Firefox Gets a Double Toolbar for Bookmarking Your Sites

If you are anything like us, you will have hundreds of bookmarked pages and a toolbar groaning with the weight of the tools you use most frequently. We tend to have all our clients' blogs, Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator all open together with social media platforms like TweetDeck and those web tools suck as bit.ly that are invaluable.

For our PC work we use Firefox, this is a great add-on, a double bookmark toolbar making life just that bit less complicated.

Go to Firefox add-ons page here to find out more and download

Worth a read...

Firefox and bit.ly team up for easy social bookmarking

Where Are You Putting Your RSS Feeds?

As we all know it's is all very well having a fantastic website or blog with great visuals and content....but putting our site out there for others to read can prove challenging and take considerable time and resources.

It took me 10 minutes to submit ARE Creative site to 10 blog directories and RSS feed sites other than the standard facilities that Google offer. Fore more information go here.

'Cannot Chase Paperchase' - when your designs are stolen!

As a small Graphic Design agency we are aware that the work we do for our clients should be unique, represent their company effectively and most of all, not be copied from another designer or company.

The beauty of social media has highlighted 2 cases in the last week where a large company has taken/copied/replicated/stolen the design of a smaller design agency.

Problogger a.k.a. Darren Rowse was alarmed to see his 'PROBLOGGER' logo (below bottom) blatantly copied by beamdotmy (below top).
View beamdotmy's comments here.

Twitter has also helped Graphic Designer HiddenEloise as her original design was 'copied' by Paperchase and used extensively via Amazon for online sales. Go here to see how easy it was to 'borrow' a design that someone else has created.

What was the response from Paperchase? Go here to read

In both cases, the designers appealed for public intervention via twitter, generating huge public interest via retweets, saving a fortune in legal bills and achieving their desired result of having the 'stolen' logos dropped from advertising campaigns.

So no design or logo is safe from exploitation even with copyright, but there is some consolation knowing how easy it is to generate public support and intervention via social media.

What is your opinion?

Scammed and Spammed by Chris Cardell?

This morning, a hand addressed envelope arrived on the doormat at ARE Creative. Addressed to our old business, prior to rebranding, it contained a newspaper cutout and a 'handwritten' post-it note bearing my name.

Immediately we started racking our brain cells for who J could be, realising then that it wasn't a business colleague, our old company name is outdated. A quick google search threw up the following articles, which begs the question......fantastic personalised marketing or just another scam.......you decide for yourselves.

Worthy of a read:
Go here
Go here

Firefox and bit.ly Team Up for Easy Social Bookmarking

If you haven't already got this, then download it here. This add-on tool appears as a toolbar and is fantastic for putting any webpage on your twitter or facebook page quickly. It is possible to edit the link too. A 2 click solution to beat the delay of some RSS feeds.

Who is Poking Around in your Website?

Using a sitemeter can be one of the most useful tools in assessing how well your website works, if it does at all!

At ARE Creative we use Google Analytics and

A sitemeter on your site will tell you:
how many people visited
when they looked at your site
what page they started and finished
how long they were on the site
where they came from in the world
what they typed into the search box to get to your site
their referring URL

How this is useful to you and your business?

Using ARE Creative Blog as an example:
It has been established for 1 year now, has been crawled by Google, appears on page 1 of some searches, page 10 of others. Our blog had started generating 10 hits per day in the last 3 days but that is not enough information. Why have those hits not made contact for a query or quote?

By looking at the sitemeter stats, it is clear that most people are staying for 30 seconds only - so is the content of the pages they are clicking on not giving the information they are looking for, or are they finding our site by accident?
With Sitemeter's world map it is clear that some clicks are from abroad, we are not localising our site correctly for our target market.
Plan: use location words (Bournemouth, Poole, Dorset) in as many posts to attract local customers

With several visitors staying for over 7 minutes, looking at most of the 15 pages, did they find what they were looking for, they must have been interested to search the site, what was missing?
Plan: optimize each page to it's full potential

This is where a sitemeter is a valuable tool for your market research and marketing. It allows you to identify where your site could be letting your business down, and what you need to do to improve it.

Assessing how effective your website is often gets overlooked. Your website is a great marketing tool.

Google Analytics and Sitemeter.com are free, do you have one, and how is it working for you?

Who is Copying Your Copy?

Are you concerned that someone may have stolen any articles or posts, graphic designs or images from your site? This happens more with a blog than a standard website as most blog content and articles are more 'editorial'.

Plagium is a great tool for bloggers and website owners, it allows you to type in your unique text from any article or post and it scours the internet for identical type and gives you the website address.

Go here for more information.

A New Bit.ly On It's Way

A refurbished and updated bit.ly should be popping up on the internet in the next week or so.

We are looking forward to it's arrival although the old bit.ly does a fantastic job of providing shortened URLs to promote your work online. Their website is having an overhaul and there will be some new features similar to the Twitter and Tweedeck apps that are currently available.

Watch this space!