Website Marketing - Surefire Design

I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard this from a new client!
Let me start by saying, our clients are NOT dumb!

I’m amazed at just how many new clients start their phone conversation with me by saying things like “I don’t know anything about websites” “I’m really not very good on the computer” or even “I’m really dumb when it comes to computers”.
These are mostly intelligent, competent business owners. So what is with that?

I can empathise with them. We recently went through the process of having our office interior design done. We started by saying “We don’t know anything about interior design” and we were cautious and fearful of costs blowing out. We thought they might laugh at our tiny budget! What if we didn’t like what they designed? As it turned out we were thrilled with the plan we got from www.fitout.co.nz.
But these are all the same concerns our web clients approach us with.

I personally think that many players in the IT and web industries have been missing the point. For years technical speak has been used to frighten and control clients, and to create a technical class of ‘those in the know’.

The reality should be the opposite to this.
As a client you don’t want/need to know about linux apache mysql php hosting, ftp servers, domain registries A records MX records, xml sitemaps, search engine friendly architecture, html javascript and ajax. Please ignore that last sentence!!

We don’t talk to our clients about computers. Here are the things you DO know about, and these are the only things we talk about with you-

Who are your target market?

What are your core messages to them?

What do you want to achieve with your website?

How does your website fit into your overall conventional marketing?

How do you take your coffee?

See not a computer term in sight!

All you want to do is crop the product photo to a square for uploading right?
You open photoshop only to find out that 30 day trial you downloaded has run out!
How do you easily resize and crop your images?

You aren’t alone. So here I am reviewing two free drawing programs and giving you links on where to get them.

These are third party programs, downloaded from websites Surefire Design have no affiliation with, so please be aware we cannot endorse or guarantee these products in anyway other than give our opinions, and cannot be held responsible for anything bad that might happen if you do use them. There, does that sound scary enough? In other words, use your common sense like you would with anything else from the internet!

1) If you want to just resize and change the quality of images.

My choice here is a free program called PIXresizer. It doesn’t get simpler than this-

This is the site we downloaded it from http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm
Or Google search for “PIXresizer download”.

This is all there is to the user interface-

2) If you want to crop, edit, resize and change the quality of images.

I’ve looked at a lot of free image software, FastStone Image Viewer really impressed me.
The user interface felt funny at first, but I quickly got the hang of it. Rather than stepping you through sequentially, you click on buttons to do the next thing i.e. if you want to edit etc.

We downloaded it from http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
Nice looking interface too-

Frustrating isn’t it? You can see that image you want in the pdf, you need to put it on your website.
But how do you get it out???

Things you will need-

1) Open the PDF document with Adobe Acrobat
2) Click on the Graphics Select Tool -
3) Use the tool to select the area you want to take away as an image. This will automatically copy it to the clipboard.
4) Open your graphics/drawing program, typically all you need to do is select New, to get a new document created, then click paste. The image that was sitting on the ‘theoretical’ clipboard should appear, ready for cropping or editing.
5) Save your new image in a useful format. For web, this is typically jpg, or gif.

If you don’t have a drawing program check our other posts for useful links to some free user friendly drawing programs you can download!

Over a BBQ at Christmas, a good friend of mine asked me “Andrew so what actually is a web browser?”.
Now he is an intelligent and capable businessman, and it’s a good question!

Some things in life become so familiar, it becomes difficult to explain them.
To some people a browser IS the internet. It’s the thing they click on and suddenly the whole of cyber space is laid out at their feet. But the truth is slightly different.

As I see it, there are three main technical building blocks that make up our internet experience.
1) Web pages
2) Web Content
3) The humble browser

It helps if you think of Web Pages as actually being computer files (which they are), and then think of the content you read as being part of the content of these files (which it is).
Ok so you when you open a web page, you are opening a computer file on a computer somewhere in cyber space. That file contains the content you want to read and also computer code instructions on how that content should be laid out, and where images go, and what colours and fonts etc…
Without the Browser thats all it would be - a file containing text. What the browser does is translate the instructions (called HTML code), and then displays the content to you correctly!

So you see the browser itself is actually a translating window, allowing you to view the internet.

There are many different browsers, with the most popular being Microsfts Internet Explorer and Firefox. That’s another article though!