1. Target Demographic
   • Target the demographic most prominent on Facebook in terms of brand or product
2. Connect multiple social platforms
   • Connect page to brand website, Twitter or YouTube accounts.  This helps fans experience the brand beyond the fanpage and engages the user in multiple ways
3. Welcome
   • In the welcome page, provide an overview of what can be offered to people who “like” the page
4. Create custom tabs and boxes
   • This will set brand page apart from the others.  It will create the look and feel of the brand page.  This helps to keep the brand identity constant, thus fans will have an easier time recognizing it beyond the brand website.
   • One way to create custom tabs and boxes is by using the static FBML application on Facebook.  Basically this application allows for advanced functionality to page.  The app will add a box to the page in which HTML can be rendered for enhanced page customization.  Promotional text and graphics can be added that allow for easy navigation through the fanpage give it the brands look and feel.  This app also allows for the creation of the previously mentioned custom tabs and boxes.  You can also create custom links  that are useful to the fanpage and brand.  These links can be created so that when clicked, they connect directly to the brand or company website.
5. Testimonial Page
   • Draws attention and exemplifies product usage and allows for customer feedback; a huge selling point for some people
6. Contact Info
   • Add extra info and buttons to enhance the visibility of the contact box.  The addition of other social media buttons also helps in user navigation beyond Facebook
7. Engage fans with fun activities and contests. Ask for feedback and always inform and entertain fans.
8. Provide fun and varied content
   • Provide articles about the company or brand, how the product works and simple tag lines.
9. Status updates
   • Update status daily.  Don’t overdo it! Once a day is sufficient.
   • Always share something new
   • Don’t always try to plug buying the product, or buying into the brand.
10. Exclusive information (secret area)
    • By creating an area that is privy to only those who “like” the page, you can provide exclusive information.  This will entice users to become fans of the brand and give them something extra.  Here you can provide newsletters, tips and tricks, videos or free giveaway information.

Check out the first post in our series - Tips for a Successful Facebook Fanpage

Pressflow is slightly tweaked version of Drupal core that improves or expands certain aspects of Drupal’s performance. It’s important to note that Pressflow is not a fork from Drupal, but rather a flavor with some minor, but key differences. In fact, they’re so similar, that you can actually take an existing site built on Drupal 6.16, replace the core files with the equivalent Pressflow core (6.16.77) and it will continue running as though nothing has changed. (of course you should run update.php after swapping the files)

Pressflow addresses three of Vanilla Drupal’s performance weaknesses:

1. Support for legacy software (specifically PHP4)
2. Lack of external caching and cached pages being served when they should not
3. Lack of database replication

Drupal is wildly popular as a CMS for personal and small business websites all the way up to large-scale corporate and commercial sites and social networks. The maintainers of Drupal have decided that the best way to keep the CMS appealing for such a wide range of uses is to make it as flexible as possible. This includes maintaining built in support for antiquated software including PHP4. So, for example, where a CMS built exclusively for PHP5.2+ can use PHP’s new json_encode function, Drupal must use resource intensive wrapper functions instead.

The second improvement has to do with the caching mechanism built into Vanilla Drupal core. It does a great job of speedily delivering content from a cache table in the DB, but, 1) it’s not smart enough to know when delivering a cached page is imprudent and 2) it still requires interaction with most of the software (LAMP) stack. Pressflow improves on these problems with a new small module and added support for external caching. The small module basically checks to see if a user is submitting a comment (or other form) and, if so, will deliver an un-cached version of the page upon submission (so the user can see their results). External caching is achieved through added support of open source project Squid and Varnish (think of sites such as Wikipedia - they use Squid to cache their pages).

Finally, Pressflow adds support for database replication. Using simple syntax in the site’s settings.php file, an admin can easily define a master DB and multiple slaves. Generally, writes to the DB will happen only on the master, but queries will be directed to one of the slave DBs - thus spreading around the query workload and freeing up the master for writes only.

We’re busy running further tests on Pressflow and look forward using it on our next site launch.

Brunello Creative has been selected as an “Official Honoree” in the 14th Annual Webby Awards for its entry http://www.childrenshealthmag.com/ in the Magazine category.

The prestigious Webby Awards draw-in nearly 10,000 entries from around the world. The 650-person judging academy selects fewer than 15% to be distinguished as an Official Honoree

This honor signifies an outstanding caliber of work. Congrats to Children’s Health and all those at Brunello Creative who worked on the site.

Many people gauge the success of their website on whether someone submits an online form. Thus, it’s really important to think about how the form is structured. The most important part of designing and implementing a form happens prior to any layout or coding. You need to prioritize what you NEED to achieve your goals vs what you WANT to have.

Keeping your form simple is difficult. Build your relationships slowly with visitors in order to instill a sense of trust, is essential.

Whether it be a sign-up, sign-in, purchase or inquiry – here are 4 tips to be taken into consideration prior to creation of your online form.

Plan & Prioritize

Know why you have a form in the first place. What do you want to get out of the form? (be specific & realistic about your top 3 goals). Less is more, determine the absolute minimum amount of information that is required to achieve your goals. Then ask, Is this information mission-critical? (Is knowing whether someone is a Ms or Mrs a deal breaker?)

Functionality & Sensibility

Ask for names in a sensible, conversational way: First, then last…. or Full name all at once. Provide buttons, pull downs and text fields where appropriate. Make it easy for the user to provide you with the information you’re requesting. Consolidate, edit and eliminate where possible.

Clarity & Calls-to-Action

State why visitors are giving you info, what you plan to do with it, and what they will get. Buttons should be meaningful and explain the action to be taken. Try “Sign-up for mailing list” instead of “Submit”. Use color that makes sense, Orange has a proven track record of helping people to take action, Red is closely associated with errors, Green is linked to yes. Make sure you’re giving visual and verbal cues to your visitors wherever it’s relevant and possible.

Availability & Alternatives

Some people don’t like forms, and you need to offer those people and easy way to get in touch with you. Always include your phone number, address and/or email on every page, or have it available via a Contact us link.

This list just scratches the surface of considerations. Let us know what you do to insure your forms are user friendly.

Brunello Creative is excited to be entering its fifth year in business (which means we just turned 4!!). Our portfolio and team continue to steadily grow.

This year we will be helping our clients get the most out of their online initiatives by offering expanded development expertise including Drupal and .NET, and services such as Social Media Marketing (SMM), Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Web Analytics Reporting.

We have also recently added a new product to our offerings, Brunello Hosting - to accommodate our client’s needs for dependable and scalable web hosting. We’re looking forward to another successful year and we thank our clients for their business and referrals. And thank you to our friends and family for their support throughout the years. A round of cupcakes on us for everyone!

Brunello has been working closely with Men’s Health on the redesign of their website. The new homepage launched today.

Brunello provided art direction and front-end design, as well as the implementation of custom jQuery and CSS to drive the main article slider at the top of the page. Cufon was used as a font-replacement technology allowing the site to feature dynamic text rendered in a custom typeface. The site’s backend is powered by Drupal.

Article and channel level pages are in the process of being redesigned and will roll out over the next several weeks.

Take a look at the before and after, and check out the live version here: http://www.menshealth.com

Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

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If you own or run a website you should be utilizing the power of web analytics. Web analytics programs help you collect information on how users are finding and navigating your website. This data can then be used to drive the improvement success of your website.

Web Analytics tracks a website visitor’s steps and collect metrics such as:

• Page views
• Time on page
• Clicks
• Bounce rate
• New/returning visitors
• Purchases
• Live visits

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides FREE detailed, accurate reporting across more metrics than any of the other Analytics service. It also offers tight integration with PPC campaigns and other online marketing efforts.

How Brunello uses Google Analytics:

We use Google Analytics on most of our client websites. This keeps track of traffic numbers, e-commerce data, and other helpful information. We take this information into consideration when suggesting design changes to websites. Sometimes simple re-alignments – not drastic redesigns – can help improve conversion and sales figures. We also integrate Google Analytics with Google Adwords to report ROI statistics on keyword campaigns for PPC accounts that we administer.

Quantcast

Quantcast goes beyond your normal statistics of analytics and digs deeper. Quantcast breaks down your user base by: education level, income, gender, age, size of household, and other sites visited.

How Brunello uses Quantcast:

We use Quantcast to get a complete picture of a site’s typical visitor. Quantcast provides in-depth audience data and helps us tailor our design decisions based on specific audience data. Information gathered from Quantcast can influence design, navigation, language, PPC marketing and more.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a heat mapping service that tracks where on a page users are clicking. They also have helpful display options that will show metrics such as: referring websites, clicks by page element, click percentage, time to click and others.

How Brunello uses Crazy Egg:

We recently used Crazy Egg on a site to determine if visitors were utilizing a newly added feature. This heat mapping service allowed us to provide metrics to the client that show how the new feature was being utilized by users.

Woopra

Woopra allows you to view live, real-time web analytics. You can watch users visiting your site live and interact with them in the process.

How Brunello uses Woopra:

We use Woopra to track live visitors on a site. We’re especially interesting in identifying areas of issue, troubleshooting and analyzing visitor behavior. Woopra enables us to watch visitors make purchases on an e-commerce site and monitor any hang-ups in the shopping cart process. This information allows us to respond to known issues quickly and confidently.

Click Heat

ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones. ClickHeat is an OpenSource software, released under GPL licence, and free of charge.

How Brunello uses ClickHeat:

We recently installed ClickHeat on our own site to track where YOU (our visitors) are clicking. This data will be used for future optimizations of our website. So click around!

What analytics services do you use?

Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Coding email newsletters can be a trip down memory lane: nested tables, font tags and plenty of inline styling. This is all fun and games until you run into varying levels of CSS support from different email clients. Luckily Campaign Monitor has an extensive chart detailing CSS support in almost every email client known to man. View the chart online or download a .PDF for handy reference.

The design community seems to be having mixed reactions to this announcement. What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.