Before we moved into our new space, Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA) purchased 7 wooden easel stands to place in different locals around our office to enhance a client’s visit and provide some visual eye candy for our 20+ employees. The graphic design department was asked to create a set of 7 posters, one for each department - DDA Corp, DDA Video, DDA CMT (Corporate and Medical Training), DDA Medical, Graphic Design, Website Development, and Programming. It’s an exciting project and one that I hope to begin today; roughing out some preliminary concepts and conceptualizing on how they will all work together as a unit and then taking them “one step further.” This “one step further” idea is and has been a key philosophy at DDA. 

You ask for a poster design and we may deliver a poster design along with a corporate video for use on your website. You ask for a logo design and we’ll prepare 10 logos that can make choosing one quite difficult. You ask for a website and we may deliver an interactive, search engine optimized, expertly written and designed website experience.  So, as we begin the designs for this set of 7 posters I do know that they won’t be just posters. They will become a website, a video, an animation, and an entire new DDA Experience. 

Today, I will complain. My first complaint is that 15 minutes into my drive to work I realized I forgot something very important and had to turn back to pick it up, and by doing so I woke up my 3-year old. Second, in my efforts to stop using plastic water bottles, the reusable water container I filled up and placed in my car fell and spilled all over the back seat. Third, as I was stopped at a traffic light, the gentlemen in the car next to me rolled down his window to tell me that something was hanging off of my front suspension. Great. So, I pulled over and deemed it non-life threatening and off to work I went.

Now, finally at work with my morning coffee, I decide to read a brief article about the use of type for HTML websites. This should have cheered me up since I’m such a font fanatic. It turns out that the article was one long complaint regarding designing accessible websites and the font choices designers are forced to use. How appropriate for today. I quite enjoyed reading this article as I have often struggled with wanting each DDA-designed website to look stunning, sexy, and load quickly with lots of searchable HTML text, but knowing that we are restricted to a handful of fonts that will show correctly on different browsers and multiple platforms. The writer of the article pointed out that great advances in technology for web typography have not surfaced for 12 years. Well, that is definitely a valid complaint. These restrictions can definitely pose a problem, but fortunately DDA’s degreed and experienced graphic designers work hard to find a balance between beautiful, user-friendly designs that can also be search engine optimized to perform well on search engines like Google.

So, Arial, Courier, Georgia, Times, Verdana, Tahoma and Trebuchet, the spotlight will still shine on you as for the time being (and hopefully not for another 12 years) you will be the font of choice for HTML-based websites.

The kick-off meeting I had yesterday went well. We have done work for this client before and they are well aware of our capabilities.

Since this website will be highly search-engine optimized, the first step is keyword research. This is a very intricate, and sometimes painstaking process, where thousands of keywords are searched in an effort to determine search patterns and to prioritize keywords.

This research will set the tone for the entire content plan to follow. It will determine which keywords we  reference in every page and also which keywords will be used for the pages on individual services. This is the foundation of SEO writing. We want to identify the most relevant and common keywords that people use to search for the particular services our client provides.

We will then integrate these keywords into original, interesting, and informative writing that will be entertaining to visitors to the site, while helping our client achieve high search engine rankings.

We have a lot of clients who come to us with misinformed ideas about search engine optimized writing. They assume that all you have to do is pepper in a few dozen keywords and you’ll be able to reap results.  In reality, it’s a very systematic and calculated approach, with multiple steps toward achieving the end result.