Author Archive for Patrick Winfield
 |
Contests generate traffic, but will your business win?Jul 24 2008 | Contests |
Contests, especially user-generated ones, have the ability to drive significant traffic and links to a site. For example, there are many sites like Contest Hound and Contest Blogger, that share information about various available contests. Many participants connect with contest for the following reasons:
- Win a prize (monetary or material)
- Recognition
- Connect with the brand
In order for people to connect with a contest, the concept needs to be relevant to the target audience’s interests. Issue-based organizations have been extremely successful at drawing many participants and encouraging feedback, regardless of the prize. However, consumer goods struggle with contests, especially if the rewards are nominal.
Wells Fargo, the financial services company, is offering a contest that encourages users to submit a story of what they would accomplish if they had a certain amount of money. Some Day Stories is rewarding the winner with $100,000.
1 Comment » - Posted in Contests by Patrick Winfield
|
Rewind to Fundamentals: The 10 Best Ways to Find the Perfect Image for your Blog Post |
Images are an important way to add that extra kick to your blog posts. They are often the first thing that attracts visitors to read further. But where do you find good image?
After completing your masterpiece, you begin to search endlessly around the internet for an image that depicts the core message of your post. When you finally find that perfect one, it is locked up in licenses and conditions that require a lawyer or a credit card. You are obviously frustrated and find yourself spending more time looking for another image than writing that post. Let’s explore some resources that will help you find that image!
Stock photography sites require a paid subscription and offer many choices and sometimes the best results. It can also be the most played out, overused, politically correct looking fluff out there. However, there are so many sources available, from the super expensive sites like Getty, to the middle of the road places like Shutter Stock and iStockPhoto.
8 Comments » - Posted in Blogging, Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
|
Researching for Linkbait PiecesJun 12 2008 | Social Media Marketing |
OK, so you have a great topic ready to write about and now you need to research it out throughly. Creating an effective linkbait piece, one that actually makes people want to link to it, requires some decent researching skills. There is a ridiculous amount of information online just waiting for you, but some of that information may be just that…ridiculous.
The task then becomes figuring out which is the best to use and which needs to be ignored, when to look somewhere else and where that somewhere else is. Here are some ideas and techniques that can help facilitate your research both on and off the screen.
5 Comments » - Posted in Social Media Marketing by Patrick Winfield
|
Call to Action! Creating Cool Gradient Style Buttons. |
“Contact Us”, “Learn More”, “Click Here”, “Free Money!”. OK that last one I made up, but we have all seen these calls that ask us to do something.
Calls to action in interactive media are usually buttons or links that begin a process. Making these important calls stand out requires some designing further than, and in addition to, the underlined hyper link.
The text and words used in calls to action are topics of another discussion. For this tutorial I am focusing on the design elements of a graphical button and specifically simple gradients with a 1 to 2 pixel gap from the border created in Photoshop. This tutorial is similar to the previous one on creating cool graphical text, but changing a few things and applying it to buttons.
6 Comments » - Posted in Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
|
How to Create Cool ‘Graphical Text’ for Linkbait Pieces |
Last week I wrote about how to create great header graphics for linkbait pieces. Now I would like to go a bit deeper into that and explain how I create graphical text, text that is an image, that stands out and screams to be noticed.
Like the last tutorial mentioned, it is important for your article to have an image associated with the content of the article. When you go on Digg and see a link to a story without an image or photo what do you do? Well, I tend to not click on that story and move on down the line. The same holds true, to some degree, to linkbait pieces and the inclusion of catching header graphics.
8 Comments » - Posted in Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
|
Using Pull Quotes & Lift Outs: How to Grab Your Reader’s Attention |
When you need to focus the attention of the reader to a certain area in the text or story pull quotes are the best method. Pull quotes are small pieces of the story or article that is being repeated and set in a larger size font and placed near the middle.
The idea is to pull the reader in further and also pull text from the main body of text. You have seen these allover, if you read an article online or in print today it may have had a pull quote in it and that may be the first thing your eye went to and read.
12 Comments » - Posted in Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
|
How to Create Great Header Graphics for Linkbait Pieces |
For this ‘How to…’ I am going to use a linkbait piece from PC World called 10 Cool Gadgets You Can’t Get Here-Yet. The piece tells about how often the coolest gadgets originate overseas and usually in Asia.
The information is interesting enough to hold my attention and I want to see which gadgets they selected and also find out what it is that I can’t get-yet.
However the main graphic header is obvious and could have been worked on a bit more to capture the interest of those people that may be on the fence about whether or not to read further into the piece. So lets get into how I would have used stock photos and created a more compelling graphic to try and lure some more eyeballs into the piece.
6 Comments » - Posted in Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
|
Creating Linkbait Graphics with Stock Photos [How Would I Do This?]Apr 08 2008 | Design |
For this round of the ‘How Would I Do This…’ I am looking at an article on CNN called ‘How do you know your love is real? Check Facebook’. I am also going to tie in my previous post on the overuse of stock photography.
The article from CNN is a news story that is generating 100’s of comments and opinions from people expressing how they deal with relationship status on Facebook.
The photo used is great. I think it conveys right away the feeling of being watched while on your computer. But I would have pushed it one step further and incorporated the Facebook logo on the computer where there is a blue space on the back of the monitor. It seems so obvious to me and would add that extra bit of information to the photo to make it almost tell the story.
10 Comments » - Posted in Design by Patrick Winfield
|
The Overuse of Stock Photography (and 3 Ways To Avoid It) |
OK, before I begin let me say that I use stock photography. Stock photos are a great convenience. I sometimes depend on it,
especially in a crunch or when I just need someone smiling and expressing happiness for a call center spot. That being said, there comes a time when stock photography is so obviously staged, politically correct fluff that screams “I am STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY!”
You all know the image, a group of happy employees who all are various ages, genders and races. Everyone is sitting around a desk pointing to a computer screen in some bland office interior.
Sometimes only the top few results are ever used in a stock library search and those photos are everywhere. How do we avoid these pitfalls of overused imagery and photography?
6 Comments » - Posted in Design, Tutorial by Patrick Winfield
|
Break All The Rules (and Still Be Successful)Feb 15 2008 | Design, Social Networks |
With great design and implementation you can break all the rules and still be successful. This, by any other means, shouldn’t have worked. It shouldn’t have reached the ridiculous number of 3,338 diggs after being posted just 4 days ago. It was Flash animation. It was an advertisement for a product. It was selling you something. But as the submitter ‘ad-hater’ #1 stated :
If all advertisements were done like this, I might actually start reading them.
What happened? It was a healthy combination of good design and smart implementation of a beautifully created product that spawned a much deserved buzz. Pink Floyd was selling their limited edition 40th anniversary 14 album box set called ‘Oh, By The Way’. The Flash animation was designed by a London digital creative agency called Bloc.
If we look at the presentation and design of the interface that the user controls to view the various albums in the set we see that it is very minimal.
