Sky Soft Consulting won a design award a while ago.
We are proud to announce this award and we would like to thank our team that has been working so hard in the past couple of months.
Thank you.
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
Seems like the folks over at GoDaddy are charging their email marketing customers if they get spam complaints. Deliverability.com broke the news when they got an email with this information sent to them from a GoDaddy customer. GoDaddy will now charge customers $200 to “manage” their complaints. Even worse is that if the customer wants to then leave them and transfer their domains to another registrar they can’t do it until they pay GoDaddy $75!
To cover all of their bases, it appears that if one of their customers uses an Email Service Provider outside of GoDaddy to advertise their GoDaddy-hosted site and they get complaints from one of their customer’s recipients, they could be hit with a fine or other action.
Wow. Serious Email Service Providers (ESPs) like VerticalResponse usually do this as a service to customers and won’t allow spammers to use their services. But let’s face it, everyone gets a complaint now and then, even customers with best intentions. The difference is that serious ESPs want to help their customers learn best practices about email marketing and not turn complaints into a new revenue stream.
If you use GoDaddy to host your website be careful. And any time you’re looking for a serious ESP, make sure you ask if they have a deliverability and abuse department – most serious ESPs do, looks like GoDaddy might not.
IMO, GoDaddy should stick to what they’re good at, being a registrar. Leave the email marketing heavy-lifting to those who “want” to do it and help businesses grow.
Source: VerticalResponse
Understanding the keys to building your personal brand begins with creating an image and more than a little passion. Knowing your skills, strengths, values and goals is the foundation of solid personal brand construction. When the right elements are in place, your brand is visible, unique and a reflection of your authentic self.
There are infinite ways to grow your personal brand once it’s been established, but only a short list of essential keys to ensuring successful results and maximizing your potential:
Explore your own truths. Building a strong personal brand demands an honest assessment of what you have to offer. It’s about knowing your weaknesses as intimately as you know your strengths and assets.
Be original. The definition of personal branding stems from the theory that there is something different about our unique blend of talent, personality and principles.
Establish credibility. Become an expert in your given field by aspiring to know more about what you do than anyone else doing the same thing. Position yourself as a source of information and be willing to share that knowledge. Create a reliable and credible personal brand that makes you the authority among your peers or colleagues.
Know your audience. Build your brand to attract your special audience. As simple as it may seem, it is often overlooked during the formative stages of brand building. Do your own research and learn what customers or clients want and need. Find out what price points, services and ideas they respond to and how you fit into the picture. Never assume!
Act with integrity. One of the most notable characteristics of the best personal brands are those built on the golden rule. They become quality brands through consistency and honesty.
It can be tempting with such a malleable medium to redesign your small business web site whenever the mood strikes.
There are some important questions to consider before embarking on a redesign. Here are some of them:
1. What do you want to accomplish?
What concrete improvements to the site will the redesign bring? Will there be more content, more functionality for users, easier/cleaner navigation? What problems with the current site will the redesign fix? Map your goals out carefully beforehand. Not only will this save time with design professionals, it’ll make it easy to judge your success later.
2. Is it worth it?
The companion to #1. Will the improvements be worth the disruption, and possible audience alienation of a redesign? Redesigns in both print and on the web have shown that no matter how great you think the new design is, there will be a segment of your audience that will hate it. Humans dislike change, and embrace familiarity. Even if people love it, they will have a learning curve with the new site, unless it works exactly like the old site. And if that’s the case, why do the redesign at all?
3. Who’s going to do it?
If you already have an existing site with enough problems/concerns to merit a redesign, I urge you to use a web professional for the job. Yes, it’s more expensive. Yes, it’s going to take time and effort to choose the right person or firm to do the project. But it’s worth it. You probably wouldn’t let a novice do your taxes, or design your next marketing campaign. So why let a novice mess with your web site?
4. Will it be easier to update?
This should be a major goal of any redesign that goes beyond the simply cosmetic. You should always be moving toward ease of administration, not just ease of use for the audience.
5. Will it be easier to navigate?
My pick for the other important goal of a redesign – the companion to #4. Does the redesign give users easier access to your content? This is especially important on the web, where every site has a different interface.
When it comes to selecting a name for your business you would assume it is the easiest part of the start up process. But in fact, there is a lot you have to take into consideration. After all, your business name acts as your identity. A poor name could keep people from even coming to your site, let alone becoming a customer.
Creativity is key when selecting a name for your online business. Anybody can come up with a bland name like Jeff’s Home Business. But throwing in creativity can help separate your business from the thousands of other businesses on the internet.
While you want to be creative, you do not want to have the name be too far out there. Creativity is good, but it is vital you stay as professional as possible. After all, it is still a business that you are running. Keep it clean and relative to what your business is about.
The next thing to keep in mind when selecting a name for your business is keeping it short and to the point. You do not want to have a business name that is long and drags on. This only makes it difficult for people to remember.
You obviously want to select a name that suits you and sums up your business. But you want to make it as visually appealing as possible to internet searchers. You have one chance to grab their attention through marketing, and sometimes it is the business name that can do it.