5 Strategies to Making Your Site Picture-Perfect

Did you know that users’ will spend 10 seconds or less deciding whether a web page is worthy of staying on or not? Users are extremely skeptical, and if the content is not visually stimulating or interesting you will lose them within seconds. Even if the website passes this initial 10-second judgment, you still only have about 20 seconds to retain your viewers’ interest with your content. So how do you stop viewers from leaving your website and inspire them to explore your website? Have a unique web design full of colorful, invigorating imagery to capture the readers’ interest. Out of the millions of images out there, which one should you choose?

Here are a few tips that might make choosing your image a little less daunting:

1. Show Instead of Tell

Instead of bombarding your users with information, use your images to creatively tell your company’s story. The brand Chanel is notorious for its rich history in Parisian fashion, founded by none other than Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. The website channels its energy towards the history of the brand through scrolling graphics and design rather than explicitly sell its products. Below details a photo of Gabrielle and on the left it is obvious that this is just one of twelve chapters detailing the history of the Chanel brand. If you were to click through each chapter or simply let the images scroll, the narrative of the company would be told through brilliant black and white imagery.

2. Be Creative, Be Unique

Don’t be shy with your creativity and uniqueness. Users will be drawn to stimulating imagery and design. A wonderful example of this concept comes from Finlandia, a vodka brand native to Finland. The specialty drinks showcased envelop consumers’ senses with crisp images of ice cubes floating in a colorful, fruity paradise. Each of the graphic blocks holds a recipe that awaits conception when the consumer simply scrolls over the image. This website exudes a certain level of elegance and class that is strictly unique to their brand and executes a creative edge to entice the potential customer to delve deeper into their site.

3. Brand Relevance

The imagery chosen for your site should be relevant to your actual brand. Any content put onto the site should relate directly back to the purpose of the company. Godiva does a great job of integrating its brand’s identity as being Belgian chocolate connoisseurs with a stimulating visual experience. Instead of simply selling plain chocolates online, each chocolate is arranged to get the company’s consumers’ salivating and ordering the deliciously wrapped treats. Godiva’s website is an experience full of delicious recipes, beautiful seasonal chocolates, classic collections and stunning graphics with every aspect relating back to the company’s brand identity. When you think Godiva, you think chocolate and that’s how it should be.

4. Evoke Power

Use imagery that sparks conversation surrounding the image. Furthermore, capture beauty, emotion, romance, or some other powerful ethos that will enchant the minds of viewers and evoke their curiosity to explore the rest of the site. A retail company that does this well is Anthropologie, which constantly uses bright and colorful visuals to showcase the newest designs and trends with a storybook feel. Anthropologie headed to Rajasthan, India’s largest state, for their Spring 2015 look book and enchanted consumers with beautiful palaces and fields of flowers. Anthropologie’s indie clothing may not be for everyone, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of the clothing in these photos.

5. Call to Action

Ultimately, producing an image that prompts followers to take action is what takes a regular image from simly improving the web design to providing visual content marketing for your site. Whole Foods dedicates its site to an assortment of calls to action from exploring the company’s blog to viewing various videos demonstrating cooking techniques. The vibrant colors and mouthwatering foods in each block entice consumers to watch the videos and read the blog posts for savory cooking tips, ultimately pushing customers to the store to buy Whole Foods’ delectable selection of groceries.

Images serve to enhance the web design of your site as well as aid in visual content marketing by giving viewers imaginative imagery that excites and stimulates their senses. If you follow these five steps of showing not telling, being creative and unique, ensuring brand relevance, evoking power and finally, having a call to action, then you will most definitely retain the interest of your website viewer for more than 10 seconds. For additional information on the topics of web design or imagery, check out articles by Mahnoor Mirza or Anthony Gaenzle for wonderful advice and profound insight.

How to Optimize Your Website for SEO Success

Nowadays you are probably hearing a lot about the importance of SEO and content marketing and how it can affect the success of a company if done correctly.

To start, what does SEO even mean? Well, SEO actually stands for Search Engine Optimization and is defined as the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results.

After some research I found an excellent article from Elumynt.com, where blogger William Harris delves into his own depiction of SEO through a stimulating SEO Food Pyramid visual. I don’t think I could find a better way to break down SEO than this. Below you can see the detail Mr. Harris went into describing the complicated nature surrounding SEO.

Architecture

He starts off with the basics, saying how the “Architecture” of a site should involve the most effort and detail. Proper code, optimized page titles, meaningful descriptions, sitemaps, and eliminating crawling errors and duplicate content are all mentioned in the foundation of an SEO. The architecture refers to the basics, this is where all the information expands upon and is absolutely imperative to have a handle on for your site.

Content Creation

Do you want people sharing your content? You should. And what is the best way to do that? Essentially, you create relevant content that people actually want to share that is relevant and interesting. Content is imperative for the success of your site or company. ESSENTIAL. If you want some good advice on the subject, check out Rand Fishkin over at Moz.com. He is basically a content marketing wizard, so if you need some perspective, he’s your guy.

Promotion

Promoting your brand is a cornerstone for success. People won’t know to share your content if no one even knows your site exists. Start by getting your name out there. Tell your friends and family and let that network expand. BizSugar.com is a great website that will help your content reach sites with bigger communities.

User Experience

The design, navigation, usability, graphics and content are all key factors that will get visitors to stay on your website. If these factors are in place, then you are on the track to creating a community surrounding your site. Check out some good examples of websites that contain these elements below!

Social Signals

Social platforms like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and even Snapchat are excellent places for viewers to share your content. Harris adds, “Social signals are a part of the algorithm that tells Google how authoritative and relevant the content you are creating and promoting really is.”

Link Building

Finally, link building is best when used sparingly. Only replacing dead or broken links is essentially all the link building you need to be doing. You don’t want to overwhelm your viewers.

I would say Harris is on the money with all of his ideas. Have you ever gotten to a site and immediately noticed how slow it is or even how hard it is to find what you’re looking for? I would say you give up looking for what you need in under a minute because you, just like everyone else, hate wasting time. If this is a common phenomenon, companies should get the picture and spend a little more of its budget on fixing these problems.

So, what are you looking for in a website? Well, personally, I am looking for the following:

• Lightning fast speed
• Easy to navigate
• Provides a search function (that actually works!)
• Stimulating visuals
• Relevant content
• Links, URLs, etc. to back up content
• Creative content
• Interesting stories

Essentially, I want to arrive at a site and think to myself, “Wow this is really cool, I want all of my friends to see this.” Honestly, you can have just about any subject on your website and make it look really awesome. Who does it best? Let me give you some examples:

1. SuperHeroCheesecake.com is a creative digital production studio based in Amsterdam, raising the bar in digital for advertising agencies. I would say the bar has definitely been raised. Below you can see a picture of the website, full of stimulating visuals, bold colors, easy click navigation and interesting graphics. Admittedly, I am super impressed with this company’s website.

2. StinkDigital.com is an interactive production agency with offices in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin and New York. This global creative agency dedicates its time to building better digital experiences and I would whole-heartedly agree. An entire page showcases this company’s work and one specific ad caught my eye – an interactive digital game for Ray-Ban fans to rescue their Facebook friends from the clutches of Dr. Compliance. Cool advertising, Ray-Ban!

3. Hyperakt.com is an independent NYC design firm based in Brooklyn with a passion for creating work that affects change in the world around us. The company essentially celebrates people’s beautiful stories through innovative designs and bright, bold colors. From the graphic below, you can see the type of work that Hyperakt does, and it is pretty neat.

So, what does all of this information mean? Essentially, it proves Harris’s point that there are a conglomeration of factors that go into successful SEO and content marketing. Viewers are more tech savvy than ever and having a website that is slow, outdated, boring and stark with broken links will only harm you and your brand. All of the sites I mentioned are various types of brands, but all have two things in common: bright graphics and interesting content. Honestly, I am not looking for any of the companies’ services, but that didn’t stop me from exploring the sites and soaking in the beautiful graphics and fascinating content.

Now I am not saying that you need to have something this innovative because most of these companies specialize in graphic design. However, providing fresh content and colorful graphics is an attainable goal for everyone and it will absolutely give you more viewers, more shares and eventually, a higher ranking through SEO.

The Unedited Gems of “Conservative Chic”

This post is simply to show the transition the photos took before Photoshop editing took place.

Conservative Chic

The series of photos below tell a story about how buyers in the Greenville area bring high fashion to their boutiques and integrate Greenville’s conservative tastes.

Back of My Business Card

This is the back!

Business Card

Shown above is the front of my business card which includes my name, subject of business, my school, and my contact information. If we’re being honest it took me a while trying to figure out all of the features on Photoshop because I hadn’t played with it for quite some time. However, once I got the hang of it I spent hours playing around with different images and features inside the application.

To start, I found two images on the internet that were copyright free and I played around with them a bit. I chose lipstick lips and a mascara wand with the black ink running because if I were to ever start my own business at this juncture I would have my own makeup company. Sadly, it is just a dream but I had a lot of fun playing around with a potential business card for my dream makeup company (makeup enthusiast).

Anyways, the break down of what I did is as follows:

First, I created a new layer above the background because I didn’t want to make any permanent changes on top of the background layer. Next, I chose a peach, flesh tone color that I thought was a pretty neutral for the pictures and text I would layer on top. Next, I inserted the picture of the mascara wand by dragging and dropping on an entirely new layer and selected “place” photo. I used the quick selection tool with the (+) to select all of the pieces of the background inside the mascara brush picture to get rid of the white background after clicking “add layer mask” at the bottom. There were still some background pieces within the black ink of the mascara so I used the magic wand tool to quickly select those and delete them. Whew! That took a while to figure out (probably the bulk of my brain power).

After that I wanted the mascara wand and its color to have a metallic sheen to it so I searched around in the effects and gave the image a gradient metallic-y gray and was really excited about what I saw. The image literally took on a silver sheen and I loved it!

Next, I wanted to add text, and there are only two different types that I used. For my name, I chose “Lucida Handwriting” in pt. 18 font. I wanted the color to match the lips picture I was going to put on the back of the card so I tried to eyeball it and match the color. I know there’s an actual tool I could have used for that but it was a little complicated for me to try to figure out at the time. Next I added the make-up enthusiast, Furman University, my e-mail and cell all in separate layers with the font “Orater Std” in font size 8. I loved the outcome so I was pretty excited about the overall look.

After, I went back and decided to add a shadow to my name in the same color red with the fx tool on the side by right clicking the layer and going from there.

Finally, I placed the picture of the lips and went through the same process that I did with the mascara wand. I removed the background with the quick selection tool and clicking add masking layer. Then, I removed the middle background color from the lips using the magic wand tool and using the delete button from there.

My final step was to link all of the layers together and use the Layer > Flatten Image option and flattened all of the images together. It came out to be two different tabs with the back of my business card and the front. I was really happy with the turn out!

The Real & The Ideal

“Pictures tell a thousand words” could not be more accurate for Kress and VanLeeuwen’s chapter entitled “Meaning of Composition.” They discuss the various characteristics that make up a photo, including what makes an element the centralized focus and what does not. Commonly your eyes focus on a salient element in photographs (or just about any work of art) that is meant to draw your attention.

Three principles of composition:

1. Information Value: various elements are attached with specific informational values for the various “zones” à top and bottom, left and right, center and margin

2. Salience: the elements are made to attract the viewers’ attention to different areas such as placement in the foreground and background, relative size, contrasts in tonal value, differences in sharpness, etc.

3. Framing: the presence of absence of framing devices connects or disconnects elements of the image, determining whether they belong together or do not belong together

The Dior Ad Campaign, shown above, incorporates all elements described thus far. In the ad, the light coming from the higher “heavenly” dimension pulls the salient Marion Cotillard, who is “connected” (framing) with the Dior handbag, into the light while the man attempts to pull her into the darkness (the disconnected character). The focus remains on the two characters clothed in dark garments due to the pale city scene in the background. Ultimately, the man fades into the distance as if to say that Dior’s purses dominate over the importance of any man (which I mean, duh).

Another way of looking at photographs is the way the images position themselves in the photos. The image left of center portrays a man who wants his woman to follow him into reality (his body leans toward the city), which is the “Given” portion of the image. Historically, men present a sense of dominance and guide their women (and yes I mean that like possession) towards their own selfish desires (or at least this used to be the archetypal man). The image at the right of center presents the “New” portion of the image. Marion is turned away from the man and follows the light coming from the upper right hand quadrant, or the heavenly portion of the ad. The choice she makes of the handbag, while neglecting him, is a new age idea that shows independence, strength, and the courage to be alone.

The “Ideal” concept also comes into play, where Marion chooses the present ideal of independence (and a handbag) over the old stigma of having the security of a man. His face and body begin to fall into darkness while the light of the upper right corner pulls Marion further away. Dior depicts a progressive ad here, where a woman appears to choose her own desires over those of a man.

Source of image: http://www.fashionadexplorer.com/l-dior–c-ad-campaign

Imagery: The Hidden Meaning

Just like we use words to describe the world around us, we use images to depict our perspective without utilizing words. Paintings, sculptures, photography and so on all are created with different messages in mind. For the purpose of explaining imagery, let me hone in specifically on photography.

Photography, specifically, is seen by some to be an objective truth of events. The raw realism in the photos depicts one moment in time that can simultaneously be informative and expressive. In fact, multiple images paired together depict a journey through time with a larger message in mind. For instance, National Geographic might post a series of photos showing how the polar ice caps in Antarctica have shifted and melted over time. The powerful imagery and raw realism of the photos creates a mental picture of the devastation that is to come in the future if we do not act now.

Rowe’s article discussing sports photography describes the human body in the images to be sexualized, genderized, radicalized and so on. Sports images, furthermore, come in several varieties. In some images, bodies are “gendered” meaning men are seen as rugged, independent men and passive, dependent women. In other photos, like pornography for instance, women are “sexualized” for the sole reason of creating excitement. This idea parallels the idea of sports photography, which itself is taken for the excitement of the viewer (in a different context!).

In images (photography too) there is a relationship between the signifier (image/sound/word) and the signified (meaning) as first described by Saussure. In sports photography the signifier might be the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated and the signifier would be sexuality (how could a woman in a barely-there swimsuit not be?). In this specific example, the object in the photo has become gendered in a form of strategic advertising. As the saying goes, “sex sells” and without a doubt there are men buying that swimsuit issue specifically for the woman on the cover. The woman is essentially a symbol for sexuality, beauty and health and each of those things is clearly depicted with her toned, scantily clad body.

Additionally, images themselves can be considered iconic, even the people in them. For instance, the iconography of the mother and child represents the universal concept of maternal devotion. In other contexts, specific people are seen as iconic. Specifically, Marilyn Monroe who was seen as a sex icon with her blonde hair and womanly curves. Madonna, the iconic singer, combined the religious iconography of Madonna (the archetypal mother figure) and the sexual iconography of Marilyn that ultimately established her as a famous icon through the irony of the combined iconographies…say that 5 times fast.

Questions to ponder:

1. Will we ever see the day when women are depicted as strong and independent rather than passive and submissive, especially in sports photography?
2. What does it take to establish yourself as iconic or create your own brand of icon?

Source of image: http://www.digitalspy.com/music/i398807-8/madonna-career-in-pictures-blond-ambition-tour.html#~oLz3ROFHy7YkgF