How do you measure success?

How about your website’s success?

Drawing a blank? Then maybe it’s time to figure out your website’s “finish line.”  I’d be willing to bet that you had some sort of a goal in mind when you first decided to build a website.  What were you trying to do?

• Make a sale online
• Grow your mailing list
• Initiate contact with potential clients
• Share critical information with the community
• Drive business to a brick and mortar location

Each of these suggests a different ‘finish line,’ and if you aren’t watching it you’ll never know how useful your website has been.  No time is better than …

Beautiful websites are a joy to look at, but it’s the return on investment that defines the value of a business website. Google Analytics are a great help in measuring ROI and the Bounce Rate is one of the immediately accessible measures.

What Is a “Bounce”?

According to Google Analytics, any “single-page view or single-event trigger in a session or visit” is a bounce. In other words, if someone shows up on your site, sees a single page, and leaves before doing anything else they have “bounced off” …

Unless you’re selling products online, it can be hard to track how your website is doing. If the goal of your website is to bring in business, how do you track if it’s doing the job? As a web developer I ask that question a lot and to my surprise most people say their website is not doing much. When I hear this, I dig in more and it turns our there are no tracking mechanisms in place! So before you jump to the conclusion that your site is not pulling …

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 …

This is the million dollar question — well, maybe not a million dollars, but quality video isn’t cheap. So making a good decision about whether to pursue a video production project or not is important because the stakes are high. In my experience, creating video content for a client’s website often costs more than 25% of the total cost of producing the website in the first place. Logically speaking, the video content should account for a great deal of the overall impact and effectiveness of the site.

Let’s take, for instance, a website that is built around marketing a single product. …

We’ve all been to websites that offend our senses. It might be the copy, the color, too much flashing or that “something” you just can’t put your mouse on that sends you packing. In working with businesses in all industries and sizes the one common denominator is they all have a website. Unfortunately, not all of them are good and some are flat out annoying. Here are a few easy thought processes you can work through to help provide your visitors with a positive visit to your online office.
Be Clear About It’s Goal
I’m stupefied by the number of clients that …

Well, we finally made it to Facebook. Just like any other small business, we struggled with the decision of whether or not to have a presence in Facebook. It’s free to start; it’s simple to use… but the reality is that it’s an investment of internal resources, mostly time. But given the staggering statistics of how much Facebook is used, we decided to give it a shot. Here’s how we did it.
1. We decided on content
We took this as an opportunity to have a balance of work-related posts and fun/personal ones with the goal of showing the world who we …

Recently Scott Stiefvater and I were discussing the principles behind the CMS driven model of website design that MB/I favors.  In that conversation he mentioned the three levels of content and presentation (the core application, the modules, and the interface and display).  This reminded me of the six elements of design presented in Scott McCloud’s visual textbook Understanding Comics.

From inception to presentation these layers are: the idea, the form, the idiom, the structure, the craft, and the surface. This week I’d like to look at the two …

Let’s face it, even if the economy is currently pulling out of the worst recession in 70 years, money remains tight and the independent entrepreneur needs to consider ways to reduce costs while retaining their brand image and placement.

So, what can a company do on a $2500 budget?

Invest in a custom blog

For $2500 you could have a fully functional and branded blog with custom features.

What does this price buy you?

• A persistent platform you can use again and again, whenever you have an announcement or other content.
• Custom blogs can build up traffic for your own domain, giving it ready-made …
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