As users become accustomed to more and more interactivity—with smart phones, tablets, advanced web designs, and more—we need to provide more and more interactivity on websites and blogs. Especially for business, and even if our clients have not thought of it yet.

Business communication used to be a one-way street. Companies made announcements, ran ads, released news. Customers waited to be persuaded. Or sold. Not anymore.

Interactivity is now essential for business websites. It has been especially important for consumer confidence in new technology such as home banking.

Consequently live chat features have become a standard for ecommerce sites to make connections with site visitors. And LivePerson, which has been around since 1995, provides the most comprehensive live chat software for business.

As the first company to make chat an active sales tool, LivePerson is a chat technology innovator. In fact, they lead customer relationship technology with chat software that includes a behavioral targeting engine to give the customer a convincing, effective, and pleasant experience.

LivePerson has live chat solutions for all kinds of sites. They offer good-looking graphics and specialized products for all kinds of businesses and customers. This is top of the line chat that increases sales, because customers like it.

That means that as blog designers, we need to recommend it to our clients and incorporate it in the sites we build.

Here are 7 tips from a former advertising account exec and PR pro:

1. Hire a Graphic Designer Who Specializes in What You Need

Do not cheap out by letting your child, your draftsman, or your brother the “artist” try to design a logo for you. Logo design is important, and it requires professional skills and knowledge.

Find a real graphic designer who specializes in logos and has a good, varied portfolio. Make sure you like the artist’s work. That may seem obvious, but clients forget it sometimes.

The only other alternative to that is to use a logo design competition. If you do that, remember, all the rest of these tips still apply, especially tip number 2.

A logo will be with you for a long time. So make sure it is a good one that fits your business and represents it well.

2. Prepare Yourself. Then Brief the Artist Well

Think, think, think. Look at the logos of your competitors and of big corporations in your field. What do they have in common? What makes them appeal to customers in your market?

Sit down and write down attributes the logo must convey about your business. For example, a maid service should look clean and friendly. A food logo should be appetizing. And so on.

3. Focus on What Your Logo Needs to Convey

Do not try to convey too many things in one logo. You may be the biggest patriot, a veteran, born on the Fourth of July, but that does not need to go into your logo, and the red-white-and-blue color scheme could be counterproductive. Let the artist  come up with colors.

4. Keep in Mind All the Ways a Logo Is Used.

Remember that your log should be used everywhere—on stationery, invoices, business cards—not just on your blog or website. So it needs to be designed by a pro to scale well (large or small) and to print well—not just show up well on line.

This is where your teenage cousin is likely to let you down. They won’t know how to do that.

5. Be Original.

Do not copy or even sort of imitate any other logo. Aside from legal issues, patterning your logo after another company’s logo can cause problems. If they are well known, you lose recognition for your business, because people will automatically think of theirs instead. Plus, it looks amateurish. That reflects badly on your business.

6. Stay Away from Fads.

Orange or purple or blue-and-yellow may be hot stuff this year, but in a couple of years, a faddish color scheme will make your business look dated, out of touch, even tacky.

7. Decide Carefully, but Do Not Dither.

If you have hired a good artist, thought through exactly what you are trying to convey about your business, and then sat down and explained that to your artist, the first few designs will likely be the best. Do not think that if you keep asking for more and more variations, the designs will get better and better.

If the first group of designs does not include at least a couple of winners, you have either hired the wrong artist or not briefed him/her properly—or both. If you cannot make a decision, it may be because you have not prepared yourself and the artist properly.

In that case, discuss your needs and hopes for the logo again, to make sure you and the artist are on the same page. If you are, then make a decision and stick to it.

Serious, subtle, creatively styled eyeglasses.

Festive? Fun? Or tired and bleary-eyed?

If you have been procrastinating about replacing lost glasses or about filling new prescriptions, go ahead and get them.

Working on line can be very tiring for the eyes. Taking good care of your eyes makes your blog design work easier and ultimately less time-consuming.

multicolored eyeglass frames say "I'm a creative person. I love to have fun!"

While you are at it, why not get some cheap, fun holiday-themed eyeglasses?

You can have spare glasses handy, amuse friends and clients, and enjoy a change just for fun.

Why not try red frames for Christmas, green for Yule, blue for Hanukkah, yellow, green or orange for Kwanzaa, and multicolor for New Years, Mardi Gras, and Chinese New Year? Imagine the possibilities.

To buy high-quality, stylish glasses inexpensively, you can buy them on line, direct from the manufacturer. ZENNI glasses, for example, are sold only on line, relying on word of mouth from happy customers instead of mall stores and advertising. So you can easily afford to buy different styles for different occasions.

Glasses can be a fashion statement, from casual to formal. They can also be used to create a signature look. Wear your favorite holiday colors, and your clients, friends and family will look forward to seeing what you come up with for each holiday.

Imagine the possibilities for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Juneteenth, Fourth of July, Halloween….See what I mean?

Stylish glasses can still be classic with just touch of extra color.

Eyeglasses are a necessity, but there is no reason not to also have fun with them. Be memorable. Be original. Show your creativity wherever you go. Be your own brand. But most of all, have fun with color and style. And now you can.

Take a look at ZenniOptical.com and then come back and comment to share your suggestions for holiday glasses styles. Tell us which ones you chose, and why.

Of course, they have a huge selection of classic styles, too. You can always just buy a pair or two for yourself and use the savings to buy your holiday gifts for others. We’ll never tell.

New in paperback, The Typography Workbook provides an at-a-glance reference book for designers on all aspects of type.The book is part of Rockport’s popular Workbook series of practical and inspirational workbooks that cover all the fundamental areas of the graphic design business. This book presents an abundance of information on type – the cornerstone of graphic design – succinctly and to the point, so that designers can get the information they need quickly and easily.Whereas many other books

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ANALOGOUS COLOR SCHEME Image via Wikipedia

Many of us have an almost childlike desire to have ideas judged on their own merits rather than on their presentation. We imagine it would be nice if every idea could be heard out for the validity of its claims instead of judged by the merits or flaws of the messenger.

But in practice, none of us actually believes this. When is the last time you actually appreciated the look of a spinning .gif? Has Comic Sans font actually ever made you stop and look more closely at an article? Can you honestly say that a mingled mash of very bright colors doesn’t put you off of a website?

All right, so these are perhaps extreme examples, but they do illustrate the point that appearance is still considered important.

And not all examples are so cut and dried; sometimes the text is just too small and poorly spaced to read properly, the lack of pictures makes a site too text-dense, the color tone is just subtly off in a way that looks unpleasant and drives off potential readers or all the images and videos are on the front page, making it take excessively long to load.

Paying attention to appearance and to some basic web and blog design elements can make the visit to your blog more enjoyable for your audience and help you retain those vital traffic numbers.

First, the Background

The website your blog is on should adhere to some basic web design principles. After all, you don’t want people to click away from an unappealing site before they get to your life-changing content, do you?

First, pick a reasonable color scheme. Sharply contrasting tones are a good start. Black text on a white background is highly visible, if a bit dull, and can be seen as a reliable standby.

Background colors should be in shades complimentary to the primary tones. Consider the default settings of the WordPress site, for example. The primary fields are white, with other colors in grays and pale blues that compliment the overall look but still subtly convey a sense of where everything is. Important functions such as social media sharing tabs, links and scroll bars are in more vivid blues to easily set them apart.

Keep special touches to a minimum. Simple effects are nice, such as a straightforward and brief fade-in for your text. If, on the other hand, every single word has to fly in letter by letter with a cute sound effect, you may lose some audiences to impatience.

If you must include effects, make them simple and integrated rather than attention grabbing. Also, keep sizes reasonably large for ease of sight, but not so big they would require a lot of scrolling on the average notebook computer.

Blog Design, Front and Center

There are many ways to organize the content of a blog, but, as always, using a few best principles will help you get the most out of your content.

First, remember that the goal of the blog is to convey information. It cannot do that buried in back pages, so whether your blog is the whole site or a part of a larger site, pertinent information must be on the front page, prominently displayed. The headlines should be links into the body of the articles, and of a size that makes them easy to pay attention to without overwhelming the page with absurdly large text.

One key is to make liberal use of the “more” function. Also called a jumpcut, this is essentially a trick similar to the way news shows keep peoples’ attention throughout the broadcast.

The front page of the site should have a number of very small posts, consisting of the blog headline, a few lines or a paragraph of introductory text, and then a tab that says “more,” “keep reading” or something of that nature. The rest of the article content is accessed behind this link.

The jumpcut is a good tool because it allows you to show a great deal of content that is easy to browse. Use the newspaper-writing trick of getting a short summary of your article out in front of people so they can quickly decide which articles to follow.

Putting the whole article on the front page stretches it out needlessly and makes it harder to scroll through and select articles of quality, particularly for new readers coming to your blog after it’s been around a while.

Finally, make sure it’s easy to navigate your blog content. Each blog should be tagged by content, and there must be a panel to navigate articles by tags.

These tags are a great place to integrate SEO keywords, by the way – choose tags that are trending high in adwords if you can. There should be a best-of panel showing favorite or highly popular blog posts as well as a search function.

As ever, engage in good linking practices as well, with links to other blogs that are relevant to the content you provide, prominently-displayed but not particularly large. Keep it to five or six links you feel are particularly relevant, with a short summary on each.

Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.Brandsplat.com or visit our blog at http://www.ibrandcasting.com
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Blogs are the hottest form of marketing both for personal and business areas. If you are interested in starting a blog design service and working with companies you should consider the following failures when it comes to business blogs.

First and foremost a good blog has to have awesome headlines. This is the first thing people see and read. Without a great headline why would people stop and read what you have to say. In addition bad headlines effect how well search engines are able to find your blog.

After all if no one can find the blog there is not much point in starting a blog design service. The important part of a blog is to make sure that you just give the reader a sneak peak of what is to come. This way you peak curiosity and you can continue to get visits to your blog.

Make sure your blog entries are full of links. This is essential to starting a blog design service because this is how you make your money. People click on your links and you get money for each click your visitors make. It is important to not just underline the link but you might also want to add something like “click here now!” for added attention.

Links are often missed because the visitor is too busy reading. Remember to let the reader know what they will get when they click on the link. If you are starting a blog design service make sure you keep in mind navigation.

Most blog sites have awful navigation and it is truly difficult to find your way to past blog entries. Calendars are a great way to solve this problem but 50% of the time they do not work. This is why in blog design you make sure that navigation works flawlessly.

Remember that if a visitor can not easily more around your blog they will leave out of sheer frustration. There is no reason for them to stick around after all there are millions of other choices out there for them.

You might want consider having a sidebar which lists all the links and also the archives. That way a visitor can easily access all the content on the blog web site.

Starting a blog design service is no easy task but for the right individual. It is a great way to earn extra money and use their creative side.

Dustin Cannon is owner of Niche Article Club and writes on a variety of subjects related to home business. To learn more about home business Dustin recommends that you visit: WarrenSmith.ws
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The reason is most blogs are designed without considering the finer design aspects which lead to a better reading and social experience. Free themes for changing a blogs “skin” can be easily applied with just a click of the mouse.  But how does one decide if the theme is right for your blog?

Themes, fonts and colors: The theme design and color scheme is imperative to make that vital first impression on your readers. Any blog post that comes with an image as part of the theme design enables readers to easily relate to what the author is writing about. For example, an attorney’s blog with a black and white theme design looks professional up front.

Navigation: A sidebar with menus, buttons and search options makes it easier to search through the various posts. Providing links to your popular blog posts on the home page enables you to highlight your best. Similarly, an inter-page linking format helps readers to easily browse through your earlier posts. This provides convenience to readers as well as better search engine rankings.

Call-to-action: The call-to-action feature needs to be prominent on each page of your blog. Make the process as simple as possible asking for just an email ID with the assurance that it won’t be given out at any cost.

Personalize:  The comments section can be more personalized by adding avatars which have shown to encourage discussions. Authors can make their presence felt with a creative rendering of their name. A blog with one’s logo further adds to its uniqueness especially if you are dealing with a niche audience.

Archives: A blog cannot be complete without an archives section. Readers almost always check the archives section for older posts if they find your current posts interesting and relevant.

Go viral:  And last but not the least offer plenty of social media options from Facebook and Twitter to Digg, Delicious and other bookmarking options on your blog. Also have a share option that lets readers mail any blog posts they like directly to friends. There is nothing like social media to make your blog viral in no time. A “share” link along with a subscribe option in the footer section serves as a perfect way to round off a great blog post.

Jane Cooke writes for Dharne & Co, a website design firm, about ways to make your blog more result oriented. Visit us at Dharne & Co for blog design services with custom WordPress themes and templates.
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When creating a blog this is generally the very first step, and one that needs to be done with careful consideration. This is especially true if blogging to make money is your goal. Funny isn’t it how when money gets involved things always turn more serious!

Looking around the internet landscape it is usually easy to determine quickly whether a particular blogging site you landed on is intent on earning an income. What you may also come to realize is that there are basically 3 different blog designs people use for this purpose. These designs reflect the persons approach as much as they do their personalities as a whole and here they are:

Plain

A ‘plain’ or text oriented blog indicates a focused on its content. Conveying the intended message clearly to readers is more easily accomplished with this approach. Fewer distractions or opportunities for misinterpretation are present thereby allowing for more focus on the information presented. If this is a site that is blogging to make money it is usually a safe bet that its intentions with the content is to teach.

Multiple Monetization Tactics

Obviously a very clear intention of this type of site is to earn an income and could also signal to readers that they are not the focal point. When creating a blog whether to make money or otherwise the success of the site is based upon maintaining reader satisfaction. Having a site with many monetization tactics employed could be distracting to visitors with the net result that they leave to never return. This could mean that it will take more time to build a loyal readership with such a layout.

Extensive Multi-Media Use

It draws a crowd but might also indicate a lack of focus if you are not careful. Content is content no matter what type you use, but the use of video, although entertaining could also distract from your message. It is often common for this particular medium to veer from the original point or intention of what it is presenting. Social media techniques utilized on a blogging site can be very effective as long as a laser like focus is maintained on the content presented.

Your blog design is usually a fairly good indication of what you intend to do with your site and how you intend to do it. When creating a blog this step is usually the very first one and it does allow you to be creative, which makes it enjoyable as well. Your next step will be putting together your blog layout and if you are blogging to make money your layout will be critical. When you survey many of the sites online created for the sake of earning an income you will realize their designs fall into 3 basic categories. These ‘categories’ as reviewed above do a fair job of reflecting not only the individuals monetary intentions but also their personalities as well. Be able to ‘profile’ a site in this manner may be helpful in your determination as to whether it would be something of interest to you.

TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina. To learn more about choosing the blog design that fits you best and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques simply visit:http://blogbrawn.com/
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Do not Put down Basic Styles

Writers who blog aspire their design to stand out, so they either compose or attain a design that has fascinating colors. This might be fantastic, but if you disarray your blog with flash files or complex navigation, how else can you let your visitor find to your content?

You wish your homepage to be your blog posts. Try to do away with splash pages which introduce your site, on account of readers crave to begin reading. The problem with splash pages is that they give out an idea of your blog in advance of the visitor even beginning to look at the content.

If they think the splash page is not worth their time, they will close your blog even prior to they learn from your educational content. You crave your visitors to stay absorbed to your blog, so you need make things accommodating for them even if your style is simple.

Construct Your Blog Design Convenient

Construct genuine to use the crucial features such as archives link or search fields to assist your readers without difficulty look at more of your blog. User friendly blogs tend to acquire more traffic as compared with those which tuck away their contact links.

This also means that you ought to not place your RSS feeds or subscription links hidden at the bottom. Build your blog configuration available by readers so they are capable to keep coming back. Place all the substantial knowledge at the top so once they get in your blog, they may easily get these things if they prefer to come back.

A convenient blog design works on getting the reader what they long. The navigation can easily be understood and with one click, they are capable to contact you. Make for a fact that your links are direct. Do not put a separate page which links to your additional education. Keep them on the header.

Blogs are very flexible because they may fit your interests. Your writing is your essential fuel, but your design can also generate or even break your blog. You ought to consider making your style foundational, because it can save you excess load times and confusion when looking for the content. Most importantly, a convenient blog style provides your readers things they want easily which is definitely information.

Check out this author’s just completed website Dallas Dumpster Rental which provides dumpster rentals in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
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Image via Wikipedia

If, like many bloggers, you started out using a free hosting platform, there may come a time when you want the increased flexibility of a self-hosted paid platform.

The question many bloggers ask is: “Which blogging platform is the right one for my needs?” but the answer may be far from simple.

For a start there will rarely be just the one best platform for you to choose but you will often be confronted with a range of options which could fit the bill.

It may be that  you just want to  avoid some of the restrictions associated with your previous free blog such as limits over they type of content you can publish or restrictions on placing adverts on the blog.

If that is your only concern then you may not be too fussy about your new platform and your only consideration may be how easy it is to transfer your old blog to the new host.

However if you are going to the trouble of changing blogging platform then you may want to give the matter a little more serious thought because you don’t want to keep changing your blogging host every couple of months. Ideally you want to move from free to paid provider and then stick with that new host for many years to come.

Therefore before you take the plunge and switch providers you may want to ask yourself the following questions:

* What do I want to achieve from my new blog?

* What features do I require that I don’t currently have?

* Do I need a blogging platform that is simple to operate or one which is more complicated but allows me greater flexibility?

* Can I choose different blogging templates to give my blog a certain ‘look and feel’ to fit in with my subject area?

* Do I need the flexibility to create a professional looking unique blog with all the latest bells, whistles and functions?

* Can I integrate my blog with a ‘lead capture’ form to link to my autoresponder?

* Can I add video and custom graphics and, if so, how easy is it to do so?

In fact once you sit down and work out exactly what you want from your blog you will find your own list of questions and you can then come up with a list of ‘must have’ features for your new blogging platform. You might also have another list of options which would be nice to have but which are not essential and knowing what you want will be key to choosing the most suitable platform for your needs.

In the end it will most likely come down to a compromise between flexibility and ease of use and the system you opt for will often be the one that ‘feels right’ for your needs. The last thing you want is to have the most flexible blogging platform known to man but find that it is so complicated that you don’t know how to use it.

For me personally I love the self-hosted version of WordPress because there are so many different templates to choose from, both paid and free, that it is easy to find one to suit your requirements.  The flexibility of various plugins to add features and functionality to a WordPress blog is another winner for me yet I know some people who find the whole concept of plugins rather confusing so WordPress might not be for them.

There are even blogs about blogging and these might be a good place to start your internet research to find the ideal blogging platform for you! However don’t let anyone tell you that ‘x’ is the best platform or that ‘y’ is the one for you as what is right for one person may not be right for you at all. A blog is a personal thing and will have to reflect your main needs and requirements, not somebody else’s.

If you use, for example, a lot of pictures in your blogs then you might want a platform that allows you to upload pictures easily and display them as a slideshow or photogallery. You might want to choose one picture from each post as a thumbnail image for the home page and allow some, or all images, to be viewed as high-resolution files.

In making your decision ensure that you have your list of needs and requirements and if the blogging platform meets those then add it to your shortlist and if it does not then cross it off the list.

Just as there is no one perfect cat or dog there is no one perfect blogging platform. Choose one you are comfortable being around and interacting with day in and day out and you will not go far wrong.

Grab your free internet marketing library here and kick-start your very own online business today. The seven volume series gives you key information on the subjects you need to know about including search engine optimization, affiliate income, traffic strategies and, of course, blogging. Visit http://www.PatrickGriffinOnline.com to get started. Article Source

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