Thomas' CSIT 155 - Fall 2020 Class Blog

 On Facebook, post reach is different from post engagement.  Post reach is how many people have actually seen what a business has posted on their Facebook page. Post engagement is the number of actual interactions or responses that the post has gotten back from those people that have seen it. The raw numbers can get a little confusing, especially when really high reach numbers can lower the engagement number while not actually making the engagement any less. It is like averaging out how many people have “seen” the post as to how manny have actually “engaged” with the post.  Knowing the difference between these two numbers can help a business create better, more engaging posts that don’t just simply get “seen” but actually engage their customer base and lead to real interactions. A post that just gets a high reach but no engagement can be looked at as not hitting the mark, and more time and energy can be put into developing better, more engaging posts. Facebook Insights is the metric to

 The target market for The Painting Dummy would be miniature hobbyists interested in watching someone bumble through cleaning, prepping, and painting table top miniatures. Those who want to see different techniques used and different color schemes on models before they commit to painting their own. These could be of any age as the hobby spans generations now. Any gender, the inclusion is not only growing but actively being promoted, The only real demographic to drill down into will be nuances between the hobbyists.

  Armstrong Garden Centers   vs.  Rancho Vista Nursery   These two businesses couldn’t be more different from one another unless they were in completely different areas of business. It definitely shows in their websites. Rancho Vista Nursery specializes in succulents. A niche within a niche market. The website screams local and they even have a “Farmstand” that you can go to to pick out your specific succulent you want for your collection. Their target market looks like succulent plant collectors that are more into locally raised succulent plants with a friendly “homey” or even “artisanal” feel to it. Armstrong Garden Centers, on the other hand, can design entire gardens of annuals and perennials while still offering a selection of “trendy” succulents, but definitely don’t specialize in them. Their website shouts “big box store” to me with the flattened graphics and the color scheme. They have an area to find their closest store and offer “personal shopper” services. I think their targ

  For The Painting Dummy I played around with a couple of ideas for logos before setting on a simple double circle with an illustrative paint brush diagonally across it. The muted greens for the background make the red and purple of the paint brush pop.  I kept with cooler colors for the background. For the lettering I went with a friendly sans-serif. The color I kept warm with a bright golden yellow. I like the logo as simple as it is, I think I can use it as an identity across many media formats. The logo comes from trying to represent what I will be mostly focusing on, painting miniatures. The idea of an actual art dummy as part of the logo mark was entertained for a while but was dropped as I thought it make the logo mark look a little too crowded and didn’t read well at lower resolution and sizes. I like having the tag line, “learning as I do”, as part of the complete logo. This represents a big part of my focus on trial and error in the painting process and exp

      http://gatesnfences.com/     http://jamilin.com/ These two websites have some problems, to say the least. The Ease of use, or more like, the lack of Ease of use on both sites makes it almost imposable to locate what you may be looking for if you went to the websites as a search result. Neither use Contrast very well. What contrast that is used pull attention away from relevant information about product or links to that information. Typography use is basic at best if it was even thought of. Both at least picked a sans seraph font. Neither of these sites come across as projecting any kind of professionalism in either the design or more safely, in the company they were designed for.   A couple of improvements could drastically change the perception of both websites. A more contrasting color scheme would change the overall appearance dramatically. Both should pay attention to where the colors could be used to build a hierarchy in the page. Proximity could be used to better illustrate

 eBay Miniature Rescues https://www.ebayminiaturerescues.com/ This is a tabletop miniature painting service. Some commission work with a majority of the business in “rescuing” damage, neglected, or poorly painted miniatures by fixing and repainting them to a table top or better standard. It is literally a one man show. Teaches tips and techniques anyone can use to save miniatures or models and save some money (expensive habit…I mean Hobby). Ships anywhere mail will go to really. Social Media: YouTube -   uploads about every week.                       as of this writing last upload was 9-6-2020                       36,600 subscribers to this channel Instagram-  posts about every 4 to 6 weeks                      as of this writing last upload was 8-10-2020                      1,684 followers on this Instagram feed Facebook-  posts semi-monthly                      as of this writing last post was 8-27-2020                      641 followers on this Facebook page Twitter-      tweet

Using Social Media now to communicate with a business or as a business is significantly different from communicating with businesses in the past. Before, almost all communications with and by a business was almost all one way. The business had a bull horn with advertising, and the customer could give feed back through customer service departments. Not the greatest way to have any type of relationship. Today a business can “mine” social media looking for any mention of their business or product. This ‘mining’ is more than just monitoring. The information that can be gathered this way one public forums, can be more informative for the business than a customer support line. The public nature of the social media sites can encourage a more authentic or honest discourse from the customer to their online community than may be reported to the customer service rep. This honest information wether positive or negative can be gathered in real time and utilized to improve the customer’s or client’s