You're Not Getting Enough Value From Your Web Team

Whether they have an in-house Web team or use an external agency, many organizations fail to get the most from their Web designers. Web designers are much more than pixel painter. They have a wealth of knowledge about the Web and how users interact with it. They also understand design techniques, including grid systems, white space, color theory and much more.

Treating designers as pixel painter wastes their design experience

It is therefore wasteful to micro-manage by asking them to "make the logo bigger" or to "move that 3 pixels to the left." By doing so, you are reducing their role to that of a software operator and wasting the wealth of experience they bring.

If you want to get the maximum return on your web team, present it with problems, not solutions. For example, if you're targeting your website at teenage girls, and the designer goes for corporate blue, suggest that your audience might not respond well to that color. Do not tell him or her to change it to pink. This way, the designer has the freedom to find a solution that may even be better than your choice. You allow your designer to solve the problem you have presented.

Design by Committee

Design is subjective. The way we respond to a design can be influenced by culture, gender, age, childhood experience and even physical conditions (such as color blindness). What one person considers great design could be hated by another. This is why it is so important that design decisions be informed by user testing rather than personal experience. Unfortunately, this approach is rarely taken when a committee is involved in design decisions.

Instead, designing by committee becomes about compromise. Because committee members have different opinions about the design, they look for ways to find common ground. One person hates the blue color scheme, while another loves it. This leads to designing on the fly, with the committee instructing the designer to "try a different blue" in the hopes of finding middle ground. Unfortunately, this leads only to bland design that neither appeals to nor excites anyone.

Introduction to the Online Consumer Behaviors (Internet to mobile era)

Consumer Behaviors (What the customer think and how they make decision) is one of the oldest topic discussed by man. Why is it so?

The reason is simple. Every company wants to be in the leading position, but it is never a simple task. This is due to we humans are always making decision from time to time, and there are so many factors that will affect individual mentality. Furthermore, as the society keeps improving from the current state, it increases the difficulties on understanding how consumers behave.

One of the hottest topic discuss by marketers today is the fast moving technological factors. Internet Advertisement, the earliest topic that changes most of marketers mentally, is already a “need” today. All organizations, no matter it profit or non profit, small or large, need to leverage the cheap, yet effective internet marketing. But the key question is, what’s more to come?

YES, I know what you are thinking, the small minicomputer on hand, the Mobile.

With 3.5G Mobile technology coming up fast, it is the next up to date internet trend people all around the world are targeting in. Are you one of them? Are you someone who goes into the mobile world and tried your best to grab a portion of the market shares?

Well, no matter it’s a yes or no, eventually all companies will move into that area. But how about doing that? How much budget you need? Will there be risk? And will mobile be your key?


Stay tune to our Next section on Online Consumer Behaviors (Internet to mobile era)

Marketing, is not only selling and advertising. Then what is marketing?

Have you ever wonders what is marketing to you? What are the marketers doing every day? Are they thinking of ways to sell their products? Or are they planning to throw in more budgets in their marketing efforts?

From people that we met and talk to, a lot of them thinks of marketing as only selling and advertising. But in my prospective, selling and advertising are only parts of marketing. There are more about marketing in the world today.

So what is marketing to me then? Marketing to me are a lot more than making sales, it is about understanding what customer needs, creating product or services that provides quality and excellent values, creating the correct pricing strategy, distribute and communicates effectively and efficiently. I deeply believe that any companies that achieve all the requirements above would have their product or services landed in a great success.

By saying so, do you have more ideas on marketing?

Some believes that marketing only required by large organization like Apple and Microsoft, but that is not true. All kinds of organization, no matter it’s a big or small companies, profits or non profits, requires marketing to ensure their success. Take for example, a clothes retail shops at Singapore, a contracting company, a hawker stalls, all of them also required marketing. Marketing like pricing strategy, how to communicates, how to cook foods that my customer would preferred, how to tell other people I’m here? All these questions are marketing, and all these are steps and objectives to their business success.

So now that you know the important of marketing for all kinds of organization, what does that mean? What we can do to move forwards in this twenty-first century? In twenty-first century, we focus on online one to one marketing which to us is more personal kind of efforts because we can now targets individuals. But by saying so, that also indicates that there will more challenges for companies to bring values and satisfaction. Marketers will now required to think in an aspect of catering specific services that able to bring value for each customer.

In another prospective, or in another saying, marketing now combines with the internet, which is a global marketplace. The real question now is how to understand the target audience using the current technology? Where are they located in the virtual world? How to create touch point for them? How to create more values and satisfaction?

All these are some of the reason why companies like graphicFuse came into play. graphicFuse is a creative agency that focus on internet marketing, or some call it digital marketing, to assist big or small companies to creates something out of the internet. What graphicFuse would do is to allow companies to understand the current online market, know who you are selling to and where their target audiences are. After which, create different effective online touch point that able to create awareness, generate interest, arose desire, and last but the most important, action of the customer.So wait no further, start thinking on what you need to do, and what you want to be like in the coming years.