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Same Name, Different Game

March 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Recently, I’ve been getting the occasional message from people having problems playing the Facebook-based game Ravenwood Fair. Seems just because I have RavenWood in the name of my firm, I must be the expert on how to get off level 24 or have all the secrets behind the game. Unfortunately, RavenWood Creative is a marketing and communication firm for businesses and organizations and has no ties whatsoever to the game.

So if you need help with marketing and taking your business to the next level or need graphic or web design services, we’re your firm.

If you need help getting to the next level of a fair game … look elsewhere …

Has your business ever been mistaken for something or someone it’s not, let me know?

Thanks, Tim

Filed Under: marketing, Services, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

WordPress Customization

October 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

WordPress has emerged as a popular and easy to use content management system. Many of RavenWood Creative’s clients are using it and loving it.

Do you want the ability to publish to your site anytime you’d like? Or tie in your social media presence to your site with ease? Then WordPress and RavenWood Creative could be for you. Check out our client list to see who’s using WordPress.

Filed Under: Featured, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , ,

What made your business a success?

June 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Steve Jobs and the Original Apple MacI recently had the pleasure to listening to Guy Kawasaki speak about innovation at the IABC World Conference in Toronto. His Top Ten items for Innovation really resounded with me. But it was his example for number 6, Let 100 Flowers Blossom, that really stuck with me. Guy was a member of the original Apple Macintosh design team. As Guy explains it, when they launched the original Mac, the team thought they had created a great computer to compete with all the other computers of the time that let users manipulate data in early spreadsheets. But a little known desktop publishing program called Aldus Pagemaker was also just starting to bring desktop publishing to the masses. Well people soon realized that the icon-based Graphic User Interface (GUI) of the Macintosh, worked hand-in-hand with this new program and the popularity of both grew. Pagemaker eventually evolved into Adobe InDesign, still a desktop publishing powerhouse. And we all know what happened with Apple. According to Guy, “Aldus Pagemaker saved Apple, if we had been restrictive of what the Mac could do and stuck with spreadsheets, Apple wouldn’t exist today.”

Guy had other examples of products being used for pursuits outside it’s original purpose, such as AVON Skin-So-Soft being used as a bug repellent. His advice, “take the money, let the 100 flowers blossom.” My question for you is what unforeseen purpose, product or service helped make your business a success? For me, I was asked to help a business communication organization I belong to revamp its Philadelphia chapter’s website. The result was having to learn WordPress on the fly and design the site at the same time. WordPress development and customization has become a majority of my business, but who knows if it would have happened if I didn’t volunteer for the website redesign assignment. What unforeseen event or product use helped make your business a success?

Let me know, until next time, Tim

Filed Under: Inspiration, marketing, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Top 5 WordPress Features Customers Are Asking For

March 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Within the last six months, my graphic and web design business has seen a shift. WordPress-powered sites are becoming quite popular with my clients. And who can blame them? The features a blog-based site gives them outstrips old, static websites. Also I’m finding this powerful content management system has something to offer everyone.

Here are my Top 5 Features Customers are asking for with WordPress.

1. Control Over Their Content

When I visit with a new client. I can tell you the first topic they bring up. It goes something like this, “I have this website, [insert name of young relative, inexpensive web design co. found in yellow pages, or themselves] designed it. It’s okay, but I can’t update it, and when I want to it takes days to update it.” Sound familiar? It’s a refrain I hear from clients all the time. WordPress solves this by putting the control over content back in the proper place, the site’s owner. With the user-friendly dashboard interface, I can train most people on how to update their site once it’s set up and customized in a matter of hours. Want to update your site? Take your pick of pages, posts or widgets and you’re ready to go. Clients love that they can ask for a certain look and feel to their site with WordPress and then it can be turned back over to them to expand and develop their site and online brand the way they want.

2. Tie Social Networks into My Site

Many of my customers are dipping their toes in the social networks or they have dived themselves and their company whole-heartedly into social marketing. A blog-based site helps you wherever you stand or “swim.” With the thousands of plugins available for WordPress and the ease of which sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn make it to cross-reference and cross-populate your social networks, the hours spent tweeting about your latest project or the comments you’ve gotten on your work on Facebook can all be featured on your homepage. With automated features such as tweeting your latest blog post, making social media marketing a part of your marketing mix, a WordPress blog becomes very attractive.

3. I want easy-breezy, lemon-squeezy ways to upload photos and video

By giving my clients some training on WordPress, I find they pick up rather quickly on how to upload and feature their photos and videos in WordPress and, more importantly, on their website. I have a real estate firm, Dan Helwig, Inc. Realtors that is using WordPress to feature the properties the want customers to know about. They upload hundreds of image every year and WordPress helps them feature all of them and a few “special” properties on their homepage. WordPress makes it easy.

4. Migrate my old content to my new blog

Another client of mine, Environmental & Engineering Solutions, Inc. recently added a WordPress blog to it’s site. By doing so, they were able to eliminate the older model of creating a subscriber-only area on their site for newsletters and information. By migrating all of this past content over to the blog, we were able to quickly add existing content to the blog (enhance SEO) and organize the content chronologically to offer EES clients a searchable, tagged database of all its past articles, related websites and commentary on environmental engineering issues. The subscriber model has changed a bit, rather than supplying an email to access the information, a customer can now subscribe to the blog’s feed and be updated automatically when EES posts something new. It greatly simplifies the site for the user, enables them to find what the want when they want it, and keeps EES in the front of their mind for future projects.

5. I need to organize my site

Another way WordPress helps is by organizing content in a fashion most people can understand. With Categories, Pages, Posts and Widgets, I haven’t found a business or organization yet that can’t benefit from organizing their content in this fashion. I find it particularly powerful for non-profit organizations that have upcoming events and updates for members to be able to post the latest information for its members and the public. Two recent examples I’ve worked on are MidAtlantic Tax Solutions, Inc., a firm that helps homeowners reduce their property taxes and Flourtown Fire Company, both are enjoying new WordPress-based sites. MidAtlantic is enjoying the fact that update no longer take hours to complete and are excited by the ability to expand the site along with the business. Flourtown Fire Company, an all-volunteer, non-profit organization also is enjoying being able to update the site soon after responding to an incident, but also the ability for multiple members to update the site and feature upcoming events. The various areas of the company from Ladies Auxiliary, to officers and its rich 100-year history all have a place on the site and can easily cross-reference with one another through tags and categories.

As you can see I’m a big fan of WordPress and have been finding it answers the needs of my customers. What are your thoughts on WordPress and what are your favorite features? Let me know below. Until next time, Tim

Filed Under: Blogging, Design, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

RavenWood Creative’s Tim Ernst Featured in Communication World Bulletin

July 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

CW Bulletin | Combat Information Overload with Visuals – July 2009

 

The July 2009 Communication World Bulletin from IABC features a piece I wrote on using visuals in online communication. Visuals are more that photos on the screen – as websites on their own are a visual media, just like TV and film. Check out my column Using Visuals in Web Communications.

 

Let me know your thoughts on the piece.

 

Until next time, Tim

Filed Under: Design, Technology, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

The Changing Standards of the Web

February 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Last week, I participated in a Dreamweaver class that discussed CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The days of web site being design using tables, and random styles are fading into history. The power of CSS became clear throughout the day. Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS4 product can do some powerful things, now I have to get  back to work in redesign my own sites and some others that still make use of tables.

The Spry features of Dreamweaver are incredible, the cool built in “Flash-like” features they offer to navigation menus, photo galleries, portfolios, or anything else you can imagine open up a lot of design possibilities.

Are you using CSS? What do you think of Adobe Dreamweaver CS4?

Until next time, Tim

Filed Under: Design, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Embedded Simpleviewer into Latest Web Creation

December 31, 2008 By 1 Comment

Recently, my company RavenWood Creative launched a new site for a client, botanical-expressions.com that makes extensive use of Simpleviewer by Airtight Interactive. We embedded the viewer into a few pages so users can scroll through all the different arrangements and floral creations the shop can produce.

We had a few issues with the viewer, but worked them out. One of the them that had me pulling my hair out was that we got the Flash to play on the page, but you could not scroll down to see the thumbnails below the main image and the footer of the site, once it was previewed in different browsers. After some research I finally found the solution on the Simpleviewer FAQ, to add a vertical scroll bar, we had to remove a single line of code from the resulting index.html.

overflow-y: hidden

A single line of code.

Sometimes it’s just the small things in life, but what a relief, when I found it!

Let me know what you think of the new site? The clients are happy and we’ll be tweaking the site in the coming weeks, they are always a work in progress.

Until next time, Tim

Filed Under: Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Loving the new WordPress 2.7 Interface

December 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I recently upgraded my blog’s backend, yes, I know it sounds dirty, to the new WordPress 2.7. The new interface is very sleek and more intuitive than past dashboards. Like most new interfaces it will take some getting use to, but I’m liking it so far. The tools I use most in creating posts are still in the same area, but the other organizational tools are, well, more organized.

What do you think?

Until next time, Tim

Filed Under: Blogging, Web Design Tagged With: , , , ,

Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimization SEO

December 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As a web designer, I often get asked by clients and other I speak with at events, “How do I get my site to be higher in the search results?” I often tell them that it usually only requires a few simple steps to help move the ranking in the right direction. But as with most things, if you start with garbage in you’ll get garbage out. It often comes down to redesigning the site to clean out years of either neglect or too much attention (i.e. too much content that is dis-organized and lacks focus).

It’s what the industry has come to know as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The Internet is filled with companies promising you results by using their SEO plans. But with a little education on such matters most problems can be addressed before calling on professionals to help. Google recently published a 20 some page starter guide to SEO. Its a starter guide to SEO, that covers such topics as:

  • page titles and the importance of accurately titling your pages
  • descriptive meta tags
  • friendly URL structures
  • using sitemaps to construct easy-to-navigate sites
  • custom 404 error pages
  • quality content
  • using anchor text effectively
  • using “alt” text for images
  • and using robots.txt files

While most of the information in the guide should be old hat for your web designer, I’ve found that I educate the site owner a bit, they can focus on the areas of their site that need help.

Google has put together a good guide to help those outside the web development world to understand “this SEO thing” a bit better. Even though some of the guide could be deemed contrary to what Google has promoted in the past, such as the statement, “Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or “sponsored” results such as Google AdWords”, most of the information is right on target. Hopefully, Google will address the contrasts of in future version of the SEO guide.

Until next time, Tim

Filed Under: Design, SEO, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Web sites I’ve designed, how best to feature them on my own site?

November 13, 2008 By 1 Comment

Recently, I’ve been wanting to redesign my own web site www.ravenwoodcreative.com. I’ve been so busy building other people’s sites lately that my own site has been neglected.

So I ask you what’s the best way to feature various sites on my own web site? Do I use Flash, or thumbnails with links, or some combination I haven’t thought of yet? I want something that looks cool but remains easy to update and change.

What do you recommend?

They cover a variety of businesses, from non-profit to a conceirge or architecture business.

TabithaHarrierConcierge.com

Flourtown Fire Company

Schaefer Design, LLC

Flourtown Businesspersons Association

and others.

Let me know, until next time, Tim

Filed Under: advertising, Design, Web Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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