Archive for year: 2017

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Colorburned/~3/ZSCa1_Jx_7c/

Stickers or labels you’ve designed can be a great addition to your portfolio. Labels are a prominent part of package design – a growing industry. Stickers are a great tool used for promoting businesses, products, events and even people. Designing custom stickers and labels is very similar to designing for traditional print, with a few mall changes. Ensure you get the best results with these tips and tricks from StickerYou, sticker printing professionals.

Beware the bleed. As with traditional printing, it is important to add a bleed of at least 1/8 inch to your design to account for subtle shifting in the cutting of your stickers or labels. Adding a bleed will ensure there are no slivers of white around the edges of your design. Die-cut stickers or labels without a border or colored background are typically printed with white padding around them to prevent parts of your design from being accidentally trimmed off.

2. Know your materials. Just like paper stocks, there are a vast number of different label or sticker material stocks. Depending on the printing method used and the stock used, your stickers or labels will have different appearances. Various stickers and labels are also used for different applications. Ex: Will they be used outdoors and require lamination or a coating to protect the design? Will the end us require that the stickers or labels be permanent or should they be removable? To get the best results, these are all questions you need to ask before choosing a sticker or label material.

3. A simple design is better. Complicated or overly detailed designs are more likely to be passed over. A sticker or label that is less complicated and vibrant will likely gain more attention. Simple designs are also easier to print and leave less room for print error.

4. Use the right color combinations. As with most print projects, color is tantamount. Make sure you are using the right colors for your design as well as any text. Avoid thin light text on dark backgrounds, dark text on dark backgrounds, or highly contrasting colors. Instead opt for a color scheme that compliments each other.

5. Use the right color mode. When you are designing for print, your colors will be most accurately represented and printed when you design in CMYK color mode. The same goes when you are designing for printed stickers or labels. If you need precise colors for a brand, you will need to use pantone colors or spot colors and may be charged extra for this.

6. Resolution matters. If you have a small print file and are printing it at a large size, you will experience resolution issues. Vice versa, if you have a large print file and are printing it as a small sticker or label, you will have resolution issues. In both cases, your printed stickers or labels may have blurred edges or appear to be of a lower quality. A good rule of thumb is to use a 350 dpi print file.

The post 6 Tips for Designing Stickers and Labels appeared first on Colorburned.

Original Source: https://line25.com/web-development/best-ecommerce-platforms

eCommerce is on the rise and people have started to have more and more confidence when buying stuff online. With online shopping trending, more and more businesses have noticed the importance of a strong online presence and an online shop to sell their products on. This is where eCommerce platforms and shopping cart solutions come in handy and dramatically reduce their setup costs.

There is a wide market for eCommerce solutions and plenty of tools and software to choose from. Some are simple tools for selling individual products, while others are created for large volumes and online shops with lots of products.

If you’re starting your online shop, this roundup will help you a lot in choosing what’s the best solution for you. We’ve analyzed some of the best eCommerce platforms and shopping cart tools on the web and selected 7 of them.

These eCommerce solutions are used by a wide range of stores and have different features, such as listing your products, building your site from scratch, adding shopping carts and payment processors, and more.

Here they are! We’ll guide you through their core features below.

1. nopCommerce

nopCommerce is an eCommerce platform for any kind of business, small or large and from any kind of niche. It can be used for selling both physical and digital goods and combines best features of an open-source and commercial software. Plus, it is absolutely free, so the cost of ownership is basically limited to hosting.

nopCommerce offers a plenty of features and capabilities to create an online store. It comes packed with all the necessary tools, plus they are always adding new ones.

In our opinion, this platform has a great value-money ratio, so we have provided a more detailed overview of what it has to offer.

nopCommerce Features

Mobile friendly

Having a mobile-friendly, responsive website is a standard nowadays. Living in the mobile age, you can lose many customers if your website and shopping cart aren’t optimized for smartphones and tablets. nopCommerce offers an online store interface that’s viewable and convenient on any device and in any resolution.

Product details

Whether you need just a couple product details for your shop, or multiple ones, such as SKU, size, weight, stock, and more, nopCommerce offers a wide range of editable and tweakable product details you can use.

Checkout

Having a well-optimized checkout page is crucial for a good store. nopCommerce lets you choose from a variety of check-out options such as one-page checkout, anonymous checkout, the addition of check out attributes, and more.

Marketing Special Tools

Do you need to have discount codes, gift certificates, product ratings and reviews on your online shop? No problem, this eCommerce platform comes already integrated with the most popular special marketing tools for online shops. Moreover, it offers statistics automation and content marketing.

Multi-vendor and multi-store support

With nopCommerce, you can operate a multi-vendor marketplace if you need to re-sell items supplied by other vendors. Your vendors benefit from a dedicated admin panel and they are not interfering with each other. Also, multi-store support allows you to operate multiple online stores with different URLs using a single admin dashboard.

2. Shopify

Shopify is a popular online store platform that offers a powerful all-in-one e-commerce solution. Shopify lets you add an unlimited amount of products, it has a user-friendly admin interface and comes with a bunch of free themes for creating your site from scratch. This solution is scalable for any type of business, plus it offers apps that are both free and paid and which you can use to power-up your website.

There are many different categories of apps you can choose from, for marketing purposes, SEO, product list customization, social media integration, shopping cart add-ons, and more.

For someone who has no experience in web design or online commerce, setting up a Shopify website can be a little overwhelming. But, nonetheless, this is a great tool that doesn’t require a strong web design background to use.

3. Wix

Wix is another popular platform for building any type of websites. It comes with a drag-and-drop site editor, packed with customization features. Like Shopify, if you want to extend your website’s capabilities, there’s an App Market that solves the issue.

When starting with Wix, your first step is to design your website using the integrated builder. You can choose the pre-made templates as a starting point and customize texts, images, and more. You can also add a blog and online shop to your website.

In the App Market, you can find tools for creating forms, live chat, booking, social media, and more.

4. BigCommerce

If you’re already selling on sites like eBay, Shopify, Volusion, Amazon, and other eCommerce platforms and want to transfer to BigCommerce, this can be done easily and without any problems.

BigCommerce includes all the features needed to run a successful store. It offers many themes you can choose from, support tools, finance tools, and pretty much anything else you could think of.

If you want to still sell your products on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other marketplaces, BigCommerce can cross-list your products. This is done while maintaining your inventory and listings.

5. Woocommerce

Woocommerce comes as an extension to the most popular blogging platform, WordPress. It is completely free to setup and use. It has hundreds of free and paid WooCommerce extensions, to satisfy all your logistical & technical requirements.

WooCommerce helps you sell anything, anywhere. It’s mobile-friendly, has extended customization options, and the best thing about it is that it’s free. However, unlike all the other eCommerce platforms mentioned in this list, you will probably need a web developer/web designer to create the website for you, as you’ll need some coding knowledge to set it up.

6. Gumroad

Gumroad is the easiest solution for selling individual products or simple, fuss-free subscriptions/memberships. You can list multiple products on Gumroad and it doesn’t require any coding knowledge at all. They have the option for a free and premium account. The free account has a higher per sale

The free account has a higher per sale commission of 8.5% + 30¢ per sale (including payment processing), and the paid on requires a small monthly fee of  $10/month plus 3.5% + 30¢ per sale.

7. Big Cartel

Big Cartel is a cheap way to start your online store. It’s even free for less than 5 products, but even the paid version is reasonably priced.

Setting up the store can be done quickly and easily. There are plenty of free, built-in themes to choose from or you can customize your own with a little bit of coding.

Big Cartel is targeted to smaller stores, with a maximum of 300 items you can list in a store.

We hope this list of 7 best eCommerce platforms will help you set up a successful online store!

The post 7 Best eCommerce Platforms and Shopping Carts appeared first on Line25.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/buildinternet/~3/PUc9bZ5jj-Y/

“You have clients? So you’re an agency?”

For the first two years of One Mighty Roar, the question of “What do you call yourself?” came up a lot. Externally, people saw as a company with a growing portfolio of brand clients and a trail of websites and social campaigns behind it. Internally, our team saw a growing stockpile of self-made code and tools which tied those projects together. Whatever OMR was didn’t feel exactly like an agency, but it was close enough. So we relented and embraced the byline of “Digital Agency” for the next two years. It wasn’t a perfect description of what we thought made the company great, but the people who mattered understood the difference and that was good enough for us.

A funny thing happens when people hear you have clients — they categorize. Consultants have clients. Agencies have clients. Product companies have customers. Customers who buy widgets or subscriptions to things — prebuilt stuff.

The “sort of” agency

In the early years, being labeled an agency on the outside wasn’t bad. We got to solve challenges for a constantly evolving group of interesting brands and individuals. The answers tended to be websites and mobile applications, but the freedom to build foundations for others inspired us. Our team approached client projects like a product team would. Instead of building for an expiration date of rotating seasonal campaigns, we focused on making reusable building blocks. Some of those blocks were pieces we would later assemble to be products.

At the time we thought product companies required outside funding to get started, and being self-funded is an opportunity you protect. Unlike many early product companies, our business model did not require hitting user count or investment milestones to succeed. Our “funding” came from the projects we contracted. Building for others was great because we were handed challenges to solve pre-validated by the brands and budgets behind them. It afforded us the opportunity to remain self-funded with access to top brands.

From agency to product thinking

Client services aside, One Mighty Roar has two products with enough traction and revenue to have “made it” as independent business models.

One is You Rather, a giant predictive modeling engine based around the game of “would you rather”. At time of writing, it tracks about ⅓ billion responses and a few million views each day. The second product is Robin, a platform that connects digital and physical things by bringing digital layers into physical environments. Despite being early to the “connected device” and “Internet of things” game, Robin has been fortunate to see use from global brands and has grown to a key initiative that powers much of the work we do.

When we interview for open positions, these are the things we talk about first. Without understanding our toolbox, a candidate won’t understand the problems our team can solve. When prospective clients come to us now, we greet them with thinking that supports the products we’ve made. In many cases, it works better than the mobile application or Facebook campaign they originally wanted.

We don’t view product as a way to escape client work. It’s all the same — our client services help evangelize our products. Our products are designed to make certain problems easy to solve. We love when there is a fit, but it’s not a requirement. We are like a toolbox filled with both general tools and some that are unique to us. Some of our best web and mobile application projects have led to new internal workflow, open source projects, and foundations for future products.

Product is a foundation not a department

The products are a part of our thought process right from the start. This is one of the things that a lot of larger agencies get backwards. Let’s take the recent “labs” trend popping up among large agencies. A 500+ person agency tries to recapture its agility by creating a “labs/innovation” department. On paper, lab initiatives feels like product — smart people in a room tinkering with the latest technology to build things their clients can use. What happens instead (unfortunately) is the lab becomes little more than a media kit checklist item to show they are forward thinkers. A handful of interesting experiences might come out of it every year, but the rest of the company doesn’t benefit from the new process, only the results.

Today’s 500+ person agency doesn’t have the cultural foundation to support a product startup inside of it. Hell, there are fifty person agencies that would have a hard time making the product shift. They scratch itches instead of solve problems and fail the test of “different or better?”. Being scrappy is something you can lose with size, but scrappiness is also the catalyst needed for compelling product direction. Scrappy can’t afford to build things with expiration dates.

Clients can sponsor features

Clients can (and should) have goals that extend beyond a single project launch. When building with a product toolbox mentality clients become sponsors for new features, either directly or indirectly. The client gets what they want for their project and we get a good reason to bump a new, client validated feature to the top of the list.
This isn’t to say that you build generic results. The difference is in approach. Simply asking “How would this be done if it wasn’t just for this use case?” nets a lot of design and development decisions which ultimately make stronger product design.

Good products come from domain expertise

People build solutions to their own problems. If enough other people have the same problem, you have a product. If enough people buy in (and they don’t always), you have a business.

Building to a product rather than a project means something is always left to improve. We believe in constantly iterating towards a goal or at least a larger narrative. Whether the product fails or succeeds, you’ll still have the “why did we make this?” to inform the next steps.

Product people and project people

At One Mighty Roar, we are product people who take on client projects. When we interview people from larger agencies, a common thread for departure is burnout from shelved projects or great work that doesn’t exist anymore. Dan Ariely covers a lot of these points in his talk called “What Makes Us Feel Good About Our Work.”

In project based work, it’s harder to be deeply invested in something the moment an expiration date is established. Product represents something to always come back to. Coupled with the diversity of challenges and the brands agency style work comes with, we find a product company with client services gets the best of both worlds.

The fabled “20% time”

Our friend, Richard Banfield of Fresh Tilled Soil, recently wrote an interesting piece which cautions design companies that try to tackle agency and internal product work. One topic covered is the danger of viewing 20% time as an adequate amount of time to develop a product. This magical time is the first to go in busy situations, which can all but halt product development.

Interpretation has changed over time, but the gist is a company spends the majority of time thinking specifically, and the minority is thinking broadly. Google and 37Signals get a lot of credit for being the pioneers in this regard, but it’s 3M we have to thank for subsidized personal projects at the workplace.

We don’t believe that client work disqualifies a company from doing product if you hire the right people and build for the right companies. Put another way, we spend 80% of our time building out customized iterations of our services, then 20% refining for the big picture.

It’s a business, not a lottery ticket

Products aren’t lottery tickets to aid in the escape from your core business. We’ve come to view products as a broader framework for solving problems by improve the toolbox and workflow we tackle projects with. You can’t force it, but if you’re looking for opportunities they will come up a lot more than if you have project tunnel vision.

Products are often, to quote the famed Bob Ross, “happy accidents”.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/visualswirl/~3/9J38q7D-HV8/

Before spring fades to summer let’s get those desktops cleared with some virtual spring cleaning. Welcome to another collection of fabulous desktop wallpaper calendars for the month of May. These wallpapers have been hand-picked from some amazingly talented artists and designers to give you a variety of options for making your desktop look nice. Feel free to share your favorites and check back next month for some great new desktop calendars. As always, if you’d like to include your own design in future roundups, drop me a line.

6 Springtime Desktop Wallpaper Calendars for May 2012
Wallpaper by Ibrandstudio

Wallpaper by Paper Leaf

Wallpaper by MonkeyMan504

Wallpaper by Webgranth

Wallpaper by Studio of Mae

Wallpaper by Kriegs

The post Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: May 2012 appeared first on Visual Swirl Design Resources.

Original Source: http://justcreative.com/2017/08/07/anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-page/

This is a guest article contributed by Matt Janaway.

Having a landing page exit-rate that stinks can be quite depressing. This is especially true if you and your team spent blood sweat and tears to create a professional-looking landing page, only to see your audience ignore your call-to-action buttons.

The thing is, there is more to a high-converting landing page than just its looks. Relying on your page’s aesthetics alone isn’t going to cut it since it can only do so much for you.

If you want to create a landing page that’s going to bring home the bacon, then allow me to share with you the anatomy of a perfect landing page for your business.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Compelling copy.

Just because your copy reads well and it doesn’t have any typos or grammar mistakes, doesn’t mean that it is enough to compel your audience to take action on your CTA’s.

Compelling copies have psychological elements embedded into them like social validation, tapping into the audiences’ fear of loss, etc.

These elements are often what compels the audience to take action.

2. Sprinkle your call-to-action buttons in strategic places.

Where these strategic areas are specifically, I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell you. Simply because these things vary depending on the dynamics of the type of landing page that you’re using (yes, there are different types of landing pages), and your design among other things.

However, I can tell you that as a general rule, it is a good practice to add your CTAs in areas where you’ve provided massive value to your readers like the image above, taken from Netflix. That way, if they are convinced that they need your help, then they can contact you immediately without having to look for your CTA buttons.

Adding a floating CTA also works. A good example is Furl.co.uk’s “Talk to Us” button. A quick visit to their website and you will see that no matter where you’ve scrolled at the page, their “Talk to Us” button is still highly visible because it is floating.

3. The relevance of the page is apparent.

Those who arrive on landing pages often have a goal in mind. That is why you need to convey to your readers immediately that your page is relevant to what they’re looking for, otherwise, they might think that they’re in the wrong place which will then cause them to click away.

A perfect way to deal with this is to make sure that your title directly addresses their concerns. Since your title is one of the first things they’ll see immediately after arriving at your page, the issue of relevance no longer becomes a threat.

4. No distractions.

It is ideal to use one type of call-to-action per landing page. That way, your audience doesn’t end up getting confused or distracted from doing the primary goal that you predetermined when you created your landing page.

That being said, do not ask your audience to share, buy, or contact you all at the same time and be careful not to distract your visitors from your main goal. Here’s an example of a homepage which distracts the visitor from completing a goal (in this instance, a purchase).

Just pick one type of CTA then sprinkle it strategically across the page. Also, make sure that your CTA buttons “pop.” If they aren’t highly visible, then your audience might not see them.

5. Carefully crafted headlines.

Your headline needs to be clear, concise, relevant, and punchy. These characteristics will ensure (somewhat) that your audience will continue reading the copy on your landing page.

See here for some tools for optimizing headlines and the ultimate list of headlines.

6. Add testimonials.

Adding testimonials on your landing page will skyrocket its credibility. What makes it so effective is the fact that testimonials are not sales pitches, and they come across as unbiased.

To make the testimonials on your landing page look more credible, add your client’s profile picture and a short information about who they are.

At Marketing Labs, we include our clients’ name, their position in the company, and their business names. This is how our testimonials section looks.

When your prospect customers see the testimonies shared by your previous customers about how positive their experience is with you, it becomes a lot easier for them to trust you and do business with you.

7. Use images or videos that are relevant to the copy.

Countless case studies are showing that images and videos can boost your conversion rates. The thing with images and videos is they can help your audience create a clearer mental picture of the ideas that you want to convey.

Of course, the ideas that we’re talking about here are meant to influence them to take action on your offers. This effort from Spotify is excellent and encapsulates the impression of peacefulness.

When your audience can create a mental picture of themselves experiencing happiness, convenience, and joy (among other things) because of your product, it becomes almost impossible for them to leave your landing page without taking action on your offers.

The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page Infographic

Infographic by SmartBugMedia.com

What’s next?

I know for a fact that I’m just scratching the surface with the points that I shared above. If you have wisdom bombs that you’d like to share about creating a high-converting landing page, then please share them in the comments section below. Cheers!