The Makak Media Blog ::

If you're about to embark on creating a website for your business then this collection of articles will help you on your journey. There's a lot involved in putting together a website that not only looks good but also easy to navigate and delivers on many fronts.

Creating a website can be a daunting prospect and if you're not technically minded then the idea of building a site probably makes you shudder. Do not worry, take your time to read my posts, make notes, bookmark this page and return to it when in doubt.

There's initial advice from a complete technophobe who required a site for her small business along with web design inspiration, SEO and usability tips. Then once you have your website built I've written further articles on promoting your site via social media and traditional press release.

Social Media Marketing is something that we all take part in, spreading our brand far and wide across the net. Often the desire to gain greater traffic leads to multiple social accounts which to some people is cheating, to others it's just playing the game.

I'd had this blog post tucked away in my drafts for a while but this article Tiers of Transparency: The Ethical Brand Ambassador brought the whole issue back to my attention. Now whether it is right or wrong is something I'm not going to get into here but all I will say is that it's here, it's not going away and you're probably not going to be able to stop it! If you want to read a more serious post then Lisa Barone The Use of Fake and Michael Gray's Fake Social Media Profiles can help you there.

The Olympics is fast approaching and whether you're an avid spectator, occasional channel hopper or think it's a complete turn off, for more than just sporting reasons, you still can't deny the sheer scale of design involved.

Everything from the medals through to logos, posters, mascots and architecture has to be planned and brought together for probably the biggest sporting event in the world. I thought I would bring together just a small portion of the design and marketing for you.

Hopefully some projects will be coming the way of small businesses for the 2012 games in London and not just reserved for the bigger firms!

The Business Network is your one-stop shop to find out how your business can get involved in London 2012, good luck.

Logos

The China Design Now exhibition at the V&A in London was about to close and I didn't want to miss it so last Saturday I went down there to take a look.

I wasn't disappointed as I walked around viewing some of the best work to come out of China in the last 20 years. Everything from photography, illustration, architecture, film, clothing and more were on view in a well laid out sequence of rooms. Some fantastic work was shown which will hopefully fire your mind!

For anyone that missed it or had no chance of visiting I have collected just a few snippets of inspiration to give you a flavour of what was on show, enjoy. If you'd like to share further design ideas and inspiration from China do leave a comment and link below.

MEWE Design Alliance

Pink is a colour that stands alone from most others, what hue you choose can change the look and feel of your web design.

Girls love pink and may even be biologically programmed to prefer it according to a Study: Why Girls Like Pink detailed in TIME magazine.

I've used pink in many web designs and love the contrast it gives against a cool grey, come on lads don't be afraid to say you like it too!

So below I've picked out 11 designs that use the colour pink in varying ways but all with a great end result, enjoy.

Charuca

Hotdog and Mustard

Great news from Adobe is that they are making Flash searchable and have teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make this possible according to ReadWriteWeb.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe.

The main problem with Flash sites are that search engines cannot crawl them for information to determine exactly what they hold. If they can't be crawled, they can't be ranked which means no search engine traffic no matter how good the content.

Adobe Flash Player is now installed on 98% of machines so this development might see Flash appearing on more sites in the near future.

This is good news although we wait and see exactly how this turns out.

Companies that only deal in local business need ways to attract people to their site, not from Outer Mongolia, unless that's your niche market, but from the surrounding area. Other than optimising your website what options do you have?

The first option and most basic is to adjust your Google account in Webmaster Tools and Set Geographic Target. This isn't necessary if your site ends in .co.uk as it's already associated with the United Kingdom, but is required if you have a .com domain.

Next you can utilise the free service from Google called Local Business Center. Here you can provide your business address which is displayed on a map and pin points exactly where you are.

Other information that you can also provide are opening hours, photos, description and most importantly a category which will help Google identify exactly what your business provides.

So you've got a new website, great you're now a step ahead of those without one but a small hop, skip and a jump behind those who have been online for a while.

What can you do to catch up with those who already have plenty of traffic, links to their site or a popular brand name?

Well don't despair there are many ways to get your site out there and in front of people and even steal a march on your competitors who have become complacent.

The Hop - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You should incorporate SEO in your design brief to your web designer but if you didn't then it's not too late to make changes that will help your site in the long term.

Directories

The first port of call for many people are directories and although not vital they are a good foundation to work from.

This TED Talk is from last March but it's a great insight into Branson the man and entrepreneur.

When Richard Branson was at school, his headmaster predicted he would wind up either a millionaire or in jail. Since then, he's done both. He talks to TED's Chris Anderson about the ups and the downs of his career, from his multibillionaire success to his multiple near-death experiences, from Virgin's line of spacecraft to the failure of the Virgin condom. He also reveals some of his (very surprising) motivations. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 30:44.)

Being a marketing junkie I was reading one of the many publications I get through the post and came across an article that inspired this post, Is social networking more of a fad in B2B marketing than a viable marketing medium? in B2B Marketing magazine.

Considering how long I've been engaged in social media and the growth in the medium I was interested to read the debate.

Ross Sturley, principle of Chart Lane consultancy and committee member of the CIM Construction Industry Group said that it's 'fun' and 'cool' but ultimately not worth the time.

He went on to say 'LinkedIn has 21 million users, but its most frequent use is recruitment consultants trying to source candidates' something I would have to disagree with. I've found Linked In to be a very good site to network on and gain work from.