Web Design, Web Development
(and vise versa)
It’s been an ongoing debate since perhaps the beginning of time– can a person use their creative and analytical brains (right and left, respectively) with equal skill. Obviously, there were some who did it well–artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci comes immediately to mind–but what about in today’s society, in particular the gap between web designers and developers. Should there be an overlap in skill sets?
While I admit that having specialization of labor, as a whole, has brought many benefits to society, in this particular case of website creation the two divergent mindsets are working toward a common goal. It is less like a composer and a biochemist and more like an interior designer and an architect.
Because there is a shared purpose and desired product/outcome, even if the design and development work is split between two individuals, there is the expectation that they will have to communicate to each other to reach the client’s goals. It becomes necessary,even on a basic conversational level, for both the designer and developer to understand parts of the other’s job and associated vocabulary. Ignorance here will benefit no one.
How much more of an overlap might be necessary depends on what type of services you offer individually. Obviously if you are a lone designer offering a PSD to HTML service, you’ll need to know HTML and CSS. If you are a solo web developer putting together a web app, being able to put together a cohesive user interface is a must. The right brain/left brain skill set overlap becomes then an extending of the basic level of understanding needed to interface with the other half–be it designer or developer. This is more, I believe, a matter of personal preference than a mandatory learning because it requires the individual to be confident enough in his or her skills to carry out the tasks of the other
While we can argue the merits of separation all day, the fact is that neither designers nor developers operate in a vacuum, completely cut off from the other. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two, put in place by the very nature of the work. Considering how tightly the Internet connects us all together, it seems even more counterintuitive to fight to keep the right and left brains completely divided. After all they do make up one mind.
All Posts
Maybe you’ve had a successful hair salon for years and your flow of clients is in and out like a Manhattan revolving door. Or perhaps, you just started one and are struggling to pack the chairs and fill the appointment book. Regardless, both need a website. It would seem that the latter would be more in need. But here are the top 5 reasons why both do and how it benefits the one with the successful streaks AND the one that’s a little green at the roots. Because the goals of a hair salon aren’t to create just great client impressions when they walk out the door, but even before they get there or perhaps know that you exist. How so? Read on….
1st Show that You Are a Cut above the Rest ~ Perhaps you can highlight with the talent of Picasso or have the most stylish stylists in a 50 mile radius- if you don’t advertise it, word of mouth is probably not enough to keep your book of business on the incline despite a declining economy. Grooming is one of the “extras” that many people can’t justify when the light bill is due and groceries are in need. In today’s tough economy improving the growth and profitability of your hair salon needs to be a high-priority and this is one tool you’ll want to have in the kit. Having a website shows potential and repeat customers that you really mean business about your business. It reflects another level of professionalism for clients and to the industry. Remember, the goal is to create a great impression on a client both before they come to the salon AND after they see their reflection in the mirror.
2nd Add Social Media Presence to Your Menu ~ Running a hair salon requires interaction with a lot of people and why not let that network work for you. What do I mean by that? I mean getting people to Like You on Facebook, connect with you via Linked-In and chat about you on Twitter. With constantly changing styles, promotions, and products you shouldn’t have a problem finding topics to talk or Tweet about. This is an ever-evolving industry and you can take advantage of that using the free resource of Social Media. Use it to show others that you are tapped into the most current trends in hairstyling, makeup, products or whatever your salon may specialize in. And speaking of specialties, if you have one in particular-like you wax as smooth as a baby’s bottom or have a stylist who coifs with the precision of Edward Scissorhands-then Social Media is the perfect place to create hype about the talents in your establishment.
3rd Great Referencing Tool for the Trade ~ A website is a great place to let your work shine and the words of your clients work for you. Often, word of mouth helps as much as it can hurt. Letting others “hear” from current/past clients does influence decisions…especially in service-providing industries. Most repeat customers would love say how Thomas keeps their true roots invisible or Shelly is a Shear-tress like no other AND see it in print! No to mention that playing to a client’s ego in this manner, is also another way to keep their business at your business. I mean this is an industry of vanity after all…
4th Stylistas, the Cutting Floor to Web Design ~ A great look and feel website should engage visitors and compel them to spend time there. You are in luck in this particular industry because the variety of website designs available can vary as much as shades of blond. But you also have to know which to choose based on your demographics, clientele and other such factors. Don’t forget that when selecting one, it should reflect both your vision for your business and the clientele walking through its doors. Keeping this in mind, don’t fail to have fun with it. I mean it isn’t a law firm for goodness sake-so you can push the envelope of creativity without seeming over-the-top.
5th Picture Perfect Coiffing & Selling ~ Photo Galleries aren’t fabulous only in SoHo but can be just as spellbinding on the www while exhibiting your stylists’ work. There are various choices to do so…like a slide show, a flip/style online book or even a Virtual Tour of your Salon while talent’s in motion. It will be engaging and be a non-traditional way of showing off your talented team.
Decide Who Will Make the Cut ~ If don’t have a salon website already but are now convinced you need one, here are some considerations when choosing a website designer and/or company:
Find one that you feel understands your salons demographics and how to reflect it on the website.
Know that imagery will be crucial for your website. So make sure that you have “web-worthy” photographs to showcase the talents of your team and use stock photography where needed to beautify the site.
Make sure they will write your content with commonly used keywords that are frequently used when searching for hair salons, especially in your geographic region.
At Design Theory, we’d love to help you take your business to the next level of design and success. As such, we now have great packages 
specifically designed for hair salons that will help you blow away your competition.
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Marketing, Social Media
There is no denying that many people are using social media in one way or another. There’s probably thousands of people each day that are new to it too. There are so many networks to use, and each one gets updated or releases new features so often, that I dare to say that everyone end up learning something the more they use social media. Here at Design Theory, we know a lot, but we try never to say that we’re “Gurus” that know everything. It’s hard to know everything when things change so frequently.
Now we’re online almost 18 or more hours a day. Be it on our smart phones, laptops, tablets, and desktops. One way or another we’re online and engaging our audience, partners, and clients in some form or medium. It’s a lot of work and a lot of constant effort. For the average small business owner deciding whether or not to get into social media, our advice is usually the same:
“Either go all in, or don’t bother at all“
Harsh? Yea a little but the reason why is we hate to see failed attempts. It is very easy to get confused when you’re first starting out. And those little mistakes that may seem insignificant to you, may cost you your online reputation.
Incomplete Social Profile
This is totally a rookie mistake, but you’d be surprised how many social accounts we come across that are only partially filled out. Have you ever seen that big goose egg on Twitter for a person or business? They probably haven’t ventured into the profile settings to upload a cool head shot or picture of their store or logo to show that they’re actually a real account. Or on Linked In where someone may use a picture of a cat or cartoon character as their profile photo. Not only is that not appropriate for that social site because Linked In is considered more of a professional business networking site, it looks like you don’t take your professional profile seriously. Facebook allows you to input a lot of information for your Business Fan page, so take advantage of that. In a lot of cases a successful Facebook page will show up in a Google search way before your website does. So be sure to have your best foot forward with all of your information listed.
Dormant Accounts
These are social media accounts of people or businesses that at some point got started, then got bored, frustrated, or lost interest and stopped using their accounts. I’m sure some of those people thought they’d get back on the wagon once they found some more free time in their day, have an upcoming event or sale that they’ll want to promote in the future, or some reason or other. However valid the excuse may be, to a potential client and your audience it now looks like you don’t take your social account seriously. And in that microsecond you lose a potential ear for someone who was willing to pay attention and follow your brand.
Duplicate Updates & Posts on All Mediums
Speaking of multiple accounts, don’t make the mistake in posting the same posts or status updates across ALL of your social media accounts. Its tacky and lazy. Sure that sounds mean, but it’s true. Most people are members of more than two social media platforms and they’ll see your post on one network then see the same one on another network word for word. It looks like a robot may have posted it or you’re not really putting time to pay attention to the conversations and tones of each network individually. Point is you can’t mix coffee with juice then a slushy and dip your donut in it and expect everyone else is drinking and eating the same things you are at each table.
Failure to Respond
This one kind of falls under the dormant accounts but in some cases is a bit worse. Have you ever reached out to a fan or someone on a social network and never hear a response? Or have you read a post that was just posted in the last few minutes of you reading it, and you like it and reply, and you never hear a response to your reply? Yea those are bad. It looks like you’re just talking and could care less about listening. Which really defeats the purpose of being “social” on these networks. There’s some etiquette for each network on reasonable response times.
You Think It Shouldn’t Cost Much
I saved this one for last because it seems to always be the elephant in the room. To be a little transparent, we get a good amount of emails and phone calls requesting quotes on managing creating social media accounts for small businesses. I would say the number one hesitation for us seems to be price. Yet we’re not the cheapest business in our local market and certainly not online. To give you an idea of a median price for a full package for social media management and marketing for Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, YouTube, and Pinterest; you would be paying around $2,000 a month. This includes metrics, tracking, custom Facebook tabs and landing pages, Call to Action and ongoing marketing initiatives, and of course constant up to the minute engagement.
After reading all this, I’d love to hear your thoughts and even your own experiences. Lets start a dialog with other readers in the comments below.
Web Development
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to any website. Being able to show up in the top of search rankings heightens visitor traffic to your site and may have a significant impact on conversions–sales, subscriptions, and so on. While content has an enormous impact on a site’s ranking, one of the factors you may not consider is how the code itself may affect it. HTML5, while not fully supported in all browsers, can be helpful in getting search engine’s “spiders” to rank your content as more relevant.
What’s going on now?
HTML is not a programming language. It’s abbreviation gives it away as “hypertext markup language” which is a fancy way of saying that it tells your browser how to display the information–kind of like a graphic designer might layout a page, adding images and breaking text into paragraphs and headings. What search engine spiders (a.k.a. bots or crawlers) do is feed that information, gathering relevant bits of text so that the search engine can feed that, plus some other factors, into an algorithm which ranks your website accordingly.
In HTML4 –the version currently supported by all major browsers, though Internet Explorer is debatable sometimes (ha ha)— div tags are used to denote sections of the page–perhaps for styling reasons, or so the designer/developer can tell where he or she is. This is an example (though not the full markup for the page) and I have added comments to mark the end of divs:
<div id=”header”>
<h1>Page Title</h1>
<div id=”nav”>
<a href=”http://blog.jpdesigntheory.com”>Link to somewhere</a>
</div><!–end nav–>
</div><!–end header–>
<div class=”article”>
<p>This is some important main content–perhaps a blog post, or just the main portion of the website</p>
</div><!–end article–>
<div id=”sidebar”>
<p>This is not a portion of the main text.</p>
</div><!–end sidebar–>
<div id=”footer”>(c) 2012
</div><!–end footer–>
Did that take you a minute to get through? Imagine if I hadn’t commented–would you have been able to understand as quickly what was going on with the code? Admittedly, a spider is designed specifically to glean information off of a webpage, but it might not most relevant content. Also, in our example, our divs had relatively easy to understand names and was commented, which is not always the case and makes the interpreting job that much harder.
How does HTML5 change that?
With HTML5, the generic div is joined by a myriad other descriptive tags. These tags are used for areas found on most websites–like headers and footers . Here’s that same markup again in HTML5:
<header>
<h1>Page Title</h1>
<nav>
<a href=”http://blog.jpdesigntheory.com”>Link to somewhere</a>
</nav>
</header>
<article>
<p>This is some important main content–perhaps a blog post, or just the main portion of the website</p>
</article>
<aside>
<p>This is not a portion of the main text.*</p>
</aside>
<footer>(c) 2012</footer>
*Note the change from id=”sidebar” to <aside>. <aside> merely denotes an area that is not part of the main content, which could be a sidebar.
See how much easier that is to follow? The same is true for search engine spiders. They are able to identify exactly what is important and what might be lesser content on the page.
Because neither version of our example has any styling information, both would display (in an HTML5 supporting browser) as:
It has no impact on mere mortals not viewing the site’s source code, but can make life easier for developers and spiders alike.
It should be said that HTML5 is not yet supported in all browsers, so I wouldn’t recommend dropping HTML4 immediately. However, as browsers update to support these new tags, it is beneficial for business owners, site creators, and SEO ninjas alike to be aware that content might be king, but code is still the poet laureate.
