How To Choose a Domain Name

As time goes by it gets harder and harder to come up with a domain name that someone else hasn’t already thought of and registered before you. But from a SEO point of view, what is important to think about before choosing a domain name is what you can do to optimize it.

One of the best things you can do is include a word or two that are descriptive of your business. And since most of the short domain names are spoken for, you might as well include words that mean something to search engines. My website's domain name, for example, is “dianewestdesign.com.” So the “design” part of it is descriptive of my line of work. It might have even better if I had chosen dianewestwebdesign, or westweb-graphicdesign.

Another approach is to incorporate a word that “localizes” your domain name, i.e., webdesigneaglepoint.com. This is of value if your business is a local one—meaning that most of your customers are local, rather than national or international. Why? This is good is because it narrows the search results. If you were looking for a carpet cleaner you wouldn’t want to be presented with search results for companies in Minnesota if the carpet you want to clean is in southern Oregon. So naturally, you would want to search for “carpet cleaner Medford,” or whatever city would be appropriate for you.

Of course, this strategy applies not only to your website domain name but also to your site as a whole. Incorporating keywords— words that people looking for your kind of product or service are likely to use in their search— into page titles, page headings and the body content of your website will help search engines identify that your site has the information people are looking for.

If you are just now thinking about building a website for your business and haven't chosen your domain name yet, consider incorporating keywords in the name. You will be glad you did!

If you already have a site with a name that doesn't have keywords, do not despair. There are plenty of other places in your site content to use them to increase your site's searchability and ranking.

Type tips You Can Use

Em dash, en dash and hyphen... which goes where?

Use an em dash when there is a break in voice or thought. Windows: Alt+Shift+Hyphen,
Mac: Option+Shift+Hyphen

Use an en dash when separating a range of numbers or times. Windows: Alt+Hyphen,
Mac: Option+Hyphen

Use a hyphen when combining adjectives (e.g. first-rate), pairing nouns (e.g. scholar-athlete), or using prefixes with capitalized words (e.g. post-Renaissance).

What in the *#!@ are Dingbats?

According to Wikipedia, "a dingbat is an ornament or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a 'printer's ornament.' The term supposedly originated as onomatopoeia in old style metal-type print shops, where extra space around text or illustrations would be filled by 'ding'ing an ornament into the space then 'bat'ing tight to be ready for inking.

The term continued to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that had symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters."

The neat thing about dingbats is that they come in a myriad of shapes and symbols, everything from animals to zodiac signs. AND they are scalable—just like fonts, you can enlarge them as big as you want. I used a few dingbats recently from a "font" that is of grapes and grapeleaves, enlarged them to about 300 points, converted them to outlines in Illustrator, applied a light color tint and put them in the background of a brochure for a winery. It's so easy and makes a big, but subtle impact.

In fact, you can see this brochure in my recently completed graphic design portfolio on my website at www.dianewestdesign.com.

Tips for Printing a Brochure

Ask yourself these questions as you prepare documents to promote your business:

What is your Objective?

What do you want to communicate? What do you want the tone and look to be? Do you want it to be bold and dramatic or subtle and understated?

Who is your Audience?

Are you aiming the piece primarily at people who know about your business already? Or, will it introduce your company to new prospects? Knowing who will be reading your brochure will help you create the look and tone you desire and communicate your message effectively.

Who will be your Designer?

Graphic design for the non-designer can be a challenge, so you may want to hire a professional. Or you may want to do your own design. If you're not experienced in desktop publishing, here are some design tips to help you achieve a polished look.

What Type Styles and Sizes should I use?

Creative use of type can enhance every printed piece. Styles, sizes and weights should be based on the objective of the document and the look and style you want to convey. Boldface type is often used for headlines to catch the reader's eye. Type for the body (sometimes called text) is usually a lighter and smaller font. The text should be set at least 10 point type for legibility. Most importantly, do not use more than three styles of type on a page.

How should I arrange Text and Graphics?

Photographs, illustrations, graphs, etc., help convey messages that could otherwise require lengthy explanation. But don't clutter the page with too many graphics. Allow for areas of white space which makes a page more readable and appealing. Copy and graphics should be laid out in groups in an orderly way on the page. Don't run the text across the entire width of the page. It's better to break the page into columns of type and intersperse the text with photos and illustrations. When laying out facing pages, think of them as one unit. Consider spreading the heading and art across both pages to create continuity while keeping the text in smaller columns, each confined to a single page.

Consider using West Design to design your next brochure or printed piece!

Color Theory 101 - I See the Light!

This is just a brief overview of the science of color, a complex and technical subject, but I  thought you might like to know the basics. (If you had art classes in school you may already know this.)

Color originates in light. The light that comes from the sun is “full-spectrum” white light which contains all colors (evident when you see the refraction of light displayed in a rainbow).  There are two types of color systems: additive and subtractive.

Subtractive color is the process of using pigment to color a surface—like paint or ink, or the color that an object possesses naturally, like the skin of an apple. When white light hits a surface, the material’s surface absorbs all of the spectrum of light EXCEPT for the part that corresponds with the color of the object, which is reflected back to your eye. So, in the example of a red apple, the skin of the apple absorbs all of the light spectrum except red and the red is reflected to your eye. I won’t go into what your eye does with the light—that’s another story.

The primary colors of the subtractive system of color are red, yellow and blue. All other colors are derived from combinations of these three colors. The color wheel, shown below, is a device artists and designers use to visualize the relationships between colors.

The other color system—additive color—is based on colors that are generated with light, as in computer monitors and televisions. The primary colors of this system are red, green and blue (RGB). When combined, red and green light rays produce yellow, blue and green produce cyan, red and blue produce magenta. Red, green and blue (light) mix to create white.

For more information about color, visit:

http://www.colormatters.com
http://colortheory.liquisoft.com/