 24/7 on your company’s behalf: always providing information and reassurance to customers who are looking for goods or services. Making your website more effective means:

• helping visitors to find you easily,
• getting visitors to stay longer once they arrive,
• making visitors more likely to initiate contact or leave their details with you,
• and, reassuring visitors to make them more likely to buy from you

Finding your site:
Search engine optimisation means using keywords, meta tags and including appropriate text on your site pages to enable searches to identify your website as a good match. Use Google Analytics to find information on what customers are really looking at on your site and to identify pages that are working well and ones that aren’t. Always promote your site in any way you can. Use online directories, referrals and reciprocal links to publicise it and add your URL to social networking profiles or business networking websites to increase your chances of being found.

Getting visitors to stay:
is all about relevant, interesting and useful content on your website, for driving sales nothing beats finding exactly what you are looking for online. Try to understand what motivates your customers to buy your product or service and orientate your content towards it. If your site is easy to use well designed and has great content it will encourage longer visits as people browse the pages. Try to use appropriate imagery to represent what you do and the kind of customers who buy from you so that visitors can feel that they ‘belong’. Get a neutral third party to test drive your site and tell you if it is easy to use and easy to find your contact details and easy to make a purchase. This exercise often reveals problems we would not spot on our own.

Get in touch:
Provide articles and newsletters in exchange for email addresses so you can contact visitors who are already interested in your site and contact them with relevant information on a regular basis. Make sure your contact details are clear and concise and easy to find on every page so that visitors can call, email or fill out a form to make contact, include your Twitter or social networking details so that visitors can make contact in a way that suits them.

By demonstrating your skills and expertise and providing plenty of relevant information on your service or product, orientated towards what your customers want and keeping in touch with them you are giving yourself the best chance to make sales from your website.

Keep in touch with your customers and benefit your business by generating more enquiries and leads to get more sales

Email-newsletters allow you to keep in touch regularly and cheaply with your customers. Publicise company news, useful information and details of your services straight to interested customers. A newsletter to customers puts your contact details into their in-box regularly and builds confidence in your abilities. By keeping in regular contact with your customers you can receive prompt feedback on your offers and gauge which ones will be successful in future.

Show your clients what you can do for them using a blog

Blogs are websites that you can update yourself by writing your own articles. Visitors can post comments back and ask questions, so a blog is a truly interactive website.

The software is free and it functions like a content managed website so you can amend your articles or add to them when you like. Update your technical information, product ranges or services and publicise company news and events quickly and easily.

Blogs are great if you are an expert because you can build up a comprehensive collection of your knowledge online, share it with others and get feedback or share ideas with your readers. You may have picked up ideas, expertise and ways of working that you could share with others. Your customers may want to know that you are an expert before they will buy.

A lot of our clients use them for business blogging, building up confidence in their readers that helps them to make contact and eventually make a purchase.

Don’t forget old fashioned promotion of your website, newsletter and your blog

Using your business cards, stationery, invoices, brochures and flyers. When you are networking, direct marketing and attending exhibitions ensure your URLs are at customer’s fingertips. Direct marketing will drive customers to your sites where you can give them more information to help them decide to buy.

Social networking isn’t just for students, use it to promote your online activities

Whenever you update your website, write a newsletter or post a blog article promote it on Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook and any other social networking or business networking sites you belong to and help people to find quality content online.

Think connections and always try to direct people towards helpful, useful or interesting content on your website, blog or newsletter.

Create Design Studio can help you to plan your website, design your website and build the pages. Call David Woodroofe and Charlotte Lamb on 01962 737989.

Come and visit us on the MBG stand where we will have some of these liitle gems for those of you who sign up to receive our e-newsletter.

Mmmm, tasty cakes!

Come on, you know you want one!

The Expo is at The Lights Theatre in Andover from 10am to 5pm on March 17th. Visit their website.

Our latest website for Venta UK: a local company who specialise in sales of safety lighting and equipment for all types of vehicle, but especially for the emergency services. This showcase of the wide range of products available from the company needed to be flexible enough to allow them to include detailed product information and photographs as well as information on their bespoke services.

Venta UK Website

The website needed to reflect the professional nature of the company and subtle enough to allow their product photos to take centre stage. Helping customers to find what they are searching for easily was addressed in their comprehensive system of menus.

To visit the Venta UK website please click here.

Create Design Studio are specialists in all aspects of new media marketing for small to medium sized businesses. If you would like to talk about your website please call us on 01962 737989 and speak to David or Charlotte.

The three simplest methods are to save your logo as either a JPEG, GIF or PNG file. GIF and PNG files can be saved without a background colour, but a GIF file is limited to only 256 colours, so logos with gradients or soft shadows may appear with bands rather than smooth gradients or shadows.

JPEG files do not have such a low limit on the number of colours they can contain, hence why they are the format of choice for photographs, but JPEGs cannot be saved with a transparent background.

Recent versions of PowerPoint, 2000 and newer, have a picture editing tool to allow you to set a single colour in an image to be transparent, so you can use this tool to remove the background colour of your logo. However it does not always produce satisfactory results with complex logos and you should also be aware that if the selected colour appears as part of your logo’s design it will be made transparent along with the background.

A little used format is WMF (Windows Meta File), unlike JPEG, GIF and PNG which are raster files (i.e. the files contain information about individual pixels), WMF is a vector file (stores information about objects e.g. circles, squares etc). When it comes to logos the WMF file three big advantages over the other formats:

1. Logos imported into PowerPoint as WMF can be resized without any loss in quality.
2. They have transparent backgrounds.
3. WMF files tend to be smaller than JPEG and PNG files.

Saving your logo as a Windows Meta File (WMF)

You cannot convert a JPEG, GIF or PNG into a WMF file, so you will need to go back to the original source file of your logo, provided that it was created in a package such as Adobe Illustrator or Freehand, you or your designer should be able to resave your logo as a Windows Meta File.

When saving your logo as a Windows Meta File, make sure you use the option to “save text as curves”, this will avoid any problems with non-standard system fonts that were used as part of your logo’s design.

Give it ago, having your logo in PowerPoint as a Windows Meta File (WMF) makes it much easier to use and gives you more flexibility when designing your presentations.

Check out the website www.soundsnap.com as it contains over 100,000 MP3 and Wav files arranged in a host of categories including animals, industrial, multimedia and sports.

You can sign up for free and download 5 clips per month, there are also various paid membership levels, with the top level offering unlimited monthly downloads.

These are ideal clips for your website or PowerPoint presentation.

There is a theory that colour can have an effect on how we behave and affect our mood. Red is associated with danger, or excitement, and is supposed to raise our heart-rate. There are also those who believe this effect can be harnessed by sports-people who wear red to compete, think of Michael Schumacher in his red Ferrari, and the Chinese athletes wearing red vests at the Olympics.

It’s not just in sport that this effect may be at work, the colours used by companies in their logo, their brochure and on their website can be used to help reinforce their company’s personality to their customers.

Opposite to red is the calming presence of blue, and energising shades of green are supposed to remind us of the natural world. Yellow is warm and optimistic and reminds us of the rays of the sun in a similar way to orange, a vibrant colour with a tropical mood. Black and grey are sophisticated and often used with technological implications.

Because we may associate these colours with certain moods sub-consciously it can be useful to carefully consider the colours you use on the materials you use for your business. It may be better to use red prominently on your PowerPoint slides if you happen to sell safety equipment than if you run a health spa, in which case perhaps blue or green might be wise.

If you want to create the right impression with any of your marketing materials then call I to Eye on 01962 737989 and we’ll make sure they get your message across to your customers.

Many presenters make the mistake of believing that their PowerPoint is their presentation.

The truth is that people buy from people and not from PowerPoint presentations, this holds true if you are selling a product, service or ideas to colleagues.

A strange thing for PowerPoint presentation designers to say you may think, surely we should be encouraging presenters to have bigger and more flashy presentations.

A PowerPoint presentation should be used as an aid to support a presenter not as a presentation.

So why use PowerPoint?

Used correctly PowerPoint will help a presenter communicate information and ideas, it is brilliant at explaining figures and trends, as well as focusing attention and giving emphasis to topics and points.

Include still photographs of products, facilities or offices, but be careful how you use video. Don’t use it as a substitute presenter. 

If your pitch is your PowerPoint

Then do your audience a favour and just email them your slides, the out come will be the same.

Your presentation plays back OK on your PC, but now that you have burnt it on to CD the video/audio clips no longer play. 

When you import video or audio clips into PowerPoint it just creates links from your presentation to the video/audio files. It is really important that when you burn your presentation to CD-ROM that you also burn the video/audio files on to the CD as well and that their relative postion to your PowerPoint file remains unchanged, otherwise the PowerPoint file will look for the video/audio files in the wrong place.

The easiest way to achieve this is prior to creating your presentation collect together in one folder all the video and audio files you are going to use. Then create your PowerPoint presentation in the same folder. 

When you come to burn the presentation to CD-ROM, burn the folder’s complete contents on to the CD, in that way your PowerPoint presentation will retain its relative position to your media clips and hence will know where to find them.

JPEG is fine for most presentation requirements, provided that the compression is not to high when the JPEG file is made.

If your images are large and paint up slowly on the screen try saving them as PNG files, they should then paint up quicker than JPEG files, but the overall size of your PowerPoint presentation file may be larger.

You should ensure that all bitmap images (i.e. scans etc.) are saved as RGB format files, rather than CYMK. This simply means that the colour information in your image is made up from RED, GREEN and BLUE (RGB) rather than CYAN, MAGENTA, YELLOW and BLACK (CYMK). Computer screens and  projectors all build up images using RGB, however colour printers tend to use CYMK to reproduce colour images.