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There are two basic types of business diaries, the traditional handwritten one, and the modern electronic one known as digital diaries. Nowadays, most businesspersons opt for the electronic version, as it is easier, and more convenient to use.
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Visual elements are a major part of your business's brand identity design. The keystone of that design is the logo, but in many cases, the logo isn't enough to convey all of your brand attributes. A visual vocabulary is a way to reinforce and add to the messaging that is contained in your logo. A company's visual vocabulary consists of the secondary design elements that are used in conjunction with your logo to form your brand identity. The visual vocabulary is composed of font styles, colors, shapes, layout conventions, backgrounds, photographic library, text treatments (such as taglines) and even the type of paper you choose. These elements should be used consistently throughout your stationery set and marketing collateral and have the following 9 advantages over use of a logo and text alone: o The elements of your visual vocabulary become a graphic language, which takes your viewer deeper into your graphics and materials. They add visual interest and continue to tell your business's story. They are another way that you can communicate about your business with potential clients and prospects, aside from the actual words and text about your business. o Graphics in a visual vocabulary are a method of communication that's more quickly understood than text alone. A viewer can absorb the meanings of colors, symbols, photos, shapes and even font types much more quickly than by reading text. So, in cases where time is of the essence - when you're marketing to busy people, creating motion graphics such as animations or commercials or designing
items that people will quickly pass by, such as car graphics or billboards, this is an important consideration. o Many people have a deeper emotional connection with graphics than they do with text. Customers will be more likely to form an emotional bond with your brand and company if you use more graphics, as opposed to just using your logo and text on a letterhead, business card, datasheet or brochure. Color and photography are two of the most effective visual vocabulary elements to use to affect this emotional brand connection. o You can communicate some of the "personality factors" of your business through your visual vocabulary. You can make your company look more professional or people-oriented, more contemporary or traditional or communicate any of your company's values by varying the shapes, colors and fonts used as the surrounding visual vocabulary. So, if you choose your vocabulary elements carefully, the story of the personality of your company can be told through those elements. o Using a visual vocabulary consistently throughout all of your corporate materials will automatically make your materials look more coherent, credible and professional, through the repetitive use of consistent elements. o The right combination of visual vocabulary elements can also make your materials more eye-catching. When your materials are in competition with others - in a stack of proposals, on a table with other brochures or even a postcard coming out of a crowded mailbox - they'll have a better chance of getting noticed when they are designed with stunning and unique visual vocabulary elements. o Forty percent of viewers better remember visual elements. A visual vocabulary will increase the memorability of your materials as well, since people will have more visual elements to remember in your materials.
o Elements of the visual vocabulary can reinforce your logo to help quicken the brand recognition building process. One common way that we do this is to use a large version of the company's logo, or a portion of the logo, as a watermark on the letterhead, business card, envelope or website. Not only does this vocabulary element effect add visual interest, but it will help to speed the time that it takes for your potential customers and existing clients to recognize and remember your brand. o A visual vocabulary becomes a tool kit from which you can easily pull visual elements to create new marketing materials. If you have a business card and brochure and need to create a post card quickly, then many of your visual elements, such as color scheme, font styles and even layout and photograph choices can be pulled from the existing marketing materials and rearranged to create a new piece. This is especially convenient when you have a short time or low budget to produce new marketing materials. The bonus function of a visual vocabulary is that when you're doing a special promotion, launching a new product or extending your services or product line, you can vary elements of the visual vocabulary or even develop a new set of visual vocabulary elements, to make the materials for your new promotion stand out. While consistency throughout a campaign is important, the elements of your visual vocabulary aren't as set in stone as your logo. This is especially effective when you work just with the colors and drawn elements and leave the text and tagline treatments the same. That way, your materials will still be partially consistent with your other company materials, but you can give your new product or promotion's materials a voice of its own. Adding some visual vocabulary elements to your brand identity makes
communicating with your audience easier, quicker and more emotionally charged. This gives you a highly effective way to increase your visibility and memorability. When used correctly, they can increase your credibility as well. They even can help add some personality to your brand identity and can make future marketing materials easier to develop. And, unlike your company logo, you can modify the visual vocabulary elements you use from time to time to spice up your business communications. Having recently worked on several eCommerce websites in a row, I wanted to mention a few issues that should be considered if you are planning to sell anything online. Although I have a current favorite eCommerce package, I've attempted to make these helpful hints independent of any particular software. Pictures Many software packages only have the built-in ability to handle one picture per item. If you want more pictures, make sure you have some sort of work-around in place. Also, some of the more popular software packages require that each picture have the same aspect ratio. In other words, they all have to be a square or a rectangle that has the ratio of 2:3, etc. Your best bet, if your software is like that, is to just use the defaults of your camera. A typical digital camera takes pictures in a 4:3 ratio. Just make sure you take all your pictures with your camera oriented the same way. In other words, all horizontal or all vertical. A workaround, if you don't want to take all your pictures oriented the same way, is to add some "white space" to each picture. In your specific case, you might need to use some color other than white, so it will blend into your website well. Your best bet is to know the limitations of your software prior to taking all the pictures. That way, you can work within its limits to achieve the best results. Inventory Control Are you going to have more than one of the exact same piece of merchandise in your store? If so, you will need some sort of inventory control. Your website will need to track how many of an item you have in stock. It will need to subtract stock when it is purchased, and remove the listing when the item is out of stock.
Payment There are plenty of payment options out there. Obviously, you can take credit cards numbers directly and process those with your local bank. If that is the case, you will need a secure web server so that the credit card data is encrypted. The alternative is to use a service like PayPal or 2CheckOut. Both let you take all the customer information except the payment info. Then you pass the user out to their site, and send them back to your own site once you've paid. Shipping There are several different ways that you can calculate shipping. The first, and most accurate, is exact cost by weight. Several shipping companies will let your web site communicate directly with theirs to get accurate shipping costs based on zip code and weight. The downside to this one is that you have to keep track of how much all your products weigh. Also, if you have lightweight items, it might be somewhat irrelevant. Another alternative is a shipping table. This can be based on either weight or cost. You determine weight or cost ranges, and base your shipping costs off that. For example, up to 5 pounds could cost $5 to ship. Then, up to 10 pounds could cost $7 to ship. Up to 15 pounds could cost $9. And so on, to whatever maximum weight or cost you want to ship. What if someone goes over the maximum? First of all, one option is to set the maximum to some absurdly high number like 999999 pounds. Then you won't have to worry about them going over that maximum. However, there's still the possibility that their shipping will cost way more than estimated. There's two basic options I suggest. One, you can simple send them an invoice stating that they need to pay XYZ more for shipping. Make sure this accompanies belkins a warning on your website that orders costing (or weighing) over XYZ dollars (or pounds) may be subject to additional shipping fees. The alternative, and my favorite, is to simply pay the extra cost yourself. Ideally, once you have to worry about a situation like that, the person has already ordered tons of merchandise from you, and would appreciate a break like that. It can definitely make a good impression. Make sure you keep a running total of how much you've charged for shipping vs. how much you've spent. If, after six months to a year, you see that the numbers aren't quite lining up, tweak your rates. Although there are other methods for shipping, those are the most popular two, and certainly the easiest to maintain. Conclusion Are these the only concerns when setting up an eCommerce site? Certainly not, but they are some of the most common. If you have any specific questions or concerns, feel free to contact me with those questions.
