What is Industrial Design?
As the force behind the industrial revolution, industrial design involves engineers and artists taking a concept and making it useful, replicable, and beautiful.
Learn about the Peterman Method™, our approach to conscious design, and how you can take the next step in your project.
The Conscious Design™ blog, podcast, and YouTube channel is your guide to understanding the product development process, branding, and starting up a company. Whether inventor, designer, or entrepreneur, we have content to help you be successful. Written primarily by Ian Peterman, our CEO, founder, and Conscious Design expert, this blog pulls from his and our team’s extensive experience and history with startups, products, and brands as we seek to build conscious brands and products. We hope you enjoy this content and learn something valuable through it. Let’s make your vision a reality.
As the force behind the industrial revolution, industrial design involves engineers and artists taking a concept and making it useful, replicable, and beautiful.
In 2009, fruit juice giants Tropicana spent over $35 million to advertise their brand-new packaging. Two months later, the company reported a 20% drop in sales of $30 million. Six weeks after the launch, the company returned to their original packaging. All in all, the experiment in design packaging had cost them around $50 million.
Ergonomics matters, greatly. It’s spoken about by many people, all over the world. And yet, I find myself still coming across products where ergonomics were not factored into its design enough.
Asking why a designer or firm prefers one CMS over another is a completely valid question. We prefer WordPress website development over any other option. There are many good reasons for this. We find that WordPress is superior to the other options we have tried based on cost, SEO performance, ease-of-use, and other factors. Before we get into why though, let’s go over WordPress and some basics about websites. Building a website is not nearly as technically complicated as it once was. We have content management systems (CMS) to thank for that. Platforms like WordPress and Drupal make it easier than ever for people with little to no formal web development training to build and maintain professional looking websites. This means you can get your content out there quicker. Of course, a professionally done website still looks and works best, but it’s not a requirement to get a presence online! What is WordPress? WordPress is a CMS that originally began its life as a blogging platform. Its developers created the platform with a mind toward meeting the unique needs of bloggers known to update their sites with new content several times per week. It proved so successful that the decision was made to expand the platform. WordPress website development these days is still based on the fundamental principles of blogging. But WordPress is highly expandable and customizable thanks to an exhaustive list of plug-ins and themes that make it suitable for any kind of website. Why WordPress? Now, for the answer to the question, why do we prefer WordPress? Well, WordPress website development is superior for many reasons, starting with the fact it’s a content management system, meaning we can develop it quicker than strait from scratch code. Below are our top reasons why we always recommend and strongly prefer WordPress. Free and Open Source Right off the top, WordPress is free and open source software. This makes it quite cost-effective when compared to paid platforms. For example, we could build a WordPress site complete with an e-commerce solution. We would pay only for the cost of hosting the site. There is no cost attached to the platform itself. The same is not true for most other e-commerce solutions, such as Shopify and BigCommerce. There are costs that are attached to some plugins, and they often cost under $100/year, in fact we use quite a few that are under $50/year. That is a cup of coffee a month! The huge benefit of this, of course, is that you only pay for features you actually need, instead of bundles. Bundles, or tiers, is how most other platforms work, including the more popular e-commerce sites. Built in SEO Tools Search engine optimization (SEO) is as important today as it has ever been. A website that does not perform well in the SEO arena is going to suffer in everything from traffic to conversion optimization. It also determines where you land on search engines and therefore the amount of organic (free) traffic. Thus, SEO performance cannot be ignored. WordPress offers a litany of built-in SEO tools that don’t require an extensive amount of knowledge to utilize. For instance, the platform automatically generates meta-descriptions and title tags for each page and post. Search engines use these two elements to better understand what pages and posts are about. Those SEO tools that aren’t built in can generally be accessed through plug-ins. This means website owners can manage their own SEO without any outside help. Of course, we highly recommend professional SEO services for the best results. Ease-Of-Use We prefer WordPress website development for its ease-of-use as well. Anyone who can use a standard word processor can find their way around WordPress without much difficulty. Suffice to say, the learning curve is not steep at all. For us, that means spending less time on hard coding and more time on design. We don’t see a need to reinvent the wheel by manually entering code. Instead, we let WordPress handle the code while we concentrate on more important issues. Ease-of-use also benefits site owners. WordPress developers can turn a completed WordPress site over to a client and know that they can maintain it very easily. This allows developers to offer as little or as much help as the client wants. Some clients prefer that their developers handle maintenance. Others handle it on their own. They can because WordPress is so easy to use. We are happy to say we are big fans of WordPress. We prefer it over every other content management system we have looked at, and we look at every new one to come to the block. It’s superior SEO, ease of use for us and more importantly our clients, and the average monthly maintenance costs have led us year over year to keep using it. While we can do development in other platforms, and have, we will always recommend using WordPress. We believe it creates the best experience for our clients, and our clients’ customers. Author Mr. Peterman View all posts
If you want a successful startup, you should be focused on building authority. That means working on your PR. PR is pretty much anything that isn’t advertising or your own content. Building your brand comes in many forms and I’d like to share some strategies I and my clients have used to build PR. A side benefit of good PR is sometimes good SEO links. The primary benefit is being recognized as an authority on your subject. PR supports other marketing by providing social proof you are the expert you claim to be. We can’t cover everything you can possibly do, there’s just too much. These are our top 7 ways to position you and your company as an authority in your space, or anywhere else you enjoy being a resource in. HARO Help a reporter out is a great resource. I use it myself and just answer questions on things I’m interested in. If you are looking to become known as an expert, this is a great tool. You can provide feedback and input to writers creating content every day. I was recently mentioned in this article about making checklists, for example. PR Releases Press releases are an art and a job by themselves, however there are some great resources, including free ones. A great article I read, especially for startups, is this article listing free press release sites. PR is important, especially if you have something news-worthy. Think about content in terms of what people want to reach about. Get on a Podcast This might seem simple, but it will take some time. You can either do this yourself or hire someone to to get you on shows. The first route is time consuming and can be harsh. Expect to get rejected a lot while doing this. The second can be spendy, but a good rep will get you 1-3 podcasts a week after a few months of going. While it’s easier to get on podcasts once you are on one, don’t let that stop you. Building authority is worth the investment, time or money. You will be seen as an expert in your field to the viewers/listeners of the podcast you are on. They also typically provide links to your website and promote the podcast, and therefore you, on social media. Be a Presenter This one can be hard to get into, but once you get going it can produce great results. While it doesn’t always provide great links or SEO opportunities, it does provide great marketing and proof you are an expert. Look at larger events if you can as these will have longer marketing ramp-ups. Even if you aren’t one of the top speakers, your name is still attached to the event. That means you have a lot of co-marketing opportunities. Teach Local Classes You can do this at a community center, college, or anywhere else. This can also be a great place to get noticed and recognized as an expert. If you are teaching at a college, you may be able to get the highly desired backlink from a .edu. This is great for SEO. This obviously isn’t a sales pitch, but in-person classes can provide a good source of leads and shows you are an expert. I mention local as these are marketed by the place hosting the class. This means you aren’t marketing it alone. It also allows for one-on-one interactions area after a class is over, which can open more doors. Local Magazines or Newspapers Since we’ve already discussed HARO you might wonder why I mention this separately. Local magazines are always looking for stories, but they are looking for local ones. HARO is national and doesn’t provide a great way to filter for local stories and information. Providing your PR news release to local magazines and newspapers can get you noticed and build local interest. Being mentioned in local magazines and newspapers helps you get into larger ones too. Publish Something Publishing is great for building authority. You can publish an ebook, printed book, course, or even just a white paper. What matters is that you have some way of tracking how many people have read or downloaded it, ideally by a third party. This creates social proof you are an expert as well as hopefully putting your name and contact information into the hands of many people. While you may think a lot of this advice pertains to only service based companies, product based companies need this too. When you, and therefore your company, are seen as an expert in your products field, it’s easier for you to sell the product. People want to buy from the expert. Position you and your company as the expert in whatever field you work in. PR is part of a good marketing strategy and shouldn’t be neglected. We always look at what we can do in the PR realm for new product launches. Author Mr. Peterman View all posts
Packaging design is important for every product. It creates an experience, opportunity to educate your customer, and is a sales tool.
When you have a big idea, setting out to bring it to life can be scary. Now you need to find someone to support you and your idea…
So do you have an idea or a business? The right answer should be both.
CBD business development tips and suggestions for you We break down some key points and give some direction to help you be successful.
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