Creative Many – Creative People & Creative Places

How to design infographics that go viral

October 15, 2024July 3, 2024 by Creative Many

Alright, data enthusiasts and visual virtuosos, buckle up! We’re about to dive headfirst into the wild world of viral infographics. We’re talking about designs so catchy, they spread faster than gossip at a high school reunion.

But first, let me spin you a yarn from the infographic trenches. Picture this: It’s 2015, and I’m tasked with creating an infographic about… wait for it… the history of the garden gnome. (Yes, that’s a thing. No, I don’t know why people need to know about the genealogy of pointy-hatted lawn ornaments, but here we are.) I spent days crafting what I thought was the Mona Lisa of gnome infographics. It had everything – timelines, fun facts, even a little gnome family tree.

The result? It went about as viral as a pet rock with a head cold.

Turns out, not everyone shares my passion for vertically challenged ceramic gardeners. Who knew?

So, how do you create infographics that don’t just sit there like a garden gnome, but actually take off and conquer the internet? Well, grab your favorite caffeinated beverage (or a glass of wine, I don’t judge), and let’s dive into the art and science of crafting infographics that go viral faster than you can say “share this post!”

Start with a Bang: Your Topic is Your Rocket Fuel

First things first, let’s talk about choosing a topic. Your infographic topic is like the fuel in a rocket – choose the right one, and you’ll shoot for the stars. Choose the wrong one, and well… you might end up with a garden gnome history lesson that nobody asked for.

5 Warning Signs That Indicate Your Recycling Business Needs A New SEO Agency

October 9, 2024March 22, 2024 by Creative Many

If you have already employed an SEO agency to help advance your recycling business, then it is possible that you are several steps ahead of many of your competitors. We say ‘possible’ because, according to the SEO professionals, many clients come to them having previously had a poor experience with another SEO agency.

Obviously, each of those bad experiences will be somewhat unique, but the tales of woe point out several issues that seem to occur more often than others. Many of them might be considered red flags that should alert any recycling business owner that the service they are receiving from their SEO agency is not one that is unlikely to produce many positive outcomes, especially improved rankings.

If you already use an SEO agency, and you feel you are not well served, or the results being generated are not what you were hoping for, then it might be time to look for another SEO agency, and confirmation of this will be if any the following 5 warning signs exist.

The Role of Sustainable Practices in Marketing Landscape Design Services

May 3, 2024March 9, 2024 by Creative Many

Going Green to Attract More Green: How Sustainable Landscaping Boosts Your Biz

Yo, let’s be real – the whole “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” terminology gets thrown around more than a sweaty athlete’s jockstrap these days. Brandslatch onto environmental buzzwords to pander to conscious consumers and come across as socially responsible.

But for us landscape designers, embracing truly sustainable practices isn’t just a marketing ploy. It’s a way of life! An ethos that harmonizes nature, practicality, and mind-blowing design. And you better believe it can be one helluva competitive advantage for attracting more green…as in cold hard cash money!

Tap Into the Eco-Conscious Gold Mine
Here are the facts: Environmental concerns aren’t just for Greenpeace-hugging hippies anymore. With climate change backlash intensifying and consumers becoming hyper-aware of their carbon footprints, eco-consciousness is going insanely mainstream.

A study by Houzz estimates that a whopping 83% of homeowners now rank environmental sustainability as an important consideration for home projects. Let that stat marinate for a second…

We’re talking about a massive, insatiable market of environmentally-minded clients who are actively seeking out professionals aligned with their values. An experienced landscape designer who can plan and execute eco-friendly outdoor spaces is pure marketing catnip!

5 Steps To Resolving Problems Creatively Within Your Landscaping Business

October 9, 2024December 23, 2023 by Creative Many

No matter how long landscapers have been in business, whether just starting or having been around for more than a decade, they will know that running a landscaping business is not all sunshine and roses. If you will pardon the gardening pun. This means that a landscaping business, or any business, no matter what niche it is in or what size it is, will invariably encounter problems.

You will often find that the businesses that have overcome the most significant number of problems have proved to be the most persistent and secure. Not that we are suggesting you set about creating problems to solve, but there is a valuable lesson to be learned here. That lesson is that being able to solve problems gives a business owner a huge advantage over others who cannot.

Taking that stage further and making solving problems easier is the ability to use creativity. By that, we mean the so-called thinking outside of the box to answer problems that no one else would have thought of. At first, these often seem bizarre and unlikely to work, but they soon become the default solution when put into practice. Here are five steps to help you creatively solve problems.

7 Eye-Opening Statistics That Should Directly Influence Your Next Website Design

October 9, 2024December 15, 2023 by Creative Many

When people consider web design and in particular what makes a web design successful, they will reflect on several elements. These will include what is visually appealing, the quality of the content, the layout, and the ease of navigation, for example. These are all perfectly valid considerations, but there is another aspect to web design that is often ignored by those who aren’t Perth web designers, and that is all the data behind it.

What we mean is that many web designs are started and completed without any reference whatsoever to data or statistics that could shed some light on what types of web design would be the most effective. Given that the internet is awash with data and statistics that are used to make key decisions daily, it makes sense that web design should follow suit. To give you a sense of what data might be useful, here are 7 eye-opening statistics relating to websites and web design.

#1: Web Design Services Growth In The Past 5 Years Is 2% Per Annum (Source: IBIS World)

This highlights the fact that more businesses are seeing the advantages of using professional web design agencies to create their websites rather than trying to build websites for themselves or using amateurs.

#2: When A Visitor Lands On A Website They Will Have An Opinion Of It Within 50 Milliseconds (Source: Taylor and Francis Online)

If ever there was a statistic that makes it abundantly clear how important the first impression your web design gives anyone landing on it, it is this one. Great visuals, easy navigation, and no annoying pop-ups will all help.

The Importance Of Actuaries In Securing Your Financial Future

October 9, 2024February 23, 2023 by Creative Many

Regardless of your age, you should be taking steps to secure your financial future, which is why you should consider using actuarial services to assist you in doing so. By all means, speak to your accountant, a financial advisor, and even your lawyer; however, if you want to minimise the financial risks you take and be fully aware of those risks which apply to your financial decisions, an actuary is who you need.

Actuarial Services Defined

Actuarial services are provided by an actuary, and the simplest definition of their job role is that they are risk assessors. However, they are not risk assessors in the usual sense whereby they will determine risks associated with a large project but, instead, an actuary’s risk assessment applies primarily to financial products and financial decisions.

More specifically, an actuary assesses risks associated with pensions, investments and insurance, and their actuarial services can be used both in the commercial sector, such as by an insurance company, and by individuals who might be considering taking out an insurance policy.

For both of these clients, an actuary will use their knowledge, skills, and experience to assess past data and past events, and then using mathematical models will make a judgement on the risk of any of these occurring again. Whilst a fortune teller might use a crystal ball to predict the future, an actuary will use only facts and data.

Features To Consider To Ensure You Purchase Filing Cabinets That Will Benefit Your Office

October 9, 2024November 30, 2022 by Creative Many

There is one item of commercial furniture from Atama Furniture that you find in most offices, and even in some home offices, which is often taken for granted. Whilst people will spend hours deciding which office chair and office desk they want to buy, this specific office furniture gets no more than scant attention. We are, of course, talking about the filing cabinet, which has graced offices of all kinds for decades

A filing cabinet is often regarded as essential to many offices, and it will sit there day in and day out, just doing what it does. Storing files safely, and making them available to whoever opens one of its drawers. That is except when someone locks the filing cabinet and misplaces the key. Even then, the filing cabinet, through no fault of its own, gets a raw deal as people either kick it in frustration or worse, force it open with a screwdriver and damage it.

What may surprise you is that, whilst there may not be so many variations as there are with office chairs and desks, there are considerable numbers of variations between different filing cabinet products. As such, a lot more care and attention should be taken when choosing a filing cabinet for your office to ensure that your office’s needs are met. So, here are some important points you should consider when buying filing cabinets.

Why Your Financial Health Has Implications For Your Physical Health

7 Reasons You Should Attend Digital Marketing Conferences

October 15, 2024November 14, 2022 by Creative Many

One of the benefits of the internet, and recently a necessity during the Covid pandemic, is that it provides the ability to have meetings and conferences online, and that includes those where the subject being discussed is digital marketing. Before, during, and after the pandemic there have been countless digital marketing contracts agreed upon, planning meetings held, and performance discussions held on platforms like Zoom, Whereby, and Microsoft Teams.

There have also been numerous digital marketing training courses, seminars and conferences held online, all of which we are sure were positive experiences for attendees. However, we hope you will agree that being able to meet others face-to-face, especially those with similar interests as you, such as digital marketing, is by far the best way to experience these events.

Now that most countries are moving past Covid and returning to some degree of normality, the option of holding conferences in person has become a possibility again. For this reason, we want to emphasise to anyone pondering whether to attend a digital marketing conference, why it can be so beneficial. Better than that, we are going to give you not one, but seven reasons why that is so.

Learn The Latest Tactics And Techniques: Another huge advantage of attending digital marketing conferences is that the speakers will be hand-picked experts who have unique and groundbreaking tactics and strategies that you can subsequently use to help your clients’ campaigns and augment their results. Learning about investing in SEO or a Google Ad campaign.

A Business Owner’s Guide To Industrial Cleaning

October 9, 2024October 12, 2022 by Creative Many

As the owner of your business, how much do you know or get involved with the commercial cleaning of your premises? Do you even use commercial office cleaning services? We ask these questions because our research tells us that many business owners are oblivious to the benefits of commercial cleaning, and even if they do know that it can provide several advantages, many do not know enough about commercial cleaning to move forward with hiring a company to do so.

We hope to change all that by providing you with a short but detailed outline of commercial cleaning so that you have all the information you need to take forward your quest for a commercial cleaning company to clean and enhance your business premises, and that includes making them healthier for all who work there.

Business Premises That Can Benefit From Commercial Cleaning

We appreciate that everyone reading this will own or manage a huge range of different business types and sizes, and be operating within equally different business premises. We can safely say that regardless of where your business and its premises fit in terms of types and sizes, commercial cleaning can benefit it. Here are just some of the many businesses and organisation types that commercial cleaning applies to.

7 Items In Your Office Which Must Be Cleaned Regularly

October 9, 2024October 5, 2022 by Creative Many

There are many significant advantages of using the services of a commercial cleaners company to clean your offices, and they extend beyond just the fact that they will clean those offices to the highest of standards. They will also sanitise many parts of your office to make it a healthy and safer environment for employees and visitors alike.

Another benefit of using commercial cleaners that is often overlooked is their huge wealth of knowledge and experience in cleaning commercial premises and offices in particular. What this means is that not only do they know how to clean and sanitise, but they also know how often everything should be cleaned, which makes it far easier for you to agree on a cleaning schedule with them.

Within that agreement, there will be items and locations within your offices that a commercial cleaning company will advise you need cleaning more often than others. This means they may set a cleaning schedule for some to be monthly, others might be weekly, and there will be some that get cleaned daily. They will also pinpoint specific areas and items within your office that should be prioritised for cleaning over others.

To assist you in better understanding what these items are that need to be cleaned regularly, and also to make it easier for you to discuss these matters with your commercial cleaning company, we are going to highlight seven items within offices that must be cleaned regularly to ensure your office remains a welcoming and healthy environment.

Top 5 All-In-One Marketing Platforms

October 9, 2024August 12, 2021 by Creative Many

When businesses are looking for software and tools to help automate and enhance their marketing and sales, they could be forgiven for being overwhelmed. The choice is enormous, and being able to pinpoint which ones are the right ones for what you want to achieve can seem a daunting task.

The good news is that there are software solutions that take several marketing automation features and instead of you having to purchase individual software for each one, instead bring them all within one platform. These all-in-one marketing tools make managing your marketing more efficient and more effective as you see an overview of your core marketing activities all within one dashboard.

Whilst there is going to be many variations to which individual marketing tools they offer, those that are worth considering the most will have solutions that help with all of the following:

5 Killer Web Design Improvements To Boost Your Cabinet Making Business’s Website’s Performance

September 15, 2021July 17, 2021 by Creative Many

A website is a huge asset to a business, and hopefully, your cabinet making business’s website falls into that category. If it does not then there are some ways to resolve any issues, and as the web design experts at www.slinkywebdesign.com.au report, they are often employed by clients to fix websites whose design is faulty rather than completely rebuilding a website from scratch.

What this means that if you feel your website is not performing as it should, you do not necessarily have to tear it down and start again. Instead, if you take a systematic approach to fixing what might be causing the problems, you should arrive at a point where you have covered all the main issues. Here are the main 5 web design improvement you should consider.

Do Not Make These Mistakes When Choosing A Website Design Agency For Your Holiday Villa Marketing Business

October 9, 2024June 15, 2021 by Creative Many

If the time has come for your holiday villa marketing business to have a new website, one of the first decisions you must make is who to employ to design and build that website. Given their huge portfolio of impressive websites built for clients, we hope you will consider the web design specialists but even they would advise you to think carefully about your choice.

There are many factors which you need to consider when choosing the correct web design agency for your website. It is important to know what you should do as part of that process, but every bit as crucial is knowing what not to do. To give you some help with regards to the latter, here are some mistakes you should avoid in your selection process for choosing a web design agency for your holiday villa marketing business’s website.

7 Design Features That Will Help You Retain Visitors To Your Website

October 9, 2024February 19, 2021 by Creative Many

Whether you are planning to have a new website built for your new home building company or wish to make improvements to your existing website, one of the main goals that any new design should have is to ensure that those who visit your website, remain on it for as long as possible. The website design experts at www.slinkywebdesign.com.au know for sure that the longer you can retain visitors the more chance there is of them taking action.

That action could be anything from filling in a contact form, calling your sales team, or requesting more information by entering their email address. Whichever calls to action you have throughout your website, they will only ever be answered if the person seeing them has spent enough time on the website to build enough trust in the company which is requesting them.

Within the design on any website, there are lots of opportunities to facilitate visitors staying for longer, and it is these design features that we are going to focus on here. In all, we have 7, that, if included in the design or redesign of your new home building company’s website, will ensure that conversions increase, and as an added and important bonus, they can also help to boost your website’s rankings on Google.

#1 – Fast Page Load Speeds: Slow-loading website pages not only have no chance of prolonging any visitor’s time on your website, but they will also end it almost immediately. Test all your pages for load speeds and arrange for the necessary changes to their design to be made if they are loading slowly.

Tips For Designing A Friendly eCommerce Checkout Page

October 9, 2024August 12, 2020 by Creative Many

It’s kind of strange to realize it, but online shopping still doesn’t seem to feel as accessible as real-world shopping, especially when a friendly ecommerce checkout page is conspicuously lacking or inadequate. There’s the obvious barriers that are unavoidable: customers can’t touch, run, or try on a product virtually; slinging your personal details about online always carries a small risk, and so on.

The thing you have to remember about your target market is that they want to feel comfortable with the experience. You should have everything be visible and easy to manage. Don’t throw a bunch of confusing popups in the customer’s face or make them wonder how to go through the steps correctly.

1. Show what currency you take up front. Whatever credit cards, PayPal, or Bitcoins you accept, have all the little icons there together so the customer knows ahead of time that their money’s good here.

2. Make your instructions clear. And being “clear” doesn’t always mean going along with whatever the interface gurus dictate as the fashion this week. Simple steps, simple instructions, and tooltips along with each field the customer has to enter. Keep things minimal – trying to sell more things to the user while they’re trying to buy something already is just obnoxious. In terms of simplicity, a friendly ecommerce checkout page should look as close to the Google search home page as practical.

Improving The User Experience Of Your Website Visitors

August 17, 2021February 12, 2019 by Creative Many

User experience when it comes to websites revolves around how a visitor to a website behaves and interacts with the functionality of the website, according to a natural flow and their natural instincts. If a website visitor has to take more than a few seconds to figure out how to complete an action, or how to navigate to where they wish within the site, there’s a high chance that they may give up altogether and leave the site. This results in a bounce rate (or short visit) that can become alarming to search engines and this is believed to be one of the many factors taken into consideration when a website is ranked in the organic search results.

So how can you improve the entire user experience of your website? If you are building a new website or redeveloping your old one to be more modern and functional, user experience research and testing should be a prime focus in the planning stages, throughout the website build and before the big launch. Below are some of the most important points concerning the critical aspects of creating and improving a good website user experience.

24 hours For Big Businesses to Remove Inappropriate Facebook Comments

August 17, 2021August 12, 2012 by Creative Many

Recently the Advertising Standards Board (ASB) ruled that business Facebook pages were an advertisement, and that brands needed to take responsibility for the comments posted by members of the public such as misleading or inappropriate content. Social media pages are now considered to fall under the category of advertising, and the rules and regulations that apply to advertising content extends to user-generated content.

This is causing some concern amongst businesses who are already actively using Facebook as part of their social media marketing strategies. There are wide reaching implications to businesses that aren’t actively monitoring Facebook comments, or don’t allocate resources to active moderation of content.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has now clarified that large companies using Facebook will need to remove misleading or inappropriate comments within 24 hours. This guideline applies to large businesses, while there will apparently be more time allowed for smaller businesses.

Australian Retailers Yet To Catch Up With Consumers In Mobile Commerce

October 9, 2024March 12, 2012 by Creative Many

Australia has one of the world’s highest levels of mobile penetration and smart phone usage – recent research by Google found that 25% of Australian consumers have used their smart phone to research or purchase a product.

eMarketingConnected’s research found that 15% of all retailers have a mobile website – this compares to 46% in the U.S. where mobile retail websites have grown from 14% in the last year (source – RIS News 2011 Cross Channel Retail Study). This puts Australia a year behind the U.S., assuming a large number of major retailers will take the plunge and build a mobile website in the next year. Dick Smith is one major Australian retailer that has recently launched a mobile website to meet the growing demand (read the full Dick Smith mobile website review here).

Less than half of retailers in all sectors have a mobile website, there’s also a large variation between sectors with multi-retailers leading the way, closely followed by the electrical retailers. The remaining sectors have a low percentage of retailers providing a mobile website.

Seven Unusual Creative Motifs For Your Next Web Design

September 15, 2021December 29, 2009 by Creative Many

Rather than the run-of-the-mill designs we normally see, what if your next web design came from someplace… unexpected? A brilliantly contrary creative motif that makes sense in retrospect? Here are our picks for some themes you might not have thought of, but should:

Hand drawn – Example It always looks brilliantly original, because it’s your own hand! Stick-figures and elementary-school drawings are getting really, really big this year. Try to look as untalented as possible!

Factory – Example Industrial designs are great for developers, producers, and artists. It makes the customer anticipate that you’ll have a strong work ethic.

Retro ’50s – Example Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe the classics work best, but we haven’t seen a single web page done in retro that goes wrong. If you readers can, please show us in the comments.