Stine-Nichols Plumbing
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Logo Design In Kansas City
Logo design can be the most fun or most frustrating part of starting a new business or rebranding and existing business…
It all depends on the company and graphic designer you choose to do your logo.
Bad graphic designers are one-trick ponies, who can only create in one style or with one vision, and then they run out of ideas. Good graphic designers can take your vision and ideas and turn them into a reality. Great graphic designers understand the balance between giving what you want and giving you what you need. They can negotiate between parties and process multiple inputs, and then take all the information to create something new, fresh and unexpected. I always love it when the outcome is better than the vision I had in my head for the logo.
At MIMO Solutions, we only use great graphic designers in Kansas City to create your logo. We hire and work with professionals who understand that getting paid to design a logo is different than being an artist who creates what they want. They understand how to balance our clients needs, yet never settle for poor quality or functionality.
Logo Design Formats & Functionality
Logos are often simple artistic designs, but they can be very complicated when it comes to formats, flexibility, and functionality. You want your logo to be unique and instantly recognizable, yet it needs to be simple enough to be embroidered on a shirt or hat, printed on a variety of materials, and still look good blown up to gigantic proportions on billboards and signs.
For those reasons, you will want to stick to what is called “vector” or “line art” for your logo. That means that every part of the logo is drawn with lines and shapes instead of pixels like in a photo. You have probably seen where photographic look bad shrunk to tiny sizes or blown up too big. However, with line art, your logo will be able to stretch to infinite sizes with perfect resolution.
You will also want to stick to solid colors and fairly standard color options. Gradients, dots and small stripes don’t embroider well and they run together in small imprints like on a pen or other promotional item. Also, gradients can be trouble in screen printing for t-shirts or other items. You will probably want to limit our number of colors as well. It will save you a ton of money in your marketing for the rest of the life of your business… One and two color logos are often have as expensive to print or embroider than 4-color or full-color logos.
In short, you can have a great looking logo that works for a long time on a lot of different places, but it is probably going to cost you a small investment in a great graphic designer to get started.
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Call us today or share your questions in the comment below about our graphic design and logo design services in Kansas City.
Why Choose WordPress For Your Website?
WordPress is the world’s most popular website platform, but is it right for your organization?
In order to choose the correct website platform, you will first need to determine your goals. It all depends on what you want it to do. That being said, WordPress is the world’s most popular platform for a reason. It can handle the simplest to the most complex website designs and functions. Here are a few of the reasons we prefer WordPress for most of our clients.
Open Source Structure
WordPress was built and is maintained in an Open Source environment. What that means is that program is open to the public and free to use by all. A collection of programmers take suggestions and make upgrades based on the feedback that they get. Everything about WordPress is public information so programmers around the world can make improvements and suggestions to alter its functionality. What that means for you is that you don’t have to pay to use WordPress as your content management system for your website, and you shouldn’t have to pay for much custom programming, since the best programmers in the world have already developed solutions for most of the usual situations.
Responsive Designs
Possibly the greatest thing about WordPress over other platforms is its ability to make mobile-friendly websites without custom programming. Responsive design was developed in the last 5 years to allow websites to grow and shrink to fit the screen size of whatever device is being used to load you website. That means your site will look different on a smart phone than on a computer, and it will rearrange things to make it more user-friendly for your visitors. WordPress has some responsive capability out of the box, but adding a responsive design template can make a huge difference to your overall results, and it avoids the cost of having to build a separate mobile site or phone app.
Easy Design & Functionality Upgrades
The other great aspect of using design templates is the flexibility for upgrades. Technology and graphic design changes so rapidly that most people were having to completely rebuild their websites every 3-5 years. Now, with WordPress, you can keep your content, pictures, and database the same, and just overlay a new design on the frontend to bring your site up to date. This takes the cost of an upgrade from thousands of dollars down to as little as a few hundred if you can do it yourself.
A Wide Range of Plugins & Tools
Another cool aspect of open source programs and WordPress in particular is the ability to add on custom plugins, widgets, and tools to add special functionality to your website. With WordPress, most of these are already built by amazing programmers. Want to add social media widgets, ecommerce functionality, or user profile pages? All of these are already made and can be added to your site very quickly. Some are free and open source, other premium plugins can cost up to a couple hundred dollars, but in general, you are saving thousands that this type of custom programming would take on a traditional website or a build-your-own solution.
Security & Speed
Everyone has heard about websites being hacked, and WordPress in no different. There is no way to completely stop hackers, but with WordPress security updates and fixes come very quickly, typically before your normal small business site ever gets affected. The largest platform in the world has already dealt with most of the challenges that custom solutions have yet to see, plus they have the best proactive and reactive staff to deal with these attacks. The same thing is true with speed. As the most popular solution on the web, WordPress has developed tools and servers have developed technology to make sure these sites stay up and stay fast for the life of the website.
Getting started with WordPress
Are you sold? There are two ways to get started with WordPress. You can set up your own blog on WordPress.com or you can download the program and install it on your own hosting package and domain name. WordPress.com is free to get started, but it has some limitations for plugins and some design templates are more expensive. We recommend buying a small, dedicated WordPress hosting package and your domain name at Godaddy, and they have tools to automatically install the program for you. Another great way to get started is to go to WordPress.org and start learning more about it. There are plenty of articles, forums, and tutorial videos around the web to help you learn as well.
Call us today for a WordPress consultation and internet marketing plan at 816-616-2201.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Modern SEO Explained:
Old School Search Engines
A lot people have differing opinions about search engine optimization (SEO) these days. Most of them are out of date. When the major search engines were first developed in the late 1990’s, SEO was mostly about putting keywords on the page. Originally, it was all about keyword stuffing, putting the keywords everywhere and anywhere on the page so that you had the word there the most times. The search engine companies quickly learned that this was a bad way to rank people, because anyone, including porn companies, could put any keyword or phrase on the page and rank highly, regardless if the page actually had anything to do with the phrase or not.
Quality Modification
The search engines changed their ranking structure by assigning quality, density, and other scores to the pages. Since, the search engines knew that they couldn’t take your word for it, they started looking for more objective metrics by which to measure. The looked at how long the domain name has been registered, the keyword density and context, and other page attributes like title tags, image names, and text size, in order to determine what the page was really about. This was a major shift in search engine optimization, because it required some attention to detail and finesse in your page planning. However, it was still largely in your control, and people still cheated the system.
Pagerank Modification
The biggest shift in SEO came from Google’s invention of the Pagerank. Google was the first to include “off-page” information in their rankings. This means that Google no longer takes your word for it. They want to know what other sites say about your page. They look at what sites link to you and what descriptions they include in the links. The number and quality of people linking to you count like referrals towards your high ranking. This was another major shift in the search engine optimization landscape, and became much more harder to cheat. However, where there is a will, there is a way, and people began trading and buying links to their site, and thousands of directories and submission services popped up where you could create your own backlinks. Google was forced to adjust by adding quality of backlinks into their pagerank system.
Modern SEO & Individualized Rankings
Google has proved that they can largely stay ahead of the people trying to cheat the system. Current rankings are based on thousands of indicators and measurements. They include things like your social media activity and follower, your page traffic, backlinks and local map listings, review sites, page loading speed, and still some on page things like original copy, copy length in words, and the usefulness of the content. Google is literally watching and tracking every move you make and everyone else makes on the web. This means they can see who likes and stays on a site when they find what they are looking for and rank that page high based on the stickiness of the website. If everyone that visits your site, goes back and searches again, Google can downgrade you for that term because they know you are not providing what searcher want to find…
They also now have the power to show different users different search results based on their personal preferences. That means if they know you are a golfer, they show you golf results when you type in “handicap”, but if you are physically disabled, they can show you medical results when you type in “handicap.” This largely means that keywords are completely irrelevant, and the context in how you use the words are more important. Google has openly admitted that they don’t even factor the “keyword” HTML tag anymore. They don’t have to take your word for what your site is about. They can figure it out based on all the web activity around the world.
What does this mean for you and “SEO experts”?
Well, it means that it is impossible to game the system. There are no more magic tricks that get you high rankings for a certain keyword or phrase. You have to do the hard work of actually earning a spot in the rankings by providing searchers what they need, doing it fast, and doing it so well that they tell other people about it and they stop looking. Modern search engine optimization is about building an online reputation for your website and organization. While there still are some basic optimization techniques to showcase your website in the best possible light to the search engines. These techniques are more about NOT making mistakes, than they are about ranking you higher, and there are thousands of mistakes that amateurs could be making. However, after your site, social, and map listings are optimized, your ranking results will largely be determined by the quality of your content and your company.
Don’t hire an SEO expert without finding out what they are going to do for you. If they are still focused on keywords for search engine optimization, they may be 15 years behind the times. If they are focusing on your online reputation and quality content, then you may have found a winner!
Good luck and good content!
The Patrick Lentz Band
The Patrick Lentz Band had an impressive web following when we met them. Patrick has thousands of follower, especially on his amazing YouTube channel. His challenge was that it was not translating into the sales and bookings that it should. We optimized the website, rebuilt the home page shown here, took over management of this pay-per-click advertising, and also did some video optimization on YouTube and cleaned up his social media. What you find now is polished, professional and just as impressive as the band itself.