Apr 27, 2011

How to Keep Visitors On Your Website Longer


If you own a website you probably want more people coming to see it and at the same time you want them come back and visit it again and interact with it.
To do that we have 6 habits we selected them for you to be applied and then get back to us and leave comment on this post telling us what are the results.

The 6 habits to keep your website visitors around:
1.      Make Sure You Are Relevant.
Make sure that all keywords of your website are 100% relevant to your web content.
2.      Get Rid Of External Links on Your Homepage
to let visitors stay and browse your website contents, don't let them go out through external links for another websites.
3.      Offer Relevant Internal Links To Related Pages
Select your internal links labels and names carefully and wisely in order to be relevant to the linked pages to be useful and worthy for website visitors.
4.      Encourage Interaction
Interaction between visitor and your website pages like commenting, voting and registering is very important to your website, so develop your website dynamic not static.
5.      Stop Being Boring
If you want your visitors come back, add crazy picture to get your reader’s attention or telling a story, or YouTube funny video related to your content, it’s up to you to keep your traffic entertained.
6.      Make Sure Your Content Is Easy To Follow
There’s nothing worse than an article that tries to explain something and ends up just confusing you even more. Make sure that your articles are easy to read, have clarity of thought, and are laid out in a way that is logical. Even your navigation should make sense; I mean you have to organize your directories and categories to be easy for navigation.

Apr 20, 2011

You Should Know Four Things About HTML5


1. HTML5 is not one big thing

You may well ask: “How can I start using HTML5 if older browsers don’t support it?” But the question itself is misleading. HTML5 is not one big thing; it is a collection of individual features. So you can’t detect “HTML5 support,” because that doesn’t make any sense. But you can detect support for individual features, like canvas, video, or geolocation.
You may think of HTML as tags and angle brackets. That’s an important part of it, but it’s not the whole story. The HTML5 specification also defines how those angle brackets interact with JavaScript, through the Document Object Model (DOM). HTML5 doesn’t just define a <video> tag; there is also a corresponding DOM API for video objects in the DOM. You can use this API to detect support for different video formats, play a video, pause, mute audio, track how much of the video has been downloaded, and everything else you need to build a rich user experience around the <video> tag itself.

2. You don’t need to throw anything away from HTML

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that HTML 4 is the most successful markup format ever. HTML5 builds on that success. Now, if you want to improve your web applications you don’t need to throw away your existing markup. You don’t need to relearn things you already know. If your web application worked yesterday in HTML 4, it will still work today in HTML5.
Now, if you want to improve your web applications, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s a concrete example: HTML5 supports all the form controls from HTML 4, but it also includes new input controls. Some of these are long-overdue additions like sliders and date pickers; others are more subtle. For example, the email input type looks just like a text box, but mobile browsers will customize their onscreen keyboard to make it easier to type email addresses. Older browsers that don’t support the email input type will treat it as a regular text field, and the form still works with no markup changes or scripting hacks. This means you can start improving your web forms today, even if some of your visitors are stuck on IE 6.

3. Upgrade to HTML5

For upgrading to HTML5 can be as simple as changing your doctype. The doctype should already be on the first line of every HTML page. Previous versions of HTML defined a lot of doctypes, and choosing the right one could be tricky. In HTML5, there is only one doctype:
<!DOCTYPE html>
Upgrading to the HTML5 doctype won’t break your existing markup, because all the tags defined in HTML 4 are still supported in HTML5. But it will allow you to use — and validate — new semantic elements like <article>, <section>, <header>, and <footer>.

4. HTML5 already works

Whether you want to draw on a canvas, play video, design better forms, or build web applications that work offline, you’ll find that HTML5 is already well-supported. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and mobile browsers already support canvas, video, geolocation, local storage, and more. Google already supports microdata annotations and Microsoft will be supporting most HTML5 features in the upcoming Internet Explorer 9.

Feb 15, 2011

What is the relationship between corporate branding and corporate identity?

John M T Balmer(2002): Corporate Brands: Ten Years On – What’s New?

“Corporate identity provides the grit around which the pearl of a corporate brand is formed.” Balmer
(2001a)
The author argues that there is in many, but not in all, instances, an inextricable link between corporate
identity and corporate branding as evinced by the above quote. However, whilst both constructs can
be important to organisations, there is a tendency to see corporate identity as analogous to corporate
branding. This is wrong. As it is also erroneous to equate visual identity with corporate identity. To
identity scholars this is all very curious since the centrality of identity in comprehending
organisations is a hypothesis which has, for the last fifteen years been propounded by identity
consultants and consultancies. The rise of interest in the corporate branding construct, invariably been
accompanied by ambivalence, and, more often than not, by amnesia in relation to the identity construct.
This is particularly the case with corporate branding, aka corporate identity/graphic design consultancies.
The author, for his part, is clear that there are however key differences beetween the corporate
identity and corporate brands constructs.
One, key, difference is that corporate brands tend to encompass “ethereal” elements which are not
so prominent in the identity mix. (Balmer 2001, Birkigt and Stadler 1986) Thus, whilst corporate
identity is concerned with the question:
“What are we?”/”What we do?” and its sister concept “organisational identity” is concerned with “Who are we?”/How we behave?”
A corporate brand whilst it may be concerned with the above but may be seen to embrace
issues associated with the question:
“What do we profess?”
As such, a corporate brand may be compared to an icon, but an icon in the sense of the Eastern
Christian tradition which functions at two levels.
The first level is that of representation or as a signifier. In this case an icon (visual, verbal, oral
etc) helps to identify the corporate brand. Here there is a clear link with visual identity and its
role as an identifier. A good deal has been written about this viz.,Van Riel et al (2001).
At the second level the icons act as windows to a belief system which represent the belief systems as
encapsulated in the corporate branding covenant (the latter may be implicit or explicit). Thus, we
enter a world of faith. Something which is potentially powerful but also, for the scholar and
researcher, problematic. This might help explain why loyalty to a corporate brands as religious
overtones and explains its power. In the Orthodox tradition the creators of icons are seen to have a
distinct ministry within the church. Some have implied that in the corporate world creators of
corporate brands are also seen as a type of priesthood. There are certainly iconoclasts in the
corporate sphere.
Klein’s book “No Logo” is one example of the above. Others can be found in the letter pages of
the broadsheet newspapers such as The Financial Times. Jones (2001) provides an example of this.
The latter questions whether it was sound business practice to project an business as a way
of life (as a corporate brand). He remarked, “Branding is, in essence, the propagation of
ideology and history is littered with catastrophes stemming from practitioners being taken in by
their own ideology.”
The issues raised by corporate branding iconoclasts are worthy of reflection but fall
outside the scope of this short article. In articulating the differences between corporate
identity and corporate branding the reader is directed to Exhibit Five compares the characteristics of both constructs Exhbit Five
(a) compares the corporate identity mix with the corporate branding mix whilst Exhibit Five
(b) compares the corporate identity management mix with the corporate branding management mix.
Consider Coca-Cola. It is both a corporate and a product brand. As McQueen (2001) observes, the company has virtually one product. A product that nobody actually needs. In its sugar laden form, it is plainly bad. The Coca-Cola corporate brand is entirely dependent on marketing. The company’s logo is the most familiar in the world.
It is not so much the product but the values/system of beliefs which are attached to the brand that matter. As such, the Coca-Cola brand does not only symbolise a brown, sweet and refreshing drink but, moreover, has strong
cultural overtones pertaining to the American way of life/Americanisation. In contrast, the identity of the company owes more to the company’s confederate roots rather than to the USA per se. Its headquarters are in Atlanta, Georgia, and its first advertisements featured southern belles sipping Coca-Cola.
The use of corporate branding is, of course far from new. Jeremy (1998) noted the importance that UK railway companies placed on branding in the 1830s. There was widespread use of coats-ofarms
which not only served to distinguish one company from another but also stood for a quality of service which staff aspired to uphold and customers to expect. Corporate brands also helped to create barriers to entry and helped preserve first-mover competitive advantage.
However, in order for corporate brands to thrive the brand’s profession of faith had to be delivered
- in other words underpinned by the identity.
What is the relationship between corporate branding and corporate identity?

Sheffield’s cutlery manufacturers were a case in point. They failed to suppport their corporate brands from American and German imitators who not only copied the cutlery manufacturer’s goods but also, quite telling, their trade marks and, more importantly, the collective Sheffield brand name.
(Sheffield was synonymous with bespoke and fine cutlery ware). At the same time they embraced
mass production which, whilst led to lower quality, also resulted in lower risk. As such, there was confusion as to what the Sheffield mark stood for; confusion as to the branding covenant and, this led to a loss of faith.