This is the second in a series of podcasts dedicated to bringing you cutting edge tips on website design, social media, marketing and more!

This episode’s topics:

Finding the right client. Hosts Geoff McMahen and Rosh Sillars discuss the finer points of client acquistion.

Are you looking for a great way to increase the local search engine rank of your website? A really great way to boost your website’s rank is to make sure you have listed your business on the major local search engines.If you need a simple way to start this process, look no further, simply visit Get Listed.org, and enter your business name and zip code.

Once you have entered your information you will see a very well laid out screen that lets you know which sites that you have a claimed listing on. From this point forward, the rest is actually pretty simple. Visit each site that you do not have a claimed listing on and create your listing then claim it.

The tools to assist your local listing needs don’t stop there. You can use the left pane navigation to see a list of any reviews about your business on each of the major local search engines sites.

Another great feature of using Get Listed is the ability to access a recommended to do list. This handy list will give you a clear view of items to accomplish for each site you should be listed on.

As with many other endeavors in life, persistence will be key here. What I mean is simply that in order to get listed on all of these sites, it will take a bit of effort. I would suggest tackling this in pieces over a period of time.

I hope you enjoyed the post and find value with the results using Get Listed.org

This is the first in a series of upcoming podcasts dedicated to bringing you cutting edge tips on website design, social media, marketing and more!

This episode’s topics:

The website design process, part one.

The value of a site map.

The power of a well crafted website wireframe.

Podcast host: Geoff McMahen Rosh Sillars

Welcome to the second post in a series dedicated to giving you a little insight on how you can use some of the latest online applications to automate and accelerate the success of your design business.

One of the tools the Motion Audio 7 design team has come to love and embrace is the UX wire framing and prototyping tool by Invision. We love this tool not only because it is feature rich and easy to use but also because it saves us time. When we say time, we really mean lots of time! Prior to using Invision to build interactive wire frames for our client projects we usually went right from project spec to design comp, usually in Photoshop or Fireworks. We presented our designs to our clients and of course, then came changes. Changes that took a great deal of time to make simply because we were making the changes right in the actual fully skinned design file.

Now that we are using Invision we go from project spec to wireframe. The wireframe is uploaded to Invision and shared with our client. Our clients can view the wireframe and make comments right on the wire frame which is hosted on the Invision site. Once the wire frame is approved we then move on to the design phase and add all of the graphics, images, etc…

So how did we add a step in our process but manage to save time? The answer is simple. We create the first wireframe in Photoshop or Fireworks but we only use grey scale blocks to represent sections of the actual website. These sections contain the content for the project. The client can then see and approve the overall layout of the project and be able to tell how their content will look online. Any changes that need to be made get made at this stage, before the actual graphics are applied therefore the changes happen much faster.

In order to put the time savings into perspective for you, I constructed a wire frame for a 13 page website and uploaded it for presentation to the client in less than two hours! I was able to complete this so quickly because I was using Fireworks to build the wire frame. That is the beauty of Invision. You can use the tools you already know rather than learning another tool.

I would encourage anyone that is looking to streamline their design processes to give Invision a try. You can sign up for a free trial and be up and running almost instantly!

Welcome to the first post in a series dedicated to giving you a little insight on how you can use some of the latest online applications to automate and accelerate the success of your design business.

One of the first challenges I faced while growing my design studio Motion Audio 7 was time management. I was working all day, everyday, but at the end of each week it seemed as if I was not making enough progress. The frustrating part was that I knew I was working hard, not taking too many breaks and no, I wasn’t surfing the web all day either.

It was at that point that I knew I had to answer one very important question: Where was my time going? The scary part was simply that I couldn’t answer the question because I really didn’t know exactly. I knew my days were split between meeting clients, networking, general studio chores and of course, working on client projects but I really could not tell you exactly how much time was spent on each.

I realized that I needed to fix the problem of simply not knowing where my time was being spent. I turned to an online application called Harvest for help. Within one hour of signing up for the trial period of Harvest I had wondered how I ever got by without this amazing tool. Harvest not only allowed me to easily track time spent on client projects but also to track time for any internal studio projects and more. My instant favorite feature was the ease of time tracking, made painless by the free iPhone app as well as a free Mac desktop widget that enables you to enter your time from anywhere.

So now that I was almost instantly up and running with a great time tracking tool, the next task was to find out where my time was actually being spent. Harvest makes this task simple as well with its powerful time reporting feature. At the end of each day or week I am able to get a detailed report of time spent on any given project. As I began to analyze my time I realized that I was actually only spending about 35 percent of my week on client projects! Because of these reports I knew I now had another issue to fix regarding the time demands of non client related projects.

The take-away from this lesson is simply that you can’t fix a problem if you can’t see it. Monitoring my business operations has now become number one priority. As the Harvest slogan goes, “Time is money, track it wisely!.”