Talking Through My Hat

The Red Beret Design Blog

What Do Women Want? Web Design and Maintenance!

by Claire Doyle Ragin on February 25, 2013

NAWBO (the National Association of Women Owned Business) and web.com conducted a survey on the State of Women-Owned Businesses. The area they cited as most important to their bottom line was web design and maintenance, followed by social media marketing and SEO, and email marketing.

Are you a women entrepreneur who would like to work with a woman-owned web design business? Contact Red Beret Design!

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Facebook Graph Search and B2B Companies

by Claire Doyle Ragin on February 25, 2013

This article on optimizing your Facebook content in order to take advantage of Facebook’s new Graph Search makes a lot of sense, but I doubt that it is applicable for most companies that don’t cater to consumers. While I may be interested in what restaurants my friends like in Durham, or what books my friends are reading, I don’t get any social-network-mediated results for, say, printer affiliate programs, or SEO consultants. What I do get are results from Bing, the Microsoft search engine. A distant second to Google in terms of search traffic, optimizing for Bing could become more critical if people begin using Facebook for searching rather than hopping over to Google.

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Use caution when selecting your WordPress theme

October 1, 2012

I read an eye-opening article today about the hazards of (some) free WordPress themes. The article, entitled “Why you should never search for free WordPress themes” analyzes the code in WordPress themes downloaded from the top 10 Google results for the search query “free WordPress themes”. MOST of the themes the author, Siobhan McKeown, examines [...]

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new designs in the portfolio

September 14, 2012

I added some new work to all three portfolios today. These are just a few of the projects I’ve been working on in the last few months: A pro bono project for the Chapel Hill Breast Cancer Foundation In the last year, breast cancer has become a personal issue for me. I wouldn’t be around [...]

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redberetdesign.com now optimized for mobile

September 13, 2012

I took advantage of a discount offer for GoMobi to create a mobile-optimized version of redberetdesign.com. According to Google Analytics, the amount of traffic I get via mobile is still pretty small, but it is growing, and I wanted to be sure that anyone coming to the website via a mobile phone was treated to [...]

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The art and science of logo design

June 23, 2012

Logo design can be one of the toughest challenges for a new company. What do you need to convey about your company, and how do you boil that down into a simple symbol? Bill Haig, Ph.D., worked for years with famed graphic designer Saul Bass. He describes his approach, which he calls credibility-based logo design, [...]

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Cancer and the Solopreneur

June 14, 2012

Last year I set out to blog regularly in order to lend insight into topics of interest to companies that are trying to figure the best way to build a website or market their business. I set myself a long list of topics and set about writing daily, and posting whenever I’d finished a brief [...]

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Predicting the Future of Content Marketing

August 23, 2011

The Content Marketing Institute recently published an article entitled “12 Content Marketing Predictions for 2012“. Some interesting ideas, a couple of which were food for thought, several of which observations of current trends more than predictions of anything brand new. Here’s my take on the predictions of the content marketers: Baggott: Agree, but loyal customers [...]

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The Hidden Costs of Open Source Web Design

August 22, 2011

In a previous post on open source web development platforms, I gave some background about exactly what Open Source means in terms of web design and development. In this post I’ll delve a little deeper into the pros and cons of using and open source web design and content management systems (CMS). The main attraction [...]

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Open Source Web Development Platforms

August 10, 2011

Several of the most popular web development platforms, including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, are “open source” software. What does that mean? Why should you care? Open source software is developed in a very different way than proprietary software. Proprietary software is developed along the same lines any commercial product is developed, under the control and [...]

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