Search engine optimization (SEO) can get complicated, perhaps overcomplicated. In desperate attempts to “fool” search engines with link webs, content farms, forum spamming, etc. many SEOs have lost sight of what’s really important: having a well-coded site that presents information in a way that both search engines and humans can easily understand, that's well-represented across the Internet. Here are a few pieces of low-hanging SEO fruit that you can start doing today:

Install Google Webmaster Tools

Google provides a suite of very effective tools that allow you to diagnose problems on a website and communicate that website’s disposition to Google. Resolve any HTML errors Continue Reading

Successful ads attract Attention, arouse Interest, stimulate Desire and present a compelling call for Action – in that order. If you want to create ads that get noticed, are appreciated and acted upon, A.I.D.A. is the tried-and-true formula.

An ad typically appears in paid media. That means it has to compete with other ads to get noticed by hyper-short attention spans. But A.I.D.A. applies to other communication contexts, too. Brochures, social media posts, postcards, even executive presentations all have to compete in one way or another to get noticed and succeed. For simplicity, I’ll use the word “ad” as a placeholder for all of these forms. Continue Reading

We definitely aren’t about tooting our own horn, but sometimes you have to gush. I am so very proud of the team we’ve assembled here at CNP over the last 22 years,  and much of their hard work was recognized at last Saturday’s Polk County Advertising Federation’s 2013 ADDY Awards.

The theme of the ADDY Awards this year was “Design a Brighter Tomorrow” and with my creative family here at CNP, I know that’s what we’ll be doing for some time to come! Each project is a labor of love and we are grateful for the opportunity our clients give us to work on these amazing projects.

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During the production of the movie Jaws, “Bruce” the costly, pneumatically powered mechanical shark, never worked as designed.

Unfortunately, Bruce was slated to appear in almost every attack scene. Malfunctions happened routinely. The studio almost shut down production because Bruce became such a pain.

With the exception of the final few minutes of the movie, director Steven Spielberg mostly abandoned Bruce and reverted to the classic Hitchcock approach: the power of suggestion. Continue Reading

Enter Google.

All too often, I hear how they’re frustrated that when they try to find themselves online, a far-less-qualified competitor comes up ahead of them … or worse yet, they’re nowhere to be seen. The Internet can be a cruel place, and it happens to all types of businesses: I’ve heard the same thing from hotel owners to restauranteurs to business attorneys to healthcare privacy consultants.

The sad reality is that Google has absolutely no idea who you are in the real world (though, for a lot of very different reasons, that’s probably a good thing). It infers who is the best (and therefore #1 ranked) by your activities across the Internet – your website or blog, presence on social media, listings and reviews on third-party sites, and who’s talking about you (and linking to your website).

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Rule #1: Color Variables are Great

One big advantage of using SCSS is that you can use variables to control all colors throughout the design. That way, you don’t have to search through 1000+ lines of SCSS to change a color later; you just change it in one place. That’s pretty much the motto of SCSS: “Change things in one place instead of all over the place.” You define them by writing:

$blue: #ff0000; // Yes, I just defined $blue as red.

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