Our Free Assessment: New and Improved

By Resound Creative on January 18, 2017

You can’t wait until your project is “perfect” – you’ll never introduce it to the world…because perfect is a lie. Sometimes it’s better to ship it, gather feedback, then make it better. Plus, your community can give you important outside perspectives and ideas. You can’t get to remarkable on your own.

That’s pretty much where we were with our Brand Maturity Assessment. You know how we always say, “Iterate, then re-iterate?” We don’t just preach it. We actually did it.

The first version of the assessment was a great…first version! With the amazing feedback we received from clients and our community, we’ve built out the meat of the report and made the assessment itself more intuitive.

Here’s what’s new:

Tool tips that can give . . .

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Taking Your Brand to the Next Technology Level: Highlights from NextCon 2016

By Mike Jones on November 29, 2016

A video posted by Mike Jones (@remarkamike) on Nov 15, 2016 at 7:58am PST

It seems like the business conference industry is hitting a new high.

Beyond the big guys like SXSW, CES, Inbound, and Dreamforce, I’m seeing loads of other conferences joining the space. And it’s been fun seeing some newer conferences starting up in the Phoenix area – like last week’s NextCon (put on by Nextiva).

When I first discovered NextCon earlier this year, I was intrigued:

it’s Nextiva’s first time putting on this conference
they had some big-time speakers lined up (Steve Wozniak and Guy Kawasaki)
they hosted it locally in . . .

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Brand Assessment Webinar

By Resound Creative on September 13, 2016

A delighted customer will come back and bring their friends.

Isn’t that every business’s dream scenario—to create experiences so remarkable that their customers not only want to continue to do business with them, but also tell all their friends? I know that’s what I want.

Experiences like that can only be built upon one foundation: a great brand.

And that’s where the problem comes in. It can be a struggle to cultivate a great brand. You want to create the kinds of compelling experiences that really “wow” your customers, and you might be suspicious that brand concept has something to do with it…but it’s all so abstract! You’re not sure where to start.

I feel for you. I really do. Branding is one . . .

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3 Tips For Working From Home

By Kayla Izard on December 9, 2015

Let’s face it, there’s really no 9–5 anymore. It’s easy to work from home at 2am, at least for my projects. Companies are heading further towards remote workstations and away from inflexible work hours.

Most of us are checking and responding to emails, writing presentations, or filling out paperwork way outside of normal working hours. Every night before I go to bed, I find myself checking the Facebook business profiles I manage and my work emails. I’m reachable pretty much all the time if someone needs me.

And I should probably say right now, I’m not the kind of person who likes structure. I love writing when I have inspiration, and when I don’t… you can pretty much forget it.

With that in mind, . . .

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Search Engine Ranking Factors: Moz’s 2015 Survey

By Mike Jones on September 2, 2015

Moz’s SEO Pro app is one of our favorite tools for auditing, planning, and reporting on the effectiveness of our search engine marketing strategies. And not only do they offer a fantastic SEO tool, but they give out tons of free insights through their blog, including today’s release of the results of their annual Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey.

Each year Moz gathers responses from some of the world’s leading SEO consultants and specialists on which ranking factors make the greatest (and least) impact on search engine results. They compile and analyze these responses and provide some great insights into what matters when it comes to search engine ranking.

Here’s the infographic of the main results:

There’s a ton of great info in the . . .

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The Internet Gets a Speed Boost with HTTP/2

By Douglas Morales on June 9, 2015

It’s finally here, the next big thing you didn’t know you were waiting for:  Hypertext Transfer Protocol 2 (HTTP/2). I’m sure you’re asking yourself “what is that?” I was too, so I did some reading. HTTP/2 is the latest approved version of HTTP, the protocol used by browsers to download websites from servers. The last version, 1.1, has not been updated since 1999, which may as well been a lifetime ago considering the evolutionary speed of web development. That was before tablets, smart phones, smart TVs, and gaming consoles all had the ability to browse web pages. The world has drastically changed since then and now it’s time that the underpinning system of how these websites are delivered catches up.

The . . .

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WikiWand: Our Newest Favoritist Way to Read Wikipedia

By Mike Jones on August 19, 2014

Confession: we’re big Wikipedia readers. Like the kind that can spend hours clicking through from one related article to another and totally forget how long we’ve been staring at our computer / iPhone.

While we love the content and ability to wander through the endless knowledge on Wikipedia, the reading experience is less than ideal. Have you ever tried to read an article on a really wide screen? The lines of text will stretch on for miles without breaking. What a strain! And fonts, line-heights, and letterspacing could all be fine tuned to make reading more enjoyable and efficient.

But we totally understand Wikipedia’s predicament: they’ve grown so large that a redesign is a massive undertaking. And they’re a humble non-profit, reliant . . .

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Google is Leveling the Playing Field of Web Design

By Mike Jones on October 1, 2013

Google recently released a free graphic design application called Google Web Designer.

And here at Resound, we think it’ll be a game changer.

I have yet to play with it in full detail but my first impression is that this is a great program for anyone wanting to create simple banner ads and graphics for their website. And it even has some basic animation features to give your graphics some movement. Overall I dig it.

But the most amazing part of this software: it’s free. This means anyone, ANYONE, can create graphics at zero cost.

With the release of this program Google has officially gotten in the ring with the biggest design software giant in the world: Adobe. Let the battle commence.

What’s really interesting . . .

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Instagram Launches Video Creation Service: Facebook vs. Twitter, Round #333

By Mike Jones on July 23, 2013

Recently Instagram launched a video creation service. I’ve checked it out a bit over the past few weeks and it looks like it will be a great new feature for all the Instagrammers (like me).

But it does sound awfully similar to Twitter’s recently-popular Vine app.

And I’m hearing the internet chatter begin to rise: Vine is about to get their butt kicked:

Instagram’s video service gives you 15 seconds of video for each post, while Vine is limited to 7 seconds
You get a baker’s dozen filters to make your videos all hipsterriffic—just like your Instagram photos.
And they added a nifty video-stabilization feature called Cinema—a feature Vine users have been asking to have for a while.
And let’s not forget that Instagram has a MASSIVE . . .

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