Here is the winning logo:

Upon reviewing the upcoming schedule for new copywriting, logo and website the topic of social media came up. Would they put together a social media strategy? It was decided that the company wasn’t going to worry about social right now and that they would worry about “marketing” later.

A Flag Went Off in My Head

Listen, I’m no Chris Brogan but let me share some thoughts on why “not doing social” (at least figuring out the plan) is a very bad idea in this case. So here goes, this is just free-flowing thoughts and not organized in any manner.

The  question is: what is this company’s digital marketing strategy? I mean, if they’re going to have this great story and identity, they need to market it. There are generally two families of digital marketing: outbound and inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing usually means “buying attention” and sending messages out through old-fashion marketing like tv, ads, trade shows, cold calling, etc. In many cases outbound marketing is 100% necessary and required. However, no one in their right mind would argue that new age of marketing communications consists of a “pull” technique where you earn buyer’s trust and build authority by sharing valuable content.

Here’s how wikipedia defines inbound marketing:

Inbound marketing is advertising a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing.

More and more, it’s becoming paramount to have a content strategy that drives all your inbound marketing. As Neil Patel has pointed out, content marketing is the new SEO. The content strategy for this company could/should find it’s origins in the identity and story they were planning to identify and start to build. I say “start”, because we all know a new logo doesn’t encompass a company’s brand. It’s the story they tell and the attitude of their online identity. How do you get this out? Through content? What platforms? Email marketing, blogs, website, and yes social media. In other words, through inbound marketing!

We have all these great social networks now, but companies mostly use these platforms to get content out there (in addition to engage with customers on some level) thereby building their “identity”.

This company already has a presence on social platforms and they need to be utilized to really start telling the story and bring the refined brand to life! This starts with a “strategy”. Social media marketing will define your company’s identity. In other words, what your company does on social media becomes your identity whether you like it or not.

Do you agree? Please leave a comment!

Why Use a Premium WordPress Theme?

Really, the question should be “why should you NOT use a premium WordPress theme”.  Using a WordPress theme can potentially save you thousands of dollars. Why? Because time is money and if you don’t use a WordPress theme, then you’ll have to pay web developer an hourly rate of $100+/hour to custom build CSS, HTML & Javascript.

You can save thousands of dollars, if you’re able to identify and use a premium WordPress theme that doesn’t require customization to meet your website needs.

Why would you want to pay a developer to re-invent a design when there are literally thousands of premium WordPress themes to choose from? WordPress themes are ridiculously easy to purchase, download and install. The very best themes make it easy for a monkey to make changes to your site. In fact, the better the theme, the less likely it is that anyone will have to edit a single line of code to build your website. Admittedly, I’ve never built a website for a client without getting my hands dirty in the code, but I can tell you that the nicer the theme the more likely it is for a client to feel comfortable making changes to the site.

What Makes a Good Premium WordPress Theme?

Shopping for a Premium WordPress theme is just like shopping for anything else on the web these days. Sometimes it’s as easy as searching for terms like “wordpress theme for schools”. You might get lucky and find just the theme. If it’s from some lone developer on a website that doesn’t look professional it might be risky to just purchase the theme and start using it. Thankfully there are now online marketplaces to buy and sell premium WordPress themes. Sounds like a fun place to hang out yeah?

Themetrust is a Great Way to Browse Premium WordPress Themes

Just take a look at Themetrust.net. You can search for themes and themes are categorized. With each WordPress theme, you can read reviews, look at comments, read documentation and of course preview the theme live. Some of the things I’m looking at are the following:

• Does the theme look good and match the overall feel of my clients organization?
• How many times has theme been bought?
• What do the reviews say? Anything less than 4 of 5 stars is suspect.
• Look at the comments tab in ThemeTrust. Is there activity? Is the theme developer responsive? He/she better be.
• Does the them have a good documentation to tell me how get the most out of it?
• Is it a fully-responsive layout (adapts it’s layout to be mobile ready)?

Tweaking a WordPress Theme, What Can You Change?

So  you’ve identified a great theme and it comes really close to matching the original vision of the site. But of course there are a few design aspects that you want to tweak. This is where it can get hairy. Of course if you have a good web developer building your website there’s nothing about a theme that can’t be changed. But the fact of the matter is that some things are really easy to change and others aren’t. This becomes a tricky conversation when a client wants to make a tweak to the styling but the developer realizes she’ll have to drop down into the PHP and actually edit the theme. This requires a different skill set then just knowing CSS and changing the line-height of some header text (for example).

This is one of the important aspects of keeping the costs low and it’s why you need an honest web development company doing your site. We can keep the costs down if you use the theme the way it looks out of the box, but when you need the blog to have an entirely new layout, for example, well that’s not an trivial task and most developers will not work for free.

The better the theme the easier it is to make styling adjustments; thereby avoiding custom development.

Here is a list of design attributes that can usually be changed easily:

• Typography
• Colors
• Simple layout changes like margin and padding

What if You Want a Truly Custom Designed WordPress Site?

Some organizations need and want a guaranteed one-of-a-kind website. Sometimes your branding just requires a custom design. Any web development shop should be able to create a customized WordPress theme from the ground up. Of course this is going to cost more time and more in developer resources. You’ll have a unique site that matches your branding exactly; just be aware of how much you’re spending to build your site and what you have left over to start driving traffic to it. What’s the point of building a gorgeous thousand-dollar website if you’re not going to use it to drive people to it and ultimately generate new leads (however you define a “lead” in your line of work).

That’s a great place to end this post. Design is important, but the real question you need to ask yourself is “Is my website working for me?”. You can have a best looking website in the world and it’s becoming increasinly easy to do that using WordPress themes. But if no one knows about it then who cares?

[By the way, in case you're curious, this website was built using the Chameleon theme by the good folks over at Elegant Themes.]

They needed us to built them a new site with a simple design, hosted on WordPress for extensibility and easy updates.

Contego Medical, founded in 2005, has developed a family of novel emboli protection devices. The main feature of each device is that the treatment portion (i.e., balloon or stent) is on the same catheter as the embolic protection device, thus coupling the two together. This device can act as an angioplasty balloon with an integrated emboli protection device. If a stent is mounted on the balloon, it can serve as a stent with an integrated emboli protection device.

After each partner collected a proposal from a local website development firm, SunCoast chose Five Points Solution to both create a professional logo and basic website.

Need some extra holiday cash? Let FPS help you, help us.

We will pay you $100 for each new client that you refer to us that signs a contract for us to build them a new website.

Please, introduce us to your friends, family, and colleagues.  We love making new friends, but we’re specifically looking to speak with people that need a new website.

So what’s the catch?  No catch.  We love building websites, we love working with people, we want more clients and YOU NEED HOLIDAY CASH. Okay…the only stipulation is that all referred clients must sign a contract with FPS before January 1, 2013 at 12:00am. EST.

Here’s the deal, these are the basic instructions:

1.  Jot down the names of people you think may need a new website.
2.  Share our website, portfolio and mention what great people we are!
3.  Tell them they MUST tell us that YOU sent them.
4.  We chat with them and send them a proposal for website services.
5.  We send you a check (assuming they agree to the “contract”)!

Does that sound good to you?   Do you know anyone that needs a new website?  Maybe it will be their first website.  Maybe they have a website and it looks like a 5-year-old built it.  Either way, we’re here to help and look forward to serving.

Visit out Contact Page or Call 919-322-9962 today!

In their own language:

CommunitySmith exists to create successful community revitalization projects by facilitating open and honest communication among all stakeholders.

Midtown staff is also aware of their ability to use digital marketing as means to grow their church and reach more people in their community with their message. They’ve hired Five Points Solutions to hold quarterly meetings to review the health of their website and discuss digital marketing opportunities like blogging and social media strategy.

Evernote app is one of the most popular mobile apps since the smartphone has invaded our lives. The app, that claims to help you “Remember Everything” is consistently recognized by trusted sources as a Top 10 Must-Have App and there aren’t many iPhone users that don’t at least have it installed on their phone (almost 80% of Evernote’s daily mobile usage is on iOS devices). It has a slew of features and the Evernote team is relentless in their pursuit of perfecting the program’s design and usability in both the desktop and mobile versions. There are as many opinions on how to use Evernote as there are on how to run our country (well maybe not that many) but hopefully you’ll find these tips helpful if you decide to invest your time into using Evernote.

Everything is a Note

When I say write a note, what do you immediately think of? Probably a small piece of a paper, like a Post-It note. You’ll put it somewhere you know you’ll see later to remind yourself. But with smart phones, a note can be so much more than handwritten piece of paper (although Evernote can handle that too…more on that later). It can be a photo, video or audio memo. It’s just anything we want to store and access later. So everything is a note. For example, here are just some of the things that I save in Evernote:

• Call notes with customers and prospects
• Bookmarked webpages that I want to see again
• Pictures of whiteboards that my team has brainstormed on
• Pictures of wine bottles I’ve enjoyed
• Audio notes while I’m driving to record my thoughts on something

Use the Camera

Isn’t it amazing that we’re walking around with a digital camera in pocket at all times? We’re constantly snapping pictures; albeit most of food or our kids. But, what do we do with those photos? Let’s don’t get into how unorganized we are with all those precious pictures of kids on the beach or the steaks you cooked last weekend and just acknowledge that we could be using our camera to be more productive. Anytime you “see” somethign you want to remember, take a picture of it. But don’t just use your regular camera app on your phone! Open up Evernote on your phone, create a new note and let it access the camera app to take the picture, so it stores it, geo-locates the image and you can categorize it with whatever process you define in Evernote.

You can take a picture of handwritten text with Evernote and the app can recognize the words so that when you search your Evernote library later, it can return to you a hand-written note!

When to Use Notebooks vs. Tags

With Evernote you can create multiple Notebooks. Everyone has a default notebook and new notes will be created there unless otherwise specified. Students, for example, might create a notebook for each class they have. Each notebook can either be a Local Notebook or a Synchronized Notebook. As the name implies, synchronized notebooks will keep all the notes in that notebook on all your devices. You can also choose to Share a Notebook, which is a pretty cool feature which allows you to essentially publish your notebook through a customized web address. After you choose to share it, you can just give out your public link or you can remove the public link and simply invite specific people.

I personally store 95% of all my notes in my default notebook and use tags to categorize my notes. Here’s why: if you try to create a notebook for every “type of note” you’re going to exhaust yourself creating and managing lots of notebooks. It’s much faster to create a note and tag it than it is to create one and decide which notebook it should go it each time. Of course you can put multiple tags on notes which makes it a more flexible categorizing system. 

Learn the Shortcuts

The more you put into Evernote, the more you get out. Hopefully that much is already obvious, so the key to being productive with Evernote is to streamline the process of creating a new note. I am personally a freak when it comes to keyboard shortcuts so if there’s a quicker way to something in piece of software I’m going to look for it. Use the keyboard shortcut to create a new Note. On my Mac when I press “Control + Command + N” I get a new, empty note window in Evernote. I use this keyboard shortcut 4-5 times a day I bet. Also, you simply must install the Evernote Web Clipper in your browser. Anytime you see anything on the web you want to remember, click that web clipper and store it baby!

Follow Michael Hyatt

Not only is Michael Hyatt’s blog on “Intentional Leadership” a constant source of inspiration and knowledge, he is nothing short of the un-official spokesman for Evernote. He has been preaching for while on how Evernote turns your computer (and your phone and iPad) into a digital brain to allow you to remember everything. You can find a handy index of all his Evernote posts on his blog. The topics include “How to Organize Evernote for Maximum Efficiency” and “How to Get Your Stuff Into Evernote”. His stuff is very hands-on.

When you create a new Note in the app you can include text, photos and audio.

Make it a Must-Have

When I say “invest your time into using Evernote” I really mean that because the fact of the matter is, when you have a must-have peice of software you’re going to spend a lot of time in it. The interesting thing about Evernote is that it isn’t a must-have until you make it one. Businesses MUST have accounting software, but you as an individual can obviously live without Evernote. Here’s the deal, you get out of Evernote what you put into it. I mean this figuratively and literally. At the end of the day Evernote is just a big huge vault with all you “stuff”. And by stuff I mean notes and by notes I mean, anything you can possbiliy imagine that’s digital. So if you want to always have every single scribble, picture, video, bookmark (just to name a few) everywhere you go then you have to put them all in something and take it with you. That’s what Evernote is for.

Lists of other Evernote Resources

• Getting Started with Evernote
• Michael Hyatt’s Evernote Blog Posts
• Stuff that works with Evernote
• How-to Books on Evernote
• Top 100+ Evernote Uses

So what about you? Do you use Evernote? Would you share in the comments your tips, tricks or thoughts?