1.Accreditation

The very first thing you should look for in a college is accreditation. Accreditation means that the college has met and maintained a rigorous set of standards set forth by a state or national body. By attending an accredited college, you can be almost certain that your credits will transfer should you decide to switch schools or pursue a higher degree after you graduate.

2.Specialized Courses

If you want a career in a specialized type of graphic design, make sure that the school that you choose has the courses that you need. For instance, if you want to land a career with an ad agency, you’ll want to take courses that will enable you to land the job of your dreams.

3.Digital Design

Computer-aided graphics design is the wave of the future. Make sure that the school that you pick offers courses in computer arts. Even if you don’t plan on specializing in this type of design, you’ll want training in Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Illustrator.

4.Student Services

Look for a school that offers a wide variety of student services. You’ll want to be sure that you can get assistance when you need it, so look for advising, tutoring and job placement services at the schools you are considering.

Once you’ve decided on a college, the question of money is sure to arise. There are several different ways available to you to fund your education. Here are the top four:

1.Grants

Grants are free monies that you are given for tuition and other educational expenses. Because these monies are free, they never have to be paid back. The Federal Pell Grant program is by far the most popular, but you may qualify for grants from your state as well.

2.Scholarships

Scholarships, like grants, do not have to be paid back. Scholarships can come from a variety of different sources: the college, companies and private foundations. Once you’ve decided on a school, contact their financial aid office to inquire about scholarships that you may qualify for. You can perform a scholarship search online or visit your local library for a book listing all of the scholarships available.

3.Loans

Subsidized and unsubsidized loans are available from the government and can help you pay for college. These monies do have to be paid back, with interest, once you graduate.

4.Payment Plans

Many colleges offer tuition payment plans if you are going to be paying your tuition with your own money or with the help of your parents. Instead of coming up with the full amount of tuition up front, many colleges will allow you to split the cost of tuition into three or more payments.

To qualify for aid, you must fill out the FAFSA, or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. You can find the application online, at your college’s financial aid office or at some local libraries. When your form has been accepted and processed, you will receive a letter telling you what monies you’ve qualified for.

Choosing a college and deciding how you will pay for your education can be overwhelming, but if your use the information above, you’ll find it all a bit easier. Remember that the college you choose can have not only a bearing on your success as a student, but can make or break your future career.

Does it make you mad when you spend ages making a website with great content and fantastic features but find you don’t get many subscribers or sales enquiries? You’re getting respectable traffic but your visitors aren’t taking your desired action. Well there is hope. Here are some real changes you can make to your website to improve the chance your visitors will buy your product or service or take whatever action you want.

Calls to Action

The phrase ‘call to action’ covers a wide range techniques but essentially it’s a message placed within your content that gives the reader a nudge to make whatever action you want. If you’re running an offline company then a very basic example is placing “Call Us Now on 0800 123456” (obviously using your phone number!) text at the bottom of your pages. You will probably be surprised how effective this simple placement will be. The reason why it works is because without this ‘call us’ text you’re relying on the visitor to find your contact details once they’ve read that particular page. It is true that a certain percentage will spend the time to find your Contact Us page but it is also true that some will not.

By placing this simple piece of text, it should boost the percentage of people who call you which at the end of the day means you’ll be getting more sales enquiries.

Not bad for a couple of words, right?

Blogs and other sites can use these simple calls to action with something like “Subscribe Now to our Blog Here”. There are many other calls to action though. For example, a more advanced example is making a slideshow, with each photo showing one of your products. And on each photo you’ll display some call to action text, together with a ‘Read More’ button. Another more advanced example when you make a video showing your product or service and at the end of the video, you’ll display a large button with something like “Click Here to Learn More” which will take the visitor to another page or perhaps your sign up page.

Give Free Stuff

Everyone loves free stuff! You can use this age old truth to get your website visitors to take your desired action. And it doesn’t have to cost you anything either. If you know your subject matter and can devote some time to write about your subject then you’ll be able to write a quality e-book that your readers can download for free. Of course within the e-book you’ll place some promotional offers, including a call to action at the end.

This is perfectly fine as both sides benefit;

• The visitor reads a free e-book, hopefully learning something new on a subject dear to their hearts.
• You win as a percentage of the people reading your e-book will follow the promotional calls to action and buy your things, subscribe to your blog or whatever else you want to achieve from your website.

Effective Headlines

You literally have seconds to grab the attention of most readers before they surf somewhere else, so the first headline on each of your pages need to stand out and be interesting. I recommend you download the (free) PDF from Headline Hacks. It contains lots of template headlines used for different situations where you replaced the ‘blank’ with your particular subject, which I use a lot. But writing effective headlines is also something that takes practice. Try writing two or three headlines then read each one and show them to a friend for feedback.

Exclusive Discounts

Another great way to improve sales is to offer discounts only available via the website. Even offering a small 10% discount should be enough to tempt people. Simply create a page on your site with details of the offer and place a form at the bottom of the offer page that will email you their details. Then create a strong call to action graphical button which you’ll place on your home page, linking to the offer page.

Call Me Back Box

This tip is mostly for offline businesses. Make a box with a very simple contact form containing Name, Phone and Email fields. Title the box ‘Call Me Back!’ and include a small introduction text of something like ‘Simply type in your details below and we’ll call you back ASAP’. And place this box on the side of all of your webpages, apart from pages such as Terms and Privacy Policy.

So why does this work? Why isn’t listing your phone number and a contact form on your Contact Us enough? The answer is simple; people are different. Some people won’t pick up the phone and would rather you call them back. Also, by having this simple contact form on every page, you’re giving the visitors more easy avenues to make contact with your company.

Video Testimonials

Most people know that testimonials can help improve sales but video testimonials are much more effective. But they have traditionally been far more complex and expensive to make but not anymore. These days there really is no excuse for not making a video of your customers to show on your website. It doesn’t have to be a top end professional video either, in fact in most cases just having some of your customers talk into the camera telling their story of how they found your product or service will be very effective.

A good example of some video testimonials can be found here (near the bottom of the page) which is just two web design clients talking into a camera with some simple animations and calls to action. You can do this for minimal cost and you should find it very effective for your website sales or subscriber numbers.

Simply video each of your customers then you’ll need to edit them together into one video. This is easy now as there are plenty of free easy to use video editors such as Microsoft Movie Maker. I also recommend you place a call to action at the end of the video which can help the person viewing it to contact you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This article was written by Bob who works for Action Online a website design company in Wellington, New Zealand. They offer design services to all New Zealand businesses and organizations.

More than half a year ago I posted about the sad news that the game was delayed to this Autumn, and later this became Winter. This was a tragic news, but I though: hey, if it’s going to be a better game than let them do it for a few more months. But the game was in some way a really fresh great game, but in an other way it was a big disappointment for me. The game itself is a cinematic adventure, so don’t expect an FPS, or a superb puzzle game, just a nice little movie like game. I don’t want to bring this game completely to the ground. It was a truly unique and genuine experience while I was playing. The mood, the camera shot, everything was there, and I really enjoyed the game. The nice little alternative cutscenes are great as well (when out heros get eaten alive by some predators). So I enjoyed the game very much, but there are unfortunately some major flaws.

They are the Slow Mo Guys, they have a nice high speed camera which is able to shoot 10,000 frames per second, making reality 400 times slower than it really is. That means that if they capture 4 seconds of video, you’ll get 26 minutes of footage. Incredible. And one of them worked on the new Sherlock Holmes movie, which is my favourite book(s)/movie of all time – almost. So have a great time browsing through their videos, if you enjoy slow motion then you’ll most definately love this channel – though you’ll need some twisted humour or taste to think that these guys are awesome.

Click on the picture for their channel!

So one goal of L.A. Noire was to  mimic a movie. This was achieved, and how! The most interesting thing about the game is the animation of the heads of the characters. Every face has it’s own characteristics, and you can see if somebody is lying, or making fun of you, or anything else. It is practically a movie. I don’t want to talk too much about the story, or the graphics or anything that might be important when reading a game review (such as AI, etc.). The game is good, let’s just say that, it meets my needs: the graphics is nice enough, the AI is clever enough, I heard from a few people that there’s too little traffic, and pedestrians, but I didn’t notice this either while playing the missions.

I had other problems. While the game offered over 20 hours of gameplay (just playing throught the story – leaving most of the side missions, such as taking care of some police business, shootouts and such), so while I played it for weeks (a few hours every day) it doesn’t offer any re-playability. The story is linear and after reaching the end there’s no need to play around the city any more. Also the city itself was not too charming, I quickly got used to the automatic “drive to location” option. I really liked that the game wanted to be more, wanted to be a movie, and it was great exploring the crime scenes, but like a movie I won’t watch it too many times.

It had one major problem. The protagonist was not sympathetic. With a movie this can be different, but if you play a guy that’s not the good guy – for you, then it becomes really wierd when you play. And this is a really interesting thing: for example Nico, from GTA IV isn’t really the good guy… But still I didn’t think he was that bad, and I enjoyed the game. Maybe L.A. Noire tries to make us really tangled with the story and the characters, but the protagonist is just not there for me… Maybe just for me.

So overall it is a really nice game, I look forward to similar games over the years. I definately recommend it to everybody: lots of gameplay time and a lot of new features. Lot of interesting cases, you should try it out if you like detective movies.

9gag is a popular website filled with funny pictures and well known stick figure like rage comics and other stuff like that. The new upcoming generation created this site and this “culture”. I say culture, because it has some really interesting details to it. I am not a professor in this field, and I really don’t know too much about psychology or sociology, or the effects of the crowds, but what happened made me think.

What happened?

The world is changing rapidly, and we don’t really know the effects of it yet. Janos posted a picture to 9gag asking the community to help him win a contest and win $5000, so he can help his little brother who is disabled. He wanted a Christmas that he’ll never forget. He seemed like a nice fellow and he had good intentions and he needed 3000 likes on Facebook so 9gag came to the rescue: with over 47 thousand likes. That is just simply impressive, and in the light of later events this was only the beginning and nothing compared to what this online community achieved.

Janos was banned from the competition. A really bad choice from Nescafé: the rage of the whole Internet came down from the heavens – the great fear happened: the sky fell on them, even a little magic potion couldn’t help on the situation. So Janos was not in the final 30 – from whom 5 competitors would win each $5000. I won’t discuss the contest in depth here. Let’s just say that the jury had every right not to select Janos as a finalist, but they should’ve done something with a contestant that had over 40 thousand people behind him. And Nescafé had a pretty misleading slogen: “the two contestant with the most likes will certainly win”. They left out: if they are selected as a finalist by our own jury.

But what did 9gag do?

And here comes the important, scary, glorious part – or call it what you will. The 9gag Army came, saw and conquered. In just one day Janos gained 25 thousand likes on Facebook for this new group. Not to mention the birth of the Facebook page: Occupy unfairNes-cafe. People were outraged: they posted on the page of Nescafé Hungary, in just minutes all hell broke lose, the page was spammed by the second, it was like they hit it with a heavy machine gun and a few tanks, bombs, cannons, everything they had and they did it continuously for 24 hours and still counting. But this is not all: They posted the same thing over and over again to the official Nescafé page, to CNN and other pages all over the world, making everybody know about what happened, and demanding the $5000 to Janos.

They reached their goal, slowly everything is returning back to normal. Nescafé reassured everybody that they are working on the situation. They contacted Janos and offered him 3 things, from which he did not yet choose anything. Also 9gag offered Janos money as well, suggesting to him to open a Paypal account to gather the $5000 for charity. Everything turned out great.

What do you want to say with all this?

This whole mess made me think. The Internet has real power now. Or I should say the community on the Internet. They forced a big company to their knees, and all this came from one person. And maybe he wasn’t even right, but the online community was outraged and that’s it. But this is a fearsome thing if you think about it – I don’t want to say anything bad about Janos, I truly think that he’s a nice fellow, and he keeps calming people down on his Facebook page, saying be funny, be creative, don’t be rude. He has good intentions, but I played with the thought for a bit: what if this power gets into the hands of a bad person? This whole thing can now have an effect on governments, on the economy. And it is hardly controllable. They can show their strength 24/7 being on different parts of the world, they can force anything.

9gag started to fight back, but more people joined quickly! Facebook and Twitter are pages where you can easily get information on stuff happening right now, and you can join in a fight that’s happening. I searched Twitter yesterday with the word Nescafé and Nescafail and everybody was talking about this. The Internet connects people really quickly. So a fully equipped army was ready in just minutes. Just imagine if this fell into the wrong hands. One Tweet and millions are ready to follow an order. Scary. Maybe impossible? Who knows…

Conclusion.

Janos was in the right place at the right time. Occupy Wall Street is happening now and obviously people are more eager to force big companies to pay up. But this whole thing showed us that in just  24 hours an online community, that’s seemingly spread all over the world and is not organised, can achieve a victory like this: it can force a big-shot company to deal with only one person – so they won’t lose customers, and they won’t have a bad reputation.

This is a huge force and it only foreshadows the things to come. I’d really like to read some interesting stuff on this subject. The power of the Internet, or the psychology of the Internet or the crowds on the Internet, the movement of this. So if you have anything to share or say about this, please do it below!

What’s the Purpose of a Website?

A website can be useful for a few different things and can have different purposes. It can be a business card for example. You give your link (your name preferably, so it’s easier) and there they can find your contacts on a single paged site. This is however a bit useless: if you hand out a business card there they’ll already have your contacts and without SEO and marketing nobody will find a business card type website, and furthermore nobody will be interested if they can’t find some material. This type of websites can be useful with already big and famous names and companies where you know their portfolio already (for example we all know the Pixar movies and if I’d like something from Pixar I would only want their contact info).

It can be a brochure. Our company website is something similar. We have some info on us, on what we do, how we do it and of course some samples of our work. This is a great opportunity for smaller businesses.

Then there are social sites like blogs. These can be individual, or company owned and they are pretty prevailing nowadays. Everybody has one – your family can know about it, or a relevant community, anything – and if you’re good you can even make money from it. If you have a huge community it could be good to maintain a forum as well. There are huge community sites around the internet where people with the same interest gather – these sites offer news, updates, links, forums, maybe even a small portfolio site for the individuals, so almost anything.

So Who Cares, I’m on Facebook.

But is this really worth it? Everybody is on Facebook. We could join in and standardize everything: money, alphabet, language, and we could make only one site on the internet. Imagine it: the Internet would be one website. For example Facebook. You’ll have an option to start a blog, share yourself, your info, your business, and already you can find other big companies there, photos of their work, so brochure, business card and even blogs and forums are pretty much available with Facebook – well different forms, but let’s just say it’s the same.

Of course this will never happen, race will always be, and one company can hardly monatize the whole Internet. But this is a relevant question: if I have a Facebook page and url, why should I spend money on a website? Everybody can find me on Facebook, I can even upload my portfolio.

Well of course, I can’t argue with this and you can do that, sure. But… this is the thing: Facebook is for free, a standard Google website is for free. And everybody knows it’s for free and some potential clients will know that it’s free and they will think that this person, or company is so unknown, or bad that it doesn’t even have the money for a personalized website. It’s just basically bad reputation. It’s just becoming customary for businesses to have a website and beside that be part of every social community. Of course I could manage everything with Facebook and Flickr for example: infos and high quality portfolio. But people love to browse. If I find a portfolio I like I look for a blog, a flickr site, a Facebook, anything I can follow.

A hard questions, so share your thoughts with us!

What’s useless?

Pretty much almost everything out there that promises you quick luck and fame is a lie. They’ll get you 10,000 views, followers, etc. in a week or two, but those followers will be of low quality and mainly spam followers. And you paid money for them. It’s just not worth it. Don’t pay anything, have 100-200 followers, but if those are quality followers then they will be more important than a million spam followers.

Don’t waste your money on Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon views and ads as well. These won’t work either. And though I didn’t try it, paying for a big banner on a site that has – presumably – millions of views a month will not get you anywhere. These are just fakes that will get your money and leave you pretty much where you were, or much worse – making you look like a spammer.

It might seem that I’m really really pessimistic, but I can tell you that experience is talking, not hate or anything like that. I tried a lot of things to advertise and better market the indigoline blog and to make it good and famous. Nothing worked from the list I mentioned above.

What will work then?

This is a great question, and a hard one. I think that it’s different for everybody. For example I have a 3d related personal blog as well. There I’m not trying to make a lot of followers, I’m trying to make quality followers and I think there are a couple of different and successful ways to do that. And I can apply these to the indigoline blog as well, and practically any type of blog or website and business.

1. Post quality content. This is a must. If you post copied stuff you won’t get visitors, because everything you write can be found elsewhere. Talk from your own experiences, share your own thoughts.
2. Make your titles catchy, and something that gets search results. What I’m saying is that there’s a pattern people tend to search. For example if the title of this article was something like “Gather more viewers to your online site“, then it would have less chance to get a good place on Google. The How to questions always rank good, I could’ve wrote gaining more traffic, or something like that. For example our article: iPhone 5 in Thailand gets a lot of traffic because it has a nice title that interests a lot of people.
3. Advertise yourself on Youtube. Advertising on Youtube is great, for example in a few weeks I gained a few hundred of views on a few videos of mine on Youtube. With this of course you need to know what people want, and what they search for. It’s a hard thing, and if they don’t search for your stuff it’s even harder. But if you have some quality tutorial for example, some interesting and rare stuff, or something that’s a problem for everybody, you can make a video and gain a few views. And of course don’t forget to mention your links in the description area.
4. About guest posts… For you it’s great to give guest posts and have your links published on an other high traffic site. But for your site it’s not too good. You can hope of course for good content and some traffic, but I tried it, doesn’t work well for the site that accepts the posts.
5. Interviews and unique stuff. This is something however that’s really great. Interviewing people can gather some traffic for your site and it can even gather hundreds of viewers if you are lucky. This happened once with me with the interview with Henning Sanden. But this thing is not something that you can calculate.

So, as I promiesed, here you can find the 25 free hand written fonts, on line 25.