(This is a follow-up to the Affiliate Summit wrap-up from Monday.)

Everyone is guilty of committing a landing page design sin, including ourselves, the pros. That is why it is important to always be testing your pages by using Google Website Optimizer, for example.

What is a landing page?

Any page where traffic is directed to for some specific purpose – to prompt a certain action. The point of a landing page is to get the visitor to take your desired action. The visitors may be coming from organic search results, pay per click, email newsletters, banner ads, etc.

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What are the right colors for you business? To discuss this topic, one has to have some understanding of the psychology of color. Different colors affect moods and attitude in different ways. Furthermore, one has to take into consideration the culture of your targeted demographic, as different colors have different psychological (conscious and unconscious) meanings within various cultures.

Red

Red is the most emotionally intense color. It stimulates an increased heartbeat and breathing. It is also the color of love.

For a long time the corporate color of choice was red. It was known as “corporate red.” This can be shown in the logos of companies such as: Shell, McDonalds, Exxon, Target, Johnson and Johnson. Red was a popular choice because of the eye’s natural attraction to the color red.

Red clothing gets noticed and makes the wearer appear heavier—so be careful with those red bikinis, ladies! Since it is an extreme color, red clothing might not help people in negotiations or confrontations. I know that you have heard that red automobiles are the most targeted cars to get stolen. Also when used in decorating, red is usually an accent—most decorators say that red furniture attracts attention, helping round out a bland room.

An offshoot of red—a pale red, pink is the most romantic color and is more tranquilizing than red. Sports teams sometimes paint the opponent’s locker rooms bright pink, so that they will lose energy. A little tidbit, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s and from then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red.

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(source: kainet)

I recently started re-reading some Chinese philosophy and it got me thinking about link building. I  am a fan of Sun Tzu （孙子）—the Zhou Dynasty author of The Art of War. Even though the book was written over 2,500 years ago, it’s quite relevant to the world we live in today. In fact, one of Sun Tzu’s quotes is directly applicable to link-building!

“Analyzing your competition is much like preparing for battle.”

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Wireframes are an essential stage in building a website. The wireframe is a large part of the blueprint for the site whether it is hand-drawn or in digital format. It should give a clear understanding of what elements are on each page, where they should be displayed and why–to achieve the most cohesive balance and overall structure. As we always say, building a custom website is like building a custom house–you wouldn’t want to pick out your dining room wallpaper before you even decide if there will be a dining room!

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(source: jef safi)

We don’t provide hosting, we don’t have licensing fees and we don’t require a maintenance plan when building a website with us. So why does BFM offer maintenance plans?

Simply to make your lives easier, however we can. We will help you set up the best hosting plan, monitor your hosting, make back-ups of your website and more.

Why might your website need a maintenance plan?

For certain companies, they don’t have time or the manpower to make updates to their website, so we are here to help when needed. It might be a few hours a month to update new products or it might be 20 or 40 hours a month to update latest news or a blog on a weekly or daily basis. Whatever it is, your point of contact is here to be sure the content of your website is always up to date and fresh.

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(source: Stabilo Boss)

Being an entrepreneur and doing something extraordinary while thriving in this economy is a common ambition. The ability to succeed is rarer. Some commentators say the economy is hindering the startup community, but startup maven Paul Graham says, “the state of the economy doesn’t matter much either way… [startups] succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it’s rounding error compared to the founders.” This ultimately means that it’s up to the founders. Founded during the recession of the 1970′s, Microsoft, Apple, and Fedex still succeed today. Companies founded in the late 90′s boom? Not so much.

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(source: ZaCky ॐ)

In terms of branding, Kryptonite Locks has a lot of coolness factors working for them – it’s the choice lock of bike messengers in metropolitan cities (especially here in New York), the premium price tag of $100 a lock, and the name alone is synonymous with indestructibility and strength.

Alhan, our Marketing Director, was sold and ready to get a Kryptonite lock for his custom vintage Peugeot bicycle, but as a search engine marketer, Alhan googled “krytonite locks” for more information, to check out their search presence. (more…)

(source: Laughing Squid)

Web design companies love to tout the awards they’ve won. Many times it is one of their only selling points. Not to say that having an award-winning website under your belt isn’t a nice bragging right to have as a design firm. After all Blue Fountain Media has won its share of awards.  What I would like to emphasize is that winning awards should not be the priority as a design firm.

Blue Fountain Media was founded on the principle that winning an award doesn’t make a website successful.

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(source: Mr. Kris)

Organizations are flocking to social media hubs to attempt to engage with their audience, and every organization has a different motive. Some are corporations attempting to rebrand themselves (@GMblogs, @Chrysler, @ComcastCares)  while others attempt to continue the conversation away from the brick-and-mortar standard of yesteryear. (more…)

We’ve talked before both about making your paid search ads stand out from the crowd, and about using microformats to help organize content on your website. It appears that Google’s new “rich snippets” announcement has implications for paid search as well, giving advertisers the opportunity to leverage the new policy to differentiate their ads.

In this example, Google includes a plus-box below a Newegg.com ad, with product images and information pulled from microformatted tables on their product pages:

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