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Ali Green

Balancing the Creative and Technical Elements of a Website

There exists a tension between the creative and technical elements of a well-built website. While you always strive to create a beautiful website pleasing to the eye, you must also consider functionality, ease of use, accessibility, and keyword integration. All these aspects work together to produce an effective vehicle for your organization’s message.   Let’s discuss some areas where it’s wise to balance the creative and technical elements of your website. Keyword optimization Properly optimizing keywords for search engines typically requires more dense content on the page, but good design principles and a positive user experience lean toward using less copy. There is an art to writing with keywords. They must appear tastefully in the copy in a way that feels uninterrupted and natural so that the search engine can still understand what the story is about. But never forget you’re writing for humans first. If your message gets lost in a sea […]

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Why You Should Have a Strategy Before Doing Ongoing Marketing

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, having a solid digital marketing strategy is crucial for businesses of all sizes. It provides a roadmap for success and ensures that your marketing efforts are aligned with your overall business goals. 

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GreenMellen Core Value: We Think Outside the Box

It’s time to unpack our core value: we think outside the box. That’s easy to say, and much harder to live out. So what does this practically look like in our daily marketing?

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Home Builder Digital Marketing: 4 Tips on Where to Start

As a home builder, your day is full of so many decisions that pertain to the details and logistics of building homes. You’re answering to your subcontractors, your clients, architects, and designers. You rarely have time to sit down—let alone time to focus on your marketing.

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6 Professional Website Design Tips and Ideas for Beginners

Even if you wouldn’t consider yourself someone with good eye for web design, you can still build a beautiful, user-friendly website that visually stands out. From our design gurus, here are the top web design tips for all levels of designers to create a stunning website.

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GreenMellen Core Value: We Are Always Improving

At GreenMellen, we like to see growth as an opportunity to continuously serve our clients and ourselves with relevant and trending digital marketing strategies.

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GreenMellen Core Value: We Do The Right Thing

At GreenMellen, one of our core values is “We do the right thing.” Sounds broad, right? Let me narrow this in a bit more. “We do the right thing, even if it’s to the detriment of ourselves.” How do we practice this?

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Before the Build: Ali Green's WordCamp Atlanta 2018 Session

At WordCamp Atlanta 2018, I had the privilege of leading a session about the scoping, planning, dreaming and designing that happens before a WordPress website is built. Below are the slides from this session, and we will post the video from the session once it’s available.

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Check Out GreenMellen’s New Logo!

Revising a logo is certainly not an easy task, but we made it a priority to revamp our brand identity this year. After countless doodles and collaboration with our hand-lettering artist and friend Joanna Dee, we’re excited to unveil the new visual identity for GreenMellen: The logo concept In our industry, we are always using a balance of our technical and creative minds to create beautiful and functional work for our clients, and we wanted this to be showcased in our new logo…literally. While at first glance this mark looks like a brain, it’s actually made of an abstract “G” and “M” for GreenMellen. We are excited our visual identity is now strongly focused on our best skill, our “mellens.” The tagline concept We also made a slight shift in our tagline. Our previous tagline was “Building Brands for Good,” which explains the balance of our long-term relationship with our clients while […]

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How Web Design Influenced Today’s Print Design Trends

Print design and web design often come up in conversation together, as they are so alike yet so opposite. When someone thinks print design, they probably refer to a favorite, physical ad they tore out of a magazine to keep as inspiration or art. This is very different for web design, as someone will rave about a website’s flow and user experience when describing strong web design. Even though they are very different from one another, print and web design are becoming more alike than ever before. Why is that the case? With the vast emergence of web design over the past 20 years, many designers have had to work in two different mediums. This leads web designers to refer to the world of print, and print projects are using the web for inspiration. Web design has certainly shaped the design world for the better, and it’s a beautiful thing! Let us […]

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GreenMellen Welcomes Brooke to the Team!

The GreenMellen team has a big announcement! We are introducing a new member to the GreenMellen family, Brooke Martens. Brooke is our new Digital Content Coordinator. She will be working with our clients to not only ensure their website remains secure and up to date, but also to help shape their brand’s tone and voice through content creation. What sets her apart is her creative advertising background, which allows her to attack everything from simple blog posts to inbound marketing campaigns from a strategic perspective. Help us welcome Brooke to the GreenMellen team!

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How to Create a Marketing Calendar for Your Business

2016 is upon us and it’s pertinent that you have a roadmap in place for planning your marketing efforts for the year. While it’s easy to procrastinate building out an annual marketing calendar, the process of brainstorming your outreach typically uncovers needs and opportunities you never knew you had. Ready to dig in? Use the following tips to create a marketing calendar that will keep you on track through the new year. How to begin Begin your marketing calendar by outlining major events and trends that impact your business. This includes holidays, trends in your product cycle, events and tradeshows, and any sales or campaigns you plan to run. Objectives With your major milestones determined, you can then begin setting objectives and strategies for promoting each one. This could be as small as a facebook post or as large as a new tradeshow booth for an upcoming event. Here are […]

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Merry Christmas From GreenMellen

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WordCamp Panel Discussion: UX / Web Design

This past month I had the privilege of moderating a panel at WordCamp Atlanta. We were given an hour to discuss website design and user experience and were able to cover quite a bit of subject matter! The overarching conversation centered around defining goals for the website and designing with user in mind, rather than designing from the viewpoint of the business owner or web designer. As Cliff Seal mentioned during the talk, “in a tenth of a second, the human brain judges what it’s looking at”. Users will quickly thereafter make a judgment as to whether they will dig deeper into the site. For this reason, it’s extremely important to approach your website project strategically. To dig in deeper into this topic watch the recording of our discussion above and read more about our website design process on our website. A few tools that were mentioned during out talk: […]

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Meetup: A deep dive into site maps and wireframes

At our last Meetup we discussed the questions we ask in order to begin a web project. This month we’ll be discussing the steps we take to get to design. This involves everything from site maps, to copywriting, to wireframing and finally design. So what is a sitemap? A sitemap is a visual model of a website’s content typically organized in hierarchical fashion. Why would you use a sitemap? A sitemap helps you determine all the pages on your website before you spend time designing or developing the structure and helps guide copywriting, wireframes, overall usability and communication strategy. You can compare a sitemap to the outline you create before writing a research paper. It helps to plan your overall content structure. Step 1: Research List all products, services, features, staff, documents, etc. that need to be present on the website.  Consider the existing sitemap and competitors’ sitemaps, if applicable, to […]

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