The look of your website will give an immediate impression to your user of who you are. If you look good, are well organized use pleasing colors and images, they’ll immediately assume you or your business are credible and professional, if instead your website looks like it was done in the 1990s by your 13 year old cousin and it’s offensive to most eyes, users will assume that it’s a reflection of yourself or your business. Just like the way you dress and take care of yourself will send a signal to others. The look of your web site will do the same thing.

Tip #1 Use a readable Font

Nowadays computers come loaded with tons of fonts and I know, it can be tempting to use them to decorate your pages. But unlike graphic design software, HTML pages will only display the font set if it’s also installed on the computer of the user at the other end. So if you pick a rare font like Pristina lets say to show up in all your titles, if the computer at the other end doesn’t have that font installed, It’ll most likely convert it to Times Roman and your title will look very plain and ugly. So stick with the standard fonts that also offer the best legibility on screen, these are Arial, Verdana and Tahoma. If you insist to use unusual fonts, create them as images and make sure they’re at a legible size, specially if you’re using some type of script font.

Tip #2 Use standard colors for links

If a visitor doesn’t know a word is also a link, you’ll miss the chance for them to click on it. So if you want to avoid confusion, stick with the standard Link Settings and Colors these are Underlined Blue for a visited link. Red for an active link or ‘hover’. And Purple for visited links. Of course, these colors only work when they’re against a light background, which brings us to Tip #3

Tip#3 Use a light backgrounds for your content

A white or light background will give the user a sense of cleanliness and will make it much easier on the eye to read text. Text is almost impossible to read against busy pattern backgrounds and your users will hate you if they have to print a page that uses white text against a black background because you’ll make them spend half their black ink cartridge every time they have to print something from your site. It is okay to use darker color backgrounds for navigation bars on the top or on the side and it’s also okay to use pattern backgrounds as long as they’re not inside the content area.

Tip #4 Leave some white space

Let your content breathe and don’t over saturate every millimeter of space of your page with images and content. Leave separation between paragraphs and blocks of information. With the right use of white space your site will be visually appealing, content will be easier to find, text will be readable, it will be easier to give emphasis to certain content and there will be balance between the elements of the page.

Tip #5 Constrain the width

Most people don’t mind scrolling up and down, most mice even have a wheel that makes it easy, but they really don’t like scrolling left to right to read content. You’ll notice it more on smart phones, since they have small screens, most people will read long content on a sideways mode in order not to scroll from side to side on every line. That’s why you should limit the width of your content to a maximum of 1000 pixels. This way, you’ll make sure it’ll fit comfortably in all monitor standard resolutions.

*I do not recommend you set the width to 100% to the screen size for it to adjust to the width the user sets its browser window to, because you’ll lose complete control on the way your content is laid out. If they expand their window to a maximum, they’ll end up with very long lines of text in one or two line paragraphs and pictures on top of each other. So Take control over the look of your design and set a fixed width.

Tip #6 Don’t abuse the bandwidth

The more your page weights, in data terms, the longer it’ll take the download, and the longer it takes to download the higher the chances are for your visitors to grow inpatient and leave your website, so keep it light and make sure it downloads fast.

Bandwidth huggers include uncompressed and un-resized images, sound, heavy flash animations, and video. Always make sure your images are re-sized to the size you need and that they’re compressed to the point were they don’t lose their quality, only use flash if it’s going to help in the sale, eliminate any unnecessary sound and use thumbnails of the video linking to a lightbox or use a player that feeds the videos as needed from an xml sheet instead of embedding multiple videos on your page.

Tip #7 Don’t use pop-ups.

don’t do unto others what you don’t like due onto yourself. Plain and simple, pop-ups are annoying and you should refrain from using them. To begin with, most browsers now have pop-up blockers and they will prevent you from opening pop-ups. The only acceptable way is to use it when clicking a link that exits your site, so the visitor can check out the web site you were referring to, but inted to come back to yours. When using video, use a lightbox instead, it’s a lot more elegant and it won’t be blocked by the browser.

*Tip #8 Keep it Quite

People don’t want to be forced to do anything when they visit a web site, specially having to listen to a music loop or a monologue on a product. Even if the site is music related. You never know when your visitor is on a library or at work with the volume to its max. The first thing they’ll do is close your page in anger and probably never come back.

Even though audio is a very powerful tool that can increase your sales significantly, you should always use it with courtesy and offer your user the option to hear it or not with a nice play button.

*Tip#9 Use colors and graphics accordingly

Know your market and design for them. Use visuals and colors that appeal to your visitors. If you’re designing a Golf related website you might want to use green in tones similar to a Golf course field and images of people playing. That way the visitor relates to the imagery and mood of the site and spends more time in it. But if you use tones of pink and pictures of babies to try to sell power tools you most likely wont have any success, so always keep your target market in mind and make them feel like they belong there.

Tip#10 Ditch the “Splash” page.

Splash pages are used as the index page of the site and always greet you with a progress bar that takes forever to load, followed by an introduction of the site you’re about to see and sometimes it will automatically take you to the rest of the web site or you’re going to have to click where it says “Skip intro”. These splash pages won’t help you at all, they’ll only steal away your time and annoy you after the first time you see it, doesn’t matter how cool it is. People go to web sites to find information, not animations.

I promise, that If you follow these rules, you’ll be on your way to offer your visitors or clients a pleasing experience that will result in a higher conversion rate and repeat visits.

Both, that’s the simple answer. There is no reason why you should choose only one form of communication. This is not an either or world, you can have both. In most cases, if you created a video you probably scripted some text, so you already have it written down, and if you improvised the information on your video, you can always transcribe it or use software like Dictate to do the transcription for you. Keep both options and use them either in the same page or in different areas of your web site.

The major advantage of text is that it gets indexed by search engines and will make your site easier to find. The second reason to use text is that if you’ve written something good you can have more people publish it on eZines, social media blogs and other online publications and last, text is printable and portable, it’s easy to copy and paste anywhere you want, it can be emailed and published.

Video in the other hand is a much more entertaining way to engage users. It engages two of your major senses, vision and sound and best of all, it involves no effort in your part to see it. Video doesn’t limit itself to be seen on you page alone, I would even venture to say that video is as portable as text. Just to give you some examples, Video can be used on a web page, on over 25 major video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo, It can be shared in social media sites like Facebook and MySpace, It can be distributed through iTunes on Apple TVs, Smart Phones and it can also be published on DVD. Just to mention a few. The use of video is without a doubt the way to go. and if you haven’t used it yet you have to start integrating video on your web pages.

Statistics show that people spend more time in web sites that have video versus text alone and in most cases conversion rates increase dramatically. There are many tools out there that make it extremely easy for you to create impactful web videos for very little money, but if you want to dig deeper and learn how to do things right and learn everything you need to produce web videos and their multiple applications I recommend you take Dave Kasimski’s coure at www.webvideouniversity.com. That’s the resource I personally used to learn how to make the videos you see on this podcast and how to maximize its use by monetizing them. So far it’s the most complete course I’ve found in the topics of web video, video integration and video marketing.

In conclusion, my recommendation is not to choose between text and video, they’re both good and in combination will give you the best results. In future blogs, I’ll be talking a little more on different applications and where to find the tools that will help you create and monetize your web videos.

All places of worship, no matter their belief system share 3 basic things in common. They all have a congregation, or in marketing terms a captive audience to which they distribute information and knowledge in the form of sermons, support groups, discipleships, bible studies, seminars, etc. They are also interested in reaching out to more people and all of them depend on their congregation’s economic support.

Even though nowadays most churches have an informative web site they are still not using powerful tools that can benefit both church and congregation.

In most church web sites I’ve visited they do a very good job providing information such as upcoming events, their faith principles, and many of them offer audio recordings of their Sunday services in a downloadable format. This is all good, but many are missing out in knowing who their congregation is and how to reach them beyond the pulpit every Sunday morning.

There are 3 online tools I believe every church should have on their web site in order to communicate better with their congregation, extend the reach of their message and increase donations, tithes and generate additional profits with the sales of books, videos and course enrollments.

The first problem that needs to be solved is communication. Most people nowadays have an email, yet rarely the church uses it to tell their congregation about special announcements, intrigue them with the upcoming teaching series, inspire them with a message, send a link to download last week’s message, promote books and courses or just remind them how much their support is needed. Not communicating constantly with the congregation is a costly mistake that is easy to solve.

The ideal tool to solve this is using an auto-responder. An auto-responders allows a form on your web page to collect information from a user, verify their email address and deliver a message automatically. It can also be configured so it automatically sends out emails with newsletters or announcements weekly or daily to the subscribers of a particular list. Normally an incentive is given for people to signup, so for example, you can say on your home page, “sign up to our weekly newsletter and receive a free e-book on xyz”. When they subscribe you’ll be creating a permission based database from people that have accepted to receive information from you voluntarily. The e-mails could even promote products such as books or courses

from affiliate sites and earn commissions on them.

If the church makes good use of this tool and communicates valuable information that benefits the members of the congregation, there will be higher attendance, more people listening to services they couldn’t attend to, and there will be more electronic sales and donations because now they’re being reminded every week.

The second problem I find is that many times Churches provide very valuable information in paid courses such as discipleships or seminars at times that might be inconvenient for many members, making it impossible for them to attend, despite their desire to learn the material. If there would be more alternatives to teach these courses in an electronic format and still charge for it, the attendance and profits would increase, but most importantly, the message will spread without any physical bounds and would not exclude people outside the congregation.

The simple solution is to have a membership site that allows the user to sign up and pay to gain access to certain content. A membership site allows for the control of access to certain pages or information of a web site, based on hierarchical rights. For example, a user can go into the signup page an select the level of access they want, it can be for the free content that allows them to listen to the Sunday service or it can cost $10 a month to see services on video, $30 to also access the Wednesday Bible studies, $50 to access all the lessons and support materials for discipleships and $70 to have full access to seminars and special events. The price structure can be set any way desired and for any amount of period of time. The membership site in the same way as an auto-responder will force the user to provide their email address even if they want to access free content.

The third tool is a donation button. These are free using PayPal and very easy to set up. These buttons should be all over the place, not just in the home page. Use them on every page if possible.

In conclusion, if you are in the position to implement features to your church’s web site, don’t let any more time go by without using an auto-responder, a membership software and a donation button. They will dramatically improve the communication with the congregation, expand the outreach of the message and increase donations.

The first and easiest way is to embed the video, either your own or from a video sharing site into the web page one after the other in between the text to illustrate the points you’re trying to make. Click here to see and example. This solution works, but is not elegant at all. One of the problems you might have is that if you decide to click play in more than one video you’ll start listening to the audio in all the videos you clicked on at the same time, making it imposible for you to understand anything. The other drawback is that the user might wonder off reading other parts of the page, clicking on additional links or stopping one video half way because of the curiosity of lookinf at the next one and lose focus on the sequence you want them to follow.

The second option is to use a Lightbox. In this case you would only present thumbnails of your videos and when the user clicks on them another page or the video alone with no navigation options will appear on top of the page you’re browsing and only lets you watch the video, nothing else. You have to close the lightbox in order to keep on browsing. This is a great solution to keep the focus of the user in the video. There are many free lightboxes scripts available and typically they involve adding a css line of code and another script to your link, but if you want to do it the easy way, there is a site called VideoLightBox.com there you can download a free wizard program that will easily help you build multiple lightboxes in 3 steps.

At the first step, you add a video clip, for example cut-n-paste YouTube url or drag-n-drop video file, then select the template for video popup and video thumbnail appearance and, at the final step, publish the result to a local drive or directly to the Internet via a built-in FTP client. You can also cut and paste the source code into your own template, but beware, don’t copy the whole thing because you’ll end up with metatags generated by VideoLightBox on your page. Make sure you select only the code related to the thumbnails and video.

Video LightBox generates a nice image thumbnail for your clip. On click, this thumbnail expands into a stylish overlay window containing the video. No css, html, javascript coding, no image editing, can’t get easier than that.

The third way to do it, if you’re dealing with a lot of videos is to use a component that will allow you to view and select multiple videos from the same place using categories and sub-categories. I personally have used and like a component called dynamic multivideo gallery. It’s perfect if you’re dealing with a large number of videos that you need to categorize, but you don’t want to send the user over to other pages like in a teaching course or portfolio. I used it for a client who’s a commercial producer and wanted to display different categories of his work in a single page. Click here to see it.

It is xml driven which makes it easy to change the menu category and video content from an external xml. You can place unlimited video content from different sources, it has autoplay feature, integrated share video button, detail info and link function, it plays in 16:9 or 4:3 and other cool features.

These are the the three easy ways to add multiple videos to your site, so pick what works best for you and most importantly for your users.

Writing email copy is less complicated than you might think, but there are some rules worth follow to increase the response.

1. Personalize
   Everybody’s favorite word is their name, so personalize the subject line inside the body of the email with your prospects first name.
2. Write just like you talk
   Use plain and easy to understand language, avoid complicated terms and acronyms that most people won’t understand. Be personable and friendly and write as if you’re talking to a friend.
3. Put some passion into your email.
   Since there’s no chance for you to see your prospect’s reactions you need to add some extra passion into your message, even if you think you’re overdoing it when you write, so get enthusiastic!
4. Imagine your ideal prospect as you are writing and make the message just for them.
   Even if your web site will be read by thousands of people each day. The use of the word “you” and “your” has a tremendous impact on the reader because they feel identified. Make your copy about them, not you. For example, instead of writing something like “We have a multi-lingual staff” you can write something like “Our multilingual staff is here to assist YOU in the language of your choice.”
5. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short
   Keep your copy short and simple. On emails, paragraphs should be no more than 4 or 5 lines. You want your email to look easy to read with a lot of white space. Make it inviting. People get scared when they see long blocks of words. You can break the paragraph regardless of the amount of content.
6. Use Plenty of compelling subheads
   Subheads should be like mini-headlines. Use them to break up large bodies of text and to bring people back into the body of the letter.
   Most people are only going to scan the text and stop only for subheads to get and idea, so make your subheads grab their attention.
7. Eliminate excess wording
   Simplify. Convey your message in a clear and concise manner, but remember, that doesn’t mean you have to keep it short. As long as there’s flow it doesn’t really matter if it’s long.
8. Use action verbs whenever possible
   When writing an email, you want it clear enough so that any 5^th grader can understand it. With all the emails we receive daily, very few people have the time to read everything on every email they get to figure out what is it that’s being offered, so keep your writing simple and straight forward.

   *Use action statements like, buy now, click here, visit us at.., act now, and actually, a major action trigger that makes prospects practically line up and beg to do business with you is the word “because” . Telling people the reason why you are doing something is one of the most powerful influencers of human behavior. Social experiments have shown that there is a higher rate of response when you tell others why you want something. For example, “Buy now because time is running out” “Act now because you will feel better”, etc. Whatever the reason is, just make sure you tell them the truth, because if you give people a good believable reason why, they’ll respond with open wallets.

If for some reason you don’t feel comfortable or just don’t have the time to write sales copy for your emails you can look into a product by Yanik Silver called Instant sales letters, is listed in the resource section. These are a no-brainer fill-in the blank sales letters that will take you 3 minutes to create and start selling your product or service with no writing of your own.

Now, to actually send the emails, create your database, personalize it and pretty much manage your campaign I personally use aWebber and Constant Contact, also listed in the resource section. They are both great products and I use them both for different businesses.

Did you know that google can now index your flash content. But there are some things you need to know in order for the indexing to be successful, otherwise, you might just be wasting your time.

Since Flash came out several years ago, it impressed us all with flexibility of design, animation power and the fact that it would just let your create anything your brain could come up with.

It is widely use all over the web, but many web designers and companies have stayed away from it because its content doesn’t get indexed by search engines. That means that you could create the most amazing looking website, but search engine robots would only be able to tell that a Flash file was embedded on your page and it would appear to be invisible for indexing purposes. Many people agreed that having your content indexed was more important than having a fancy web site that no one could find and decided to stay away from web sites designed completely in Flash.

The Good news is that Google announced that they will index sites with flash content. Everything that’s textual content in SWF files of all kinds, from Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus to self contained Flash websites.

All the text that users can see on the Flash file can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website and can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

Also the URLs found on these Flash files will be sent to the crawling pipeline just like in non-Flash web sites. This means that if you have more pages inside your web site that are being referred by the Flash file, Google will find them and index them too.

If there is any content you would prefer to have ignored, Google recommends that you convert it into an image, that is basically invisible for them

If you want to optimize your Flash file for Google indexing you have to be aware of its limitations.

1.Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file and it won’t be indexed.

2. Content from external resources such as HTML, XML and SWF files that are loaded into the Flash file will be indexed separately and will not be considered part of the page that contains the main Flash file.

3. Content in bidirectional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic cannot be indexed yet.

So if you’re a web designer or a business owner that wants to create a whole site in Flash, go ahead, get creative and don’t worry about you site not being found anymore. Just work around google’s limitations to get ranked fast.

What Our Clients are Saying …

“I have never, ever worked with a group, that so outperform all my expectations in my life like Creative Spin.” “Amazing doesn’t cover It.”

Steve Scott – is a popular national speaker. He has written, produced and directed countless award-winning television productions and commercials, Author of two books and Co-Author two, million copy best-sellers.

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Introduction into Creative Spin.

We are a Multimedia Company specialized in Web Development and Audio Dubbing (lipsync) from English into Spanish located in Coral Gables, Florida.

We integrate many skills and talents to be able to offer our clients a one stop shop for web projects, design, video editing and audio productions, specifically audio dubbing.

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Who have we worked for.

Within the past 10 years we’ve worked with over 250 clients producing websites, graphic design, photography and lip sync projects, from the small mom & pop local businesses to banks, international radio stations and celebrities.

Among them are Mannatech, Radio FG USA, StateTrust Bank, Pacific Coral, Triunfadores Extraordinarios, Tradepal and many, many others.

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