Articles by Melissa

Recently we’ve discovered a few more Bings out there – besides Microsoft’s. There are several similar, small design agencies across the country that share our name. And, upon the release of Microsoft’s search engine, some of them are changing their names.

We’re not.

Because, our “Bing” means more than just “eureka!” It’s part of our history.

Here’s some Bing trivia for your Thursday:

Our agency was established in 1979 by Bob Bingenheimer. At that time, the agency was known as Bingenheimer Design. Bob “retired” in 2000 and sold the agency to an employee, Nick Gaskins. As the new owner, Nick shortened the name to Bing.

For more information about Bing, visit our site.

I’m not a designer, so this may be old, old news … but I wanted to share a handy website with y’all. Lipsum.com is a great website for generating Greek (or, placeholder) copy.

The site allows you to input a number of paragraphs, words, bytes or lists that you’re looking for and … voila. Custom Greek copy to use as placeholder.

The majority of web traffic is driven by major commercial search engines.

Need some help populating at the top of search engine results?

Here are 10 quick techniques you can do to improve your search engine optimization. Now, these may not be the TOP 10 things to do, but they are certainly 10 EASY things you can do. And let’s face it, you need to start somewhere.

1. Create a website title (title tag) – Make it specific, relevant and include keywords … but keep it under 66 characters (that’s all Google will display).
2. Create page titles – Create different Title and Meta tags for every page of your website. Different tags are essential to get highly targeted traffic. Think about how a visitor will search for your site. Incorporate the keywords your would input into their Google search bar in your Meta tags.
3. Use headings – Not only does it organize content and help readers, using headings also helps search engines find what your page is about and convey the importance of the text inside of the header tag.
4. Publish Content – Make sure your web pages are content rich, and that your copy includes the keywords you want to be searched/found for. SEO experts like Steve Wiideman recommend having at least 400 words per page. Updating content frequently will also help your search results.
5. Tag your Assets – If you’re using images and video on your site, make sure the media files are named and that the titles are relevant to your site. If you use a photo sharing site like Flickr, take it one step further – upload the images to Flickr, tag them with keywords and descriptions, and then link to the images hosted on Flickr for your site. You can also describe your images by using alt tags. This attribute provides value in the same manner as meta tags.
6. Check Your Links – Use a free site like Link Checker to make sure you don’t have broken links in your site. Also ensure web pages are W3C Compliant to see if you have any bad HTML coding throughout your website.
7. Add Links – Create a web of links between your pages, connecting related content. Search engines will be able to provide visitors the relevant pages they are looking for in their search – and that can help convert them from a visitor to a customer. Also add links to other websites that include relevant, related content.
8. Submit your site to Google – Enter your URL at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You only need to do it once!
9. Things to avoid: Flash based openings or “text as images” – these can’t be searched by Google.
10. Call Bing. We can conduct a free site analysis to help get you started.

If you have additional EASY tips, please add them in the comment sections.

Joe Gauder is a contributing author to this post.

Last week one of our clients, Management Excellence Inc., was in Colorado Springs to manage the Sonitrol National Dealers Association Conference. Bing provides graphic support for portions of the conference, including an awards ceremony on the final conference date.

So when our client, who is based in Yellow Springs, needed items shipped to them overnight – we took it one step further. Hand delivery.

Keep that in mind, folks. If you’re in the Colorado Springs area, we deliver. Especially if you’re at the Broadmoor.

Proudly Built on WordPress

You may have noticed that our website lacks a certain “finesse” for a design firm… Some of the fonts or the formatting may not be absolutely, spot-on perfect … It might not be what you would expect from a design firm, where “form” can override function.

I’m not being “mean.” We know. We don’t care.

We found a smarter way to work.

Bing used WordPress to build its company website, bingdesign.com. Now, why would a design agency give up control of its own website design and use a theme-based blog platform?

Because it’s a living case study. The site is an example of what can be accomplished with minimal time, resources and money. Specifically:

WordPress is free. That’s right, $0.

WordPress is easy. If we need to make a change or add a page to our site, it doesn’t require a webmaster or a code guru. As a content management system (CMS), anyone in our office can contribute to the site, at any time, from any computer.

WordPress is flexible. This site is based on Woo Theme’s Vibrant CMS template. With modification to the template and the addition of some common widgets… viola! We have a website.

WordPress is search friendly. It has many search-promoting plug-ins that help drive traffic to the site.

Sure, we’ve given up the opportunity to spend countless hours on font pondering and putzing – but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. At the end of the day, even for a design firm, it’s the content that counts.

WordPress isn’t the only free platform you can utilize. We validated several CMS platforms from Joomla to Drupal and considered WordPress our best fit.

So, when you add it all up, the better question is “Why not?“