Foundry On-Screen Ads
Here’s some examples of on-screen ads at The Foundry.
Web Banners for Mountain Biking Blogs
Proof for MBC Web Banner for Widget on website. 300x250px. Slide for Trails for All Abilities, Gears & Beers, and call to action with larger logo.
SEO – what it is, and what it does
We’ve had more and more questions lately about search engine optimization, or SEO. What is it? How does it work? What does it afford me and my website? The answers to these questions can get pretty long-winded and technical, but we’ll try our best to keep it short and sweet.
Search engines (like Google) work in 3 ways. First, they “crawl” the Internet, or use algorithmic computer programs to fetch data from websites. These programs determine which sites to crawl, how often to crawl them, and how many pages to fetch from each site. The programs do this by using data from previous searches, as well as sitemap data provided by webmasters – you know, the webmasters who design websites to be optimized for search engines.
Next, the search engine programs use all that data they obtained from crawling to create a massive index of the Internet. This index includes the words on webpages as well as other info, such as key content tags and attributes designed by webmasters to help search engines find websites.
Finally, when a user conducts a search, the search engine serves up search results based on what indexed data appears to be most relevant. Relevancy is based on many factors, including content keywords, behind-the-scenes website data, and PageRank, which is the measure of importance of a page based on how many other webpages link to it. Webmasters who design sites for SEO optimization account for these relevancy factors to improve the ranking of a page in search results.
In plainer terms, webmasters who optimize your website for SEO do lots of things both to a site’s displayed content and a site’s architecture to make sure your website can be found when folks search for it. Because, if no one can find your site, what good does it do?
It should be noted that search engines don’t accept payment to crawl sites more frequently. There are indeed paid advertisements that will appear as “sponsored links,” but the “organic” search results appear based on whose site is the most relevant and best optimized, not who paid the most to get it there.
And since websites are added and updated virtually all the time, SEO also must be continuously managed for the best keywords, content tags, and links. This is what we do at O2 Creative.
When clients ask us to manage websites for SEO, we consider it an ongoing process. We’re constantly making sure all the content and all the design and all the architecture and every other little thing about a site is as current and complete as possible. We’ll continually look at your website, consider what search engines think of it, how it compares to competitors, how many other Internet users will end up linking to it, and many other factors to make sure your site stays optimized.
Because we want to keep our clients and their websites…well…relevant!
Click here for our next blog post – digital vs. print media!
The importance of mobile websites
How many folks access the Internet on mobile devices? Quite a few, actually, and the numbers continue to grow. Experts predict that by 2014, more people will surf the ‘net on mobile devices than on desktop computers. That means more and more people will be doing business on mobile devices as well. They’ll be using their smart phones and tablets from anywhere and everywhere to access the websites of businesses like…well, you.
Of course, just because customers can find your website on mobile devices doesn’t necessarily mean their mobile experience with your website will be a good one. If your website isn’t designed to be viewed on mobile devices, then it probably doesn’t have the right graphics, buttons, navigation screens, sizes, and other details to make it easy to view on a smart phone or tablet. It can make your website look disorderly and unprofessional, which is not the impression you want to be giving customers. You should make the effort to get your website mobile-friendly. It’ll make more and more of your customers happy, which will undoubtedly make you happy, too!
75% of customers prefer a mobile-friendly website when surfing the net on their mobile devices. That means if you indeed have a mobile-friendly website, then the majority of mobile device customers will favor you over…oh, say, your competitor who doesn’t have a mobile-friendly website.
Roughly half of customers say they are less likely to do business with someone if a mobile website experience was bad. They think it’s indicative of a business that just doesn’t care. But, of course you care! That’s why you should develop your mobile site – to please the customers. Before, you know, the customers just stop bothering with you and start doing business with somebody else.
Long story short, an optimized mobile website pleases your customers because it makes doing business with you that much easier, whenever, wherever. If you don’t have a good mobile website, then your customer’s experience with your website may not be good, either. It could frustrate your customers, which could cause them to simply do business elsewhere, and ultimately end up tarnishing your entire brand image. Don’t let that happen.
At O2 Creative, we’ve optimized websites for businesses large and small. We make sure a website is clean and easy to navigate from any smart phone or tablet, anywhere and at any time. So if you want to mobile-optimize your website, or create a dedicated mobile site, then come talk to us. Trust us – your customers, and everyone else involved in your business, will appreciate it.
Click here for more information about mobile websites in the original Yahoo article.
Click here to read our next blog post – search engine optimization!
Winter Park Jazz Festival Design
Winter Park Jazz Festival 2013, graphic design for all collateral, online design, print design. Winter Park, Colorado’s favorite playground present the 2013 Jazz Festival design.