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Archive for April, 2012

My week in Singapore – 22-28 April – and the 3 things I loved

Monday, April 30th, 2012

Keren Lerner in Singapore

I have just come back from a week in Singapore. This was on invitation by one of our favourite clients, Gina Romero. For those of you who haven’t heard of Gina, she runs a business strategy consultancy called “Unconventional Busness Thinking” and we did the website for that. She also co-founded Athena Singapore with Claire Kidd, (and we did the website) and she is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to networking and teaching businesses how to make the most of it.

Gina also consulted on and project managed another project we worked on for a Blue Ocean Systems Singapore.

So, back to my week in Singapore. I mainly wanted to go as we have already had 3 great projects with Gina and I wanted to meet more of the businesses out there.

My itinerary included the following:

  • On Monday, I attended a “Pecha Kucha” event at Asia Professional Speakers saw some great speeches and and met some great people.
  • On Tuesday we met with Google to talk about bringing women entrepreneurs online through a special Google sponsored training scheme, in partnership with Athena Singapore (this new scheme was announced on the Friday)
  • On Tuesday evening, I gave a talk called “How to Rock Online” at Gina’s Business Rocks event – and met more great people.
  • On Thursday I had a day off which included a visit to Sentosa Island to experience the spa first hand.
  • Friday morning I gave a talk on “Why you need to be blogging, and 9 tips to make the most of your blog” at Athena Singapore “Cappuccino Connections” – where I met more great people.
  • Friday afternoon I ran a 2 hour workshop entitled Pimp My Website – attended by great people!

http://www.picmonkey.com/

Marina Bay Sands hotel

I found the people I met to be friendly, respectful, fun and interesting, and I am definitely going to go back for more trips. Singapore is now in my list of top 5 best cities in the world!

Here are 3 things I loved:

  1. When you give a business card, credit card, money or receipt, you use both hands and sort of bow your head – it’s a sign of respect. This means you have to stop typing on your Blackberry for a little while, which is nice actually. I loved this.
  2. People in business are friendly, enthusiastic and genuinely interested in talking to you – just like networking in London (yes, I have this experience most of the time). My hosts Gina Romero, Claire Kidd and Bobby Jimenez were absolute darlings.
  3. There is a real interest need for Top Left Design advice, websites, blogs and social media training – WOO HOO!

There are lots of other things I loved (the food, how easy it is to get around, and how clean and civilized everything is) but I want to publish this blog TODAY so I will end here. If any of you have been to Singapore and want to add your thoughts, comments and experiences, that’s what the comments box below is for!

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Posted in Advice on Websites, Events, Networking | 1 Comment »

8 ways we improve your presence online

Friday, April 27th, 2012

8 ways we improve your presence online

The number 8 is lucky for us at TLD (and for people all around the world, it seems), and anyone knows that when you write a blog post, the ones with a number in the headline are the most widely shared!

Plus, we really want to take the time to be incredibly self indulgent, for a bit, and just share the 8 ways we improve your presence online.

The 8 ways are:

  1. We give advice on how to to engage visitors, so they are encouraged to browse through the website and there are clear calls to action at every stage.
  2. We show options for the design and then have a “live design session” so you are involved in the process and you love your site’s design.
  3. We never build the site unless you have signed off the design
  4. Our designers work directly with our clients and keep them in the loop at all times.
  5. We integrate a WordPress blog into most sties, and train you on how to keep it up to date, and blogging best practices.
  6. We give clients 1-2-1 training on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Blogging and include 1.5 hours free for every project.
  7. We make sure we follow all the big SEO rules when we work on the websites and point clients in the right direction for ongoing link building options.
  8. We ensure each site is built to be easily read by search engines and mobile devices.

Our clients can explain more, and our portfolio shows more – but we really thought this deserved a special mention. And this picture of “Henry the Octopus” and the 8 ways is going to be displayed on the wall of our office as well.

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Posted in How We Do Things | No Comments »

Are you heading for extinction? Don’t be left behind like the dinosaurs!

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Are you heading for extinction?

The web is a constantly evolving beast, and it can sometimes be a struggle to keep up. With new services popping up daily, there is a veritable Cambrian Explosion of online software emerging – and if you don’t want to be left behind like the dinosaurs, read on. And watch out for that meteor too.

Your website

Are you still using a company website that has been built using Flash? Only residents of the Jurassic period will be able to enjoy your content if that’s the case – mainly because most new mobile devices don’t support Flash, and T-Rex’s arms are too short to use an iPad.
Your website should be built using HTML and CSS – not only for mobile devices’ sake, but also for SEO and accessibility. You could even go one step further, and get a responsive website made – meaning your site will resize itself to any device, be it a desktop computer, or the latest mobile phone!

Blog

Hands up anyone who still uses Blogger? Go and sit with Triceratops in the corner. With a plethora of amazing new blogging software out there, you really have no excuse for not having a bespoke custom blog.
We prefer WordPress these days, as it allows us to design a completely custom website, and integrate it with other non-blog pages on your site seamlessly. So say no to templates, no to quick fixes, and no to extinction level events.

Facebook

Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently (that was a fossil joke by the way), you’ll have heard about the new Facebook Timeline. It might be time to have a fresh look at your page, and see what you can do with the new features. First, add a nice big cover image to the top of your page (needs to be 851 pixels wide x 315 pixels high), and then you can “pin” an important post to the top of your page, AND add significant events in your company history. These can include hiring your 10th employee (like we just did!), the date you founded the company, and other landmark events. Sadly, it doesn’t go back as far as 65 million years ago.

MySpace

It almost feels pointless mentioning this one – but should you be still using MySpace (and MySpace solely), may we suggest expanding to other more prominent social networks such as Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter? That’s not to say that MySpace has no uses at all – it’s still quite prolific amongst the music community, but there are lots of other ways to promote yourself too! If audio is your thing, look to get involved with Soundcloud, Audioboo and Last.Fm too.

Online Software

You might have heard people talking about “the cloud” recently – and no they’re not referring to a dust cloud which blocked the sun for hundreds of years as the result of a meteor strike. “The cloud” is a term to refer to a new wave of data storage methods, meaning that instead of your files being on one computer, or one device, you can now backup your files to the internet, and access them from anywhere! Handy huh? Give Dropbox a try – you can put your files in a folder, and access them from any computer, and even on your iPhone or iPad!

Pinterest

The latest “big thing” to give the Argentinosaurus huinculensis a run for its money, Pinterest is a new social network, allowing people to “pin” content they find funny, interesting or cool, and create mood boards, curate pictures, and generally keep track of niceties they come across on the internet. And no, it’s not just used by girls who like tea cosies, there’s a multitude of ways to use it: Logo collections, infographic collections, cool space pictures, owls, etc.. So get sharing!

Twitter

You would have to be a caveman to not have heard of this one – chances are, you already have an account – but are you using it for your business as well as you could be? Unless you’re conversing and engaging with your followers and friends, then you’re doing it wrong. Nobody wants to see you spam out 100 links to your latest blog post – you need to mix it up and get people talking to you. Talk to them first, and if they don’t talk back, well they’re doing it wrong too. Lucky for you, there’s over 140 million people on Twitter, so you’ve got plenty more potential listeners. You just need to invest some time, and with a dash of training, you’ll be racking up the followers faster than you can say Micropachycephalosaurus.

So don’t be a dinosaur, upgrade your online arsenal, and join us in the new age of online activity!

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

3 Reasons Why We Use Owls in Our Branding

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

Owls on the wall

Ever since we put the owls vinyl mural on the walls of our new office, people have asked us – what’s with all the owls?

A short history of Owls at Top Left Design

Tamlyn originally came up with these as characters for our Twitter background. And we have since been taking these owls through our branding to other stationary,  newsletters, our powerpoint slides, cupcakes at our seminars, proposals, and now our walls in our new offices. And of course there’s the amazing Pinterest board on owls!

Last Halloween we dressed the owls (Oliver the Owl pictured below) in pumpkins for our Halloween Newsletter.

Oliver the Owl in a pumpkin

For our seminars, Tamlyn made special Owl cupcakes.

Let’s look at Owls and draw upon the similarities between Top Left Design and Owls. You will see it will become clear.

3 Reasons Why We Use Owls in Our Branding

Owls ask “Who? Who?” At Top Left Design we specialise in creating websites with personality. This means we take the “Who You Are” into the “What You Do”. We never work on any designs for clients unless we ask them a lot about the people in their business, and then we set out to, as much as possible, help the world see the personality of the business and what makes them unique.

Owls stand for Wisdom We consistently stay ahead of the game and study the constantly changing landscape of marketing and especially online marketing. It’s a mixture of design and human psychology. It takes talent and empathy. So, we can safely say, we are wise.

They always look forward and can swivel their heads 360 degrees – that’s ultimately a cool trick but really – we do the same – we are forward thinking, always looking ahead, but we also look ALL around to make sure we are on top of it all! Part of owl’s strategy is based on stealth and surprise. That’s just like us at TLD – we are always coming up with new and innovative ways to keep our clients happy and our readers educated and amused.

Take action now! What visual elements do you use in your branding?

Comment below – or send us a link to your blog – where you explain the reasons for the visuals in your brand. If you can come up with three excellent reasons (like we have above) then you’re onto a winner!

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Posted in How We Do Things | 2 Comments »

Michael wins at Startup Weekend London

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Winning

A couple of weeks ago, I won a ticket to attend “Startup Weekend London” – a 54 hour ‘hackathon’ event at Google’s new Campus co-working space in Shoreditch – and won!

Our team of 4 went up against 140 other participants to conceive, plan, and create a start-up over a long weekend of designing and coding, to be pitched to and judged by a selection of top-dogs in the tech world, such as Eze Vidra of Google, Jemimah Knight of The Next Web, and Philipp Moehring of Seedcamp.

The idea we came up with was ‘pollarize.me’, a social polling tool which allows people to create questions with 2 possible answers, push the question out to all of their social networks, and gather feedback and results in one place, visually represented by a pie chart. (more…)

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Posted in Team TLD | 3 Comments »