Working in business you quickly learn that a partnership with your senior management team is like a marriage. The playbook and attitudes you all took on across a dinner table as the company may have started are often in need of refreshing. Seriously, you spend 8-12 hours a day with them, more than with your spouses and partners, and chances are you have discussions over wins and disagreements that may blush a customer if they walked in. So what are three key ways to ensure a happy and profitable long term working relationship?

First, act your role in the situation. No …

So you need a copywriter to help craft your marketing message.
You’re not a writer, but you need to get your message out. So you call in a professional copywriter to help you craft your marketing messaging. To ensure the marketing materials best reflect your product or service, you need to provide your copywriter with all the information needed to write the most persuasive copy possible. This can be accomplished with an in-person meeting or conference call with email follow-ups.

Let’s start by reviewing what your copywriter will need from you:

Your business challenge: What is the market situation? Are there any unmet …

You have identified the need to build a new website for your company. The site you have now no longer reflects your business offerings. Maybe your company re-branded and the site never got updated. Maybe the content is current but the competition is outdoing you in functionality. Maybe you got tired of not being able to update the site yourself and waiting for days and even weeks for your web developer to make the updates. Maybe it’s just simply time.

Whatever the reasons are, you have some key decisions to make:

• …
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When writing a Request for Proposal for a web development project, consider writing it with the end goal in mind: to find the most qualified vendor for your project who can work within your requirements. If you want a good response with accurate pricing and schedule, then you will need to put effort in providing the same level of detail and accuracy in your document.

An RFP can be organized into three main sections.

Information about the company requesting the proposal
The goal of …

Website development starts with intense conversations about what the site should look like and what it should do to meet the desired goals. Typically several people on the client’s end are tasked with describing what the company’s needs are from each of their perspectives and to ensure nothing critical is missed by the web developer. At the other side of the table, the web development team will ask many, many questions first to understand the company’s needs and then to make sure the site’s functions are clearly defined. After these conversations, a site specifications document is drawn. The web developer …

There are many details to think about when developing an e-commerce site. We have developed the list of questions below which help us discover what “size” e-commerce site we will be building. An important part of our job is to guide a client through these to determine what is really needed to meet goals, budget, and timeline.

Hope you find these helpful.

PRODUCT-RELATED
1. How many products will there be at launch?
2. How many product will there be 3-6 months post launch?
3. How are these products organized? How many product categories?
4. Do products have …

E-commerce websites seem straightforward, and some of them are. However, we tend to end up building the complicated ones! They are only complicated because there are many, many details to consider and test… both on our end and the client’s end. It’s best to do all of the planning at the beginning to avoid changing specifications as the site is being built. Here are a few key items to consider.

1. Focus on the Objective

• Selling your product

Every design decision on an e-commerce site should be made with this goal in …

A word of warning: If you produce blog posts regularly and without fail, this article is not for you.

This article offers approaches to writing, strategizing, using research, collaborating, and scheduling.

If you’re already on top of your blog, producing regular content on schedule and without impacting your other obligations, you will not gain anything from the suggestions it contains.
Where to Begin: Write First
Putting pen to paper is the most important part of any writing project. Without that crucial step, you will never generate any content.

First you must write.

Don’t worry about style.

Don’t worry about substance.

…

Talking with a colleague the other day, I was startled to learn that he does not write down the project details when he takes on a new client project. No written contract.

Yikes.

“Spell it out” is my advice, and I guarantee it will save you time, money and headaches.

I have written Agreements with all my customers to spell out at the least what I will do for them, how long it will take, and what it will cost.

My Agreements evolve out of my proposal to the client. Having discussed the essentials with a client, I put together a proposal using my …

When writing for a business, there is a temptation to turn writing into a solo affair. Why take time from several people when one is clearly an expert with all the knowledge you might ever need to include?

Unfortunately, it is also an approach that invites problems, from missed deadlines to reams of techno-babble, or worse still, it’s converse: a treatise so bland and accessible it seems to lack any genuine insight.

Injecting a second actor into the writing process speeds content generation, creates a more dynamic voice, and ensures the resulting text has both depth and breadth.

We have started using …