Websites are tools, and the tools that endure are the tools that serve a purpose.  Shovels are good at making holes, cars are good at moving people from one place to another.  If you want people to use your website, it must serve a purpose.  However, it is not sufficient for the site to serve a purpose for you, it must serve a purpose for whomever you want to use it.

What Purpose Should Your Website Serve?
And Whom Does it Serve?

There are any number of purposes a website might serve, but let’s take a look at some of the more common …

Redesigning a website is like building a new one:

Start with a purpose.

If you know you need a change, but can’t put the reason into words, try answering these questions:

“What do I want my new website to do that the old one couldn’t?”

“What do I want my new website to do better than my old website?”

Maybe you want your new site to reflect a new identity, perhaps you want to start selling products online, or you want to start an online community, or improve online customer communication, or reduce the turn around time between when you decide …

As Twitter continues its meteoric rise towards becoming the largest, easiest vehicle for mass personal communication, advertisers and marketers continue to experiment with how the social media tool can be monetized and/or integrated into their campaigns.

Three concerns in particular have driven these experiments: Cost, Impact, and Disclosure.

Cost

As anyone with a Twitter account can tell you, Twitter is a free service.  It costs you nothing to set up an account, and there is no charge for posting to Twitter.

However, there is another price associated with marketing through Twitter, and its coin is time.

If you wish to grow a successful Twitter presence …

Last month marked the 20th Anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Awareness of this landmark date was a part of my inspiration to write my blog entry on using vacations and sick leave as a small business stress test.

At that time I suggested that business owners make contingency plans and run drills for all variety of business obstacles, including the possibility of bridge closures. Last week the Labor Day repairs of the Bay Bridge failed and we were faced with the longest closure of that thoroughfare since the Loma Prieta quake.

For five days …

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… once only visited for personal use, these sites are now being used for business purposes. We all hear about them and see their icons everywhere. And, we feel out of touch or like we are dropping the ball if we don’t have profiles on all of them.

It is true that social media sites help business. But how? Most of the case studies we read about are about big business and their bigger than life social media campaigns. How can small business benefit?

The truth is, at least our opinion of it, that there are no step-by-step rules …

Most small businesses know their business. They also excel at explaining how their business operates and probably have a supporting brochure that tells that story. This knowledge creates operational excellence. But, growth potential is found in identifying why customers buy, who is buying from the company, and how to connect with them; this is a reoccurring question for even the most passionate business owners. A marketing strategy is a foundation built on the answers to these questions, a strategy for success. Building a strategy can be simplified if it is broken into small components.

Moving past operational deliverables, a …

An important thing to remember when you go looking for your online market is that nobody can tell you more about your audience than your audience itself. With that in mind, here are five ways to …

In medical terminology, a stress test (or exercise test) can be any of a series of tests designed to measure how your your heart and lungs hold up as you put greater and greater demands upon your body.  As a result of the Wall Street bailout, it has been increasingly common to hear of such tests being applied to various corporations.  Mostly we hear about outside agencies performing these tests, but it is possible to conduct them upon your own organization regardless of its size.

For example, if someone takes a day off or is sick, either some tasks go undone, …

When the question is, “How many slides are sufficient for my Powerpoint presentation?” my mind irresistible chants: “he would chuck what a woodchuck could, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”

That’s not really off point: You need as many slides as you need, but not more than that nor less.

In some situations presenters are told how many slides they must use, or can’t use. In fact, participants at Ignite! presentations get five minutes on stage to speak through 20 slides, each of which gets 15 seconds of display.  Tough parameters indeed, but I bring this up mostly …

People often seem to think that “thinking outside of the box” is all about being creative.

It’s not.

It’s really about defining the problem and it’s constraints.  In problem solving, as in mathematics, a constraint is a …