You may be hearing others mention that you have to brand yourself, or the importance of branding. It is often the first step in marketing, and we may all agree with it, but do we carry it across all of our advertising? Is it always present we show our image to the world? After a business meeting recently, I found my colleague carefully examining my card. She remarked that she thought it quite clever, and she asked about the symbol that I use. She mentioned that she noticed that I use it in e-mails, as my gravatar, on my paperwork, and on my website. I explained that it is a variation on my family crest, which is significant to me, because the meaning of the symbol on the crest was to remind my family that we were responsible for protecting people on both sides of the river Ladbeck. I see it as a reminder that I am to protect my client.
Considering that this woman was in marketing, I noticed that she did not present a consistent brand throughout her materials, but she is not really alone in this fact. I still am not the best at consistently using my branding elements across the board, but I do spend time thinking about them on occasion. I have now started a new blog, where I am trying to take the steps to make it successful, so in a way, I have gone back to square one. I have been looking into ways of incorporating my logo into different features of the blog where it makes sense. I realized that most highly visited sites have an image by their URL in the “Go” line of the browser. This image will show up on my bookmarks if I save the site there. Since I am trying to have people bookmark my site, I want it to stand out when they look it up.
This may be one small marketing element, but it helps in creating your professional look, so here I am sharing with you how I created mine. You can use any png or gif file of your logo to accomplish this task.
Scale the image so that
it is 16x16 pixels. I use Gimp Shop, which is free at sourceforge,
but you should be able to do this in any image editor.
When saving the image,
you may want to save it as an ico file. Most web browsers will
recognize a gif or png image, but there are versions of MS ie which
will only recognize an image if it is .ico. I had a problem saving
my logo as an ico so I used the gif.
Up load the image to
your site into the public_html or www section. These are the two
locations which contain files that can be seen by your site. I use
my FTP Client, Filezilla.
Now you have to paste
some code in a specific place. First the code: <link rel="icon"
type="image/gif"
href="http://www.yourhoustonhomeinspector.com/SchulteLadbeck.gif">.
Since I have a gif file, I typed the gif extension under the type
command. If it was a png file, then I would write type=”image/png”.
I then need to tell the browser where to find the image. I titled my
image with my last name, and placed it in the public_html folder, so
I write my website's name slash the image name for the location.
Alright, simple enough, so let's move onto pasting this code into
your site. It needs to be embedded within the <head> </head>
commands. Each page of your static site will have a head, so your
will need to paste it there. For a blog, you may have a head.php or
a main header.php or a style sheet template that contains this
command. You look for the proper section under your theme editor.
Once the change to the sheet has been saved, you will have the
flavicon (flavor icon is the name of this image) come up in the
browser.
That is it. Some considerations: an overly complex image will not look good so small, so pick something that can be easily read and identified with you. Although most browsers out there are excepting png or gif images, to make this work across the board, you really need an ico image. I have not done this as you can see, but I am looking into why my ico image is not showing up the way that I want. Try to have the image fit your theme. The image does not have to be exactly like your logo, but make it similar. For example, if your logo uses a phrase or word in it, you could delete the word for the flavicon. Have fun with it.
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This is helpful to those who have NO CLUE , where to start. Great job on helping others!!!