Marketing using social media platforms can be a bit like trying to sell a product in a pub where all of your friends are. If you’re not funny, informative and effective, you’ll not get anywhere and, to add to your problems, you’ve just made yourself look foolish in front of your peer group. It’s a fraught business. Especially when you’re on a budget.
For the small or starter site owner, there are methods by which you can use Facebook to increase your traffic, or at least to consolidate your core group of fans, ensuring that they feel involved with your project and 100% behind what you’re doing.
On a limited or non-existent budget, we need all the tools we can get, and Facebook as well as Twitter can increase traffic if you play things the right way.
Don’t be annoying
As a rule of thumb, you probably don’t set out to be annoying in any aspect of your life, but social media has it’s own complex etiquette that’s still in its infancy, and developing.
When promoting anything you’ve created, make sure you pack your links with entertaining content or informative text or video, and keep an eye on how many times you’re promoting things. The issue with Facebook is that you’re literally surrounded by your friends. You really don’t want to look like you’re pushing your work onto them in a place where they come to relax.
Create a Facebook profile solely for your business
To avoid the problems involved in using your real life persona to push your business, you could always set up a dedicated account to your business. This is a double-edged sword used the wrong way, as your reputation may bite the dust if you can’t find fans, followers or friends to become Facebook buddies with your brand – so do this with caution and be sure you’ll get the right response.
Start a fan page
Less risky, set up a Facebook fan page and, if your web content is constantly updated, set up a feed so that fans of your product will see any developments on their homepage. Even better, they can comment on any new content without having to directly become involved in any comment debate. This suits some personalities, because they feel Facebook is a much less intimidating online environment than a blog or website comments section.
Get a discussion going
People can probably talk in your comments section or forum, but anywhere that you have a community discourse going on is to be encouraged. Remember that if someone has become a fan of what you do on Facebook – they’re probably pretty devoted to what you do. So it’s feasible you could use your Facebook fan page as the place for real geek-out discussion about your service – where your nerd army can talk at length about the finer details of your product in the safe environment of your designated Fan area.
Encourage Facebook feedback
You could quite easily start using the Fan page for a specific purpose. Say you receive a lot of feedback from users or potential new users, and they use a standard email to get in touch. You could do away with the emailing back and forth regime and realistically ask them to become a fan on facebook, where you respond to every query in person. They’ll feel they’re getting direct contact with the site-owner – and you’ll have won a new fan.
Status update your new content
Some of us not only have our news story update on the Fan feed, but also in our own personal profile’s feed. Some people have told me they find this annoying, but the vast majority don’t mind at all. Where most people status update about the sausage they ate for dinner, you’re within your rights to post a link to the latest thing you put on site. Nobody’s getting hurt, and if it gets noticed, all the better.
Have a loose attitude to who’s your ‘friend’
Obviously we don’t mean you should start making friends with reprobates, but it can be wise to be all-inclusive. Cynics may frown on those who get in touch and friend people they haven’t spoken to since the sandpit – but really, there’s no harm in it. A friendly word with an old real world friend will let them know what you’re doing now, and when they see what you’re up to in your feed, they might like it and become a regular on your site.
Consider Facebook exclusives
People, don’t have to follow you on Facebook – remember that it’s purely their choice to do so, and they’ve gone out of their virtual way to allow you some space on their feed. If you have time to offer them some exclusive content that’s Facebook only, then you’ll cement the value you give them and also make your fan area a desirable place to visit. It needn’t be a huge slog – maybe early heads up on podcast clips, extra blog posts or even just links to cool stuff. Small things are massively appreciated.
Think about advertising on Facebook
If you’ve got the budget, Facebook does carry targeted advertising, though there are conflicting reports on just how effective it can be. True, you have a potential captive audience of 500,000,000 users, but you’re also dealing with a very controlling social media site and, as a result, can’t be entirely sure how your ad is being used.
Before you make the jump into paid advertising there, instead of relying on the usual social media tricks, read around on the effectiveness of different kinds of advertising there are. We’ve provided some further reading below, so you can evaluate whether or not it would be worth your while.
This post was written by Liam Tucker of the excellent Watch With Mothers. Which is another great way to waste your day. – Want to write for the BaseKit Blog? – Drop us an email.
Big news today for you fellow Basekiteers! The Gold release is out and ready for you to try out.
The Gold release, despite the name, is in no way our final or complete release. It is, however, still pure gold. In some ways we consider it the “social” release – we’re adding a number of new features to help you share your BaseKit sites with your friends and get them to benefit from BaseKit, through our brand new referral program. Other features of the Gold release include:
• Ability to build HTML5 and CSS3 enabled sites through BaseKit
• Instant Twitter updates
• A whole lot of new CSS styling controls
• Open Themes
• Selective Page Publication
• Additional video support
• Multi select and delete Image/files en masse
• PSD Downloads of Themes
To check these all out in greater detail read the notes below.
We’ve also deployed our first private beta widget to the BaseKit Beta Program. We’re continuing to develop incredible new widgets for BaseKit behind the scenes, and some of these need some testing in the semi-wild before we release them publicly. We only release these to our Beta Program, a select group of BaseKit enthusiasts. If you’re interested in joining the program, check it out. The new widget we’re working on should be one of the most powerful in BaseKit, so after we get some feedback from our community look for it coming soon to everyone!
Finally, we’re kicking off a long term initiative to make BaseKit the best online service to build HTML5 and CSS3 enabled sites. The shift to HTML5 and CSS3 looks to be one of the more exciting developments in the web space, and we’re fascinated to see what the BaseKit community comes up with when given these powerful tools through our user friendly GUI. Stay posted for more information as this develops – we’ll have more news on HTML5 soon – but you’ll be able to start using some of the new CSS3 tags immediately.
Without further ado, the major items :
Friend Referral Program: You enjoy using BaseKit and so might your friends too! We’ve now made it simple for you to get them on board and try out our Basekit. If you’re an active BaseKit user, you can now invite your friends directly from the dashboard in the “what’s new” section. If you don’t see it, you probably haven’t been that active, but you can always reach the referral board by logging into your BaseKit Dashboard -> Account.
The best part? refer friends to BaseKit and you and your friends get a one month free trial of a BaseKit Basic Account or £5 ($8) off if you’re already a BaseKit subscriber.
Twitter Updates: You can already pull in Twitter feeds to any BaseKit site using the Twitter widget and as of today you’re able to notify your Twitter followers of your latest BaseKit creation. Just publish any site, and you’ll be prompted to connect with your Twitter account. Then, whenever you publish updates, opt to notify your friends automatically (or not, if it’s a minor update).
CSS3: We’ve added a whole host of new styling controls that you can find on the Text Widget -> Styles tab. These enable you to apply some of the new CSS3 items to your CSS elements. You can add shadows, gradient backgrounds, rotations, scales, skews and more and more at the drag of a slider. While not technically CSS3, we’ve also added fine-grained control over borders, which was a commonly requested item, while throwing in the CSS3 for rounded corners. By rounding each corner style independently (easy in BaseKit!) you can get some very cool asymmetric effects. This functionality should also give you a preview of how we’ll be integrating this functionality across other pieces of BaseKit soon! Here is a preview of the CSS3 controls:
Open Themes: Themes remain one of the most popular ways to try BaseKit, giving you a fully functional site to deploy, play with (or rip apart and redesign) as soon as you start. In addition, we’ve received many requests from our community members who don’t use Photoshop, but just want to set up a great looking site from scratch. So, our design team has been hard at work building a number of “open” themes. These are full design templates, all with at least 3 colour variations, that let you start a new BaseKit site with background graphics and regions, but nothing else. Build up your pages, layouts, widgets and more just as you’ve envisioned.
Here is a sneak preview of one of the open themes:
And some more minor updates:
Selective Page Publication (ie, draft pages): You can now specify a page to remain in a draft state. This means this page will not be updated to the live version of your site when you hit “Publish” – allowing you to work on new versions or long term projects on live pages without having to hold off on publishing your site. Here at BaseKit, we use it in particularly on our homepage. Since all of BaseKit.com is built in BaseKit, we have a huge number of pages that are updated daily. By leaving our homepage and other major pages in “draft” state, we ensure that they never get accidentally republished with in-progress work. Access this through the Page Options in the BaseKit editor.
More Video Support: We’ve already supported embedding some of the leading video platforms – YouTube, Vimeo, Google- inaddition, we’re now supporting new services, such as Facebook, UStream live video feeds, MetaCafe, Veoh and Blip.TV. You can drop the embed code for these services directly into the Video widget, or just the direct URL which we’ll convert to embed code . Note that Facebook videos will need to be full public access to ensure they can be played on site.
Mass Delete on Images/Files: A common request on our team and some prolific BaseKit users, since sometimes you end up with huge numbers of images and file uploads in the media manager. Now you can multiselect and delete these en masse.
PSD Downloads of Themes: We’re making all the PSDs we use for creating the themes you find in our Theme Selector available for download. You’ll be able to see a big variety of BaseKit ready PSDs, as well as tweak your favourites in Photoshop and then re-import the new PSD. Enjoy!
That’s about it. As always, another busy release for us here at BaseKit. But we’re impatient, and ALWAYS moving quickly to provide you maximum design in the minimum time. Your feedback is what matters, to help us shape the future of BaseKit. Feel free to share with us your views, opinons and experiences through any of our community or support channels – we’re always listening.
To see the Gold release features in action watch the video below:
Maybe the standard design isn’t for you – you prefer a simplistic minimal design to help achieve that harmonic balance. And if you find yourself designing for a client who has a minimalist outlook for their vision, and are finding things are lost in translation, hopefully this article will be helpful.
We start with a solid wireframe (digital or traditional), but pay close attention to the design, because with the proper layout you can nail down your Information Architecture and hierarchies to create an overall visual appeal. Keep in mind that white space goes hand in hand with minimal design, without it you end up with a cluttered mess. Just take into consideration to add a bit of more white space around objects than you normally would. Try to avoid elements that do not directly affect the readability or usability of your site.
Strip everything down to it’s core essence until something breaks it down, so functionality is king. The further you progress in your wireframes, I’m sure you’ll come across certain areas or items that you feel differently about now, than when you put them in place. Do you really need those social network icons? Does the RSS feed which sounded fantastic, come across as too cluttered? (although, people do love lists and organized data)
You can create focal points in the design by adding splashes of color, it is certain to grab the users attention against a black and white landscape of the screen. Even though most minimalist’s enjoy clean, simple, and straight lines; textures are a good way to give depth to the overall appeal. Keeping your content to a minimum will give you more room to create the perfect balance to the graphical elements contained to each page.
So, achieving a balance and contrast seem to be the two major prevalent themes (at least to me).When it comes to your minimal designs, and simple yet effective grid system these will help you accomplish that. But you need to remember the principles on which you would normally build a site:
Rhythm
Balance
Dominance
Unity
Proportion
Like many others, I sometimes tend to over complicate my designs. It is important to look at your work objectively and form new design habits when necessary. Take a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture in your design. Can you take things out? Is there room for improvement? In the end practice makes perfect and not every design you put out is going to be a winner. Don’t be afraid to reach outside of your own comfort zones and ask advice from other designers and get their takes on your design.
I’d like to share some good examples that I came across online below:
The world of the web is rapidly changing as the dawn of HTML 5 and CSS3 is here. With this, there are many new design trends appearing and in this article I will attempt to outline the ones I believe are most influential in my approach to design.
Oversize
Over sized logos, images headers and footers are currently very popular, they grab the viewers attention with interesting and realistic graphics to encourage interaction and a longer viewing period on the site. They also provide a more user friendly alternative to static splash pages wherein a link must be clicked to pass though to the rest of the site. It’s important to consider that in our current “instant gratification” society, people will spend milliseconds deciding whether to read on or navigate away from your page. Thus an eye catching header, banner and logo, could have a positive effect on viewing times.
Typography
As site logos and headers get bigger and bigger the typography used is increasing in size to match this. As long as the page doesn’t look cramped, bold messages in fonts such as Impact have attention grabbing power.
As many are aware, there is currently a revolution in web fonts. Previously, designers had to stick to the 16 web safe fonts in an effort to make their web pages accessible to the largest amount of people. Now with companies such as TypeKit, who provide accessible fonts to the general public, the designer has a much wider choice.
As Web Design evolves, visible influences from print design, both past and present, can be seen. Publications such as ‘The Times Newspaper’ have a requirement to replicate the look and individuality of their publication on the web. Especially since magazine sales are decreasing and more people are using mobile devices to read their favourite newspapers and magazines. However, with all these new fonts to play with there is a danger of going overboard and stifling the message.
Hand drawn Graphics
Reality seems to be slipping into the world of web, with more and more designers developing an penchant for ‘real’ imagery such as drawn graphics and photography throughout their pages. Gone are the times when gradients and reflections were king, designers are creating more gritty and real work using light textures and noise. Creating new perspectives on the page also interests and surprises the viewer. For example, a photo of a designers desk or an artists canvas, or even the inside of a fridge used as the background image to a site.
Social Networking
Social networking is becoming increasingly important and useful as people can now easily upload their work or photos straight on to sites such as on Flickr, Behance, LinkedIn , as well as Twitter and Facebook. The work is already circulating, and creating a website with the same information that could be considered unnecessary. Single page websites catch the viewers attention, and collate all their links in one place.
As designers we all know it’s essential to be aware of new trends, and ‘what’s hot’ and ‘what’s not’. However, it’s also important not to get carried with the flood and create designs based entirely on what you think the ‘latest thing’ might be. Your client and the needs of your project need to take precedence over any fashion that might be common at that time.
This post was written by Asia Simpson and Holly Kennedy from the Design Team @ BaseKit
"It differs from other similar services by allowing users to implement functional, interactive and dynamic elements without coding. It doesn't simply build a static site like the web site builders of a decade past.
