Archive for the ‘For Our Clients’ Category

Paper Leaf Design in Parlour Magazine

April 14, 2010

We’re going to take a quick break today from our regularly scheduled, design-informing programming to jump on the Self-Involved Train and talk about ourselves for a minute. Why? Because this month Paper Leaf Design is featured in Parlour Magazine. This Edmonton-produced design, lifestyle and fashion magazine is available in Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, and is noted for its great design, photography, and content.

Parlour Magazine

We’re honored to have been mentioned (and so kindly!) in their favorites section – judging by the quality of the other talent featured in the section, it’s no small feat. So thanks to Parlour for mentioning us, and if you see Parlour in your city, pick it up! It’s free and the content is awesome – for example, this issue features articles on the Bouncing Souls and Metric, as well as highlights of up & coming fashion for the season. If you’re not in Edmonton, Vancouver or Calgary, read the new issue online here. Also, much thanks to Leah Rae Photography – she took the photo of us that appears in the ‘zine (and on our About Us page).

Here’s some shots of the inside of the magazine (we’re the big photo, where Andy is threatening me with physical harm).

Paper Leaf Design in Parlour Magazine

Paper Leaf Design in Parlour Magazine

Alright, enough about us. Back to dropping design science in our next post!

How Your Business Can Effectively Use Social Media

March 29, 2010

“Social media” is everywhere. Everyone’s talking about it – news anchors, journalists, your mom, your bowling team. And while social media – Twitter, blogging, Facebook, etc – is hugely popular and has great potential for you and your business, the method in which most businesses use social media is largely ineffective. Let’s face it – nobody, especially your clients, cares about your inside jokes and how you burnt your toast. In our time as Paper Leaf Design, we’ve managed to use social media to help our business presence grow and attract new clients. In this article, I’ll share tips and guidelines on how you can successfully use social media for your business;  I’ll also talk about what not to do.

how your business should be using social media

Who is Your Audience?

Right off the bat, just like most everything else related to business, you should think about your audience first. Tailor your social media content towards them. Are you a marketing consultant who provides your services to small local businesses? Perhaps you should put yourself in the shoes of the small local business owner, then; what would they want to hear you talk about on your blog? What sort of Tweets would they want to read? Be honest, be blunt, and use the answers to these questions steer your social media content.

Hit the jump for the entire article! Read the whole article >

For Our Clients: CMS Websites Screencast

February 1, 2010

Businesses need to be able to control the content on their websites. We understand that at Paper Leaf, which is why we offer CMS-powered websites. Our solution provides you with a very simple way to add, edit, or remove pages, text and/or images on your site. Plus, we brand the content management system for your business, and give you a training session on how to use the administration side of the website. That’s right – we don’t just design aesthetic & usable websites, we also do the implementation side of things. But instead of rambling on in text format, we recorded a short screencast for you.

In this screencast, I go through a testing site designed & built by Paper Leaf and show how easy it is for clients to add a page with an image & some text, as well as how easy it is to change text on another page. We also talk about users & permissions, and website stats. Have a look and contact us if you’re interested in our services. Thanks!

 

 

* Keep in mind that this video showcases just a small part of what a Paper Leaf built, CMS-powered website can do. There’s a whole lot more under the hood, so drop us a line!

For Your Clients: How to Use WordPress

January 4, 2010

This post is based on an old version of WordPress.

Here at Paper Leaf, we do a decent amount of WordPress blog design & implementation for our clients. While WordPress is super easy to learn, you can’t just build your clients a blog, send them the login information and then disappear off of the face of the earth. Where’s the customer service, people?!? Ideally, we sit down for a half hour or hour with our clients to show them the basics of how to use their new blog (writing a post, adding categories, checking stats, uploading photos, adding users). However, sometimes a face-to-face meet up isn’t doable; we offer graphic & web design in Edmonton, but many of our clients are outside of the city.

Click here to download the free basic WordPress author's guide

To combat this, we built a very simple reference guide to give to our clients that explains how to do the following in their new WordPress blog:

  • write a new blog entry
  • save, preview & publish a post
  • add tags (and what that means)
  • add categories (and what that means)
  • check blog stats
  • use the Media section
  • moderate comments
  • update plugins
  • add a new user

This covers about 99% of what most basic blog users need to know, and it provides them with a resource they can come back to when needed, share within their business, and so forth. It’s sort of a basic WordPress author’s guide suitable to email and view on screen – click here to download it (or click the image above).

We figured that since this guide has been helpful to us, maybe it will be helpful to other designers who use WordPress. Here’s hoping! Anyway, share freely (but not as your own, please!)

*note: we install the Site Stats plugin for all clients – if you use this guide, I recommend doing the same, or your clients might be confused as to why they don’t have a Site Stats link.

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Paper Leaf Design is a small but mighty graphic & web design studio in Edmonton. This is our blog, where we wax poetic on design.

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