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IS MY WEBSITE WORKING?

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:19:31 GMT

Is your website helping or hurting your business?

You have a website and want to find out if its working for you or not. Websites are a great tool for promoting what you do and generating new clients. If a website isn’t doing its job, you won’t to be able to sell your product or service. A proper website should have a clean design, effective SEO and clear content that sells you. We are here to guide you through this process of judging your website.

The first step is judging the design of your current website. Most websites are not very visually attractive or effective. If your website doesn’t look great, it will affect your brand image. Customers will look at your website and see it as low quality and cheap. You need a website that looks great and reflects the rest of your branding (ie: colours and styles).

This may sound like a no brainer but having a fast-loading website is a must. If your website is slow, it will instantly turn away customers and send them to your competition. If we stumble along a slow website, we click off it right away and look to the next website on the Google search. Having a slow website is a sure way to frustrate your potential clients and help your competition.

Now that your website looks great and runs smoothly, you need to keep people on your website with quality content. Having great content isn’t easy, but that’s the best part of it, very few people have it so you can make yourself shine. A lot of websites use industry related buzz words to make you think they are telling you something but don’t tell you anything important about what they do, who they are, how they can help you and why you need their services. You need to be answering peoples questions along the way so they can feel confident in their choice. What makes you stand out from your competition? You need to answer this question quickly and in a way that customers can feel confident in choosing you.

Many people want to boost their website's performance the easy way and look to quick tactics that, in some cases, hurt your website more than they help. The number one thing you will see people talking about is backlinks. Backlinks are when other websites have a link to your website. They are a great way to gain authority on the internet because they work almost like a reference system. We do not recommend backlinks though because they are not the most effective use of your time. Yes, they are the best way to get ranking well but they are not as easy as it sounds. You need reputable websites with a lot of domain authority linking back to your website to gain any traction. How and why would these large websites point back to you for free? You can spend countless hours chasing these backlinks and end up with nothing. Unless you get lucky and find a unique way why you can help out one of these websites, they aren't going to just give you a backlink. Paying for backlinks can get you penalized by Google . After chasing these backlinks personally and being left frustrated, we had to find a more effective, repeatable solution that works every time. That is when we started exploring on page SEO. On page SEO is when all the SEO is done on your website and not relying on external sources.

If you’ve made it this far, you can probably see some issues with your website and you want to know how to fix them the right way. That’s why we are here. This is what we do every day. We understand each part of a website, why it’s important and how we can make it perform optimally. We are here for you to help turn your website into an effective tool for your business that generates new customers and helps you retain your current clients.

We specialize in building quality websites that are designed to help you rank well. From start to finish we want to take care of you and see you succeed. The difference between us and other website experts is that we have a background in graphic design and over the years have unlocked the secrets of SEO. Many ‘Web Designers or SEO experts’ are usually only good at one thing, either building stunning websites or SEO tactics, not both. We believe that having both skills mastered is vitally important to our business. Having the SEO knowledge to help you rank is great but once customers get to your website, they need to stay there and having a background in design is the key to this.

All our websites are fully custom. You are a unique business that deserves to have a unique website that is catered to you and your work. Sure, you can save a couple bucks and have a cheap website built using a template or a low-quality designer but is it worth hurting you image and website performance? In the long run, you will lose out on business because your website is low quality.

What makes our websites stand out?

Stand out design

With our background in Graphic Design, we love building stunning websites that catch your audience’s eye and make your business look great. Every website we build is custom so you are getting a unique and fresh look.

Effective SEO

SEO can make or break a website, it may be the most beautiful website, but without SEO no one will ever see it. SEO is what makes your website visible to Google and help your website rank better so that when someone searches a topic related to your industry your website will pop up. We can make your website perform very well and we have had many successful websites that without SEO wouldn’t be performing like they are. We focus on ‘on page SEO’ for the majority of what we do as we have gotten great results and we find for the time spent on it, it is the most successful and cost effective for you. When we are done, you won’t have monthly ‘maintenance fees’ that add up and do almost nothing for your website. We believe those are a scam and don’t help your website at all. SEO is the backbone of what makes a website stand tall and does all the heavy lifting on promoting your business so you can focus on your website while we take care of the rest.

Professional content writing

We can coach you through writing content for your website, but we find often that customers don’t have the time to write content themselves. That’s why we write the content for you. We have a proven method for developing content for your business that is catered to you and has SEO in mind when building out the content both in keywords and structure to promote better SEO and design style. This really is the foundation to what makes our websites stand out.

We love building premium websites for our customers and taking care of every detail so that you can focus on your business and take things to the next level. We believe you deserve the best and we are here to help you every step of the way.

IS WORDPRESS WORTH IT?

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 20:17:12 GMT

Wordpress, being one of the most popular website platforms, must be worth the price, right? Well, it's not a simple answer.

As website designers, we get asked if we use WordPress a lot. We can happily say that we don't. This comes as a shock to some customers because they've been told they must build in WordPress, but this could not be further from the truth.

To start, we need to learn why people choose WordPress to build their websites. WordPress has huge aftermarket support in the widgets and plugin world. Many businesses build and design templates or themes to help users have a better experience and make more powerful websites. This can be a great for users as they can quickly pick up the platform and build a website easily with no prior skill in website design, but it comes with its downsides. Build time, complex tools, and cost. Because of all the tools you have at your fingertips, WordPress can quickly become complex, and the fancy widgets can get very pricey. That’s why we steer everyone towards a program called Without Code. A new website builder that takes the hassle out of website building.

While WordPress itself is free to use, all the fancy widgets and plugins are not, and they can really add up. Not only are the widgets expensive but the platform itself, while giving you a platform with a lot of freedom, often give users too many tools at their fingertips and they end up overwhelmed and confused. Since WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, website design is not its indented use, and this comes with a price. All of this adds up to making the website building process a lot slower and more difficult resulting in higher design costs when using a professional designer. Or if you are the designer, time is still a major factor when building. The longer it takes, the more it costs the customer, and you may not get jobs because your quotes are higher than alternative options. With all the aftermarket support you can really build anything if you know how. And that’s the key, while the initial learning curve for WordPress is small, learning all the fancy features and widgets can be very time consuming.

At the end of the day, WordPress may be worth the cost for you. If you are looking to have some fancy plugins added to your website that no other platforms offer, then WordPress may be for you. But we find many small business owners would rather build on other platforms as they are cheaper and still have many powerful features.

That is why we use Without Code to build all our websites. The name Without Code means exactly that. No more code to have to learn how to write and/or understand. They are a newer website builder that we love more and more every day. From its easy-to-use platform to quick and powerful tools, www.wocode.com is a great platform for small businesses. As a web-based platform, there are some serious advantages. One of our favorite features is their CMS user interface. Not only can customers view their website before it is live, but they can also make edits to the website. From text edits and image replacements to store management or make blog posts, Without Code doesn’t hold back. Our favorite part of this platform is that you and the customer can see exactly what the website will look like in the editor before the website goes live. When the client views that website in the editor, they will be able to view and interact with everything as if it were live while being able to make edits.

The cost of Without Code is also significantly less. You won’t find yourself paying for endless amounts of plugins because everything is already built into the platform. The only additional cost is for an online store, but any platform will have an additional cost for this. Since everything is integrated into the platform, including the store, the user has a much more seamless experience, and they are always optimizing the platform and adding new widgets to make your website more powerful.

Without Code SEO

SEO is so important in the world of web. Without it, you will never get noticed. Without code has recently been putting a lot of effort into improving their SEO game making it easier for you as the end user. As Without Code is a web-based platform, they are constantly updating all the websites on their platform in the background to make sure they are running optimally and performing as they should on Google. They have also introduced many easy to access and do features like automatic schema to many widgets and other areas of the website so that you can save time and not have to worry about it. No more writing large amounts of code, adding it to your website, updating your website and checking to see if it worked only to find out there was a typo. By simply inputting your business info and toggling a switch, your schema is live and helping you rank better. If you are trying to make your website look great and perform its best, Without Code is amazing for helping you get there.

Here are some examples of websites we have built using Without Code:

(click on any image to go to the live website)

We believe in building website that are very effective and attractive while keeping the price as affordable as possible. Without Code is one of those ways we can keep our cost down and quality up. By saving money from the software to saving time in the building process, we believe this is the future of web building. We are not sponsored by Without Code in any way, we just like their platform a lot as it fits what we need perfectly, and we are happy to promote solid companies that care about their customers and make great stuff.

Yes, there are template builders out there that are significantly cheaper than our offerings, but they are taking the design out of websites. If you are a serious business, why would you cheap out on a website and use a template that thousands of other businesses have used? Your brand will look cheap and show your customers that you don’t take yourself seriously. We believe that all websites should be custom. Catered to your business and designed tastefully in an effective way that promotes your business in its best light. Why would you put your business at risk in today’s competitive market. If you are low quality, your potential customers will find someone that isn’t, you need to stand out and make a lasting impact.

At the end of the day, WordPress is kind of like having a luxury car. Yes, it has massage seats and interior RGB lights, but these are all just distractions that cost a fortune. The real question you should asking yourself is, is my website effective? All the fancy widgets look great but don’t add to the actual value of your website, so you are really paying for gimmicky things to keep people from learning about your business. Why not invest your money in quality content and design over distractions? Without Code allows for you to build stunning websites that have the powerful tools you need, no distractions.

WHY I NEED TO HIRE A GRAPHIC DESIGNER?

malachi.cowie@gmail.com (John Cowie) — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 13:46:06 GMT

Basic design tools have come a long way over the years and become very accessible and are either free or reasonably priced. Due to the fact that they are more simple and easy to use, the learning curve is significantly less than years passed and often you can be up and running in a few hours. With these “high tech tools”, you might be able to save money by not hiring a professional graphic designer but there are real pitfalls in following this approach. We believe there is no replacement for professional and skilled design when it comes to your marketing materials, website and brand. Simple templates can make life easy but they end up forcing you into a cookie-cutter approach. You will end having one item of your branding look relatively good but carrying that across all your materials will simply not be possible. Like a professional mechanic, doing it yourself, can appear attractive but once it hits the road, will it really stand up or fall apart?

As professional graphic designers, we start each brand development from scratch—ensuring that your core focus is clearly communicated to your target audience with an end result of attracting new customers and building a brand that people can trust and believe in. Your brand, website and marketing materials will be 100% original and crafted perfectly to fit your business. A professional graphic designer has years of experience creating effective marketing solutions to ensure you stand out and receive the credibility you need to get to the next level.

A Few Key Reasons You Need a Graphic Designer:

Short-term Pain, Long Term Gain

You may initially save money by doing it yourself but in the long run you will end up losing money. Customers can recognize very quickly when something has been done “in-house”. You may fool them by using a template for one project but when the next item follows, there will be a disconnect and customers will start questioning your brand. Customers are smarter than you think and can pick up on lack of continuity and professionalism. This translates to lack of confidence in your business even if it is in their minds and not spoken about. When you lose confidence in a brand, you leave it behind and move on with a competitor. Hiring a professional graphic designer who truly cares about your company and creates a solid brand is significant. When they follow this work with consistent and high-end marketing materials, web development and social media engagement, your company leaps forward and captures the customers you desperately desire. Customers recognize quality work and are far more likely to buy your services or product when they feel confident in their choice.

Jack of All Trades or Expert?

Stick to what you’re great at! When you spread yourself thin and start trying to do more roles, they all suffer and you end up doing more tasks at a mediocre level. We are graphic designers that spend our lives perfecting our craft. It’s not something we dabble in but rather something we are immersed in. Let us handle your design work. We take great pride in creating exceptional quality design and want your business to stand out. It’s a competitive world and if your brand and marketing is not top-knotch, your business will suffer. Why take your chances with something so important by doing it yourself? That’s why we always say, ‘focus on what you do best’. Stay focused on your business and let us help you with your advertising and marketing.

The Clock is Ticking

There is a large time commitment to develop high-end design work. You business will suffer if your attention is elsewhere. If you need to spend time learning how to use design software and then navigate the waters of creating quality design, it can be a very time consuming process. That time will be much better spent focused on building and maintaining your business. Leave the design work to us—we have lightning fast turnaround times for all our work—you will be impressed.

Brand Development and Integrity

Having a memorable brand is so important. You should have a set theme that travels across all your visual assets. We will ensure all elements of your branding stay on theme and are tailored to your market. This is something that will regrettably be missed when trying to do it yourself. There are too many companies that exist with no solid brand—they jump all over the place with splashes of excitement and leave no lasting impression or confidence for customers to grab hold of. A concrete brand will establish and maintain a look and feel that your customers will remember.

Quality Content

Another area that often gets overlooked is quality content. Splash design with weak content makes for ineffective communication. This is an area that needs a lot of care and attention. Writing is challenging and without the skill to write effectively, your message will suffer. The better your content is the better you can get your message across and the better you can sell your product/service. We focus on developing high quality content that will show your customers you mean business. The final aspect of great content writing is content organization. No one really wants to read a book when they view your website or brochure. We help ensure your text is organized and designed in bite-size chunks varying in flow to keep things interesting and lead your customer effectively to understand why they need your product or service.

Typography Expertise

Font choice can make or break a design. If your font selection does not properly mesh with your branding, you will be sending the wrong message. All too often, customers choose the wrong fonts to use. Using trendy or decorative fonts is a great way to not be taken seriously. You deserve to have a unique, memorable brand that sets you apart and commands the respect that you deserve. We will hand-select a small group of fonts that fit perfectly to your brand. The final result—an effective brand moving forward combining design, images and typography.

Credibility (Are you being taken seriously?)

Bottom line, customers can spot in-house design. This tends to repel customers because it conveys exactly what it is—cheapness. No one is going to select your business to use because your image is cheap. When customers have the perception that you cheap out on design, they will think that your product/service is cheap or low quality as well. They will have the impression that you don’t believe in it enough to invest in it properly. Make sure your customers take you seriously by selecting a graphic designer with a proven track record, an impressive portfolio and verifiable results. After all, you only get one chance to make a great first impression.

In conclusion, we understand the temptation to doing it yourself, but we believe that your business deserves to be better than that. Design is an investment—invest in your brand.

12 QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR WEB DESIGNER

malachi.cowie@gmail.com (John Cowie) — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 14:46:38 GMT

Getting a website can be a stressful process, here is our guide to help better equip you. These are important questions that get asked most frequently and are going help you not have any surprises along the way.

What is the process (what do you need from me?)

Before we can get started building you a website there are a few things we need from you. We will start by asking what you are would like to achieve from your website, the type of website you need (informational, blog, store, services, etc.). Determining your target audience is a critical focus in the process too. Once we have a good idea of what you need, we can then start planning out the structure of your website. We will then ask you if you already have branding (logo, colours, theme, etc.). If you already have solid branding we can get started once we have access to you brand assets and content. If not, we are designers, let us build out your brand and cater it perfectly for your audience and then tailor fit it to your website. Content is very important and is often what slows down the timeline. This is often a huge part that gets overlooked, but without quality content to fill in your website, it is very difficult to get started because the layout of a page can change dramatically depending on the content supplied.

I need content for my website but am not good a writing, what do I do?

This is a question that we get asked a lot. Writing great content is very challenging and unless you do a lot of writing you may not know where to get started. We are here to help you with content development as well. If you can give us general ideas about what you are after, we will write content for you and structure it perfectly for your website. As we write the content, we are planning ahead to the website look to ensure the text is broken up effectively with headlines, subheads and a nice mix of paragraphs, bullet points and punchy blocks of text. Since we are designing, building and creating the content, there is one vision ensuring the final product will fit together seamlessly and communicate effectively. Content is really important, the stronger your content is, the more it will speak to potential customers, not to mention, help your Google rankings.

What is the timeline for web design?

This is a very important question to ask before you choose a website designer. The reason is because, many design studios have huge backlogs of projects that need to be completed and use old, slow methods for building websites. We believe that you should have your website completed in a timely manner. New website building tools can dramatically decrease the time it takes to build your website. Since we do not use code to build your website, we can completely bypass the prototyping phase. This is a slow process that allows you to see what the website will look like before it is built. When this method is used, the designer has to build the website twice in order to get the final product, which means your website will take much longer to be completed. We believe that web-based software is the way of the future. This does not mean that you are getting a template or unoriginal design when we build your website, it simply means you can see the website from start to finish in its final form. We provide a preview link that will allow you to view the website. You can interact and see the website exactly how it will look when it is live. This streamlines the entire process so that you can have your website faster without compromising creativity or quality.

How much does it cost? Are there recurring fees?

Depending on the design studio you choose there will always be a fee to build the website but there may also be some hidden fees. Make sure you ask about them. Often website designers will charge monthly ‘maintenance packages’ to keep your website running smoothly. Be careful about these because your website can get expensive, really quickly. We only charge for work that we actually do. If there are changes required to the website on a frequent or infrequent basis, we will give you a quote for the work to be completed so you know exactly what to expect. If you decide you would like to make updates yourself—no problem at all. Our back-end access for customers is super easy and looks exactly like the website to make this process crazy-simple. General maintenance is not needed as our web-based software is always updating their platform so that your website will be perfectly optimized for web browsers and Google. The only recurring fees for our websites are for hosting. Hosting is an annual fee.

Can I see your portfolio?

Hopefully the design studio has recent work listed on their website so that you can see their style and quality of work, but if they do not, make sure you ask for some samples of their work so that you can find out if you like their style. Make sure you see more than the first screen of the home page. Too many web designers only show a super small snippet of their web design. That one item might look nice but how about the rest of the site? We believe every page of your website needs to look great, consistent, professional and on-brand. This is a very important aspect to not overlook. Websites are an investment into your business, with the world of the internet growing everyday, your website is often your first impression. If your website design is lacking creativity, your business will just blend into all the others. You can see our Durham Region website design portfolio HERE .

Do you have any experience in my industry?

The more experience a website designer has in your industry the better they can help you curate your website to potential customers. However, a seasoned content writer can develop content for any industry with careful research and study. Industries that have detailed technical information will require the customer to give some insight into the content to ensure it is factual, relevant and specific to their services/offerings. The more the client can fill in the content with general information, the website content will be better.

I want to introduce a store to my website,
how does that work and who manages it?

Adding a store to your website is a great way to sell your product. Integration is very easy and you are able to manage all products, descriptions, images, payments, etc. very easily. The website designer will design and setup the store structure for a short list of products first to ensure the look and feel is consistent and professional. Once this structure is in place, it is most efficient for the customer to manage the store side of the website so they can populate all the store items and details and make any edits as needed.

Can I make edits to my website?

Yes! This is just another advantage to using a solid web-based platform for web development and design. Making edits to your website is easy through our website platform. It is very visual and looks just like the actual website. With limited access, you are able to make simple edits such as text changes or blog posts. If you are more seasoned, we can give you full editing access to make complete updates, SEO changes and so-forth. We do recommend having the designer make edits if they are more intensive to ensure the design flow and integrity is maintained.

How often should my website be updated?

This is a bit of a loaded question, but we want to point you straight so that you don’t get ripped off. Your website should be updated if there is new content that needs to be added or old content that needs to be removed, but outside of that you shouldn’t need to update your website regularly. We do recommend giving your website a refresh every 5 years or so. Our reasoning behind this is because, your website might still work great but by giving it a refresh can update content to be more current to your business and keep up with current web design structures. Web design is always changing and you want your website to always look fresh and current in functionality and design. Styles change and keeping on top of your website will show customers that you mean business. Once your website is more than a few years old, the SEO techniques used will likely be out of date as Google is always redefining its value system. This is another big reason to refresh your website—ensuring your website is always optimized for Google. Sometimes the design and content do not even have to change, just a review of all the on-page SEO to ensure it is solid.

Can I add a blog?

Blogs are becoming more and more popular. They are a great way to engage with your customers and help with SEO. We highly recommend adding a blog to your website. We can seamlessly integrate a blog into your website. You will be able to make blog posts and connect with your followers. Sharing snippets of a recent blog and then pointing to it through social media is a great way to reach new customers and ensure the hard work that you invested into the blog is not in vain. No matter what you do, a blog is a great addition to any website.

Custom photography or stock photos?

Most websites use stock photography. The question is, do you want your website to look like other websites or do you want it to stand out from the crowd? Many businesses overlook how vital custom photography is for your website. Show off your work, let your customers see what you do. Custom photography may cost a little to have it done well but without a doubt, your website will be more unique and tell your story more accurately with it.

Can I add video to my website?

Videos are a great way to create more interactive content for your website. Did you know that we do video production as well? We can professionally film and edit video to show off your work and what you do. Having a video on your website is just one more way 9of impressing potential customers, telling your story and taking your website to that next level.

There are many questions to ask when you want to have a website developed. We hope this answers many of the questions you may have. You deserve to have a smooth process and nothing is worse than getting surprises because you didn’t ask the questions. Feel free to reach out to us and we will be happy to answer any further questions you may have regarding websites. We want your website to be the very best it can be and really make an impression on your potential and existing customers.

ADVANTAGES OF CHOOSING A SMALL DESIGN FIRM

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 15:46:57 GMT

Are you looking for a design firm? Here are some considerations to look at before settling.

There are many different design firms out there. How can you know which one is right for you? Here at Eyetoeye Design, our goal is to make the experience as smooth as possible for you.

What makes us different?

Every customer is unique and there is no one size fits all solution to what you need. We take the time to get to know you, find out what you need and personalize our process for you. Most design firms look at customers with a cookie cutter approach. We have heard too many stories about customers who get treated poorly if they don’t follow the design firms ‘process’. We believe you should always have a good experience with your designer, and we want to rebuild your trust in designers. As a small firm, you are not a number to us, and we want you to feel comfortable contacting us anytime to talk about your projects.

Another big part of what we do differently as a small business design team is that we don’t offer ‘packages’ to our customers. The problem with packages is that you end up getting a lot of extra materials that aren’t needed while still having to pay for them. We cater the project to your needs and give you what they need. For example, when doing a website design, there are many variables that change based on what kind of website you need. Like how many pages you want, your industry and if you want SEO or not. If we offered 3 different website packages, you would be really limited in what you pick. We calculate all the things you need and give you a perfect solution for your business.

Lightning-Fast Turnaround

We pride ourselves in our fast turnaround times. This has been the foundation of our business. Our customers have come to expect things very quickly from us and even when you have a rush job or last-minute changes, we will do everything in our power to make it happen. Many other design firms seem to take their time with getting back to their customers. Not only does this show you that they don’t care, but it also shows you that they are inefficient. We are very responsive with our emails and phone calls. If you reach out to us as a new customer, our goal is to get back to you faster than any other business. We want to be the first ones you hear from. Not only does this usually get us the job, but it also means you can move ahead with your project sooner.

Rush jobs are a big deal in the design world. We often get design jobs that are super rushed and don’t have time to delay at all. We want to make the process as smooth as possible for you. That’s why we are very accommodating with rushed jobs, and we try to be very quick workers. Many design firms won’t even look at a project until the next day and if you do have a rush job, you will be charged an extra fee to get it done. We believe you should get your projects back quickly without being penalized.

Communication is Key

Nothing is worse than calling a business to ask questions about your project only to get connected with someone who knows nothing about your project. Since we are a small design firm, when you call us, you are talking directly with the designer. That way, we know what you need, and you can communicate more directly about your concerns. We believe this makes us faster and more accurate as we can hop right on your project, and nothing gets lost in communication. We will often do changes for you over the phone and send them right back to you.

Large design firms don’t have a personal approach, you are just a number and when you call to ask about the status of you project or want to request edits you end up talking to an account manager who knows very little about you project. This can be frustrating and make you feel helpless. This is where small design firms stand out, we cut out the middleman and when you call us, you are talking to the designer. This saves you time, frustration and ultimately your money at the end of the day.

Saving you money

We believe you deserve high quality design without having to pay a premium price for it. Since we are a smaller designer firm, we can keep the prices more affordable than our competition while still offering high quality work.

A big way we can save you money is by getting good direction before we get started. The better the direction, the cheaper we can make the project because it saves us a lot of time in the design process. For example, when building websites, we have a very efficient process. To start, we develop the content for you. We have a unique process to write great content for your website that is targeted for SEO. Since we are doing the writing, you can focus on your business. Next, our website builder is not only powerful, but it is very affordable for small businesses and allows us to build creative websites very quickly.

Here is a recent website design job we completed. For this project, we catered our process to what they needed. They were looking for a new logo design and a website design. JB Landscapes is a new Landscaping company that is focused on high quality landscaping and design. Starting with their logo, we wanted to update their old one with a new refreshed design that still captured what their old logo was. This logo has a more abstract and modernized windmill design and the font selection is much more confident than the previous logo. Next we moved onto the website. We built them the right website for what they needed. This website has a more premium feel to it and talks about all the important and unique parts of their business. Another big part of this website is SEO. When building it we had SEO in mind and made sure that it follows specific guidelines that will help boost their rankings. You can view their website here.

We want you to get the most out of your marketing materials. Our small design firm is here to help you every step of the way, not matter what type of project you have. Want to learn more about our work? Visit some of the links below:

SIX FONTS TO ADD TO YOUR COLLECTION

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 19:55:32 GMT

Here is our list of fonts that we think you should try in 2022. There are so many fonts to pick from these days, that why when selecting these fonts we were looking for something that made them unique. We didn’t want to give you fonts that everyone already uses or fonts that are don’t stand out. We wanted truly creative fonts that will establish a unique look for whatever you need it for.

Starting off the list we have ‘ BOX ’. A really fun font to try out. Box is a great display typeface. With the unique ‘Box’ style you can really create some fun designs with this font. With both regular and the outlined style you can make headlines without spaces and toggle between both styles to make it readable still. This is a very fun way to make your headlines more unique.

Great Sailor Serif Display Font is a great choice for those looking for a unique serif display font. With only one weight you won’t be able to adjust the thickness, but it is still great. With it’s very unique curves and cut-ins it is very memorable.

Noir is a Sans Serif typeface with 12 weights to choose from. Allowing you to use it for any application whether it be headlines or body copy. A truly versatile font. Inspired by geometric structures it still maintains organic personality. It also has support for Latin, Cryillic and Greek.

Our next pick is Frank . You will quickly notice this font is with it’s condensed look and unique corners. This is a great font that is very readable and has many different styles to play with. The only thing that isn’t great about Frank is that it is caps only. But if you plan to use this font as a headline or accent font it’s a great pick because you will have no problem finding the perfect weight for your needs.

Re:Sale is our first expanded font and we think it is really cool. With a regular and outline version of this font you can get pretty creative with using them side by side with your design. We feel that expanded fonts are going to be a trend that in 2022.

My personal favourite on this list is Osa nde . I instantly fell in love with it when I saw it. With the growing popularity of sans serif fonts because of their modern look this font is sure to get noticed in the crowd. This font really can be used for anything. From fun and creative to fancy and elegant it is very versatile.

We hope you enjoyed this list. All of these fonts can be found on Envato Elements if you are looking to try them out for yourself.

WHY CHOOSE A WEB DESIGNER THAT IS ALSO A GRAPHIC DESIGNER?

malachi.cowie@gmail.com (John Cowie) — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 17:22:03 GMT

When designing a website, many ‘builders’ are not graphic designers. Why is this a big deal? Websites need to be designed, not built. Your website is often your first impression, if it is a bad one, customers will move onto your competition.

How can you create something visual without having design skill? We want to change that. We want to create stunning websites for our customers that makes them look great and attract new customers. Since we have a background in design, we have a better understanding of what looks good and how to apply that across multiple platforms. This is how we apply it to our websites.

We started website design around 20 years ago and have been chasing a better way to build websites. With our background in graphic design, we wanted a more visual way to build websites. HTML is the exact opposite of that, and we want to use our design skills to make better websites. A few years ago, we found the ultimate solution to this struggle, and we believe this is the future of web design. Web-based platforms are quickly becoming more popular as they are easy to learn and allow you to build powerful websites that can be built quickly and eliminate a lot of the issues we had when using HTML to build a website from scratch. A new company came out and answered all the question we had perfectly, they are called Without Code . Funny enough, their name is exactly what we were looking for and they catered their platform to other like-minded designers like us. Now we can make our websites really stand out by using our design skills to take them to that next level!

User Experience or UX is a big art of website, and we focus our attention on this. From beautiful design to having a website that flows well are all parts of that experience. We want all our website to guide you through and answer your question as you go.

The traditional way to build a website is with HTML or code. This way is both much more time consuming , less effective and requires maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Our web-based platform that eliminates all the negatives of code, while giving us a lot of customizability and advanced features. HTML was originally invented by scientists using programming over the internet as a means of communication. It wasn’t created by designers who had visual minds, wanting to create visually stunning graphics. So why would you build your website that way, you need a visual way to build out your website so that you can take full advantage of your mind and how it’s wired.

Time Saving

Our web-based platform saves you both time and money. When a website is build using code, the industry standard way to do it is by starting with Photoshop and building out the entire website design. Once this design is approved, the entire website needs to be rebuilt in code. Web-based platforms completely remove this step because they are visual, there is no need for the prototyping phase. When you as the customer see your website, it is previewing as if it were live. That means you can interact with it and see how everything works. There is also a lot of trial and error with code. You may code out an entire page and find out it isn’t working, now you must read through countless lines of code to find what mistake was made. That doesn’t happen with visual builders. If something isn’t working, you can see it right away and fix it.

More effective

When using a web-based platform, we can see the website as we are building it. That way, we can see instantly if the design is working or not. Everything is visual, making our graphic design background stand out that much more. Going back to the Photoshop prototyping phase, websites behave differently to static images. Every computer is different and there are thousands of different monitor sizes and proportions that need to be accounted for. This can all be done seamlessly with our website builder, making your experience better and your website more visually stunning across multiple platforms.

Powerful, built-in tools are a huge part to all our websites. What good is building a website that looks great but doesn’t have the functionality you need. We offer built-in stores, blogs and more. These can be seamlessly integrated into your site and give you back-end access to manage them on your own. Want to update pricing to items in your store or write a new blog post? Do it all with our seamless CMS manager. You can log into the back end of the website, see everything as if it were live and make updates where needed. Having access to be able to make small changes to the website, store updates or blog posts is huge. You can do them yourself, saving you time and money getting the designer to update it for you.

No more maintenance

Now you can rest easy knowing your website is being taken care of without the high price of maintenance fees. In the past, HTML websites required frequent maintenance to keep them running smoothly because website browsers update, and different online standards change all the time. With the birth of web-based platforms, ‘maintenance fees’ should be a thing of the past, and we feel that they are a scam now. Since its all online, it is always being updated to keep everything running smoothly. There are frequent updates to the website that make it run faster, less buggy and improve SEO optimization. This is a game changer for us and saves you thousands of dollars.

As you can see, there are many advantages to choosing a Web Designer that is also a Graphic Designer now that we use a web-based platform that allows us to build websites visually. Not only do you get better design, but you get a faster turnaround, powerful features and no more maintenance fees. While design is important to keeping customers on your website, how are they going to find it without advanced SEO techniques? SEO or search engine optimization is a vital part to any website, without it, no one will ever find your website. To learn more about our SEO offerings click here.

We want to take care of your business from every angle. That is why we started offering web design and now SEO. No matter what your next project is, we are here to make it a successful one.

Want to take your website to a whole new level? We specialize in building websites for small businesses. As a small business ourselves, we know what you need and we understand you. Call us today to learn more about how our small business web design and small business SEO packages can help you!

CUSTOM WEB DESIGN FOR YOU

malachi.cowie@gmail.com (John Cowie) — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 15:37:58 GMT

Being a business owner is hard with how much competition there is out there. You need a website that can attract customers to you and sell them, but where do you get started? How do you get noticed?

Eyetoeye Design specializes in effective Ajax web design solutions that work. At the core, we believe there are three fundamentals to having customers choose you. Effective SEO, professional content development and quality design. Here is our website design and building process.

INSPIRATION

Every website we build is completely custom, no templates. You are a unique business, and you deserve a unique website to match it. Since all our websites are custom, we want to find new ways to make your website stand out, we don’t have a cookie cutter formula that we use for all our customers. Far too many ‘design firms’ do this, and they rip off their clients by recycling their work. We always start with inspiration when designing any website. Without following the latest trends and pushing yourself, your design will get stale and boring. As designers we strive to stay relevant and up to date. We take the time to look for quality inspiration. Just because something is cool, or trendy does not mean that it is good design. This time is worth spending to make sure that we make your website has a creative look and stands out with unique and fresh design.

PLANNING

Having a plan for the website before getting started is key. With a plan, we can make sure that everything you want is incorporated properly and not forgotten. Before getting started on anything we need to organize all the content, pages, and other elements. We will sit down with you to plan out how many and what type of pages you need (Informational, blog, store, services, etc.). This gives us an idea of how large the website will be. Once we have all these questions answered we can start to piece it all together and layout each page with its according content and structure.

CONTENT

Often the most overlooked area of a website. Content is vital to sell yourself to potential customers. Having quality content that is structured correctly is vital to the success of your website. Most people don’t have the time to write out content that works great. It takes a long time, and many people struggle with writing. That’s why we offer professional content writing for all our websites. We have a proven formula for developing content for your business that is unique to you and directed perfectly to your business. All our content is built to flow well with your website and increase your SEO performance. The better the content is, the better we can target those keywords and answer people’s questions. Your content needs to be better than your competition’s. If you are just writing content to have content, there is no point.

IMAGES

Finding quality images related to your industry can be hard. We offer custom photography to compliment your website and other design materials. With custom photography you get images that show off your business, your employees and/or products and services. This is a great way to bring that personal touch to your website and make it look professional. If custom photography is not an option, we offer stock images to give you that professional look at a much cheaper price. We try to stay away from free stock banks as the images tend to be lower quality and because they are free, end up getting used a lot more by others so you may not have unique images. No matter what your budget is, we have an image option that will work for you.

STRUCTURE

Having proper page structure is not only important for visual appearances but also for readability and SEO. Your content should visually guide people through your website. If content is placed randomly, it can be hard to follow or know where to go next. Page structure is also huge for guiding people through your website. If it takes more than 3 clicks to find what you are looking for, page structure needs to be more optimized. Page structure should be like a family tree. Starting with the home page (grandparents) and then working its way systematically down to the other pages (parents, children, grandkids, etc.).

FONTS

Depending on your branding you might have fonts selected that you need to use. If not, we need to select fonts that suit your brand and style while remaining as readable as possible. There are many places to look for fonts. Google fonts has access too many fonts that are all free to use. This is a great place to get started. If you are looking for a more unique font, we have access to more exclusive fonts that are more creative and stylized. We will take the time to experiment with different fonts to find which ones we like and fit with your brand the best. Fonts can make or break the design of your website. If you go too crazy, they will look out of place or dated, but we also don’t like to play it too safe.

WHITE SPACE

White space does not necessarily mean the colour ‘white’ space. We like to think of it more as breathing room. Allow your design to breath. If all the information is jammed together, it can be very exhausting to read through it, but if everything is separated into their own sections with lots of breathing room around it, your website will be much more readable and allow for more creativity.

SEO

SEO is what separates good website from great websites. SEO or search engine optimization is how you get noticed on the internet. Without SEO, no one will ever find your website because it won't be ranking in any areas so it won't pop up on Google. Google looks at every website and ranks them on how relevant they are and what they are talking about. The goal is to gain authority in your industry and increase your ranking to get noticed more. There are many different techniques to achieving this, some more effective than others. The number one way you will hear about when researching SEO is ‘backlinks’. Backlinks are the ultimate way to make your website rank better. Backlinks are basically an online reference system. If a website with a lot of authority has a link to your website, it shows that you are trustworthy, and Google sees this and will make you rank better. The issue with backlinks is getting them. Unless you have a way of getting backlinks on high level websites, you will end up wasting countless hours and getting no new backlinks. You also can’t pay for them, or you will be penalized. We stay away from them because they are time consuming and aren’t as effective at organically improving your website.

We focus more on the website side of SEO or ‘on page SEO’. We have developed a repeatable process to making a website effective for SEO that is very cost effective. We have tested this process on our own website, and it really works. If it didn’t work, how did you find us? Through all the steps above and some other ‘top secret’ website secrets we have turned our website from a poorly ranking website with very little traffic, into a big competitor for Ajax website design and SEO services . Without chasing any new backlinks, we have almost doubled how many we have in the past year, organically! The big trick with SEO is making your content better than your competitions. One thing to keep in mind with SEO is that it does not change overnight. It took close to a year for us to see the impact of our work. This is a really hard process because once you make an update to your website you want to make sure it works, but you have to wait 6 months to a year to see the full impact of what you did. A lot of SEO experts will charge you monthly fees and we believe this is just a scam, don’t fall for it. Once we are done building your website, we don’t charge any ‘maintenance fees’.

At Eyetoeye Design, we have years of experience creating content that not only communicates effectively with potential clients but is structured and focused for Google to index well and help you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Do you want a website that really rocks? Contact us today and let’s talk about making your Ajax web design something amazing.

FOUR CRITICAL LOGO DETAILS YOU MAY BE OVERLOOKING

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 14:00:33 GMT

When designing a logo there are many details that are highly important. Here are our top 4 must-haves that you won’t find on other lists:

Creative power - This one may sound like a no brainer but many customers overlook how important it is to have a logo with strong creativity. I have worked with several customers who took the easy route and used logo building software that generated them a logo. The advantages to this process are they are cheap, quick and easy to use. The disadvantages cannot be overlooked. Too often, they discover one of their competitors with the exact same logo other than name of the company. These logos also tend to be very simple and end up looking more like an icon than a professional logo. You need a logo that is curated perfectly to your unique business and has just the right amount of creative power infused.
Understanding - Having a concept that shows off your brand and is easy for others to understand is the perfect combination to making a logo. The more concepts you throw at your logo the harder it will be to understand what the logo is trying to represent. Try to stick to 3 or 4 concepts.
Readability - Before you finish your logo design it’s time to take a step back. Take a few steps away from your computer so that your logo is much smaller. You want it to still be readable and recognizable. Imagine you are driving down the road and see a billboard with a small logo in the corner, are you able to make out what it is? Are the lines blurring together because they are too thin? Is the font bold enough? Is the icon simple enough that you can understand what it is? These are the final things you need to keep in mind when creating a logo.
Uniqueness - If your logo is not unique from the logos used by your competition, you are not going to stand out and be noticed. Your customer needs to feel that you are not just another cookie cutter business so why would you look like everyone else. Be sure to come up with a design that stands out, communicates clearly who you are and is one-of-a-kind.

OUR GUIDE TO SELECTING THE BEST FONTS

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 19:21:06 GMT

In the wide world of font selection there may be many fonts that are good for what you need. The trick is finding the best one. Here are some resources to help you get started when looking for a new font.

Finding Fonts:
With so many fonts to pick from it may be hard to know where to begin. Google fonts is a great place to start. With Google fonts you can access thousands of free fonts. With a great interface for finding the font you want they really have a good platform for beginners. Another great reason to use Google fonts is because they many of them are web fonts. This means that you can use them for your website or blog. You can also access many of them on Canva. So without a doubt, Google fonts is the best place to get you off your feet with free, easy to access fonts.

As great as Google fonts are there are some problems you may encounter. Since they are free and easy to access, everyone uses them. Your font will not be original to your brand. Many others use that same font as well. If you are looking for a unique font for your brand we recommend trying out Envato Elements. Envato is a great place to find yourself some unique fonts. Since it is a subscription based platform this will instantly decrease how many people have access to their font library. The great thing about Envato is that you get unlimited downloads, feel free to experiment with lots of fonts before you settle on one that you like. You will find some very unique and creative fonts on Envato.

Lastly, Adobe fonts is our top resource for fonts. On Envato, it can be difficult to find great body copy fonts, since many of the fonts only have one weight or are all caps this will decrease the usability of them. Adobe fonts on the other hand has many fonts for body copy with many different weights included.

When looking for fonts for projects I am working on I usually use a combination of all 3 of these platforms to find my fonts. I usually start on Envato as they have very creative and unique fonts that I like to use for headlines and logos. I then move to Adobe and Google to find myself a body copy font with lots of different weights to work with.

Headline Fonts:
Before we select ourselves a headline font we need to ask ourselves some questions. What am I using this font for? A logo, a business, my personal use, a blog, a website, etc. Depending on what that answer is will start too narrow down what you are looking for. For example, if I am looking for a font for a local upscale restaurant, I will be looking for a font that is more sophisticated and classy. Maybe a serif font with unique characteristics that make you feel like you are getting a premium experience.

How to use serif fonts:

In 2022 serif fonts are a great way to tell whoever is viewing your font a lot about you. Serif fonts have a classy, sophisticated and mature feel to them. They also have a lot more character. Like an old home with fancy on the roof or trim around windows and doorways. When using a serif font you can really express a lot of emotion depending on how the serifs are styled. I personally enjoy using serif fonts more than sans serif fonts as they tend to be more unique and fun to work with.

How to use sans serif fonts:

Sans Serif fonts are much harder to use that serif fonts in my opinion. You can very easily make your design look very basic and boring if you do not use them correctly. That being said, when used correctly you can make really modern, crisp and clean designs that stand out. When looking at sans serif fonts you need to look very closely at all the characteristics of the font. Shape, weight, expanded or condensed all have parts to play when picking out a font.

How to use accent fonts:

Accent font are a bit more situational. Many projects may not require them at all, but when possible I like to add them in add more flair to your work. Accent fonts are fonts that are more for looks than for practical use. That is why you cannot get carried away with them. I tend to use them in the background of a design or to highlight a single word or short phrase. Otherwise, it will take away from your design, they are ‘accents’, not for wide use. When looking for an accent font you can get creative with the style you would like. You can use a hand-written script font to add character to your design or a modern bold blocky font might be right to add to your new blog talking about video games. Make sure that you use a font that adds to your design through its unique characteristics.

Let’s get inspired:

Before you make your decision on your font, look for inspiration, you may find a style that you wouldn’t have thought of or even learn from bad design to see what not to do. Lastly, make sure that you have some music playing that motivates you to push yourself.

THREE REASONS YOU NEED A SIMPLE LOGO

malachi.cowie@gmail.com (John Cowie) — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 14:17:33 GMT

When designing a logo there are many things to look out for, we believe that simple logos are the key to success, but you have to do them right. The best logos require a great deal of effort and finesse. At the same time, they need to be simplistic and communicate quickly.

What you don't want is for your logo to be so simple that it qualifies as an icon. When you think of an icon you probably think of something like a phone icon or an information icon. The reason icons are bad for your logo design is because these icons are meant to represent something so that there are no words needed for you to understand them. While they do a good job representing that one thing, they do not qualify as logos as they are far too simplistic in design concept and effort. Yes, there are many successful companies with very simple logos but, they have earned it. When you see the Apple logo, you know what it is because of it's popularity. Without that popularity backing up their symbol, it's just an apple that tells us nothing about the brand. Another example is the Starbucks logo. Currently, they only have the symbol as their logo, but they had 'Starbucks Coffee' included in it a few years ago. Again, they earned it through popularity.

Your symbol representing your brand should be unique and have more than one concept. Now this is really easy to take in the other direction and have far too many things trying to be represented that your logo ends up being so busy and complex that it loses it's impact. Another major problem with having too many concepts in your logo is that it is almost impossible to make that logo look good when in a small format. If your logo is small or seen from far away, you should still be able to tell what it is.

Now that we know what too little and too much concept are let's talk about what is the right balance. This is easier said than done as every logo is different so there is more than one solution, but there are some key principles to follow: Clear communication, ease of readability and whimsical fascination.

Clear Communication

When someone sees your logo they should be able to instantly recognize what it is and what your business does. How are potential customers going to choose you if they only see your logo but don't know what it is that you do. Whether it be in your symbol, company name or tagline, one of those areas need to tell others what you do.

You probably don't have a choice when it comes to the company name as that was probably already selected, but if it does tell what you do, this makes your job easier as the symbol can be more abstract. The easiest one being the tagline because you can say exactly what you do there. If you are going to introduce what you do into the symbol itself, be careful, there are so many popular symbols that people use. When you think of a real estate agent you think of a roof top above their name or a hammer with a construction business. Think outside of the box. Don't do what everyone else it doing. If working with a realtor think about what makes them unique or maybe change a letter into a tool for a construction business. If everyone has already done the logo design you are about to do, what's the point in just making another cookie cutter design? Your logo should clearly communicate what your business is. If you can do this, you are off to a great start.

Ease of readability

When designing a logo it is really easy to get locked in and forget that not everyone will be seeing this logo at large scale in front of them. Depending on what the business is, it could be on a billboard or some sort of large format display. Does your logo still look good? This is a challenging part as there is a balance. Our trick for solving this issue quickly is by taking a step back from your computer. Make sure that you are far enough away that it is fairly small. Now you can see if the lines start to disappear if they are too thin or maybe they blur together if they are too thick. Now you can optimize the logo for all sizes easily with this simple trick. The logo should have the same impact at all sizes, not just when it is in a large, easy to see format. Another big one is font selection, this can make or break a logo as some fonts can be really hard to read. Make sure that the fonts you choose are easy to read by all.

Whimsical Fascination

Now it's time to chase that wow factor. There is nothing like looking at a logo for the first time and saying "wow, now that's clever". Not every logo can hit this mark though as often companies have long names or a tagline that gets in the way of creativity. Often there isn't a budget to be that creative as well, but when there is, that is the time to step out and get really creative with your logo design. Take the time to explore lots of options. Get some great inspiration and create something that is truly outside of the box.

Hopefully these tips are able to help you make sure the you next logo looks great. Remember that simple is good.