Facebook rolled out the Timeline feature some time ago and whether you like it or not it’s here to stay. It will become mandatory on March 30, 2012. The functionality of the storytelling layout is open for debate but the cover image is a big improvement!

This really gives you a billboard to put your brand out there and by combining it with the profile image you open up another jar of creativity.

Artwork by Giuseppe Draicchio

Measurements

The cover image is positioned at the top and uses the full width of the Facebook interface.
The size is 851×315 pixels to be exact. That’s a lot of space to display your brand! There are sites available that will help you in setting up your cover image, just Google: timeline cover service. We have created a special template in Photoshop with the exact measurements and profile picture placement to set up cover images for our clients.

Landing Page

We have lost the ability to display a custom landing page when non-fans visit your page but the enhanced branding opportunity should outweigh that in the long run. The cover is a great spot to inform visitors on new products or services, you could even create a dedicated cover for each of the four seasons.
By losing the custom landing page to engage non-fans we now have the cover to serve everybody that visits your page. This requires a new approach to grow your fan base and a stronger focus on quality content.

Now it’s time to get creative and set up your own cover photo because come March 30 your page will be converted anyway. Below are some more creative (and funny) ways to utilize the Timeline cover!

Artwork by Richard Kårström

Artwork by Mohammad L. AlAzzam

Artwork by Aly Moffatt

Every business must have a website these days. Most clients will not take you seriously if they can’t find you online. One of the first things new business owners will do is hire a web designer to get a professional site up and running but it doesn’t stop there…
If you’re getting a website build be sure to ask your service provider how you can access the website traffic statistics and keep a close eye on them. If you’re not putting any effort into promoting your website you will probably notice that you’re not getting a whole lot of traffic to your website. This means you’re not capitalizing on your online presence and missing out on a lot of potential clients. If you’re going to invest in a website you should make it worthwhile by generating as much traffic as you can!

Traffic stats improvement for a website that was launched in March

We always keep track of the website statistics for our clients and we can clearly see who is making an effort into promoting their site and who is just letting it sit.
This article will give you some great tools to start promoting your website today!

Search Engine Optimization

Your website needs a decent SEO setup that will tell the search engines what your site is about. You can control how your site is displayed in the search results by adding a good site title, description and keywords.
Having your site on the first page of Google depends on many different factors which you have to take into account when implementing SEO. If you have a lot of competition in your business topic you have to find clever ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors. One of the things you can do is targeting a geographical area in your SEO. For example: Wild Peek Design will never rank on the first page of Google for the search phrase "web design" simply because there is too much competition on that phrase. What we did is focus on the phrase "saskatchewan web design" which we’ve had good success with.

Social Media

Sign up and create a business page on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure to do some research to prevent yourself from making mistakes or hire someone to do a professional account setup for the Social Media platform you want to feature your business on. Managing your social media accounts doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time though the more active you are the more feedback you will get from your followers. Make sure to add links to your Social Media accounts on your website and invite everybody you know to join. Keep an eye on your website traffic stats to see how many visitors are coming from you Social Media accounts. This gives you some insight on the success of these accounts.

Blogging

If you like to write and you know a lot about your business topic then blogging can be a great way to increase traffic to your website. If your website is built on a strong blogging platform such as WordPress you can have a full featured Blog right on your business website. There are also specific SEO plugins available that will boost your blog posts to rank high on the search engines. You can’t just put up some articles and expect mass traffic instantly. You must carefully select your post title + description and make sure that this is what people are searching for. This blog has greatly improved our website traffic and currently generates about 50% of our total website traffic.

Offline Promotion

This one is obvious but something you have to get used to now that you have a business website. Update your business cards, hand them out where you can and grab every opportunity to tell someone about your website.
Radio and TV ads are a lot more effective now that you can mention your website. Keep in mind that this will work best with a short or easy to remember domain name.
Other offline areas to promote your site are: vehicle decals, promotional items, product packaging and all of your business documentation such as quotes, invoices and your letterhead.

Paid targeted traffic

Your goal is to end up on the first page of Google but what if there is too much competition and you are on page 5 or 10? This is where Google ads come in! These are the ads that show up on the top and right hand side of the Google search results. It’s free to display these ads and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your website. This is usually anywhere between $0.25 and $1.25 depending on the competition you have on the search phrases that trigger your ad to appear.

We have recently launched a dedicated service under the name of SaskAds.ca that will help businesses to promote their website on the Google advertising network. We offer full Google account + ad campaign setup and we will also teach you how to manage your ads. We only charge a onetime fee and the monthly budget can be anything from $30 to $300 or more, whatever you feel comfortable with. Ad campaigns can also be paused and started again whenever you want. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding the promotion of your website.

Cartoon avatars are fun! You can use them in your social media accounts, discussion forums or incorporate them into a logo design. There are free online services that can create an avatar for you but the best way to go is to design them with software programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Using a Wacom tablet will also be convenient but is not a necessity.

We recently received an exciting order that consisted of creating over a dozen avatars! These were employee avatars to be displayed on a new website we were also building for this client.

We used Adobe Illustrator to create the avatars and the advantage here is that the avatars are vector based and can be scaled to any size without losing quality. Below are a few more samples of the avatars we created:

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in getting an avatar designed for business or personal use.

We design and build websites and we love what we do! Located in the North Battleford area, the RM of Round Hill to be exact. Situated on 160 acres of pure inspiration surrounded by nature and wild life. Our business setup allows us to be flexible and always available when our clients need us. Whether it’s during or after regular business hours we’re here to help you.

Our client base stretches from many clients in the Prairie Provinces to British Columbia and even Europe. Our international experience in various industries allows us to understand your business and product which we can then translate to the best possible website. A website that you can update yourself if needed or you can hire us to maintain it for you.

The services we offer:

• Web design and development
• Graphic design
• Hosting and domain name registration
• CMS (content management systems)
• Ecommerce solutions
• Website maintenance
• Web marketing and Social Media

Feel free to browse through our portfolio and contact us to get a quote for your project.
We look forward to working with you!

This is a question many new Twitter users struggle with. They see all these big accounts with 20, 50 or even 100K followers and wonder how did they ever get there?

Today we will give you some tips and tools on how to grow your following steadily and we’ll also make sure that you stay within the Twitter guidelines to avoid account suspension. There are certain practices that are not allowed and the last thing you want is to get your account suspended after you worked hard to get a decent following.

Our Twitter stats of the last 3 months

Quality or quantity?

This is the first thing you have to ask yourself. Do you want a small group of followers where you can easily keep track of the timeline and interact with everybody or do you want to grow as big as possible and utilize Twitter lists to keep up with the tweets you care about?
If you have a Twitter account for personal use the first option will probably work best for you. If you have any commercial aspirations and would like to promote your brand or business to the world market your goal will be to reach as many potential clients as possible. Growing your Twitter following is an easy and low cost method to promote your business or brand worldwide. 

Tools of the trade

These are a few tools we use to manage our account. There are many more tools out there but today we will stick to the tools that work for us.

friendorfollow
Simply enter your user name and it will show you who isn’t following back, who is a fan and mutual followings.
If you connect with Twitter it will also give you the option to follow or unfollow users.

manageflitter
Similar to friendorfollow but more advanced and it can filter your account for a variety of stats such as users without a profile image or users that are quiet or tweet a lot. There is a pro upgrade available but the basic mode has all the features an average user will need.

socialoomph
When your account starts to grow exponentially it becomes hard to keep track of all your new followers. If you want set up a welcome message for all your new followers this is the tool to use. You can set up an auto DM and welcome new followers. DO NOT add a link to that message because that’s what everybody is doing and will only tick people off. Come up with something creative and original within the 140 character limit.
There are also features that will allow you to auto tweet status updates but that is NOT done as you should keep it real on Twitter, more about this at the end of this blog post.

twiends
Fun and addictive would be the best way to describe this tool! You can actually use this to grow your stats on Twitter, Facebook, Website and YouTube. You can earn credits for connecting with other Twiends users and use those credits to let others connect with you. Sort of like a marketplace. You can even tweak your setting to get higher quality followers and there is an option to buy credits if you don’t have the time to earn credits manually.

twellow
If you want to find followers in a specific geographical area or category this is the tool for you. It lets you search for users per city or from a directory of categories. This is great if you have a local business and you want to connect with all the Twitter users in your city for example. You can also follow and unfollow within this tool.

Now how do I get followers?

All the above tools will help you to manage the new followers as your account starts to grow. Obtaining new followers can be done in many ways.

• Follow users from follow back lists. Many users have created lists consisting of people that returned the follow so there is a good chance those users will follow you as well if you start to follow them.
  Just Google: "follow back list twitter".
• Use the Twellow tool to find users in your niche or city and connect with them.
• Add Twitter links to your website, blog and email signature if you use one.
• Use the Twiends tool to get new followers.

As your new followers start to roll in it’s time to use the account management tools such friendorfollow and manageflitter. Find out who followed you back and who didn’t. You can also unfollow people that didn’t return the follow if you wish but DO NOT mass unfollow people or unfollow those who did return the follow. These are bad practices that could get your account suspended. We’re not celebrities that have 500K followers and only follow 10 users back. Your account should have a healthy follower ratio.
Remember that you can only follow 10% more than your follower count when you pass the 2000 follower mark. Example: 3000 followers will allow you to follow 3300 users.

Keeping it real

This is what it’s all about. It’s alright to try and get a large following but don’t do any of the following:

• Don’t spam your product link over and over again.
• Don’t use auto tweet tools expect for a meaningful auto DM perhaps.
• Don’t mass follow and unfollow since this could get your account suspended.
• Don’t unfollow those who return the follow just to make yourself look more popular.   

If you stick to these guidelines and use the above tools you can easily grow your following to any size you want.

Want to stay in touch? Follow us @WildPeekDesign

After much brainstorming and anticipation you feel you’re ready to order a website that will move your business forward or make your organization stand out from the rest. Great!
You start to look for web design firms that have the style and vibe you are looking for but you also want the best possible Quality Price Ratio (QPR). The end result has to meet your expectations without destroying your budget!

Be prepared

The first thing most people do is send out some inquiries by email or through the developer’s website. The more details you can provide in your inquiry the more accurate the quote will be.
We often get website development inquiries that read as follows:
"Hi, how much for a website?" or "I want a site just like Facebook, deadline is next week…"

This is not the way to go. We can always give a ballpark price or provide some sample pricing setups but it will never be specified to your personal needs. It’s hard to compare design firms without providing the project details and you might miss out on your perfect match because of this.

Checklist

Here are some pointers that will help you to get an accurate quote for your project:

• Tell a little bit about your business and your industry, just a few lines will do.
• The estimated amount of pages or titles for the pages you have in mind (about, contact etc.).
• Do you have a finished logo or do you need one designed.
• What social media platforms are you on and do you want them integrated into the website.
• Do you want to update the website yourself (CMS) or leave it in the hands of the developer.
• List any other special features you would like to see in your website.

Now you are ready!

Send out those inquiries to the shortlist of design firms you had in mind and let’s see what they come up with. Remember that you get what you pay for but the highest quote does not guarantee the best quality. Look for the company that guarantees a fixed price from start to finish, is flexible and able to provide good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) into an original design.

Good luck with your project!

Older browsers may have serious security flaws that allow malicious websites to read your files, damage your files, steal your passwords and infect your computer with viruses.
It also affects the quality of websites rendering and the web developers waste their time adapting the website to render finely in these obsolete browsers. Using an updated browser will give you the best possible experience when surfing the internet!

Pick your browser of choice and see if there is a newer version for you to download:

We recently came across a great summary of why you should be on Twitter and we would like to share that with you. Source for this blog post: About.com

Twitter seems to be following the same pattern that blogs did. First a few, and just for personal use. Then a lot more and an expansion of uses. And then a belated awakening by businesses that something is happening over there and it might be worth getting in on it.

Something is happening over there at Twitter and it’s well worth getting in on. Your small business should be using Twitter because:

Everyone else is doing it.
The guy who runs the convenience store down the street. The landscape architect. The shoe store owner. And lots of big companies, such as Dell, HP, AT&T and Microsoft. Having your business on Twitter is hot.

Twitter is good optics.
Using Twitter is evidence that your small business is participating in this whole social media thing and obviously a “with-it” kind of outfit that people might be interested in doing business with. It’s just not enough to have a website anymore.

Twitter is a fast way to get the message out.
Assuming your potential and existing customers are on Twitter, you can instantly let them know your news, whether it’s an announcement or a new product, a special deal, or an upcoming event they may be interested in.

Twitter will help you stay on top of your industry and/or market segment.
Twitter lets you hear what other people are saying. Using Twitter Search you can find out what people are saying about a particular topic, enabling you to keep your ear to the ground about your company and the competition.

Twitter will help you refine your brand.
By participating in Twitter (that is, using it to communicate with others, rather than just spamming product announcements) you can present and develop the kind of image that attracts your potential customers, and refine your brand. (Remember; communication is a two-way thing.)

Twitter is a great networking tool.
Being on Twitter will give you opportunities to meet and talk to oodles of people, some of whom you would never get the chance to talk to otherwise. And some of those people might be the very business contacts you’ve been seeking, people you want to start projects with, source product from or even hire.

And most important: Twitter lets you engage your customers.
Posting information about your products and/or services is the obvious use. But Twitter also gives you another channel for listening to and finding out about your customers – what they like or dislike about your company, how they feel about your brand, what suggestions they have for improvement, what their favourite products are and why… all kinds of nuggets that you can use to make your business more successful.

So there you have it. In a nutshell, Twitter can provide your small business with another channel to inform and engage your current and potential customers – and every opportunity to do that is worth exploring.

You will want to make sure, though, that you’re following the Twitter promotion rules for small businesses. If you don’t use Twitter properly, you can end up being seen as a spammer and damaging your small business’ reputation. We can help you by setting up a professional branded Twitter account and providing support on how to use it and grow a large following.

Finding the right host and hosting package for your website is not easy if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Many website owners pay too much for their hosting plan.
How much do you pay?

When you hire somebody to build you a website make sure that you own the domain and hosting plan. You never know how the business relationship will evolve and you might want to look elsewhere someday only to find out that your are stuck at your current provider!

We always direct our clients to a reliable host in their own country that will give them the best price and good support if there is ever a problem. If your website doesn’t get enormous amounts of traffic your hosting plan should never be more than $100 a year.

Many companies offer 1 year of free hosting when you order a website, though that may sound interesting make sure your ask them how much it will be in the years after that!

We like to keep things transparent and always do the following:
The client tells us what they need, we select and advise a hosting plan at a reliable provider and at the lowest cost. The client then purchases the hosting plan themselves or through us.
This will result in the fact that the client now owns the domain and the hosting plan putting them in charge of their website.

So are you paying too much for your website hosting?
Contact us today and let’s see if we can change that.

We support green hosting!

It’s not just websites what we do! Bringing your logo idea to life and setting up your business card are just two of the other services we offer our clients. That was just what the owner of gebakster.nl needed after we finished her business website.

The logo was created by us alongside the website design. She wanted a logo of her working in the kitchen making a cake so we got here to take a picture of her in action and recreated that in Adobe Illustrator which turned out like this:

Next up was the business card and a sticker she needed to put on the cake boxes when she delivers them to her clients. The business card layout falls in line with the website and is double sided. The sticker is her exact logo set up in a size that fits well on the cake box.

The last thing she requested was a customized apron featuring her web address and a cupcake! This is great advertising when she facilitates workshops for example.

As you can see we don’t stop after the website is finished, there are many other ways we can help our clients. Promote your business where you can and be creative, we will help you!