Your Website and your BrandWritten by Dom Moreci
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message, and to communicate same message, we need to speak same language. A company with a high-tech brand position would not do well with a traditional, corporate looking brochure. A company with a feminine image would not do well with a high-tech Website treatment. Picture a Website like women.com done black and day-glow green! Or IBM.com done is pastels with illustrations of flowers and waterfalls. Maybe it would help to think of it in terms of an established brand... like GAP. The attitude of identity, feeling of stores, look of print ads and essence of TV ad campaign all speak same language. And Website is a direct reflection of all of these other elements. In fact most brick and mortar companies that have moved to Web are relying on essence of established brand to influence look of corresponding Website.This is not to suggest that everything looks exactly same. The identity is starting point, but annual report, Website and print ads are like different children of same family. Not exact knock-offs of original but similar enough show they are related. The bottom line is that Website should look like it is a part of company or product it represents. Fonts, color, voice, and attitude should all be related across marketing board. Similarly, website should communicate in way a Website needs to communicate. It needs to feel like a Website, but it need to represent it's company's brand and image effectively. It must retain integrity of brand.
Dom Moreci is the president of Plumbline Studios, inc. a brand identity and design firm located in Berkeley Ca. You can learn more about plumbline at http://www.plumbline.com
| | How to Get Your Visitors To "Tell A Friend"Written by Dawn Gray
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2. CGI. I really like Birdcast at http://www.bignosebird.com - it's what I use on my website. You can find more options on my Webmaster Resources page. 3. A service. Many remotely-hosted scripts are available. The most popular is Recommend-It at http://www.recommendit.com (which offers a contest as an incentive and allows you to add recommendation links to email you send out). There is also a free program called Let 'Em Know at http://www.letemknow.com which allows you to run your own contest for participants and probably offers more statistics. Either can be set up in 5 minutes or less. Javascript and CGI scripts have benefit of being completely under your control. You can customize them to work on your website and decide if and how visitors are notified about origin of your script. Services are easier to set up, but have to make a living somehow and may use advertising or big, tacky buttons with their name and/or logo in order to do so. Don't delay! Set up a Tell-A-Friend system on your website to watch number and quality of your visitors improve without raising a finger.
Dawn Gray writes Busy Marketing Tips! Subscribe today by emailing subscribe@busymarketing.com and get free Search Engine Tips. Busy Marketing dawn@busymarketing.com
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