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Adobe is starting to Embrace HTML5
Adobe has always been in the business of providing the best applications you can buy that help people communicate. They have Photoshop and Illustrator for creating imagery, Acrobat and InDesign for laying out content that’s ready for print, Premiere and After Effects for video/animation, Dreamweaver and Contribute for website design, and Flash is a great tool for creating interactivity & animation for websites in a way that web browsers without it simply can’t match. That is… until HTML5 included Canvas support.
Flash was created due to the user’s requests that the web should be able to do more than just serve up static images and text. This also needed to be provided in a way that didn’t result in a large file-size, because the majority of people online were still using slow dial-up Internet connections. These two things couldn’t be done with the capabilities that the web browsers provided on their own so Adobe decided to build the Flash platform that would be a plug-in for your web browser to extend it’s capabilities.
Over time, users came across different problems while using and developing for Flash. The issues that people experienced included crashing, inconsistent/confusing user interfaces, excessive computer resource usage (draining battery life), couldn’t be crawled by search engines, and others. This is fine as software gets better over time, but the problem that many people came back to is that Adobe has ownership over Flash, and they’re the ones that develop and make the improvements to it. Adobe listens to feedback from it’s users, but ultimately they would have the final say in what gets added & optimized in the next version.
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The open standard of HTML has a new version in the works that will include many capabilities that until now could only be done via Flash. HTML5 has a capability called Canvas that is what it sounds like. It’s an area of a website that can do pretty much anything the developer wants. There’s too many benefits to using this over Flash moving forward that I’ll have to make sure to cover them in a future article.
One move that Adobe made recently (that I couldn’t agree with more) added capabilities to the latest versions of their applications (Creative Suite 5) that utilize Canvas for displaying content on the web. This is something that until now would have been using Flash. They’ve demoed the ability of being able to export something made in Flash to Canvas, and sadly that doesn’t look like it’s going to make it to the shipping product yet.
Something that is going to be available as soon as Creative Suite 5 is released is the ability to take vector images created in Illustrator and simply paste them into a website. This means that you can zoom & resize the image, literally, as much as you want without any loss of quality/pixelation right on a website. They also are including a feature that allows you to tie data to the image. The example they gave was that they made a bar graph look exactly how they wanted it in Illustrator and simply tied a spreadsheet file to it. They then pasted it onto the website where they wanted it. If they needed to update the bar graph on the site, they would simply update the spreadsheet and the image would automatically update to match the spreadsheet. This is only a taste of what’s to come in terms of making things quicker and more manageable for those running websites, and a better experience to use for those viewing the site. Here’s a video of the demo they gave at a conference:
Henry Russell Bruce is a full-service advertising agency and Internet marketing firm that focuses on branding, developing and executing marketing roadmaps, and growing companies.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Building an Effective Online Marketing Approach – Part Three
In Part One of this series, I talked about the importance of getting your Web site design ready to receive visitors. In Part Two of this series, I talked about implementing a blog or news section on your Web site. Once you have these two steps completed and are happy with your internal systems and processes to ensure consistency, it’s time to start leveraging your blog content into email marketing.
As a recommendation, let’s start out slowly. Assume you are writing one blog article per week. This means you have four articles to use as the foundation of a monthly newsletter. In other words, you don’t have to write all new content for a newsletter. Simply use the information you’ve already communicated via your blog in a slightly different format.
Let’s say your average blog article is several paragraphs long. I recommend using the title of each blog entry and the first paragraph as content for your email newsletter. If the recipient of your email wants to learn more, they can click on a link that takes them to your Web site to read the full article. Here’s an example:
Question: Why would I use the same exact content in my blog and newsletter?
Answer: You have to communicate with your audience using the media they prefer or your message will not be received. Some of your audience will enjoy reading your blog. Some of your audience will prefer getting a monthly email newsletter. It will take approximately one hour or less to prepare and distribute your monthly email newsletter. The recipients of the newsletter have opted-in to receive the information, so you’re simply giving them what they have already asked for. Another reason you want to do this is to get more people visiting your Web site to get them closer to your existing content.
In the email newsletter example above, I’ve included offers in a column on the right. These are offers for your readers to engage you further or gain additional information. In the HRB newsletter, we use these areas to promote:
- Seminars or other speaking engagements
- Free White Papers that can be downloaded and might be useful to our target market
- Contact information
- Other promotions
This also provides some insight into the next area we will be discussing – offers and further engagement.
To sum up our progress to date, we have implemented a new Web site design to prepare our site for visitors and to create easy paths for these visitors to contact us. Once the Web site was built, we added a news or blog section designed to educate and inform our target audience about things they care about. Now we’ve designed an email newsletter to re-purpose the blog information for the sector of our audience who prefers reading an email vs. a blog.
If you stop right here in the process, you’ve built a decent system to be transparent in your approach and to communicate your expertise to your audience. These are all really good things that will help you build a better relationship with people who are shopping your brand. This may cause a few people to contact you and you might see a slight increase in leads or sales, but it falls short of the well-rounded approach that will truly be most effective for your business. Unfortunately this is where a lot of companies stop.
My next article will discuss the art of the offer and building a following. While I’m noodling on that, take the time to review your internal processes and procedures. Are you leveraging your information?
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Jeff McEachron
Senior Vice President
Director, Internet Operations
Follow me on Twitter @Jeff_McEachron
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jeffmceachron
Publishers Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Using RSS Feeds
Preview of Instapaper on an iPad
As a preface, I recommend that you check out my previous post about RSS feeds so I can jump right into the questions that publishers have to ask before distributing an RSS feed. The first major concern is that an RSS feed takes away visitors from your actual site. This means that those people don’t see the offers and forms that are on your site, and not the RSS feed. Turns out that the subscribers are people that have been to the site often enough to know that they like the content and would like to stay up to date with the articles. That means that they have already been exposed to the offers you have made available and would have participated already if they were truly interested. If you have a new offer that the people viewing via RSS wouldn’t know about, I highly recommend that you make an article about it. The readers will accept/appreciate any article that brings their attention to changes made to the Web site. There’s also going to be a group of people that choose to get a large amount of their web content via RSS feeds. If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed, then you’re turning down that potential audience.
There are ways to draw the people using RSS feeds back to your Web site. One way is to build an active community where the user could potentially be interested in what other people have to say about a certain article. That’s one feature RSS feeds aren’t able to serve up so the user would have to go to the site. That’s just one example of something you could make sure that is only available to those that visit the actual site. Another way people have been trying to get people to visit their site is to make it so that the RSS feed is only a tease of the article and you have to go to the site to read it in it’s entirety. There’s a really great Daring Fireball article on this topic that I can only butcher if I were to summarize, but I’ll try for the heck of it. Publishers hope that truncating RSS feeds will drive people to go to their site and increase ad revenue. In practice there’s people that realize that the Internet is a large place and that they can get very comparable content in the fashion that they prefer at a different Web site. Publishers are trying to stick with the model that has been working, and aren’t sure of the right way to get this new model to work (we’ve all come across this before). The fact of the matter is that there’s a way to satisfy both, but it takes some thought so that it works for that specific site.
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So how do you provide an RSS feed, and know that that audience is almost never going to go to the site and click on an ad? There’s a few things to try, and these might not work for your specific case. You can always embed ads into each RSS feed article as you would on a Web site. This usually isn’t the most effective method as the ads are traditionally very distinguishable from the actual article. One other way is to have an article that is a promotion for one of your advertisers. That way it shows up like any other article in the RSS reader. The user knows it will be quick to skim the article over. The traditional method here is to mention somewhere in the article that it is an ad as to not mislead the user. At the very least the ad has captured the user’s attention and they will pursue it further if it interests them. There’s still more ways to give the audience what they came to your site for and make sure you benefit for your work, but you will have to consider your specific website design / audience to be able to determine what will be best.
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Feed Your Audience With RSS Feeds
"Times" is an RSS reader for Mac by Acrylic Software
RSS feeds haven’t actively gained mainstream adoption, but have provided a great service to the people that don’t want to have the potential of missing something that they wanted to see. Essentially, an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a file on a Web site that only contains the content, and separates each update into an individual post with a timestamp of when the update was made. The website design completely removed from the content if the user is really only interested in the content. People can then subscribe to that one URL using an RSS reader (I will go into more detail about this below) and they will be notified when there’s been an update made to your site and how many updates that have yet to read.
If a user stumbles across an RSS feed, it might be something that they haven’t used before and don’t really understand the benefits of subscribing to it. There’s a few things that are making this adoption process easier for the user. Most modern web browsers are including RSS readers so that the content is displayed the way a user can understand when you visit an RSS feed. For the publishers out there, you might look into using a service like Feedburner to enhance your feed. The services that Feedburner include a user-friendly interface, analytics, sharing functionality, promoting your feed to news hubs, email subscriptions, and more. You can visit our feed that’s been sent through feedburner at http://feeds.feedburner.com/HRB and check out what would show up without feedburner here. The next post I’ll write will address the concerns you may have of possible lost traffic to your website resulting in lower ad revenue or leads, because people are using RSS feeds to bypass directly visiting your site.
The beauty of the RSS feed isn’t the fact that it’s once place to go for all of your content, but rather the nearly endless options of how you want to go about reading it. The RSS readers out there allow you to put all of your RSS feeds in one place. At that point you can choose how you want to be notified when there’s a new post on any of the feeds you’re subscribed to so you never need to visit a website just to find out that they haven’t updated anything on it. The range of RSS readers offer a variety of ways to interact with your feeds. Google Reader is a powerful feed reader that is simple to use, has unique community features with other people who use it, and keeps track of your reading patterns to show you the stuff you’re more interested first based on your past behaviors. There’s also applications for both Mac and Windows that you might choose to use also. There’s one that caught my eye, called Times (Mac only), that styled your feeds as if you were reading a newspaper, and when you click on the headline it shows the full article either as a new page in the “newspaper” or as the actual site where the article is located. This might be an interesting way to go if people start using tablet computers (such as the iPad) where this is provides a newspaper-like experience that shows you what you want to read and nothing that you don’t while also including high-resolution photos and videos.
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RSS is a very basic and universal capability that sites can take advantage of. In fact, podcasts became popular once people started utilizing RSS feeds to take care of distributing the new episodes to the subscribers as soon as it’s available. If you’ve never tried using RSS feeds to go about reading the blogs or news sites that you frequent, I recommend that you first find an RSS reader that appeals to you (considering that’s what you’re going to be using to read everything), add the feeds of a few websites, and give it a try for a short while. You might find it’s not for you, but you might also find it a great time-saver or a nicer way to go about staying up-to-date with the sites you frequent.
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Building an Effective Online Marketing Approach – Part One
This is the first of a series of blog articles where I’ll write about what needs to be done to effectively market your business online using a systematic approach based on fundamentals we all know. My goal is to package this approach in a way that helps you build an effective online marketing approach that delivers results.
There has been so much written about social media marketing. It seems so many people think it’s the silver bullet that will take your business to the next level. It’s not. In order for social media marketing or any other online marketing to work effectively, it’s critical to think of the entire structure of your online marketing efforts. As with every structure, you need a strong foundation in order to be successful.
The foundation of your online marketing, is your Web site. More specifically, your Web site design. Is your Web site designed and built as an online brochure where you talk AT your customers and clients, or is it built in a way that will educate them and entice them to contact you? Take the HRB Web site for example. Our site isn’t overly flashy, and it doesn’t have a lot of text on most pages. People simply won’t read a Web page that is text heavy and image light.
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Instead of using a lot of text, we briefly explain most of our services and rely heavily on our portfolio section to show examples of our work. We rely on the HRB Blog as a means to educate our audience and provide insight into our expertise. Both of these serve to begin building a relationship with potential clients and hopefully building trust in our ability to help them. If people like our work and trust in our expertise, then we remain top of mind and are included in the conversation when they are in need of the services we offer.
If you look at our site, you’ll notice we have icons to our social media sites and an icon where people can subscribe to our blog. Another thing you’ll notice is the ability to subscribe to the HRB newsletter. In all of these cases, we are simply providing a way for our audience to receive information from us using the media of their choice. We’re not pushing our articles on people, but rather providing them with choices on how they prefer to receive our message.
On some of our blog articles, we provide an opportunity for people to download white papers that provide in-depth information on a topic. One example is our white paper titled “Learn how to avoid the 15 biggest marketing mistakes in 2010.” You can see an example of how we worked this white paper into our content in this article:
I’m Tired of Watching Companies Fail at Social Media Marketing
Finally, you’ll notice each page of our site has a link to Contact HRB. In the footer of the site, you see the addresses and phone numbers (mobile device compatible) for our locations in the Quad Cities and Cedar Rapids. Those are two items that virtually every Internet user has grown accustomed to. If you don’t deliver these elements, then you’ll quickly lose the user.
Hopefully it goes without saying that the HRB site is programmed to meet the very strict standards of the World Wide Web Consortium with search engine optimization built into the foundation and added to each new blog post and page built.
In summary, your Web site is your foundation. Be sure to offer multiple ways for your audience to engage you. Offer promotions and information that prompts the user to engage you further, or at least keeps you top of mind. Once this foundation is strong, you can begin some marketing efforts to test the effectiveness of your Web site design.
Related Services:
- Website Design Quad Cities
- Website Design Cedar Rapids
- Email Marketing
- Internet Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
Henry Russell Bruce is a full-service advertising agency and Internet marketing firm that focuses on branding, developing and executing marketing roadmaps, and growing companies.
Jeff McEachron
Senior Vice President
Director, Internet Operations
Follow me on Twitter @Jeff_McEachron
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jeffmceachron
