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You’re tired of hearing about how profitable the Internet is, especially knowing your website is an increasing expense never to be recouped, continually bleeding your bottom line. The time has finally come to choose a new website design company. Ironically, most websites are not profitable and many brand new websites are hamstrung in regard to ever being profitable the moment, the very moment, of publication to the Internet. Profit generating website development is a puzzle with dozens of critically important pieces. First and foremost, your website must be found in native or ‘free’ search engine queries. Nearly as important to website profitability is graphic design perfectly definitive of your unique business or organization.

Picasso, Monet and Rembrandt-‘like’ creativity, coupled with compelling creative genius is certainly not a prerequisite for a career as a web development graphic designer. The evidence is everywhere on the Internet. Through the ages humanity has sought to make personal and beautiful the things we have to view in day to day life. Architecture, public places and dwellings have been made visually unique and personally representative since prehistoric times. American Indians painted walls and ceilings of dwellings, ancient Egyptians built architectural wonders of the world as celebrations of culture and Romans built stone monuments of extraordinary beauty for entertainment and worship. The dominant culture of the last two hundred years is adorned with graphic appeal in every glimmering facet of our, “Shining city on a hill.” Homes bristle with intended graphic appeal, automobiles continuously change visually to suit human interest. Is there a home that doesn’t have a few pieces of art adorning the walls or shelves? Even our clothes make visual impressions defining us as individuals to the rest of the world. With graphic appeal having all encompassing human value, why do so many websites have none? Why do most websites visually say nothing about a business? Why do so many websites graphically confuse who or what a business is for site viewers?

Unlike the exterior of a building where there may be little a small or even large business can do about visual appeal, a website walks customers directly in the showroom or executive offices where visual impression make or break a business. Nothing says, “I am overpaying for this oil change,” like fine art, luxury furniture and a 72 inch plasma television in a corner garage waiting room. Nothing stokes pangs of anxiety like lawn furniture, stained emerald green polyester shag carpet and a toothless receptionist in a dentist office. Accountability for failure of graphic design in the website industry lies squarely on the backs of website graphic design professionals and the proliferation of, ‘what the customer doesn’t know’ approach to website development so many website design and development companies adhere to. What you know/don’t know determines what you get… Even what you pay. There is much all but the very best website development firms don’t know about website development; it simply is not feasible for a business person or manager to understand what is required for profitable website development.

Most graphic website designers are perfectly happy putting minimal thought into the visual creativity of their customer’s websites. Minimal work and maximum profitability is a great motivator for many web design and development firms. These template website designers are content to create websites requiring the site viewer to discern what the website is about or to read it. Like it or not, most website text rarely gets read. With website visitors spending less than five seconds on the ‘average’ website homepage, unique, definitive graphic design may be the single most important factor, once a visitor lands on your website, in having a web marketing platform literally adding to your business bottom line.

Great graphic website design instills customer confidence. Intriguing website graphics slow Internet shoppers down. Well done, unique website graphic design defines a business or entity visually and precisely as the business marketing team or owner defines the business in written words or conversation with The single customer the business must acquire to succeed or even exist.

The ‘kicker,’ so to speak is; the cost of a Custom Creative Genius inspired website design, coupled with template free code achieving at the highest level in search engine rankings is often less expensive upfront than half baked, template website development. While ‘file tab’ navigation buttons on the left or top margins, with base-color predetermined boxes to plug an individual business’s logo, marketing and photos in is, ‘classic website design,’ classic website design is a complete and utter failure for business’s desperately needing to capture every customer who experiences their web based marketing platform as a new business client.

So what is a business or organization to do in choosing a website developer? Shop around for a website design and development firm with many examples of custom design websites at the top of free searches on major search engines. The custom designs must make sense, visually defining the services or products the business offers. While great, custom website design and development firms are but a drop in the ocean of all website developers, finding one will not only make the likelihood of return on investment at any price point much higher, a real website developer who, ‘gets’ the importance of graphic design, who has the ability to do great graphic website development will make for your business, an Internet based marketing platform generating profitable new business.

Follow these simple keys to find a website developer and your business will have the greatest chance to experience the deep refreshing profit filled waters of the Internet revenue stream. Ignore these simple keys and you will likely end up with a website only profitable for your template website developer.

Avoid any website designer/developer who pushes pay per click. Even asking you to consider pay-per-click is a RED FLAG. If your perspective web developer is a pay-per-click pusher they likely use template code or don’t have the ability to install your web marketing platform where it needs to be to generate profit. Template code very often stops search engine spiders. Template code is often indicative of web developers who don’t know how or don’t want to do the work to get your website to the top of free searches where profits are generated on the Internet.

Look at your prospective website developer’s portfolio page. If they don’t have one ask for twenty examples of websites they have developed. If they can’t come up with twenty, quickly flee. If they come up with twenty after not choosing to display them on their own website, call all twenty and ask if they are experiencing profitable new business, undeniably related to their website… If not flee. Past performance is the single greatest indicator of the result you will achieve with any website deign/development firm. Avoid any website developer who offers templates like the plague. Offering templates is a clear indication the website developer is willing to take shortcuts to maximize their own profitability at the long term expense of their clients. The shortcut mentality is a form of rot spoiling everything it touches in website development. Template development is almost always indicative of a website developer who will deliver a solution with very little hope of ever achieving profitable new business via the web. Finally, in keeping with this article look, REALLY LOOK, at the website developer’s portfolio. Do all the sites look very similar? Is the logo in the same place and all of the navigation always on the left side, with boxes for content? Does even the website development company’s own site lack any kind of graphic uniqueness? Could you unplug their logo, put another in its place, and the website would be a different type of business website? If so, look elsewhere. If they can’t do it for themselves they won’t do it for you.

A graphic design equivalent of a Monet website no one other than your existing customers can find is a bad website. A website at the top of free searches for your choice of keywords, with great graphic design, perfectly definitive visually of your business or organization, is a profitable website for YOU. Your best choice for a website designer/developer is a developer who proves they will put you on the top of search engines like Google and Yahoo, AND who is a designer capable of developing a unique image, intuitively endearing customer confidence while gently pushing your online customers into the contact or purchase process. While it may take a little more effort to choose your website developer, your graphically superior website will be the single greatest return on investment marketing your business ever invests in, IF you make the right choice.

When writing content for a website, there are several factors to keep in mind. The most important consideration is to optimize your content for web searches, a process otherwise known as SEO, or search engine optimization. The good news is the Texas web designers have the experience and know how to provide you with optimized content across all pages of your site to insure you will have the highest possible rankings in search engine results.

Optimized web content is based on keywords. When people search for information on the Internet, they type in a variety of keywords. The list of possibilities may be large, so it is important to keep this in mind when making out your keyword list. The Texas web designers all have a good understanding of how this works, so all you need to do is supply them with the information and they will take care of the rest.

Search engines such as Google place a great deal of importance on the keywords found on your web page when calculating where you rank in the results. The Texas web designers will help to strategically place you among the top ranked sites relevant to yours. For example, if you run a car rental business, you want people to be able to find your site before they see other potential competitors. This is where page ranking comes into play and why the content found on your pages must be optimized.

Here’s how it works. You know you want to include pages with information about your car rental service that will illustrate to others exactly what you do and why people in your area should rent a car from you. The Texas web designers will use keywords such as Texas car rental, Texas car rental services, Texas automobile rentals, and so on when writing the content of your pages. The keywords are included so they are relevant, not just placed in the content to serve a purpose. When they are relevant, they directly relate to the content of each particular page. Then when a person searches for car rental services in Texas using any of the keywords incorporated into the content, your page will have a better chance of ranking toward if not at the top.

There are many other factors the Texas web designers will take into account, but content is among the most important. This is because the actual content found on your site is what people are there to read. It will provide them with valuable information about who you are and what you do, and will make them want to keep reading to find out more.

High quality content will bring your website higher rankings, more traffic, and greater popularity. The Texas web designers work to insure the content on each page is of the highest quality, as this is a very important factor in how sites are ranked by the search engines.

The content provided by the Texas web designers will be optimized, informative, and interesting. The amount of traffic this will drive to your website will make a definite difference for your business, and you are likely to begin seeing results fairly quickly. .

Next time you get in your car, take a moment and look around — quite a collection of electronic content isn’t there? Yes, there is. In fact, most projections indicate that the use of electronics in automobiles is increasing at such a rapid rate that by the end of the decade more than 40 percent of an automobile’s cost will be in electronics. That’s an amazing number that was virtually impossible to imagine 10 to 15 years ago, but is now very much a reality.

What you see electronically from your view in the driver’s seat is only the tip of the iceberg. With advanced features in the automobile such as telematics, DVD/video, satellite radio, GPS navigation, automatic climate control, electronic stability control, power doors, seats, mirrors and windows … the fact is there is an increasing amount of electronic sophistication in the automobile. And these are just the systems you can see.

Beneath the surface of your vehicle, changes have occurred over the past 10 years equally as dramatic as those in the passenger compartment. Just about every system in which an actuator drove the mechanical or hydraulic system has been replaced by an electronic sensor and switch augmenting the mechanical and hydraulic systems. Many of these critical systems and electronic control units (ECUs) manage the brakes, airbags and steering.

The “electronification” of the automobile is being driven by today’s consumers and their demands for increased reliability, not to mention the more basic desire for more sensory sizzle. Consequently, automakers are scrambling to recruit talent and retool an industry that, until recently, mechanical engineers and design software had dominated. A new day is dawning in the automotive world, and automakers and their suppliers need a savvy electronics staff and supplier-support structure that can deal with electronic-design issues that are unique to the automotive arena.

The major challenge facing automotive electronics designers is the high degree of connectivity required within the vehicle. In just the past decade, the magnitude and complexity of the interconnection of automotive electronics has increased dramatically. Depending on the vehicle, there can be 3 to 15 ECUs (over 50 in some high-end vehicles) with hundreds of embedded software modules; and each of these applications must inter-communicate. Adding to the complexity is that each ECU presents its own challenge, given that the software, middleware and application software is written by different companies, yet must be integrated together within the overall framework of the vehicle.

The pressure falls squarely upon the tier-one suppliers, because today’s auto manufacturers don’t design the electrical systems; it’s the responsibility of the many tier-one suppliers to design the electronic subsystems found within our vehicles. Tier-one vendors, in turn, rely on tier-two vendors, essentially semiconductor and pc-board-design vendors, to supply and even custom-design components for each ECU.

Automakers design automobiles four years in advance of their commercial release, so auto manufacturers today are working on 2012 cars, vans, SUVs and trucks that they will release in mid-2011. They take responsibility to conceive an approximation of the electronics inventory, such as a list of ECUs and their behavioral specifications. This can even include data about the ECU’s networks that includes low- and high-speed controller-area networks and local-interconnect networks. The manufacturers almost never specify the actual electronic components; they rely on their suppliers to delve into that detail.

This is just the start of the process. The manufacturer shops the rough specifications to the tier-one suppliers for bid, narrows the field down to perhaps three finalists for each ECU and demands that each of the finalists deliver a prototype within six months. Once the prototype meets the functionality requirements, the supplier designs an actual scale model ECU. When the manufacturer begins testing, it’s not uncommon for the ECU’s specifications to change, further adding time, money and complexity to the design phase.

And therein is the crux of the challenge that automotive companies face — how to shorten the traditional automotive design phase in conjunction with the ever-changing demands of today’s electronics-eager consumers. Ask yourself this question, “How many people do you know that have a four-year old cell phone?” With the infotainment options available to consumers both outside and inside their vehicles, automotive manufacturers are under pressure to stay current with the demands of these consumers, many of whom are updating their entertainment gadgets every year.

Manufacturers and suppliers are up to meeting the challenges. Real-time design and testing, developing streamlined communications across each design tier, more standardized products and application-specific standard products — these are just a few of the solutions that are being implemented to deliver cutting-edge electronics to an ever-demanding automotive customer in today’s, and tomorrow’s, cars and trucks.

Envisioning the Open Road: Automotive Designers Creating the Cars of Today & Tomorrow

By Damian McKnight
Designschools.com Contributing Writer

It can be argued that no design career is sexier than that of the Automotive Designer. Today’s designers embody the styles and culture of today while contouring the style of tomorrow. They utilize product design principles and emerging technology to create commercial, yet innovative, designs for new automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, buses, coaches, and vans. Often working in tandom with a large team of engineers, designers work to ensure that their concepts are appealing to consumers, can actually lead to functioning automobiles, and are environmentally friendly and affordable. Not to mention…..sexy.

History

In the United States, automotive design reached a critical juncture in 1924 when the American national automobile market began reaching saturation. To maintain sales, General Motors pioneer Alfred P. Sloan Jr. suggested annual model-year design changes in the hope that car owners would want to buy a new replacement each year. His strategy succeeded and was later adapted by rest of the industry.

The most celebrated American auto designer is probably Harley Earl,who brought the tailfin and other aeronautical design references to auto design in the 1950s. Earl is joined among legendary auto designers by Gordon Buehrig, responsible for the Auburn 851 and iconic Cord 810 and 812. Another notable designer who had a markedly different style was Chrysler group’s designer Virgil Exner, an early pioneer of Cab forward (a.k.a.Forward look) design in mid-1950s. Exner is also credited with introducing the pointed tail fins in the 1956 Plymouth Belvedere later adapted by all other Detroit studios. (more…)