Are Online Coupons Good Marketing Tools?

November 26th, 2011 by

To say that Internet has drastically changed the way we do business is an understatement. Internet has truly transformed the way a business is being conducted and marketed. The inexhaustible information and the ability to connect instantly from any and everywhere has revolutionized the way businesses big or small advertize, market and promote themselves. With the arrival of mobile and great advancements in its technologies, marketing strategies have altered completely.

Online coupons are the latest trends that have emerged due to the use of internet as an excellent advertising platform by businesses of all sizes. Online coupons have become a rage among the businesses to capture the attention of a huge base of prospective consumers, increase their sales and create brand loyalty among them.

Online coupons also act as great traffic builders for your business. By offering special offers, discounts to future customers with hassle free access to them via online, a consumer can be easily enticed to buy more than what he actually intends to. Moreover there is a huge segment of people who take their buying decisions based on the availability of coupons and go only to stores that offer regular coupons and/or discount offers. This large segment can be easily reached out to via online and mobile coupons. This also builds loyalty towards a brand that gives them uncomplicated ways of saving money and getting quality products.

Mobile coupons also come in very handy as they are not bound by geographical distances as the print media and businesses can reach out to an exponentially huge consumer market directly without much expenditure. Moreover every third person owns a mobile and uses it for their day-to-day activities as well. Millions of consumers are on the look-out for best deals available in their market for saving money and mostly utilize their mobile for searching for them. Thus, mobile coupons act as a great marketing medium because the required information is on the fingertips of the potential consumer and is more likely to persuade him into a purchasing mode.

Also mobile and online coupons have greater recall value as they reach out to the consumer directly and can be accessed easily by them. Moreover companies can use these to promote and communicate with consumers repeatedly on a regular basis at much lower expense. By listing their coupons in online coupons directory gives businesses an opportunity to be discovered by consumer. With such convenient positioning, businesses can easily access important information such as email, address, etc about their consumers and can build an authentic database for further marketing.

This proves to be excessively helpful for local businesses such as the grocery stores as they can use this database for promoting their grocery coupons by making them available online and on mobile. Grocery coupons on mobile are great medium of building a connection with consumers as everyone loves easy access to good money-saving deals.

Online coupons also aid businesses in cross promotion within the same budget. Coupons that are being utilized for special offers for one product can be availed for promotion of other related products as well. This works in favor of the businesses as two products can be promoted without any extra expenditure.

With increasing advancement in mobile and web technology, online and mobile coupon marketing is set to achieve greater heights as it is convenient, economical and effective.

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How To Create Special Effects With Adobe Photoshop – Part 1

November 26th, 2011 by

Need to add special effects in your pictures? This special guide is going to lead you through step by step with the help of several How to Adobe Photoshop ideas, so that you can include some great looking computer graphics to your digital images.

So, you may well find it beneficial to implement a masking on your photo to select which parts you want to change and leave untouched before you use any of these kinds of special effects. You may create a soft fade in between the areas having special effects included, and the areas without. This is known as masking and can be done through a number of techniques. One strategy is called the “quick mask mode”, as defined below;-

Locate the press button called “edit in fast mask mode” inside your Adobe Photoshop software package. It looks just like a circle inside a rectangular shape situated near the bottom of the main tool bar. There is also a short-cut key to use “Q”. And once inside the quick mask setting, it is possible to choose as well as deselect parts simply by painting them white and black respectively, when using the regular brush tool. For best exactness, zoom to between 100 or 200 %.

You can use a soft-edged brush to avoid hard perimeters. Once you are done, quit the actual masking function and go to “Select – Feather” and set the feather radius to around 5 to 10 pixels. You can set your opacity at somewhere between 0 and 100%, enabling you to apply the effect greater or even weaker in one part of the picture than in the other.

Anyway moving on, and more complicated is introducing a layer mask. This allows you to apply virtually any effect gradually to any given point inside your picture, so just follow these guidelines;

1) Select “Windows – Layers”.

2) Right click your layer and choose “Duplicate layer”.

3) Click on the tiny symbol towards the end of your layer box called “Add layer mask”.

4) Select the “Gradient tool” within the primary tool box.

5) Select a gradient type from the top “Options” bar.

6) Just click your graphic around the position that you really don’t wish to alter, and drag the button off to the point where you wish the total effect to take place. The effects shall be carried out progressively more and more along the line you have just produced.

7) Then last of all, return to the original background layer and add any kind of effect you would like. This will apply the effect in a soft, gradual way.

You are able to implement “Gaussian blur” making use of the layer masking explained above that can make the selected regions appear soft-focused, as if you had used a large-aperture lens. Using “Curves” you may make the corners darker as opposed to the center, duplicating the zoom lens effects, which is known as vignetting.

Really, vignetting is recognized as a zoom lens malfunction, yet subjectively it can bring an extra feeling to your photo, creating a type of frame that will take add a “sucking” influence, attracting much more attention to the center of your picture. You can also simply reduce the actual contrast along with color-saturation around your main topic, helping to distinguish it from the background clutter, so be creative using the many possibilities available!

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Great to Use Less Framework to Produce Web Content for Multiple Devices

November 26th, 2011 by

As all the layouts are based on the same grid, elements created in one layout are reusable in the others without making lot of changes. For example, by adjusting the text elements or image sizes in one layout works in another. Lets say some more changes are also required, use the common baseline grid and type presets to fit in different UI elements.

Less Framework is easy and simple for CSS professionals. Its free from pre¬defined column classes, pre-compilers. Just keep playing creatively with HTML and CSS to design and develop content for multiple devices all at once.

Easy steps for CSS Engineers to get started with Less Framework

1. CSS Designers and Wireframe Designers can start with wireframes using Less Framework structure i.e. single grid, composed of 68 px columns with 24 px gutters.

2. Layout home page Layout for web browser and then move to other devices like phone or tablet as amount of columns change from layout to layout.

3. If your website design is content heavy. Typography pre¬sets available for CSS Designers in Less Frameworks like

24 px baseline grid;

16 px body text,

17 px,

18 px

are very useful. These typography sets contain many usable and aesthetically balanced type sizes based on the “Golden Ratio” rule which can easily used by CSS Engineering teams.

4. While working on wireframes spend less time on refining the font style or size because that can also be handled by UI Designers and CSS Engineers while converting design into HTML, just the placement and approximate ratio helps to decide layout of the webpage.

5. Once wireframes are completed based on Less Framework applying aesthetics to wireframe with in the Less Framework limits is faster and save lot of time for CSS Engineering teams. Avoid using gutter spaces to end design element for example don’t leave an edge of rectangular box in gutter space or text in gutter box. End them on the grid itself.

6. CSS/HTML conversion teams can make pixel perfect translation of UI design – pick Default Layout (992 px), and then use CSS3 media queries to code different child layouts: 768, 480, and 320 px. The Default Layout is picked by any browser, which does not support media queries. The various child layouts are displayed, as appropriate, on browsers that do support media queries. Its really fast to code them as they inherit all styles given to the Default Layout.

Great for Mobile CSS Engineers who are working with different OS and Browsers

On Mobile – web pages appear neat as they reorganize automatically using the default 992 px layout. Child layouts are IE-proof which saves development time- which is big time saver for CSS Engineers, and CSS Engineers can freely use modern CSS to display content and images on different sizes of devices.

Here’s the list of browsers, latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Nokia Webkit, WebOS, Blackberry OS, as well as Internet Explorer 9, Android Webkit, and Mobile Safari (iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches) use the most appropriate child layout. Older browsers like Internet Ex¬plorer 6-8 and old mobile devices will only use the Default Layout.

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