A good logo will help your business. A GREAT logo will help MAKE your business. This guide to establishing a strong identity will help you make the most of your brand.

Identity:

What portrays you to the public. A combination of elements. Your logo. Your brand. Your style. This simple guide will help you make the decision that will launch your business into the public eye. Chosen correctly the logo can propel your business to national recognition and become household symbol.

By keeping a few simple ideas in mind as you look through possible logos you will be able to find the “perfect” fit for beginning the branding process. Remember that the logo you choose will be around for a while. Once an identity has been established it should ONLY be updated every 5 years or so. This ensures that the public will be familiar with your business and easily recognize it. If a brand is updated too frequently, the result is confusing to your clients.

The following guidelines can help you ensure that your content is attracting new visitors and enticing other visitors to return to your site.

• The quality of your content will often define it’s level of credibility. 
  In the eyes of your visitors, they are directly related. 
  If possible, have your content proofed and, if necessary, edited before posting it to the Web. 
  A page full of spelling errors and typos isn’t particularly authoritative or impacting.
• The word count for Web content should typically be, at most, half of what you would 
  use for printed media. Remember, people read 25% slower on a screen than they do with paper. 
  People typically skip over large paragraphs of text. Try to break content into easily scanned, 
  smaller paragraphs with clear headlines. Use bullet points when applicable.

Web content is the “meat” of your site and the primary reason visitors come. “Content” actually consists of all the copy you have written and any images you will be including with that written copy. The rest is just presentation. Because people traverse the Web differently than they do printed media like books, magazines, etc, there are some standards that can help you reach them better.

Clear Headlines: The typical person scans more than they read. Usually a visitor has come for a specific purpose. To capture their attention it’s good to have clear, descriptive headlines for your all of your content. As with other aspects of a site, the user is only there for seconds. The more they have to think to find what they’re looking for, the less likely they will remain on your site beyond those initial few seconds.

Attention Span: Most people have very short attention spans when reading. This is why good Web copy is usually written to be short, concise, and directly to the point. It is very rare for a visitor to actually read your site’s copy word-for-word.

1. Playing music in the background on your Web site. This applies to any and all pages, even media pages. Most people don't expect to hear music suddenly start playing when they visit a Web site. It's usually an un welcome surprise. Usibility testing has shown time and time again, that most people will immediately close a site the moment music spontaneously begins to play.

Reasons you want to avoid this:

• Web users are impatient and difficult to get to your site in the first place. Auto-playing media takes extra time to load and tries their patience. 
• Your visitor may be listening to something already. Drowning out what they are trying to listen to isn't going to win any brownie points for your Web site or what it is meant to represent.
• Your visitor may have left their speakers turned up. Nothing is more annoying than turning on the TV or stereo when the volume is turned all the way up. Well, visiting a Web page with auto-playing audio with your speakers turned up is probably more annoying.

The Function: A good Web site can be your best employee. Not only is it on-call 24/7, 7 days a week—it will actually tell each customer the same thing! (Seriously how many employees can really do that?) If properly designed the site will serve as a hub of information for both your general constituents and consumers purchasing your products. It should serve as a means to accomplish your company’s goals, whether they be to bring exposure to your brand, sell a product, or attract people to your ministry.

The Focus: One of the most common mistakes made by new Web site “owners” is trying to cram too much information onto a site. First you should determine who your main audience is. This is where many ministries become scattered. Determining who you will be ministering to specifically will help determine the look, feel and personality of your site.

A site that contains too many branches of information can be confusing and chaotic. Viewers should easily be able to determine who you are, what your ministry believes in and does for the community.

The Format: The Web site should be formatted with both the functionality and focus in mind. A clever layout that allows the user to easily navigate through all features and components is a must. If the user isn’t able to find the information they’re searching for within the first fifteen seconds, they will lose interest and leave the site.

From a design perspective, the site should be branded to correspond with the rest of the ministry in look and feel of other promotional pieces if possible. As trends and options are expanding, the site should be designed in such a way to make this growth easy.

The Future: Every ministry is looking to the future. Where will you be in 5 years? In 10? In 15? Keeping the future growth of your ministry in mind as your organize your Web site is vital to optimizing your system from the beginning. When selecting a start-up package, make sure the services offered will enable you to exponentially add elements to the site at a later time as your client base and revenue increase. Your Web site will be required to grow as your ministry gains constituents.

Email Marketing is a popular and efficient way to maximize your exposure and touch your constituents. This simple guide will reveal the ins and outs of this marketing tool.

Opting-In:

When collecting e-mail addresses, whether through a Web site or other means, it’s important that you are approved to use the e-mail address in bulk e-mail campaigns. The approval process, called “Affirmative Consent,” by the FCC, is referred to as “Opting-In.” Basically, you are required by law to ask permission before collecting and using an e-mail address bulk e-mail campaigns.

The process usually requires a check box explaining that, by checking, the user is consenting to be added to your mailing list. A confirmation e-mail is then sent to the user. It requires that they click a confirmation link before the e-mail address is used in an active campaign.

We get this one a lot. There is a lot of bad information floating around out there from people who call themselves "SEO experts," but you have to be very careful dealing with these people and the tactics they teach. They paint the picture that there is a secret, magic formula that can be applied to shoot your site up in search engine results. Anytime you see anything promising to get you on the first page of Google, for example, you can be sure that it's a rip off service, whether they realize it or not. A simple rule of thumb with dealing with "SEO experts" is if it sounds too simple, it most definitely is. Most of their techniques are outdated and entirely ineffective, and a lot of them will flat out get your site blacklisted by search engines. Google, for example, is a very intelligent search engine and simply does not fall for SEO tricks. It also takes action against sites when it sees that they're clearly trying to game it because of the high potential of them being spam sites. Additionally, most search engines, including Google, have not released the incredibly complex indexing and ranking algorithms. They're guarded like the recipe for Coke Cola, so anyone guaranteeing you placement is an immediate red flag.

All that to say this: there are correct ways to increase your search engine ranking by abiding by the principles search engines expect legitimate sites to go by, but they do take time. Trying to force the rank up is tricky business and if done improperly can cause problems rather than increasing your search engine result placement.

E-Mail Client Configuration

Follow these links for specific instructions on how to set up the corresponding e-mail clients

• iPhone
• Android
• Mac OS X Mail - different pages for 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5
• Microsoft Entourage for Mac
• Outlook Express
• Outlook
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Nokia S60 phones
• Webmail

Troubleshooting:

Username and Password

• Use your account's full E-Mail Address as your username. Remember to do this for both your POP/IMAP username and your SMTP username.
• Use the password provided by your administrator.

NOTE: The use of the "m1234567" style mailbox names as your username has been deprecated (effective January 7, 2009).

NOTE: Username/password authentication MUST be enabled in order to SEND e-mail!

NOTE: Passwords are CaSe SeNsItIvE!

NOTE: You CAN change your password via our WebMail interface (using your "mailboxes" hostname). See details below under the "WebMail Interface" section.

Server Names

• outgoing - Ask us for your Cluster Name
• incoming - Ask us for your Cluster Name

In the examples above just replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name.

When you set up the first e-mail address under a domain (that is configured to be hosted with us) our system automatically creates the necessary hostnames and MX records that are required to process e-mail for that domain.

NOTE: Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) require that you use their SMTP server to send mail (example: smtp.yourISP.com). You must check with your ISP to see if they require you to use their SMTP server for outgoing mail, or if you can use your domain's mail server for outgoing mail.

Protocols and Port Numbers

Can't decide which incoming protocol to use? See this article for more information: POP3 vs IMAP.

Insecure Transports (defaults)

• outgoing - SMTP - port 25 (alternate 587) [username/password authentication MUST be enabled!]
• incoming - IMAP - port 143
• incoming - POP3 - port 110

Secure Transports (recommended!)

• outgoing - SMTP - port 465 * [username/password authentication MUST be enabled!]
• incoming - IMAP - port 993 *
• incoming - POP3 - port 995 *