LightMix Design Studio

Design Studio | Web | Interface Design Company | Multimedia

Creating a trifold brochure – a quick guide

A quick guide to create effective trifold brochure – part 1 When creating a trifold brochure it is important to decide on several items. Consider purpose, audience and content. Usually, a company or an organization decide to print trifold brochures to start marketing campaign, target specific event, group or promote specific product. Engaging customers online more »

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Free Financial Content, free financial data for your website – wikiinvest

Wikiinvest has improved free financial content section allowing to generate your own charts, derivatives, indices, global markets. Check out http://www.wikinvest.com/ and revisit the Blogger Plug-ins ( http://www.wikinvest.com/special/BloggerCentral) specifically updated Embed Stock Chart module.  Also use top navigation to select popular categories many of which have charts that can be embedded into your site. For example Currencies, more »

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Forex tools for your website, free FX content, free FX data

Are you looking for free FX content providers? We continue our collection of free resources for website owners in the financial service industry and today focus on various resources that offer free forex markets data and tools. We noticed that all or most top FX clearing firms are starting to provide free content as a more »

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Corporate identity guidelines, Branding guidelines, Styleguide design examples

How to approach identity and branding project? We recommend that a first step is for organization to review examples of corporate identity guidelines, branding guides and style guides from other companies before deciding on how to approach their ID redesign. A great resource to see examples of how your corporate identity can be documented is more »

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Website design checklist – planning a website, logo, marketing campaign and more

We will not try to reinvent the wheel here. Creating a good checklist for designing a website has two sides. On one end, website design checklist is good thing. We see that many clients come completely disorganized and want to see end product without realizing that they have no content, no marketing plan, no offer, more »

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Introducing Broker website design, website for IBs – futures brokers, equities brokers, commodities, forex brokers websites

Designing a website for an Introducing Broker (futures brokers website design, forex broker website design, commodities brokers, equities brokers website design) requires understanding how IBs and Clearing firms work, basic understanding of financial markets and experience designing websites for many firms. Look no further, LightMix was designing websites for introducing brokers for over 10 years. What more »

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Social media marketing to improve website design and website performance

Everyone is aware of recent popularity and necessity of social media marketing. There are many ways how a marketing professional can approach social media. Ability to customize approach and change direction depending on the trends is most critical and valuable asset in promoting a website especially after it is redesigned. Marketing website on popular networks more »

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Website design fees – how much to spend on creating or redesigning a website

How much you want to spend to create or redesign your web site? What are the fees associated with website design or website redesign? Partially, this depends on the company and on the industry, but mostly, on knowledge of a person who is interested in services. True professionals of online marketing realize enormous possibility to more »

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Dashboard redesign – how to create a dashboard that fits, checklist

How to redesign dashboard to represents all key data and still fits into current framework? It’s often a question that many companies have to struggle with due to ever increasing complexities of today’s reporting and statistics. Struggling to combine results form multiple processes, operations and at the same time enable key users of the dashboard more »

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Virgin Money advertising

Will we see exceptionally bold advertising similar to ones used in other countries in the financial services industry? Take a look at this post by The Financial Brand about Virgin Money. Ads are filled with provocative, seductive, direct and often obnoxious messaging all targeted to stand out from the rest of the sector. You are more »

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Dashboard designer – custom design or ready to use dashboards

Dashboard designer In this port we want to examine differences and benefits of custom design vs ready to use dashboards. There are many applications and providers claiming easy to use and plug and play dashboard functionality that easily integrates in framework of your application. True, to some degree ready to use products can correspond to more »

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Rebranding a company

reRebranding a company Rebranding an existing company’s branding is always a difficult assignment a it takes experience, understanding and knowledge of branding strategy, marketing and advertising to suggest effective method and best means of implementing rebranding. It is often confused with logo and identity redesign, but rebranding is a widest an most significant update of the company more »

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Discount web design – professional creative web, services at a discount

Is it a good idea to negotiate price for creative services such as website design or professional products?  What can work in the market while buying tomatoes doesn’t work in the professional services fields. By bringing the cost down, clients eventually devalue services and bring quality of work and workmanship down. Even during the recession, more »

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Website design rates – rate for web design services

How website design rates help to understand type of provider This questions is based on type of a provider and quality of work. While freelance designers can offer design services for $20/hr, top design agencies do not work for less then several hundred dollars per hour. Depending on the type of your organization, you need more »

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Advertising in a recession, recession ads

Advertising in recession – what messages work In tough economic times companies are starting to focus their advertising on messages that stress continuity, longevity and survival despite bad economic situation. Take a look at the latest ad from Bank of America: Key messages used in the advertising that tries to refocus audience toward positive outcome more »

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Top data visualization examples

Following are most notable data visualization examples for the past week How different groups spend their day This interactive map shows different patterns of work vs sleep and other activities in different demographical groups. Homocide and murder statistics in New York Interactive map of New York homicide statistics CongressSpeaks Impressive visualization and interactive map What more »

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Data visualization – benefits of right approach

Choosing a right data visualization consultant and technique for your application might not be easy. There are a lot of considerations that need to come into play, such as selection of appropriate technology provider and aligning internal and external IT resources to enable smooth collaborative environment to make the development and integration process run effectively. more »

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Web Interface Design – tips, techniques, results

What contributes to best results in web interface design? Usable, functional and accessible design approach allows web users to interact with your web site or application at a different level. Lets consider scenarios where user A attempts to proceed through a typical path through a website from home page to confirmation screen. Our typical path more »

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Website design samples – designing sample web sites

Name: Last Name: Company: Email: Project: Website Identity Interface Multimedia Print IA / UX / UE Consulting Programming Comments: Why is it critical to understand that website design sample work or what is called speculative work is bad Read an article by AIGI http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/news-090527 This essentially confirm that designing anything before designers are contracted to more »

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User interface designer – consultant, geek, artist, architect – all in one

Who is an interface designer you may ask? Is this somebody who is putting together UI in Visual Studio to get the application work finally, after 3 weeks of delays and boss screaming on top of their lungs? Is this somebody who thinks more then does and never gets passed the stage where he or more »

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Social media branding, marketing, using twitter and facebook as focus group in rebranding

Many wonder what is the real value for business of twitter or facebook. For large organizations and those with substantial fan base, twitter, facebook and other social media networks are becoming the easiest, fastest and most effective focus group tools that allows gather quick results for new product launch or rebranding. Recently, Tropicana rebranding effort more »

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Washington dc web design companies

Washington DC web design firms are divided into following categories Firms that work for Federal government and their contractors These companies have ongoing accounts sustaining their operations and expand adding additional resources depending on the contracts. Firms in this category generally are not interested in working with smaller clients and they are all on GSA more »

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Creative Services Washington DC, Virginia, Maryland

Creative services or design consulting firm in Washington DC, Virginia or Maryland There are many choices in this area and many companies offer different sets of skills. Non-profit organizations tend to go with firms that have experience designing associations websites while technology companies look for hands-on design and development expertise. There are many hidden values more »

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User interface design principles

Numerous usability studies conducted by top agencies indicate that main properties of effective user interface design are simplicity, ease of navigation and effective information architecture. True, while many other factors play a significant role, few can be a detrimental factor in how application is received by the users. Assuming all functional elements of the application more »

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Website design pricing – prices for web design services

Name: Last Name: Company: Email: Project: Website Identity Interface Multimedia Print IA / UX / UE Consulting Programming Comments: Does your organization struggle in determining where to go to get pricing and an estimate for website design project? The information below will help to understand types of providers. There are 5 levels of pricing for more »

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Creative services for financial websites, marketing services for financial industry

How important is it to find the right provider of creative services for your financial organization? Financial services companies are going through tough times this year. Not only different financial institutions received really bad rep, many one man operations such as brokers, advisers etc have suffered significantly. Many firms however take advantage of low business activity more »

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Creative Design Services

Top 10 recommendations for best results from your creative design services provider and online marketing Hire only professional company to execute creative design services for your organization. �Find industry-specific marketing firm for marketing only, do not go with design services from marketing firms. Avoid low cost service providers. Creative design means iterative design approach. Low more »

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Don’t use template websites.

Why not to use template websites The reason is simple, templates are too generic and have less value then custom made design specific to your company goals and subject matter. Template web sites are designed to be sold to you and not to your customers, and many business owners get into the trap thinking that more »

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User Experience Design, UE, UX

User experience design for online applications and relationship to online behavior Why is it important for an IT company to hire a usability consultant? Today’s web applications pose significant challenge to users of all fields. Few organizations go an extra mile to engage professional usability experts and go only through limited usability group testing before releasing more »

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Website design consultants

Website design consultants, how to chose a right website design company. Its critically important to select a qualified and experienced�group among all �website design consultants you research. Pay special attention to years in business, client list, samples of work, relevance to your industry and past references. When selecting website design companies, you need to realize that more »

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Law website design, legal website design

Law website design Is your law firm lacking consistent and clear marketing message, campaign? The easiest way to bring visual consistency in communication materials for legal services organization is to upgrade corporate website which will correspond to corporate branding and complement it. What is important is to have a professional and clear design, focused entirely more »

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Co-branding, how to co-brand your company products and services online

Co-branding and how to co-brand your company products or services Much of the .com and post .com period can be characterized by wide use of co-branding. The definition of the term itself is: “Co-branding is when two companies form an alliance to work together, creating marketing synergy.” per Wikipedia.  More profoundly, online co-branding means offering more »

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Corporate website design, corporate branding

Corporate website design and corporate branding. Website design or redesign is an important step in upgrading your organization’s marketing campaign. It is important to plan in advance and engage key decision makers to define vision and direction for what you would like your website to do. It’s important to set realistic marketing goals and break more »

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Software GUI design, application interface design

Software GUI design Application interfaces shift to the web from typical desktop environment. Latest tools allow ever more detailed and sophisticated application prototype development. While tools enable technical teams to perform many tasks without resorting to hiring off site consultants, how can a typical IT company benefit from hiring a professional user interface consultant and more »

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Landing page design, how to create effective landing pages

Landing page design Each company with a web site loses potentially significant percentage of leads by not employing basic strategy of landing pages. This does not require a marketing department to figure out that landing pages are tools that can save your business when no other methods of lead acquisition work. Specifically, strategy of channeling more »

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