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It might surprise you to know this, but one of our least favorite questions is: “Can you design a logo for my company?”

As the head of a graphic design firm that works on dozens of logos every year,  what gives? The problem isn’t with logos themselves, or the process of designing logos, but the difference between what they are and what new clients sometimes think they mean.

To see why that’s so problematic, let’s take a look at a couple of important distinctions.

Your Logo is a Visual Component of Your Brand

New clients and inexperienced marketers love logos, and devote a lot of their time to them, because they are easy to understand. A good logo is more than a symbol, it’s a representation of your brand in a nutshell.

As such, it needs to not only have the right colors and graphical elements, but also incorporate fonts, styles, and even emotional elements that stand up for your marketing message on everything from a website to a business card along with the literally dozens of identity pieces that can come between.

Your Brand is Much Bigger Than a Logo

For all the praise and importance heaped onto a logo, however, it really represents the tip of the branding iceberg – something that’s highly visible, but that can actually obscure the more weighty and important pieces below.

For example, companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, Apple, and Starbucks all have well-known logos; however, their brands aren’t successful because of those logos. Instead, the logos themselves reinforce strong, clear impressions that have been built one interaction at a time. The logo isn’t the company; it’s a reminder of the product, the customer service, and the emotional connection that customers have with their favorite businesses.

Reducing branding to a logo is like equating a whole pizza to a slice of pepperoni. It makes for a nice instant visual, but it only tells a small part of the story. If your brand isn’t bigger than your logo, you don’t have a brand at all – you have a visual identity and a lot of wasted opportunities.

Logos Matter, But They Aren’t All That Matters

By now, it should be clear what the ultimate message is: It’s great to have a logo, and perfectly acceptable to have one designed (or redesigned) for your company. If you make that the focal point of your branding efforts, however, you’re missing the point entirely.

Logos are important, but they aren’t the only things that matter.  The power of a strong brand is much more valuable than a catchy piece of art, no matter how effective you think it is at capturing your position in the market.

User experience has become a buzzword when considering both site design and SEO. In plain English, user experience, or UX, as it’s commonly referred to, relates to all that your users experience when they interact with your organization online, primarily via your website. This includes everything they see, hear and do as well as the emotional reactions elicited.

On the Internet, where content is king and the kingdom is crowded, potential customers have many options. By improving the overall online experience, the most successful businesses (think major online retailers, social media sites featuring advertising) have learned to leverage the time potential customers spend on their site, which leads to greater satisfaction for the customers, and increased sales for the business.

However, creating a good user experience is sometimes compromised if SEO becomes the primary consideration. According to UK-based Mosaic Digital, a digital marketing and website development agency, this is because user experience (UX) and SEO are often considered two distinctive disciplines requiring separate approaches.

When well integrated and thoroughly planned out, the benefits of ensuring good user experience are numerous, including:

• An increase of sales and online conversions

• Improved perception of your brand or company

• Improved rank in search engines, including Google

• Reduced customer frustration and turnover

Having a plan for your website is the first step; partnering with a skilled and knowledgeable I.T. firm is the next. By utilizing powerful and diverse web design technologies including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver, along with XHTML/DHML/HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery, and more, the team at Kinetik I.T. is your partner in making a great custom website. 

We build websites to reflect your organization’s personality, maximize your client’s user experience, and support your online marketing goals. To learn more about custom websites, and a wide array of other services and products, visit www.Kinetik-IT.com or follow Kinetik I.T. on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

As we pass the halfway mark in 2014, not much has changed this year in how social media affects our use of various outlets—perhaps with the exception of those taking part in the “99 Days of Freedom” experiment. The usual rules still apply, to post topics that are timely, emphasize the customer’s needs and building a relationship, make offers and information unique to the outlet, and, most importantly, use proper grammar!

While some companies fail to grasp these simplest of rules, others have not only embraced the use of social media to build their brand, they are taking innovative steps to connect with customers and offering unique incentives for those who interact. By integrating social media into their corporate structure and business plan, these companies are engaging with customers on a new level.

One such company is Whole Foods, who established a dedicated team responsible for monitoring social channels for customer questions, and concerns, as well as praise. After announcing in March that it would begin labeling GMOs, the company received a lot of customer questions and feedback, which it then used to create a initiative to educate customers and to answer the most frequently asked questions.

Hampton Hotels and Restaurants is another example of business getting to the heart of what matters to customers. The company employs a dedicated staff to listens to every single tweet, post, status update or comment about their hotels and restaurants—and for a chain of their size, that’s a lot of mentions.

Primarily, the staff members address the issues and complaints, but this company takes it a step further. In one example, a guest received a bowl of soup and a spot of tea. This may not seem terribly out of the ordinary. That is, until you consider that the guest, who was in a Maui hotel, had voiced her woes over social media that she was sick that day and couldn't go out. In addition to the thoughtful nourishment, the hotel included a get well card to her tray, for good measure.

Credit card behemoth American Express connects card members with merchant partners—millions of them—allowing a card member to load an offer directly onto their card via Twitter hash tags. Last March, the company launched a program with the functionality to tweet special hash tags to make purchases, allowing customers to buy products from companies like Sony, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Using social media in business is far from an exact science, and while the basic tenets may not change year to year, the inventive ways businesses engage with their customer base is evolving, creating its own niche.

Whether you’re migrating to a new platform, building a new store, or simply upgrading the one you have, shifting ecommerce platforms or making changes to your current system could actually do your company more harm than good. Unfortunately, the little things have the potential to kill your current optimization strategy, and a big shift in your site could mean a shift in your ranking. What can you do to implement your changes while preserving your rank? These tips can help.

Keep an eye on the information architecture during migration as well as the URL structure.

If you have an established site, the search engines know what to expect. The better your information architecture and URL structure, the stronger your SEO program. That could change as you work on your store, so be aware of the fact that you don’t want your pages competing against each other and you want everything you do to strengthen your site as a whole.

Look out for duplicate content!

There is no faster way to get your site in trouble from an SEO perspective than to have duplicate content on the site. Proper planning on the part of absolutely everyone involved can help you avoid this problem, though.

Don’t lose sight of traditional SEO tactics.

Ignoring standard SEO simply because you’re dealing with ecommerce isn’t necessarily a good idea. While there are some practices that may not be perfect for those with an ecommerce site, others, like solid text, are just the gold standard no matter what kind of site you happen to have.

When you’re looking for help optimizing your business’s ecommerce platform, call Kinetik I.T. We can develop a customized solution without compromising your overall SEO efforts, ensuring you get the services you need without losing any page rank in the process.