I used many different fonts overlayed on each other to give a feeling of depth. The busyness of the fonts are balanced by the minimal color scheme including various shades of gray, purple, and pink.

The cool, simple effect matches the reality of March in Marquette, Michigan. Harley’s Lounge is one of the few venues in Marquette that supports local music and I am proud to design their monthly posters.

There are two fonts used. One is a mono-spaced serif that looks like it could be from an old printing press, and the other is very futuristic. I used these to impart a sense of timelessness. By using the same warm colors from the Egyptian art on the text, the bottom half is tied in with the top. I also used green and white, two colors that were taken directly from the color scheme at terracottahalflife.com in order to create some continuity of branding.

Terracotta half-life is a musical group based out of Marquette, Michigan that I started about five years ago. Performing with the group are some of the areas finest musicians. Over the years I’ve designed Logos, T-shirts, Stickers, and many Posters for the band.

The lower portion is a colorful spattering of blues and greens. This area is held together by a half-way unzipped zipper, which opens up to show the white space behind. Over the white space is the main info in a modern font with a black and red color scheme.

The overall effect is very futuristic and leaves a thick science fiction residue. Harley’s Lounge is one of the few venues in Marquette, Michigan that supports local music and I am proud to design their monthly posters.

The site has gone through several revisions since 2005. It was given a proper style sheet, the layout was changed several times, and of course the actual content was modified (many times).

In 2008, the site went through a major overhaul with a transition to a WordPress based site. Built with PHP and using a MySQL database, it was now a dynamic site with blogging functionality and an RSS feed. However, I used a generic WordPress Theme (slightly modified) for this version of the site and was never completely satisfied.

Now, its been completely redesigned again. This time with a new WordPress Theme that I custom designed. Although the site has been completely redesigned, my goal was to maintain a similar feel. So the logo, background image, and color scheme have essentially remained the same.

The site is now more user friendly with a horizontal navigation bar just under the logo as well as at the bottom of every page. This should make it much easier to navigate the site.

Also, the blog has been moved to the main page instead of being separated into different categories and buried in the site somewhere. This should make it more interesting to visitors immediately upon arrival.

You can now subscribe to the blog via email as well as RSS feed.

The Photo gallery is now broken into separate years to make photo browsing easier.

Of course there were a lot of other small changes made that I won’t go into, but let me just say that I am much more satisfied with the site now.

terracottahalflife.com

For January, I used an image of an old sandstone brick wall for the background. After giving it a red tint, I added yellow and white text in a fancy but readable font.

Check out the Current Poster

1. Include Your URL on all printed material.

Including your URL (aka your web address) on all of your other promotional material might seem like an obvious thing to do, yet there are many people who don’t take full advantage of this technique.

Your URL should be printed on anything and everything possible including stationery, business cards, brochures, invoices, literature, store-front signs, and even vehicles.

By doing this, you are maximizing the use of existing materials to advertise your site as well as reinforcing your brand to all existing clients.

2. Social Media

First of all, what is Social Media? This is a term that includes blogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, and forums. These sites encourage people to interact with each other and make it very easy to get your message out to the masses.

There are millions of people using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn everyday to make comments, share personal information, and share links.

Social bookmarking is a way to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Social bookmarking sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Technorati, Delicious, and Slashdot.

So, go create a profile for your business at any or all of these sites and use it as a way to expose more people to the content on your site. Of course, this will be even more effective if you actually engage in conversations and interact with other users rather than just “spamming” them with promotional links.

3. Submit your site to Online Directories

There are a ton of different directories online. Some are all inclusive, some are industry specific, and some cater to local businesses.

Two free options for listing your local business are Google Local Business Center and Yahoo! Local . These are both great ways to make sure people can find your site when doing a local search.

4. Traditional Advertising

Yes it is true that the print media industry is declining as more and more people realize how much more efficient and effective the internet is. That being said, print media is still important. This is even more so for local businesses.

Many people still read newspapers and magazines for their news and a nicely designed print ad could draw them to your site. Another traditional form of advertising is the radio. Radio ads can help attract listeners to your site as well.

Keep in mind that these methods may not work well for certain types of businesses. It is important to know your intended audience before shelling out the cash for traditional advertising.

5. E-mail Marketing

When I say e-mail marketing, I don’t mean unsolicited mass mailings, also known as spam. I’m talking about things like starting a Newsletter, or including a custom signature at the bottom of all e-mail correspondences.

A periodic e-newsletter is a great way to keep people interested in what you do. It is important to include and emphasize a sign-up option on your site. Make sure it is easy to sign up. Also, using a well designed HTML e-mail template will make your newsletter more appealing.

A custom signature at the bottom of all e-mails should include your name, business name, URL, with an active link to your site and can also include an image of your logo or a custom designed banner ad. This signature will be seen by everybody you communicate with through e-mail. It will make it easy for them to get to your site and reinforce your brand.

After doing all these things, how will you know if they are working? The best way is to use some sort of statistics program to track activity on your website.

Most commercial hosting packages include statistics tracking abilities, but I recommend Google Analytics because of its great depth, flexibility and visually appealing reports and graphs.

If you need help setting goals or analyzing your data, I offer this as one of my services. Please contact me to discuss in more detail.

What is dynamic content?

Back in the day, a hypertext document on the world wide web was a static file that looked the same to everybody who viewed it. If the page was lucky, it would be updated periodically, but for the most part, it just remained the same and collected virtual dust. If you’ve ever stumbled across a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated in 10–15 years, it probably hasn’t.

In contrast, a dynamic document on the world wide web can be customized for each user based on individual conditions or parameters. So it could show different content depending on the time of day, a user’s profile, operating system, browser or just about anything else.

Sometimes referred to as “conditional content”, it allows a more unique experience for the user with personalized messages and such. With dynamic content, the content is separated from the design and stored in a database. The content seen by the user is generated at the time of request at the server level using CGI, ASP, PHP, or a content management system.

How does it drive traffic?

Search engines, or more accurately, their search bots (also known as spiders) crawl the web and index the sites they find. They prefer dynamic content over static content because they figure something that changes often is more relevant than something that doesn’t. Therefore a dynamic page is more likely to ranked higher on a search engine’s results page and that means more traffic to the site.

How does it drive sales?

Even more important than its SEO benefits is the fact that human visitors like to see something different each time they visit a site. It keeps them interested. If it looks the same every time they visit, they are much less likely to return again. We humans also tend to enjoy an experience more if it’s personalized. For example, when a user logs in, they might see a custom welcome message that includes their name. No matter how it’s done, if a user has an enjoyable experience while using your site, they are much more likely to return again. They are also more likely to tell all their friends how great your site is, buy your widgets, visit your physical location or sign up for your service.

Using a CMS like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., allows you to control your dynamic content very easily, hence the massive number of “blog” type sites that have popped up over the last several years. The key to this is quality not quantity. You must give your audience something that is interesting or important to them.

So, keep it fresh, keep it flexible, keep it dynamic.

For December, I went with a simple yet festive look. I used green, red and black over a white background for a holiday feel. The letter “o” in Lounge has been replaced by a wreath. Also, as a symbol of the gift of music, a treble clef is adorned with a big red bow.

Check out the Current Poster

As you might have guessed, the higher the PageRank, the more likely a page will appear at the top of the search results. Well, sort of. The problem is that Google shows us one score (Toolbar PageRank) that gets updated periodically (3 or 4 times per year) and uses a different score (actual PageRank) that is constantly being updated. So, we really don’t know the exact relationship between the visible Toolbar PageRank and the actual PageRank or how much either of them help or hurt our listing in Google search results.

Hold on though! Now Google is telling us that we shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much. In fact, they removed PageRank data from their Webmaster Tools recently. Apparently, there are other metrics that are far more important for website owners to track in terms of SEO. Some of these include traffic, relevancy and backlinks. Yes it’s true that the publicly visible PageRank (via the Google Toolbar) is updated infrequently, and therefore is inherently inaccurate, but people still use it as a benchmark.

One problem I see with Google telling us to ignore PageRank is that much of the online Advertising and Link Exchange that goes on is based on using Toolbar PageRank to determine value. So, why even give us a PageRank to look at if we’re supposed to ignore it, especially if it’s almost always out of date?

Here is a short sample from a track called “Take Me Back To Jamaica.”

As well as the audio restoration, I also designed a cover for the CD. My idea was to use as much historical material as possible. To accomplish this, I scanned in a couple photos of the band and took photos of the cassettes. I used one photo of the band for the cover and the other band photo on the inside. The lettering on the cover is actually the original handwriting from one of the cassettes.

The magnetic tapes were deteriorating, but now the music is safe in a digital form. I feel blessed to have gotten the chance to work with and restore a recording that’s nearly fifty years old.