Check out the full article here! Social Investors Seek New Niche Networks
Home Elephant Mentioned by Adweek
Posted in Announcements, Home Elephant, Social Media, Web Sites
Tagged Home Elephant, neighborhood social media
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LeeBrant Jewelers Launches New Site!
The brand new, CSS3-rich LeeBrant Jewelers website is live! Stay tuned for new features including a comprehensive blog and more than 30 pages of great new content, coming very soon. In the mean time, check out the new design here: LeeBrant Jewelers
Original Site:
New Site:
Posted in Announcements, Web Sites
Tagged DynamiX Web Design, Jewelry Website, LeeBrant Jewelers, New website, Website Relaunch
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Using Image-Based Search Engines to Find Image Thieves
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess we should feel good when someone steals our DynamiX blog images (without crediting us). But what if you want to protect where an image you created is being used?
The answer comes from a cool site called TinEye. TinEye is known as a “reverse image search” engine. In short, that means that you can give it a link to an image, and it will find where that image has been used elsewhere.
Let’s show it off!
This is an image that we made way back in May 2009 to correspond with our article “Our Plumbers, 10% Steroid Free.”
The Image:
And here are TinEye’s results for the image:
These sites are all using the image.
In looking a bit deeper, we can see that all four of these sites are simply hotlinking our image (linking directly to our image), without any attribution. In other words, they’re stealing our bandwidth (which is admittedly cheap these days) but not telling anyone who made the image. The fourth result appears to just be a simple forum, and we’ll let them slide.
This is a great time for us to call out the two images we took 3 minutes to combine in Photoshop to make this picture in the first place:
- Billboard image: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1089869 by artist asifthebes
- Clown: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/32081 by artist glo
Obviously I can hardly call this image our own, as we simply combined two free use images and added a tag line over them, but this technique is great for finding photos that you took yourself, or designs that you created from the ground up.
TinEye isn’t the only place to go to track down your images, and Google has recently gotten into the game with their hugely popular Images search. To use it, just save the image in question to your computer, go to http://www.google.com/imghp and drag the image over the text box on the page. You’ll see this:
And the results:
Interestingly, the three images it found are all ones that TinEye didn’t catch. This illustrates the benefit of going through both channels when trying to track down an image.
What do you do when you found an image that you want to have removed? Try http://www.dmca.com/takedowns.aspx for a start, or send the site a letter directly informing them of the infringement.
Stay friendly, you never know where they found the image or what they knew about their ability to use it on their own site. There’s a lot of conflicting information online, and the chances are high that this was just an innocent mistake on their part!
Injected Engineering Celebrates 1,500 fans with a Face Lift!
Congratulations to Injected Engineering for passing 1,500 Facebook fans at http://www.facebook.com/InjectedRacing! To celebrate, we’ve rolled out some new changes to their site, including heaping gobs of CSS3 goodness (check out the site in a modern browser such as IE9, Firefox or Chrome) for animations, tilting and shadows. We’ve also added a “Recent Mentions” box on the front page that includes some of their recent magazine articles in an easy to peruse format.
Stay “tuned,” (get it? car shop humor) more is on the way soon!
The New First Fidelity Financial Group of Atlanta site is Live!
First Fidelity is a diversified financial services company focused on the needs of those planning for and enjoying retirement and their specific financial problems and opportunities. They specialize in protecting current assets, achieving investment objectives, and reducing taxes.
Visit the new First Fidelity website, or just view the “before and after” below!
Before-
After-
Georgia Renaissance Festival passes 15,000 Facebook Fans!
Congratulations to the Georgia Renaissance Festival, who just eclipsed the 15,000 fan mark on Facebook! Since their new website launched at about this time last year, the festival has seen well over 10,000 new fans. We’re absolutely thrilled for them, and look forward to seeing their meteoric growth continue!
Don’t be shy, check them out at http://www.facebook.com/garenfest
Next up, 20,000!
DynamiX’s Own Featured in Atlanta Journal Constitution
The Atlanta Journal Constitution has posted an article about Home Elephant that includes mention of DynamiX Web Design’s Jeff Jahn. Check out the full story here!
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The New Optimal Hearing Website is Live!
Featuring our exclusive SE Content Management System, the site has been designed to make it very simple to find information, ask questions and locate the closest Optimal Hearing location. The site uses large, friendly fonts to keep content readable for seniors, and the tableless XHTML Strict design ensures that the site can be easily interpreted by accessibility readers.
Check it out here! http://www.optimalhearing.com
Before:
After:
Posted in Announcements, Web Sites
Tagged new site launch, New website, site launch, website design
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Your Website Shouldn’t Be A Modern “Sleazy Car Salesman”
There’s a great reason why car salesmen of old get a bad rap – people hate to be shoved in the direction of buying something by a pushy salesperson. So why is it then that companies often try to do the same thing with their website? Conversions are very important of course (they pay the bills), but they should not be the only goal of your website.
In virtually all cases, the primary goals of your website should be to:
- Establish your position as a trusted expert and resource.
Unless you’ve made your brand by selling the lowest end junk that you can find, you need to prove your knowledge and expertise through your website. It doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber, an attorney, a charitable organization, or someone who sells car parts. No one will (should) buy from someone that they don’t trust. - Provide what your customers need to make an informed decision.
If all your website says is how great and how trustworthy you are, then it’s all but useless. Your site needs to be about the customer, their needs and wants, and how your product or service helps to solve those for them. Information about how satisfied your customers are is great and very important, but it’s not a substitute for providing knowledge about your product or service. - Make it easy for customers to contact you or buy when they are ready.
If your contact information is hard to find or non-existent, then you might as well not have a website. There are far too many alternatives just a Google search away for people to waste their time trying to get in touch with you. Make it very easy, but don’t shove it in their face. Phone number to the top right, Contact Us form and a well-formed Live Chat if desired. - Make it very easy for customers to continue doing business with you.
You’ve proven the value of your product or service, you’ve gotten the order/e-mail/call and you have a new customer. Fantastic! Now what are you doing to keep them happy, keep them coming back and make it easy for them to continue doing business with you? Consider e-mail newsletters that talk about new benefits for your customers, new products or services, and include articles that would be valuable to them. If your e-mail blast just talks about your products and how great you are, don’t bother sending them out.
For help with your online marketing, website design or search engine and social media efforts, give us a call at 800.203.8139, or e-mail us.
Posted in Advertising Advice, Marketing, Social Media, Web Sites
Tagged car salesman stereotype, continued business, easy to contact, increase conversions, informed decision, knowledge and expertise, make it easy for customers, primary goals of your website, pushy salesperson, resource, trusted expert, website design
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Home Elephant iPhone App Version 2 + iPad is out!
Check it out on iTunes here!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/home-elephant/id431799568
Just as with the Home Elephant site itself, a valid Facebook ID is required to register. This is to help prevent spammers from signing up and entering your neighborhood, and to prevent users from registering with fake names. No one wants to be in a neighborhood with 47 “Jane Doe’s,” right?
Prefer to use a computer? Visit www.homeelephant.com to join.
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