• Best Overall Campaign
• Best Presentation
• Big Idea
• Media Solutions
• Brand Management
• Visual Excellence
• Direct Marketing

NAIT celebrates these achievements at their annual Advertising Awards Banquet.This event is one that Ken, our President, looks forward to, as a NAIT alumni himself and a recurring figure on the panel of judges.Top Draw is also proud to provide a scholarship for the Excellence in Visual Communication award recipients, who are recognized for successful implementation of branding, design and strategy within their campaign.

The Advertising Awards event is also a great opportunity for students to network with industry professionals and get a taste of the opportunities available to them after graduation.

The calibre of the work that is presented at the awards banquet is top notch. The work pictured below received the Best Overall Campaign Award because it provided the best creative solution for the clients, all while staying within financial and logistical constraints.

Congratulations to all of the award recipients, and to all of the teams that were invited to present at the banquet – jobs very well done!

Below is a random sampling of Edmonton-designed WordPress websites that we think look great, offer a unique and interesting approach and effectively customize WordPress to meet the needs of their respective clients.

Yoga for Today

By: Paper Leaf Designs

River City Event Rentals

By: Top Draw

dacapo Cafe

By: Harry Vance-Law for Vision Creative

Tres Carnales

By: North Republic

The Maple Leaf Mission

By: Be3 Designs

Our Lady of Grace

By: Paper Leaf & Flagship

Finesse Home Living

By Overhaul Media

Delton Cabinets

Trafik Interactive

Coventry Homes

By: Top Draw

Alberta Hotel and Lodging Association

By: Microtek

Do you have any favorites? Tell us what you think of our selections!

An Account Manager at Top Draw is responsible for following our clients through their web, SEO and/or conversion rate optimization projects. The successful candidate will have:

• Experience providing excellent customer service that will not only meet, but exceed expectations.
• The ability to build relationships easily.
• Kick-ass organizational skills with the ability to manage more than one client at a time.
• Excellent email, phone and in-person communication skills.
• The ability to provide clients with additional Top Draw services and strategic recommendations that will increase their online return on investment.
• The aptitude to learn new technologies quickly.
• Knowledge of web design/development, online marketing and/or experience with WordPress would be an asset.

If you are looking for a position where you can work in a creative environment that offers perks like flex-time, free parking, great benefits, a health spending account and awesome co-workers, we would love to hear from you.

Please send your resume to Jennifer Banks jennifer@topdraw.com for consideration.

He’s magic, folks!

Adriel’s Five Best Practices

1. Key phrase research
2. On page optimization
3. Building links
4. Differentiating your site
5. Measured results

Be sure to check out the presentation slides if you missed this conference. (Just don’t take Adriel’s advice on the tomatoes… Trust us on this one.)

The evening was a great opportunity to reconnect with Daniel, the student we hosted for JA’s Company Program Day. It was also fun to see all of the companies and different products developed by this year’s young participants. Spending any amount of time with these students is so inspiring! They have big dreams and big plans, and it is wonderful to see how Junior Achievement feeds their creativity and drive.

This year’s event raised $300,000 for Junior Achievement programs in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Highlights from the evening included The Honourable Lieutenant Governor Donald S. Ethell and His worship Mayor Mandell as featured speakers, and the induction of Doug & Carol Golosky and Roger & Martin Gouin into the Alberta Business Hall of Fame. Arguably the most touching speaker of the evening was JA student Sylvia Nguyen. Sylvia told a captivating story about how her involvement in Junior Achievement has helped her to overcome being bullied. It was a proud moment for everyone in the room, whether or not they knew Sylvia personally.

We look forward to this event every year as it affords us an opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones – and to be inspired by the dreams of Alberta’s next business leaders. To find out more about how you can connect with this amazing organization, please visit the Northern Alberta & Northwest Territories Junior Achievement website.

When we do Search Engine Optimization for our clients, the general rules and techniques apply across all search engines, but the question always comes up: will my site rank in Bing and Yahoo? Is this even a valid consideration? I took a spin around the Analytics for a few popular websites and noticed that Bing/Yahoo seemed to be really low on share, lower than public sources would suggest.

So what can you expect to see as a share?

Of the sites I checked out, the numbers below show how many incoming visitors came from Bing or Yahoo. I compared both search engine-optimized and non-optimized websites.

• Optimized Canadian Website 1: Bing 4.9%, Yahoo 3.1%
• Unoptimized Canadian Website 3: Bing 7%, Yahoo: 1.8%
• Unoptimized Canadian Website 4: Bing: 4.5%, Yahoo: 2%
• Optimized Canadian Website 5: Bing: 2.7%, Yahoo: 0.5%
• Unoptimized Canadian Website 6: Bing: 1.1%, Yahoo: 0.37%
• Unoptimized Canadian Website 7: Bing: 2.4%, Yahoo: 0.93%
• Our Website 2: Bing: 0.59%, Yahoo: 0.25%

What about the US?

• Optimized US Website: Bing: 3.8%, Yahoo: 3.5%
• Unoptimized US Website: Bing: 2.3%, Yahoo: 2.56%
• Optimized US Website: Bing: 1.7%, Yahoo: 1.67%
• Unoptimized US Website: Bing: 2.45% , Yahoo: 2.5%

There’s not really a pattern to discern here between search engine optimized and unoptimized websites. Bing and Yahoo usage just seems to be much lower than what the usage stats seem to state. Even in the US, usage seems to be pretty close to “who cares?”. This was a bit surprising for me, since Bing is the default search engine in the default browser (Internet Explorer) that many new or beginner level internet users should be using, yet clearly aren’t.

With online marketing, there’s an almost unlimited number of things you can track; but it’s critical to know what is important to track. Unless you’re running a website that generates tens of millions of dollars, it’s almost irrelevant to be separately tracking Yahoo or Bing traffic and results. You might want to troubleshoot if you’re getting no traffic, but otherwise you can safely put your efforts onto other traffic sources.

Thoughts? Feel free to share!

1. Register Your Business’ Google Places Listing

Do you have a Google Places listing? If you do, that’s a good start – but you still need to make sure that you’re the owner of it. To claim your listing, Google your company in Google maps. Once you’ve located your listing click on the blue hyper-link titled ‘Business Owner” on the right hand side.

Using an existing Gmail email address or one you have created for your business, claim your listing. If there is no listing for your business, cruise over to Google Places and get started. The more complete your account, the better. Add photos, videos, product information, services offered, industry information, hours of operation – everything you can. Once your Google Places account is complete and submitted to Google, you will receive a postcard in the mail with a unique pin, which you then enter into Google places to verify the listing. Sounds a little complicated, but Google makes it pretty simple.

2.  Ensure Your Website Content References Your Location

Make sure that your content describes that product or services you sell and the city in which you’re offering them! It seems extremely simple but it is often overlooked. An easy way to do this is in headings, “Gluten-free baking in Edmonton, Alberta.” And in content,” We bake gluten-free cakes, biscuits, cookies and bread. Centrally located on one of downtown Edmonton’s finest streets, we only use the freshest ingredients in an entirely gluten-free bakery. We specialize in delectable treats using potato and rice flour, all conveniently located in Alberta’s capital city.” You want to make sure to reference your product/service alongside your city so that when Google crawls your website it sees both. The trick to this is making sure that you don’t stuff your content with keywords or locations; your content has to make sense, or you could be penalized.

3.  Put Your Address & Phone Number in the Footer of your Website

Putting a verifiable address and phone number on your website increases your algorithmic integrity with the Google robots. Referencing your local address on each page really shows Google where your business is located and that you are in fact a real business.

4. Name, Address & Phone Number (NAP) Consistency

Ensure that your company’s name, address and phone number are displayed consistently across every single website, directory or link. If your name is Betty Lou’s Gluten-Free Bakery you will need to make sure that you always use the full name Betty Lou’s Gluten-Free Bakery every time you display your company’s name online. Any variations like Betty Lou’s Gluten-Free or betty lou’s bakery will only dilute your search results. The same is true for your address; commit to one way of displaying your mailing address and one way only. When it comes to your phone number, the natural inclination is to publish your 800 number in the most prominent place; however, if you post your local number first it identifies your business as relevant much more quickly.

5. Reviews

The golden unicorn of local search. Reviews act in a similar way that link building does. Legitimate reviews show Google that live people are using your services and buying your products. Even better, reviews are recommendations from people and not just affiliate links from websites. Encourage your customers to review your business on Google Places and other review sites such as Yelp and Hotfrog – and don’t forget about industry-specific review sites like Urbanspoon. Just like with Google Places, you will want to make sure that you owner-verify all your business listings so you can  respond to reviews, post photos and provide relevant news and updates to your existing and potential clients.

And there you have it – five relatively quick tips to help your business rank better locally! Let us know if these tips make a difference for your business!

3 years and some (I think)… time flies.

What has been your favorite project to date?

Being diplomatic, I’m going to say that it’s tough to pick one in particular. Every project comes with its own set of unique challenges, stakeholders and requirements. As a result, every project has distinct  memories for me. I will say that the projects with more complexity, problem-solving and design-thinking typically result in being classified a ‘favorite’.

What do you like best about working here?

It’s kind of a cliche but it’s the people. We have a fantastic group here. Some people have ‘work-wives’ or ‘work-husbands’. I like to think I have a ‘work-family’.

How or why did you work your way into this career?

I originally entered the University of Alberta with the intention of completing a general Bachelor of Arts degree. Through my meandering, I was introduced to the Bachelor of Design program. The classes, products and visuals really excited me so I applied with a terrible and embarrassing portfolio. Not surprisingly, I was denied. After taking some fine art classes deemed a ‘portfolio builder’, I re-applied and was admitted.

I then chose to pursue a specialization in Printmaking. After a few classes, I decided it wasn’t for me, so I switched to Industrial Design. Being a lover of all things shiny and beautiful, I thought this was more up my alley. Unfortunately, I don’t work well in the third dimension. So I switched again to Visual Communication and Graphic Design. It was in this program that I discovered an affinity, passion and ultimately, a career.

Did you have any interesting jobs as a kid?

Throughout my university degree, I worked for a friend of mine who specialized in window display design and visual merchandising. This often involved making vinyl signage, mannequin styling, and carving huge stage props out of 4x4x4 blocks of high density Styrofoam. Two of my favorites included carving and hand-painting a series of animals for the Telus World of Science and building a life-size replica of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise for a bingo hall.

Any crazy items on your bucket list?

I don’t really believe in bucket lists. I believe everything happens for a reason. Because of that belief, my list is always fluid and short-term which makes things attainable. But if I were really pressed for an answer, I’d say:

1) Go bow hunting for wild boar or moose;

2) Write a novel.

Have a quick design or usability tip to share?

For me, usability is about making content accessible. You really have to study the content in order to communicate it effectively. Only then can you make decisions about what is useful to the audience and let it inform your designs. When you don’t consider content, you are no long designing. You are merely decorating.

Hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about our Director of Design & Usability, Mark Yiu. We think he’s pretty awesome. Check back each month to ‘meet’ another member of the Top Draw team!

Is WordPress scalable?

There are two ways most owners want a website to scale: the number of visitors the website can handle at any given time and the ability to expand in functionality. In terms of scale of visitors, WordPress is easily the most popular CMS of the top websites on the internet so it does scale to high traffic loads. Of the top million websites that use a CMS, WordPress powers 63.2%. No other CMS comes close. Along with a good website hosting company, WordPress can scale to very high levels of traffic.

WordPress is also in the lead on the scale of functionality front, with just under 20,000 plugins as of this post date. Those plugins offer components such as social media capabilities, eCommerce carts, forums and slick commenting systems; they allow integration with analytics, connect newsletters to websites, and much more. The rich ecosystem of programmers building onto WordPress keeps development standard instead of forcing the re-invention of the wheel when faced with new, but common challenges.

Is WordPress secure?

Just like Windows, Mac and other modern piece of software, WordPress is secure as long as you follow reasonable security practices and keep it up to date. If you’re interested in more information, read our blog post on WordPress security.

How does WordPress compare to other popular open source CMS’s?

The 3 most popular open source CMS platforms are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. To illustrate their current online prevalence…Of those same top million websites referenced above that are using a CMS (where WP is at 63.2%), Joomla is at 11.1%, Drupal at 8.8%, and it goes down rapidly from there. We used to develop websites in Joomla and before that in Mambo, but we found WordPress to be cleaner on the code side and easier to train our end customers on use. In general, Drupal comes with some community building functionality that would make it a better choice for a massively user-based platform. WordPress is generally more intuitive and easier to train customers on use. That said, all 3 are good Content Management Systems.

Other questions?

There are many articles online that review WordPress on different fronts. When reviewing them, do make sure you pay attention to the date the article was written. Content Management Systems have been progressing fairly rapidly, and an article from 3 years ago just doesn’t accurately portray how they stack up now.

Do you have questions about using WordPress as a CMS? We’d be happy to add them to our post.

Are you a social media enthusiast? If so, this conference is for you. The event begins with a kick-off party at L1 Lounge on Friday night.  Saturday is a full day of iLearning with 2 keynote speakers, your choice of four breakout sessions throughout the day and a local iMedia-lite panel discussion over lunch.

Breakout Session Topics

Connecting to a Brand – Focus Communications
The World of SEO – Top Draw
Attention Grabbing Pitches – Dynamite PR
Inspirational Blogging – Bikini or Bust
Sports Blogging – Edmonton Oilers
Not for Profit Blogging & Social Media Impact – Edmonton Food Bank & Junior Achievement
Creating Personality on a business Blog  - Fused Logic

The organizers of iMedia have graciously given us two promotional codes for you to use and share:

• Save $46 off the cost of registration by using ‘Topdrawconference’ at checkout.
• Save $10 off the cost of kick-off party tickets by using ‘Topdrawparty’ at checkout.

For more information and to register for this event please visit the iMedia Conference website.

Hope to see you there!