The Great Business

The office reception space is an often overlooked component in office design. From simply awkward to mysteriously absent, the design or presence of a reception area is regularly disregarded. To shed some light on how proper planning of this space can greatly benefit the efficiency and professional image of your business, I’ve put together the five most important design aspects of the office reception space and how to best use them.

1. Plan to have a reception area and a receptionist.

Not having a reception is mistake # 1. Have you ever had a meeting at an office where you’ve never been before, and when you walked in you found yourself in the middle of all the employees with all of their work suddenly paused while they stared at you blankly. I have, and it makes a negative first impression. Plan to have a conspicuous reception area and staff it with a pleasant and informative individual who will keep your other employees from getting interrupted.

2. Where to put the reception area.

Place it at the entrance so that it’s the first place a visitor will head. There’s no point in having a reception area if visitors find it easier to interrupt other staff.

3. Lighting in the reception area.

Not just mistake #3, but the most common mistake is lighting, and the most overlooked detail is lighting colour. Have you ever walked into an office where the light makes everything look distasteful or sickly? Every bulb, whether fluorescent or incandescent, emits light which is measured on the Kelvin scale. Typical bulbs will be anywhere from 2500 – 7500 Kelvin, where 2500 is warm and yellow, and 7500 is cold and blue. A cold, blue light will make skin and even food look unpleasant so stick to between 3500-4500 Kelvin, which you’ll find written on the bulb box.

Increasingly, there has a lot more installs and interest emanating from ski-resorts and mountain areas in Europe and the United States. The screens are being used for both advertising and information and their use in such areas it is a good example of the unique benefits that outdoor digital signage can offer.

Alpine resorts and other ski locations have begun turning to outdoor digital signage because of the effectiveness in providing information that other communication methods simply can’t match.

The great advantage of using outdoor displays in these sorts of areas is the immediacy that the information can be uploaded and distributed. Often, in skiing areas emergency information such as dangerous snow and avalanches needs to be relayed as quickly and to effectively as possible and until the advent of outdoor digital signage the only real method of passing this information on was physically, with a steward going up and down the slopes.

Now, emergency information can be uploaded remotely to all slopes and areas and displayed on the outdoor screens, warning and informing everybody that is out. – no other medium can do this as effectively and what-is-more, when the screens are not being used for information, advertising can be run to generate revenue that can eventually pay for the installation of the outdoor displays.

The use of such technology in such locations is only made possible due to the advancement in the protection of LCD and other display types. There are many challenges to installing a screen in a cold and snowy environment. Not only do you have to prevent snow and moisture from damaging the screen but also you have to keep temperatures high enough to prevent the components from freezing. The sun too, can cause sun-glare and make the screen unreadable on a bright day.

We all know that Facebook is a dynamic and very popular meeting place to catch-up on the latest news with your friends and families. It’s like email on steroids. It is said that more people spend more time on Facebook than other social networking sites on the net today. People of all ages are connecting with Facebook every day. It is probably at the top of the scale of the favorite social pass-times of people all around the world.

To a budding entrepreneur, Facebook is a marketing opportunity with endless possibilities. Traditional marketing tells us that if you are going to get your messages to the masses, you need to go where the masses hang-out all of the time. In the past to create a powerful, massive media campaign, you would have to air your message during prime time television hours. If you did that, then you did it to the tune tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Today, with the right strategy, you can network with the masses and expand your business influence through Facebook. For the most part you can do that absolutely free. To increase the power of your message you can pay a relatively small amount to advertise on Facebook. To blaze trails and dominate the Facebook Marketplace you must understand the full array of Facebook components and develop a strategy to employ each one of them to promote your passions, your service, and your products.

The first thing that you must get right on Facebook is your Profile. In your profile you will want to create a concise, yet powerful presentation of who you are and what you are about. Understand as you do this that people do business with people that they know and people that they trust. You must begin to make yourself real and validate what you do through your profile.