I'm from Brazil, co-founder of Zee with Fabio. Nowadays I like to play with Fireworks, Photoshop and improve my skills in CSS. If you wanna request some posts, please feel free to contact me or follow on Twitter.
This is our weekly selection of our favorite web designs from the past week. Thanks to everybody for their recommendations and please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.
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Pure Pleasure Design
Pathwright
ABA design
Stry.us
Pagoda Box
Elliot Jay Stocks
Ludlow Kingsley
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Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration Archives →
Posted in Weekly Web Design Inspiration by .
May 12
18
Daily Inspiration #1139
This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo's writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, You can submit your images and inspiration to RAWZ via http://raw.abduzeedo.com and don't forget to send your Abduzeedo username; or via Twitter sending to http://twitter.com/abduzeedo.
Do you want to see all images from all Daily Inspirations? Check out http://daily.abduzeedo.com
2D
366i
7robots
Álbori B. Ribeiro
Alexandre Ormond
Antariksh Pratap Singh
art-and-love
ashrafomar
balarezographics
Bogdan Sandu
bomka
caoscaotico
cajr
Claude Durand
cuded
Dan Haigh
dayinspiration
Dhyan
diegoacarneiro
Érico Santana
Firmorama
giordancasanova
hudsonfredricks
inspirationfeed
Isra Cruz
Jack Redmond
Jamie
Jon Nyquist
JosMach
Justinkhuong
koningstuff
lait-noir
Lenka Schlawinsky
Leon Ingram
Let me be inspired
Liad
Liannie Rios
luxbrand
mackenziechild
maheshartist
Mika Melchiors
monica blackburn
nenuno
Nick Blair
olivergareis
Ollie Weeks
Pawel
Patrick S. De Jesus
Petra Blahova
philippedenisphotography
Rockarolla
SpEEdyRoBy
Steven Skadal
studioOpz
sunsetlive
tatotoledo
thaeger
Tim Heckhausen
Vini Feijó
Posted in daily inspiration by .
Shopping via a mobile phone isn’t an everyday experience for most people, but already we can see patterns forming around the how, the why and the when.
Last month, IAB asked a group of mobile shoppers to keep a diary of their activity in a two week period. Here are some of the things they found out:
Home Usage
Here we see that almost half of all e-commerce interactions happened at home. They found that purchasing peaked in the late afternoon, early evening. 49% said they shopped while watching TV.
The dollar amounts aren’t too impressive, only 38% reported spending more than $21 a month. Most of the purchases were digital downloads with clothing and entertainment items coming in second.
Out and About
Only 29% used their mobile phone to shop while they were out, but 73% used their phones while they were shopping in a brick and mortar store. 34% used their phone to look up a price and 53% abandoned their purchase because of what they found. A few abandoned the purchase because they saw a bad review but most were lured away by a lower price – the downside of mobile commerce.
The good news is that 70% said they saw mobile as as more of an “invitation” than an “invasion.” They do not want ads to take them straight to check-out. They want to be taken to a page with additional options. 30% said they’d like to pay with mobile then pick the item up at the store.
Overall, the IAB Mobile Phone Shopping Diaries shows that consumers see mobile shopping as a way of getting the best price with the least amount of effort. They want information and options and in return they’ll allow you to use their geo-location to target them and their phone to contact them. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Posted in Ecommerce infographics mobile research shopping by .
Last week, a small business owner talked to me about his new marketing plan. It went something like this: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, MySpace, blog, blog outreach, YouTube videos, forum posting, SEO articles written and posted to Hubspot, Squidoo, every other article site then promoted on StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and every other appropriate sharing site.
He figured someone could do this in ten hours a week. I told him he was in over his head. I told him he needed to focus on a few keys areas to start — Facebook and Pinterest since he was selling a very visual and colorful product. I also told him to forget article marketing, it not only wouldn’t help his business but it might actually hurt. I don’t think he liked my advice.
Now, let’s all open our Wall Street Journal to the Small Business section: “As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web.”
The story focuses on two small online business who have suffered devastating losses since the latest Google search update known as Penguin. The owner of Oh My Dog Supplies says his sales went from $68,000 in March (pre-Penguin) to $25,000 this month (expected based on current sales). He blames the loss in traffic on Google search and thinks it’s the result of two actions. He once paid for a large number of inbound links and he posts marketing articles to EzineArticles and Squidoo.
Under the new Penguin reign, these kinds of marketing ploys are considered spam. Google sees them as ways of artificially inflating the relevance of a website. As such, they are not helpful to searchers and so Google penalizes the sites for being deceptive.
The author of the article admits that some companies have gained from the Penguin update but those that took a hit are suffering, to the point of possibly losing their business.
The people the Wall Street Journal profiled in the article are all legitimate, small business owners who were only doing what they thought was best. They followed advice (Did they know that buying links has always been a questionable tactic? Not likely.) and did all the things some marketers say you should do to get noticed. Marketing, however, is not their field. They’re people who simply wanted to share their passion for pets and sports and art and found they could turn that passion into profit. Now, though, you can bet that passion is waning as they scramble to regain what they lost through no fault of their own.
I’m not saying Google is wrong. They’re right to want to clean out the spammers and the snake oil salesmen. I’m saying that it’s time to stop marketing based on the way it’s always been. The rules have changed and they’re going to keep changing. What business owners have to do is follow the path that makes the most sense for their company and forget the rest.
You know what Google likes? Relevant, accurate, informative content that is better than what the competitor has to offer. That’s how you rise in the rankings and that’s how you stay on top the next time Google makes another update.
What are your thoughts on Google’s Penguin update? Good news, bad news, or just another twist in the path?
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Our industry’s conferences are a lot of fun, and of course educational. In the past few years several companies, like Distilled, have been offering smaller conferences which allow attendees to get to know each other better and have more contact with experts in the field. Distilled has been offering conferences for the past three years. [...]
Posted in Interview by .
David Mihm wrote an epic post earlier this week about the eventual merge/integration of Google Places and Google Plus. (It would help if you read that post before continuing on here.)
He lays out a number of ways the two could be combined and suggests how the integrated product could benefit small and local business owners. It’s well written, thoughtful, intelligent and very thorough … but I don’t ultimately agree with his conclusion that Google is “going to nail this integration.”
With all due respect to one of my best friends (whom I failed to tell before hand that I was writing this post – sorry DM!), here’s why.
Why I’m Not Sold On Places & Plus
I’ll share a few of David’s points in italics, and then follow them with my opinion.
David writes about the potential inclusion of Google’s Talkbin product into an integrated Places/Plus platform:
“Allowing customers to text feedback that appears in a business owner’s dashboard seems like an incredibly valuable feature, and one that will really keep business owners–at least retail business owners–coming back frequently.”
I question whether customers actually want to send feedback directly to business owners via text. The sites that are collecting the most customer feedback — Yelp and Google Places via reviews and Foursquare via tips — position the feedback as consumer-to-consumer sharing, not consumer-to-business. Sure, some reviewers certainly write with the business owner in mind, but the primary attraction is being part of a community of consumers helping each other out via reviews and tips.
Google has been trying to steal Yelp’s playbook in recent years with its aggressive acquisition of local reviews, hiring community managers, and other things that Yelp did first. Google will surely integrate all of this review activity into Places/Plus, as well as the existing tool that lets business owners respond to reviews — that seems more likely to bring business owners back than a text-based tool that I suspect has very low usage.
“…a Plus page update is a far more attractive proposition than the considerably more tedious, less visible, and less interactive changes to a 200-character business description in Places that may or may not make it through the Places Nannybot filter.”
In my opinion, Plus page updates will only be more attractive to the small business owners that know what to say in an environment like Google+ (or Facebook, or anywhere that repeated posts are rewarded). Some small business owners do very well in that environment, but my experience is that many (most?) don’t know what to post on their Facebook pages and their Twitter accounts. (Nor on their Google+ pages if they have them.)
And the ones that don’t know what to say either A) say nothing, or B) default to what they think will be best for sales — i.e., posting links to their website, their real estate listings, their products and services and other stuff that looks like spam. They become unfollowable (or unlikeable … or un-plusable).
Sure, there’s not much you can do with a Google Places description field, but I’d bet that more small business owners can execute a one-time suggestion like “Write a 200-character description of your business” than a suggestion to “post continual updates that will interest your audience without being too self-promotional.”
“Plus’s Circle functionality makes this a natural extension as a business feature. It’s not difficult to imagine businesses segmenting their followers into ‘existing customers,’ ‘prospects,’ ‘top customers,’ ‘first-time visitors,’ etc., and sending them different marketing messages.”
I do agree that there’s great potential in the ability to target messages to different audiences, but again I question how many small business owners will have the time and energy to manage their customer base via Google+ circles.
“Imagine a local sporting goods store being allowed to target any user who’s +1′ed ESPN, or an independent bicycle outlet targeting any Plus followers of REI. Pretty powerful stuff that’s probably even more powerful when combined with traditional category-based Adwords Express advertising.”
The idea of being able to do Facebook-style ad targeting based on someone’s expressed interests inside Google+ is interesting, but the larger problem is that AdWords is flat out too complicated for a great many small business owners (not to mention longtime marketers like me!), and — as David also points out — Google’s repeated efforts to simplify it haven’t been a success. There’s just no reason to think that they’ll have any better shot at making paid ads easier while also trying to integrate them into a combined Places/Plus platform.
“Not to mention retargeting. Think of the potential for any small business to re-target consumers who had visited their Place/Plus page with ads across the internet at the click of a button.”
The problem with retargeting, aside from explaining it effectively to potential advertisers, is that about 70 percent of consumers don’t like it — and that surely includes a lot of small/local business owners who’ve seen ads that “follow” them around the web.
There are tools inside AdWords that can help limit the creepiness of retargeted ads, but then we’re back into the discussion of about how complicated it can be to manage online advertising.
David also mentions the possibility of bringing an email marketing tool into the Places/Plus service, and making the existing Offers/Coupons feature inside Places more visible. I don’t have any specific thoughts pro or con on those two, aside from the concerns I’ve stated above about the lack of time for many SMBs to adopt new tools like that.
He does make several other points that I do agree with (daily deals, tying discounts into +1s, etc.) and I hope the eventual merge of Places and Plus will be great. I’m just not sold that it will be.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, the reason I’m not sold on the Places/Plus merger being a home run for Google or for local business owners is that Plus just doesn’t have enough general consumer adoption to make it worth a small business owner’s time right now.
David suggests that Google is going to use businesses (via offers and other Places ad tools) to attract more consumer usage, but I don’t see it. Consider the business experience on Facebook: Sure, people might “like” or “friend” their favorite businesses on Facebook, but practically no one ever visits the business page again.
Consumers generally don’t adopt a social network because they want to find businesses and get advertised to; they adopt a social network because it’s where their friends and family are. So, I think it’s unlikely that a suite of tools for small businesses will help drive Google+ adoption.
I’m sure we’ll see some kind of Google Places and Google+ integration soon. But I suspect that Google will move very slowly with it — there’s huge room for error here with the messy data in Google Places and the problems with merged business listings and such.
Google may eventually hit a home run, but I don’t think that’ll happen in the early part of the game.
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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
Why I’m Not Sure Google Will “Nail” the Places-Plus Integration
Posted in google Local Search by .
May 12
18
Friday Humor: Game of Thrones
Since HBO took the Game of Thrones books and created a fantastic show the books and the series have taken off. The show is great and the books are fantastic! I have collected some funny Game of Thrones items for fans everywhere. Oh and remember, Winter is Coming! Are you ready? Disclaimer – If you [...]
Posted in Uncategorized by .
by Nick Stamoulis
For instance, "IT services" is a wildly popular keyword with over 45 million searches each month. However, "IT services" is also an incredibly broad keyword and might not be the most accurate keyword for your website. What kind of IT services does your business offer? Do you cater to small businesses or global enterprises? Do you offer IT consulting services or maybe you specialize in certain software platforms? Are you local service provider or do you have clients all over the country? More specific keywords like "managed IT services" (which still gets over 60k searches each month) might send less traffic to your site, but they will also drive a more targeted visitor. The more targeted the visitor the better chance you have of converting them.
Broad keywords with large search volumes are typically used at the beginning of someone's buy cycle when they are just beginning to research their options. They want to cast as wide a net as possible and will subsequently narrow it down the more they learn. Someone who searches for "IT services" at the beginning of their buy cycle might end up looking for "small business IT service providers in New York" by the time they are ready to buy. While targeting "IT services" might drive more traffic to your site, you're not driving the quality traffic you need to grow your online business.
Think about it like this--let's say that after thorough keyword research you added 20 new long tail keywords to your website. Even if each of those keywords only drives 5 unique visitors to your site each month that's 100 more highly-qualified visitors that have never heard of your brand or been to your website before. Those 100 visitors are much more likely to convert because they found your site through a very specific search phrase. On the flip side, a visitor that found your site through a broader keyword (even though they can still convert) might not be the kind of visitor you are looking for. For instance, an SEO client of mine had visitors finding their site by searching for "software." While it's great that they were getting any traffic from such a broad and competitive keyword, "software" could really mean just about anything. The majority of the visitors that came to their site from "software" weren't good leads for their company and clogged up the sales funnel.
Many site owners think that keyword research is a one-and-done process, but that's not the case! No one is required to get their keyword selection right the first time (it took me years to really hone in the right keywords for my site and my audience!) but you shouldn't assume that the keyword with the highest search volume is automatically the best one for your site.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Posted in keyword research Keywords by .
May 12
18
Facebook IPO By the Numbers
While there will no doubt be tremendous demand for Facebook stock today, as it begins trading at 11 AM Eastern time, there should be plenty of it available. As David Angosti reported for Search Engine Journal, the social network raised its target IPO price range to $34 to $38. The move prompted a number of Facebook's major stakeholders to increase the number of shares they plan to offer - and in some cases, that number went way up. I am not a stock broker; I don't even play one on the Internet. But I think even the people who crunch these kinds of numbers for a living would be amazed by the c...
Posted in Uncategorized by .
May 12
18
Friday Fresh Free Fonts #153
Friday fresh free fonts is a series of free fonts posted every Friday, yes I know it's awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#153 and make sure to comeback for more next week.
Click here to view all Friday Fresh Free Fonts
Patinhas
Download Patinhas
Retro Town
Download Retro Town
Stroke
by The Kinetic
Download Stroke
EdmondSans
Download EdmondSans
About the author
Hi there! I'm Paulo Canabarro, 26 year old web designer - paulocanabarro.com I'm from Brazil currently living and working out of Providence RI, USA. I'm truly passionate about design of all kinds, finding and sharing inspiration here has become part of my life. If you like to know more about me or get in touch visit my website paulocanabarro.com Stock me at Twitter and Dribbble
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Posted in FFFF fonts free freebie typography by .