Guest post by Ben Johnson

Have you created a logo design for your business? If not, then you have got to get one. Why? Well, because your logo design gives your business a face. If you create a good looking logo, then your business will look really good. If you create a low quality design, then you will mess up the image of your company. So, it’s your logo design that can either mess up your business image completely or give it a dazzling identity.

To give a good-looking face to your business, you need to create an attractive logo. Once you create a dazzling identity, you will be able to win the trust of your market. How? Remember, your market won’t be able to meet you personally or see you physically – They will only see your logo and try to determine how reliable you are.

So, if your business has a pretty face (logo), you will create a pretty good impression.

Now…To give your business a dazzling identity with a top quality logo design, there are several elements you need to take into consideration to make it a success. Let’s discuss them:

Make Sure the Color Scheme is Relevant to Your Business

What does it mean? Your logo represents your business, so it must have the right colors to represent your business properly. For example, if you are creating a logo for a hospital, then its color scheme will be light and sober as compared to the color scheme of the logo of an entertainment company. So, you need to keep in view your business and audience before you finalize the color scheme.

Make Sure Your Logo Clearly Depicts the Mood of Your Business

Just like color schemes, this is also a very important element of your business logo. If you are designing a logo for charity, then you must consider the mood of such organizations and contributors. It will be wrong to have a clown in such a logo. So, you need to do some research and analyze your competitors first and then determine the layout of your logo design.

Make Sure it’s Simple and Memorable

Do you think that a complicated logo will make you look more professional? This is a totally wrong perception. Complexity has nothing to do with being professional. Simplicity always rocks and simple logos are always memorable. Do you think that Nike, Toyota, Honda and Target logos are complicated? No, they are not. They are simple and attractive logos and you need something similar too.

Make Sure Your Logo is Visually Appealing

Just as flowers attract bees, your logo should attract your target market. If it doesn’t look good, will anyone take notice of it? No, everyone will ignore it. So, to grab the attention of your market, you must work hard to create a visually appealing logo.

The bottom line is that you have got to seriously consider the elements mentioned above to create an attractive and top quality logo design and give your business a dazzling identity.

About the author

Ben Johnson is the Alliance Manager at Logoinn, a custom logo design company. He writes about the effect of design on marketing and brand identity and helps small businesses find design solutions for effective marketing.

Hi everyone! As of late last night, Words of a Broken Mirror has a new theme, designed especially for me by Alex Cristache of Blogsessive through his amazingly creative design company, QBKL. We went for a more professional and clean look, staying true to a red based color scheme. Because I am a red maniac and luckily for me Alex indulges this weakness of mine

I want to thank hig again for designing the theme, helping me implement it, and taking the time to explain things to me so that I could understand his point of view. I can be a designer’s nightmare if I really put my mind to it, you know!

I’d really love to hear what you have to say about the new look. I hope you all love it, as I am thrilled with how my pr and marketing blog looks like right now!

Guest post by Alex Cristache

Did you know that every second a new blog is published somewhere in the World? That’s 84,600 new blogs everyday! Some of them are personal blogs, others are targeted, niche blogs. If you are running a niche blog, just think about how many competitors add up each day, eager to overtake your position, authority and search engine rakings. It’s a tough world for a blogger and to insure your success you must take advantage of every “weapon” at your disposal. My weapon of choice for today is Blog Design.

No matter if you are running a personal or business (niche) blog, you should always keep in mind that your blog is who you are, it’s your profile on the internet and a mirror for yourself. It is said that you can’t find two identical people, so why should we find 2 identical blogs?

Blog writers allover the World, agree on one thing: Give your posts a personal touch; make your presence felt on your blog. The same rule applies when it comes to blog design. These days we have hundreds of resources at our disposal, most of them even free. We have free and premium themes, we have plugins and widgets and we have experts giving away free advice on their own blogs. What we don’t have is an excuse not to make a difference by using them!

While a designer will always choose to create a new theme for his blog, the rest of us will have to search for a premium theme that will best serve our interests, or get a free theme that would need to be customized for a better use. Premium themes usually come packed with almost every option that a professional blog would need, so I’m not going to talk about them. Instead, I’ll concentrate on things that need to be taken in consideration when creating a new theme, or customizing a free one.

Choosing the best resolution for you theme

At this time, there is no fixed resolution that can provide accessibility to 100% of your readers. It pretty much depends on your blog’s target and your statistics.
My preferred resolution for design is 1024×768, since it has become widely used, but still there are people using old monitors, or simply don’t need a higher resolution and are using still 800×600. Look at your statistics and compare the two. If the 800×600 users are only a small percentage of your total (mine is around 0.64%), you should definitely make use of more of your available space.

Also, when choosing the right layout resolution you should consider your blog’s structure: 2 columns or 3 columns. If you’re going for 2 columns, you could easily use 800×600, but if you’re choosing a 3 columns layout, you should give your content enough space to “breathe” by using a larger resolution, preferably 1024×768. Always, make sure to eliminate the scrollbar width from you layout’s width (~40 pixels).

Structure and layout

Before designing or choosing a free theme to customize, take a moment to think ahead. Consider you blog’s evolution, advertising needs, required sections etc. These are all important factors in your decision when choosing a 2 or 3 column design. If you’re running a news blog, a 3 column design would most probably serve your needs better. It provides enough space to list recent, popular and featured articles, archives and categories, authors, advertising zones, links and whatever you might want to add at a future time.

Another important thing to consider is your sidebar placement. As most of us are right-handed, and the website’s scrollbar is on the right side, I’ll almost always go for a right-aligned sidebar for navigation purposes, since it’s closer to the users’ action zone. Placing the sidebar on the left has its advantages too. There are many resources online that can confirm the fact that a website’s main heat zone is top to mid-top left. This means that your users will scan your blog starting there and loose interest while advancing to the right and further down to the bottom. Still, I’m choosing the right side, as the heat map is relevant only when providing good, interesting, content, and I’m still to see the internet user more interested on clicking links than reading a good article.

When using a 3 column theme, make sure that your main navigation items are place on the first sidebar, not the one on the right. This gives the low-resolution users the ability to further browse you blog.

Make use, but don’t abuse, the white space. Having a clear separation area between sections and between blog posts it’s extremely important, as it help users scan faster for the desired content. When fighting for a lower bounce rate, making sure your reader finds his way easily around your blog becomes a top priority! Consider at least a 20 to 30 pixels space between your sidebar(s) and the content, and between 2 successive blog posts.

Highly important items and sections

When building up traffic (visits), three factors are essential: the number of pages viewed per visit, the time spent on your site and the bounce rate. These factors can all be improved by providing your readers with means to continue their navigation on your blog.

Always consider having a list of recent and popular items displayed on your sidebar, or at the end of your article, when reading the full post.

Give your users the option to search for relevant content by placing a search box in a visible area in the upper part (above the fold) of your blog. While most blogs automatically place a link to your RSS feed, most of the time it’s placed at the end of your sidebar. Consider repositioning that link closer to the top, and also, adding an option of email subscription.

Place your blog’s categories in an easily accessible and visible area. It serves both as a way to further guide your readers and as a statement of what your blog is all about!

The tag cloud is a great section that can guide your readers through your blog’s most popular topics. Make sure you place it in a visible area, or create a separate page that includes the tag cloud, like I do on my website.

Through phrases in your post and links in your template, guide your readers to the comment section. It’s highly important to add interactivity to your blog. Debates can lead to new content ideas or you might even learn a few new things!

Final thoughts

While having a well designed and structured blog is not enough to ensure your online success, it can easily make a difference between two equivalent-content-quality blogs.
Think ahead, plan, make the right choices and you’ll have a better chance against the thousands of new blogs breathing down your neck every day!

Alex Cristache is 27 and has been working for top Romanian web design, development and consultancy companies for over 9 years. Quite impressive for his young age, don’t you agree?

He’s tried a lot up to now: web designer, senior web, print & logo designer, occasional copywriter, web & SEO consultant and project manager. Although he focuses on design, he’s also been working with PHP & MySQL on the side. He also fell in love with WordPress the moment it appeared on the market and changed our lives.

He currently blogs at Blogsessive.com and runs CREATIVEurope, a website bookmarking the best European creative portfolios available.

When my friend Mig told me I should check JS-Kit out, I of course did as she never recommended something that wasn’t interesting and useful. And she once again was right. JS-Kit is indeed something to keep an eye on, widgets, but taken to another level and in no way limited to blogs. JS-Kit offers just the right tools to make your site visitor oriented and make it easy for those stopping by to provide feedback and comments.

You’ve got quite a few options to choose from: a Navigator showing your most popular works, Ratings to show you how good or bad a certain piece you’ve published is, Reviews and Comments for elaborate opinions and engaging conversations and Polls to quantify what your readers think. It’s all there, easy as copy-paste. But – yes, there is a but – there are a few aspects that simply puzzle me!

Usability and Design

I don’t quite grasp how a site aimed at revolutionizing web site development by introducing easy and customizable gadgets can pay so little attention to the details on their own site. The home page is what struck me most. There is no navigation bar and the About, News, Support and Your Settings links placed on top of the page look quite unfinished, or even worse, like some text ads that haven’t been tuned to fit the general design.

Also, I am not a fan of throwing loads of colors in a website, even if you use them only for sporadic words. 6 colors or shades is too much in my book and I have not counted the gray text, as to me that’s still a non-color. When browsing through other deeper pages in the site, you can enjoy a really nice navigation bar. Unfortunately, it’s there for the product only, the rest of the information is left out.

And we get to their logo. If you only take their logo, tagline and first paragraph and read them, you won’t know what it is they are doing exactly. After reading the entire home page, you still won’t know exactly how it all works. But moving past this aspect, their logo changes too often while you browse through. One rule I know is that you can’t have different colors of your logo, especially when it’s placed on the same background every time. Besides colors, they are also not sure what font to use and how exactly to spell their name. On some of the products they offer, their logo has a completely different font and style. Plus, is it Kit or KIT? They have not decided yet.

I personally happen to also dislike the icon showing up in the browser next to the site’s name. I am sure it wants to envision a kit of some kind, but I can’t help thinking it’s a purse! Besides, if you have a script only logo, what’s that image doing there in the first place?

Customer Care – What Experts Would Freak About

I won’t stress the one word replies that appear too often in their pages! Those are just soft skills, they’ll learn in time. I’d strongly recommend that they changed their style of writing replies as soon as possible and they should take it as good advice from someone who’s spent quite some time in the customer service department.

But there is a way more important aspect: the large numbers of unanswered questions. First you have to know each product section of the site has the same structure of sub-pages: overview, customization, ask your question and FAQ for some of the products. While most questions (but not all) in the Ask your question section are answered, there are plenty of comments turned into questions from different sub-pages that have received no reply. That’s a big no-no, it gives potential users the impression their questions might never be answered, even if they are through an email or on a different page.

A Long List of Unanswered Questions

The first question that I don’t know how to answer after going through all of their pages is if JS-Kit services are free. I can tell you they don’t have any prices listed, but the word free per se is inexistent. Given that the code is in plain view and you can copy-paste it at any time, I’d go for free, for now. Maybe they’ll chose to charge something or place adds sometime soon, everything is possible as they have made no commitment to providing free services.

If you were wondering if their code can be customized to fit your design, I can tell you where you can find the answer: on the About page, the very last paragraph! Such information should definitely be on the first page, replacing other more puzzling details that make no sense. Furthermore, ratings for example feature a unique design: stars. You can customize their color to fit your site, but if you want a different art, you should start creating it.

On the homepage, they also state their services pay you. I’ve been looking for an explanation as to how their widgets pay you all over the site and have come up with nothing. If you can do better, please point me in the right direction.

Business Advice

Their Contacts page is hidden in the About us section. I’d say it would look more professional if it would be moved upper in the hierarchy and displayed in broad view, as it happens for the support email address.

Their roadmap is targeted at driving users and potential partners away. It starts in 2006 and ends in December 2007. We’re in February 2008, maybe they should really add something to it. If they are not going to create new products, they could have a roadmap for improving the existing one. Such as more options when it comes to artwork for the ratings.

To Sum Up…

JS-Kit is indeed easy to use and a bliss for those new at the blog or site fine-tuning business. It also has great potential of becoming part of most web pages out there. But if they don’t focus a little more on keeping users returning and bringing new ones along, they’ll just end up as just another cool toy that everyone first played with and then forgot it in a dusty corner.