I can drive a car but I guarantee you no NASCAR team would want me behind the wheel. If I can drive safely and get from point A to point B, why shouldn't I be able to drive for a team?

Easy answer - because it's pretty much guaranteed that I would wreck, and 100% guaranteed that I would come in last if I could even finish. Plus, who in the heck would want to watch me race (other than for the laughs)?

Similarly, did you know that elements of your website can not only be wrecking your chances for good search engine ranking but can also be driving visitors away?

Across America, communities have become more vanilla over the past several decades due to the proliferation of franchises, chain stores, and chain restaurants.

People yearn for a connection to places and other people, and these desires are slowly helping rebuild the demand for local products.

A geographic brand validates authenticity and quality for consumers, creates exposure for the community every time it's seen, and helps businesses by improving the marketability of products over time.

Giving good feedback is key to a successful design project.

Regardless of what you're having designed - logo, website, Annual Report, brochure, etc. - your input is important and totally necessary for your project to be successful.

You're paying good money for your project and you want great results, but the onus is on you to give good feedback. After all, designers aren't mind readers. No one knows your business like you, and the magic happens when your knowledge comes together with your design team's skills and expertise.

Below are a few guidelines on how to provide effective feedback and, just as or more importantly, what not to do.

In the spirit of Throwback Thursday, thought I'd share a design from back in 2006.

Did you know we've been doing this since 1996?!?

James Dietz is an award-winning military and aviation artist whose work is collected worldwide, and even hangs in the White House. Back in 2006, our Ballowax small business division was actually a separate company (owned by Glerin and a couple of partners) that provided e-commerce order fulfillment services. We were contracted to develop a site to sell collectibles that featured Dietz's art; the new online store offered full-featured e-commerce including live interaction with USPS.com for shipping, live chat customer support, and the ability for customers to manage their existing orders.

We actually developed our very first e-commerce site in 1997 and had to code everything from scratch!

This is the kind of project we love.

A client that's important to the community, is fun to work with and welcomes creativity, and has ideas of their own so is able to give good feedback and guidance but knows when to turn things over to the pros.

We just recently launched the new website for Halifax County Tourism, including creating a custom illustrated animated map that displays tourism sector information and provides visual site navigation.

For as long as we've been working with the tourism office, director Linda Shepperd has wished for some type of animation that would let visitors "drive" around the county to discover things. Cost, not wishing to use Flash, practicality of the feature, and several other factors always kept us from creating it.

On this site redesign, though, illustrator Erin Kipps Brown came up with a concept to treat the project like a theme park map.