Sunday, February 28, 2010

Yesterday I sat, for quite some time, at a red stop SIGN waiting for something to turn green.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Two Cures for Boring Website Syndrome. Part 2: Content & Function

This is part two of our two part series on Boring Website Syndrome.. Part one can be found here, http://cdllc.blogspot.com/2010/02/two-cures-for-boring-website-syndrome.html

 

When approached by new clients, there are a few common opening statements, requests, and complaints we hear, such as:

  • I need "Help" with my website.
  • I need a complete "Redesign" (which a lot of the time has more to do with engineering than design).
  • I need "something more 'current.'"


But our favorite opening statement—and perhaps the most honest—is this one:

"My Website is Boring."

The Boring Website Syndrome is our favorite because it presents an opportunity for further diagnosis. We have the opportunity to get to know our client better and probe for unique needs relative to the business they're in.

15+ years experience in internet consulting have taught us that Boring Website Syndrome breaks down into one of the following two categories, and often both:

1) The website looks old.
2) The website doesn't offer or do anything . . . it doesn't engage visitors.


Today we will look at #2 My Website Doesn't Engage My Visitors.

Have you ever thrown a party, only to see your guests milling around for just as long as they felt necessary to appear polite—and then bolt for the exit? More than likely, these people didn't feel engaged.

On the Internet, failing to engage your visitors means they'll be leaving . . . immediately. Let's look at what it takes to keep your visitors hanging around longer:

The first issue is content.  It's possible to have an incredibly ugly website that offers good enough content or functionality that the bad design does not interfere with its popularity. Some long-tail blogs are like this ["long tail," is a term coined by the book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.].

Want examples?  Click this link to see who carries Google's #2 ranking for "growing habenaro". Or look at Authorize.net's members' section. Although slightly updated in past years, the Internet's most prominent credit card processor has lived through poor organization and design inconsistencies, but it always "did the job".

The point? With incredibly valuable content (here content refers to words and functionality), it is actually possible to overcome poor website design (outdated fashion). However, it is the rare & very fortunate company that can simply say, "Click here to buy my stuff, and that's all you need to know," or, "Your eyes will just have to tolerate the pain of horribly designed site if you want my brilliant information." 

The point is, to attract and keep visitors you must offer something valuable, words or tools, and in return they give something; their time.

It can be as simple as offering specific, detailed information about your offerings, or as advanced as leveraging your hard-earned, de-facto, "expert blogger," position on a topic.

Everything above discussed the "words" or "content" part of what a website offers.  Now let us look at functionality.

All of the "stuff" that can be done on a website is a comprehensive enough topic for a week of articles. So for now, let's just list a few website functionality ideas than will engage your visitors, and maybe even get them to return.  Consider:

  1. How easy is it to give you money? Do you take credit cards? E-checks? Does your business accept these 24x7x365, from any computer or mobile phone, via an automated, no-staff-intervention-required method?
  2. Do you accept reservations and appointments via an online scheduling system? Make it fast and easy for people to schedule with you from anywhere/anytime!
  3. Are you taking advantage of an online store front?
  4. Are you collecting inquiries from your website? This is the easiest way to convert curious visitors into customers.
  5. Does your website include a Help or FAQ section? This brings customers back to your site, helps them solve problems, and converts them into repeat customers.

There are even more advanced offerings that are surprisingly easy to add to your web site, like live, online support, incident tracking/trouble-ticketing, optimizing your products into search-engine specific feeds, and creating password protected areas for "special people."  And people love when you make them feel special.

"Boring Web Site" means out-of-fashion, out-of-date, and/or non-engaging.  The solution?  Consult with a web firm about content, functionality, and style overhaul, using the above list to beging the brainstorming process over what your website should offer visitors.

You can even use CDLLC if you like . . .


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC


-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

this is punk rock:
http://ping.fm/ZeJeL

Two Cures for "Boring Website Syndrome." Part 1: Fashion

We were recently referred to a new client who asked us to make their website more engaging.

The simplicity of the word, "engaging" is terrific. It's more personal than interactive. More descriptive than customer-oriented or useful.

And so the thinking began . . .

Generally, we're approached about existing sites with a variety of opening requests, including:

  • People need "Help" with their website.
  • Companies want a "Redesign" (which a lot of the time has more to do with engineering than design).
  • A request for "something more 'current.'"


But our favorite opening statement—and perhaps the most honest—is this one:

"My Website is Boring."

The Boring Website Syndrome is our favorite because it presents an opportunity for further diagnosis. We have the opportunity to get to know our client better and probe for unique needs relative to the business they're in.

15+ years experience in internet consulting have taught us that Boring Website Syndrome breaks down into one of the following two categories, and often both:

1) The website looks old.
2) The website doesn't offer or do anything . . . it doesn't engage visitors.


Today, let's explore number 1, the Old Website.

This is the easiest one to qualify, but hardest to quantify.  It's very subjective. Website old-lookingness is a function of fashion. There were technologies in style 5-10 years ago that have gone the way of leisure suits and bell bottoms, and these technologies resulted in a distinct look, or "fashion," in the sites that employed them.

Some "old-fashioned" items:

* The gray-background, center-aligned website.
* Embedded background music.
* The 3 resizeable, big-bordered frames/panels.

. . . we could go on and on.

And there are technologies available today that weren't options 5-10 years ago. Some will stand the test of time, while others will go away. And this is one of the many areas in which we can help you. After so much time in the web world, we're pretty good at separating the passing, frilly technologies from the solid, lasting ones.

And, of course, we're well-versed in the latest design fashion—this includes the layout of your website container, global elements like navigation and search, the look of your deeper menus and navigation elements, and the division/layout of the primary page content inside each page container.

All of these, geeky as they sound, come back to the very practical issues of both the way your site looks and its function.

We've pointed out before that getting you set up on a Content Management System (CMS) creates drastic time and money savings by making redesigns and content publication a snap. Now let's add to that:


Making your web site look good, act the way you need, and easy to administer all go together. And we want that to be as simple for you as possible.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Monday, February 22, 2010

Luddites: How May We Be of Service?

http://cdllc.blogspot.com/2010/02/luddites-we-understand.html

"Years ago Dad came home from his business and informed us, "'hey took away my calculator and replaced it with a computer.'"

 

... Like so many others during this time, he was pushed into accepting technology change.

Just last month, Dad-in-law announced something similar. "I got a computer so I could look up specs on our website.  It's quicker and easier than the paper catalog."  Slightly different from the above case, he was responding to the reality that technology makes a lot of things easier.

Do you know the word Luddite? Today its most-used form is to refer to a slow adopter of technology. But historically the term's roots are a reference to the anti-industrial revolution movement in the early 1800's. British textile artisans rebelled against wide-framed looms, fearing for their livelihoods in the face of technological advancement. They took their name from the fictional textile rebel Ned Ludd, and acted out by destroying mills and factory equipment.

Everyone resists change. Answer Guy Central is a whole business devoted to addressing this.

Evolution made us naturally conservative. But with virtually all of our evolving happening before technology we're stuck with this cool but hard-to-understand stuff and a fast-moving economy— and we have built-in aversions to both.

This aversion is no illusion. An interview with the authors of TechnoStress reveals that EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT of the population feels uncomfortable with technology. And there are real and measurable physiological stress responses to technology: sweating, increased blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and dry mouth!

Why is an internet company talking about Luddites and TechnoStress? Because we can help. There are all sorts of stress coping mechanisms, but let's take a lesson from the industrial revolution—outsource difficult change to the specialists (that's us).

Both of the Dads above had the same great reason for being late technology adopters, personally. They each run highly specialized businesses . . . so why be an expert in something else when you can rely on outsourced expert IT support to take care of everything for you?

That's what we do with websites, search engines, e-commerce, back-end business/database systems, document management, forms, online payment... whatever you need chances are we do it.

Anything that makes money, saves money, and/or increases efficiency . . . call us.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Sunday, February 21, 2010

whenever I enter bed bath and beyond I feel like my mind is being violated

Friday, February 19, 2010

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results," or, Winston Churchill & Search Engine Marketing IV: Conversion Analysis

"Beyond measuring where your website traffic originates, you'll want to keep track of..."


If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

  1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
  2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
  3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
  4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #4:

We know a guy who works in the restaurant business whose entire strategy comes down to one phrase: "Inspect, don't expect." There's an SEM equivalent: Check Your Results.

Traffic comes from many sources. Don't you want to know from where, and which of your efforts are paying off (the question was rhetorical; of course you do!)? Think for a moment about the many ways site promotion happens. Here's a quick list:

  • Websites
  • SEO
  • Off-page factors (linking strategies)
  • More comprehensive SEM activities (Adwords, Pay-Per-Click, etc.)
  • Blogging
  • Newsletters and direct email
  • Other offline marketing

We have techniques to measure ALL of these—yes, there are even tricks to measure your web traffic from offline marketing!

Beyond measuring where your website traffic originates, you'll want to keep track of a some important measurements:


Conversion: What's conversion? Conversion is when a visitor is CONVERTED into something more. It could be a direct sale, a viable lead, a client, an appointment, or even something as simple as an entry on your mailing list.


Aggregation: A fancy word that in SEM terms means traffic origination measurement combined with and compared against conversions to figure out what return you get from each source of traffic.

 

Once you have monitored the above metrics (and potentially more metrics, depending on your business needs), it's time to do the...


Fine Tuning: The complexity of what we do at CDLLC starts to creep in here, but here's one simple concept —SEM takes time, both because it's a cumulative process and because you need to resist the temptation to cut corners by altering many variables simultaneously. Change one variable at a time and wait for results. Changing too many things at once as you pursue SEM Nirvana removes your ability to identify the changes that lead to positive results.

And you thought this was easy. It is: Just contact us, and we'll do the rest . . .

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Thursday, February 18, 2010

bleeding edge:
http://ping.fm/PpGRl

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give," or, Winston Chrchill & Search Engine Marketing III

At CDLLC we've been building web sites for a long time- since the WWW was just a little baby...

 


Enjoyed our riffing on Confucius? You'll love this: Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

  1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
  2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
  3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
  4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #3:

At CDLLC we've been building web sites for a long time- since the WWW was just a little baby. And we're proud of our work. Some of our clients have sites designed with very simple purposes in mind, while others are quite complex, and broad in their scope. But one thing they all have in common is that they look good . . . to the person or company they represent.

Hopefully, of course, they also look go to the people who stumble upon them.  And people that we drive there with SEM efforts. But since others' reactions are tricky to gauge, the way a web site looks really does have to reflect the personality of the party displaying their corporate personality before anything else.

The problem with this is the potential for your web site to become a vanity project.

How do you create a web site without it becoming just an advertisement?  How do you create a website that attracts people rather than talking at them?

The answer is simple.  Be honest.  Share information.  Just like life, you gotta give to get.

So whether it's a newsletter, website, or blog, share, share, SHARE knowledge and information.  Similar to this new world community and global economy we are living in, the days of business information protectionism are limited.

Offer something to your prospective target.  In doing so, you get to prove your expertise while increasing the likelihood of winning business... and loyalty.


To echo what we said in our previous post. Publish, publish, publish. Tell people what you know about the things they're interested in, and keep your target audience in mind , rather than writing to existing customers and vendors already in your industry.

People will notice.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

the time thing has bugged me since middle-school, and the REAL problem: every time I asked a teacher or bring this up to someone, THEY GET REALLY BORED.

Concert is starting now. Bye.

fascinated that time is called primary unit by SI, but time can't "be" w/o motion. there has to be distance comparison (clock hands, crystal vibrations, planet orbit, light particle).

Monitor #3 is dying. My left eye is strained from the purple-red pre-death monitor syndrome.

Monday, February 15, 2010

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential," — Winston Churchill's SEM Part II

In the previous segment we talked about the need to publish regularly. The success of your SEM efforts depends on it. Today, we extend that point to include the way you say things in your published works and what you say.

 


If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

  1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
  2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
  3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
  4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #2:

In the previous segment we talked about the need to publish regularly. The success of your SEM efforts depends on it. Today, we extend that point to include the way you say things in your published works and what you say:

You say important things repeatedly.

Do you remember how many time you were told "look both ways before you cross the street!" as a young child? The message sunk in. We all know way more about Coca-Cola and McDonalds than matters, but we sure do remember who they are. And like these examples of repetitive message delivery your job in SEM is to drive points home over and over again.

Whatever you feel about that message, the point is clear, isn't it? Tell a story. Tell it again. Then look for new ways to tell the story and new places to tell it in. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Which, naturally, brings us to budget.

We've seen businesses "do search engine marketing" once, and then stop. And it works! But just like with Yellow Pages advertising, the SEM work you do has a limited shelf life. Buy a Yellow Pages advertisement just once and it will become less useful when next year's version of the book comes out and progressively less useful over time as people replace the book that has your listing in it with a newer copy that has no such listing. And when was the last time you looked in a Yellow Pages, anyway?

The Internet has all but replaced that way of looking for people to do work for you, and a new version of the Internet "comes out" every single day. Churchill was right about that continuous effort thing, don't you think?

Lacking continuous effort, you'll ride an SEM campaign up the search engine rankings, sink soon thereafter, and then then sink even further until you start your SEM efforts again. And each time you allow a sink cycle you make it a little harder to climb back up.

Budget for Adwords, Pay Per Click, Sponsored Links, Off-page links, Blogging, and on-page optimization, implement them all, and stay on top of them. Or . . . you guessed it . . . let us take care of the whole thing for you.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Saturday, February 13, 2010

"To Improve is to Change; To Be Perfect is to Change Often," or, Winston Churchill and Web Content

If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

  1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
  2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
  3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
  4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #1:


Anyone in business—especially the INTERNET business—over the past 15 or 20 years knows that the only real constant in business is that there is no constant; you must count on change being a continuous state of being. Agility in coping with that change is important for all businesses on many levels. In search engine marketing terms that level is your web content.

Search engines like you more the more often your content changes.

Search Engine Marketing is the art/science of getting your content ranked highly, in the places you need it to stand out. While there are many other factors involved (and we take them all into account) in getting you top ranking in Google and other search engines the single most important one is fresh content. An unchanging, static, stale website will torpedo your efforts. And unlike the unreliable German U-Boat torpedoes Churchill so easily countered, this one will sink you fast.

Truly, short of a major offense getting you thrown out of the search engine indexes having a stale site is the worst thing you can do for search engine ranking .

While "perfect" is too strong a word to associate with a single factor of change, I can say with confidence that CDLLC can and will get you a perfect (#1) listing in the search engine(s) of your choice. But it starts with content.

Bottom line—publish, publish much, and publish often. This is the easiest, most common sense thing you can do for your search engine ranking. We can even help you create content if you aren't sure where to start.

And then, we'll take care of the rest. Churchill may not have been willing to forecast the upcoming actions of Russia, but we can forecast better search engine rankings—and make them happen.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

"Never trouble another for what you can do yourself." -Thomas Jefferson and Web Design

In his letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith in 1825, Thomas Jefferson included the following two items in his Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life:

  • "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
  • "Never trouble another for what you can do yourself."

Just as with our friend Confucius, TJ's wisdom applies to your business web presence.

In web context the translation is this: Eliminate the bottlenecks that slow down and reduce efficiency in your web content publishing process. i.e. : reduce unneeded expenses of both time and resources.

Everyone is a content contributor—or needs to be. Why send word processor documents to a webmaster for translation to "Internet language,"  when you can handle most of the work yourself in your content management system (CMS) , having authors self publish? Yes, there are times when you might want the kind of relationship with your webmaster where he does certain things for you that you could do yourself.  However, if someone's time is more valuable spent programming and working on databases and web servers than acting as an administrative assistant, shouldn't you strive to work that way?

With CMS, you can often publish web information as easily as you can write it on a word processor. That's the kind of process CDLLC implements, and you should ask us how simple it would be for us to do it for you.

Save time. Increase efficiency. Save money. Make your life and those of the people you work with easier and more satisfying.

Or just keep throwing away money instead; your choice.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Monday, February 08, 2010

CMS is a Beautiful Thing, or Confucianism Part IV

"Good people distinguish things in terms of categories and groups."

In prior Confucianism-inspired posts, we talked about the benefits of using Content Management (CMS) at your website. We've made the case for organizing, ordering, and arranging web pages, so now onto breaking bottlenecks in controlling costs and maintaining efficiency while moving forward with today's standards. With navigation management addressed, here are some other bottlenecks that we eliminate by using a CMS:


1) Without CMS, each time you redesign the website look-and-feel you create a need for extensive programming. This becomes both a people management and a cost issue.
2) Now add the need for multiple contributing editors/authors having to get their content to a "webmaster," and costs explode. Again.
3) Adding functionality, like forms, e-commerce, and online payment? More programming and webmaster skills get added, too. A CMS reduces the costs associated with these—tremendously.

CMS makes life easier by separating/disentangling content editing, copy writing, and navigational elements of your web site, design, and functionality.

1) Design becomes a separate module- a wrapper for the web pages. With CMS you change this design wrapper in one place, and the changes take effect globally throughout every page of the website.
2) As many content editors as you need can login, protect pages, and change just the content they're responsible for without the risk of breaking the design.
3) Applications that "do stuff" are programmed and arranged independently, so modification and re-programming creates no risk to the rest of the website.
4) And while we've already mentioned this, it bears repeating for the cost savings it brings you: changing the order and hierarchy of the navigational links becomes as simple as making a few clicks with a mouse.

Sounds almost like magic, right? With a CMS, the magic comes from putting all your stuff inside a database, grouped and categorized with an eye toward Internet presentation as needed to suit your company's needs relative to customers, vendors, employees, and whomever else stumbles upon it. The pieces are stored separately so they don't get entangled with one another, and "global site elements", like search engine META tags, polls, online payment, and sign-up forms are all grouped separately so changes to them only have to be made once!

And with a database, EVERYTHING is easier to categorize and group. For example, if you set up and write an FAQ section and it grows unwieldy, it's stored in the database so modification of the Q&A is a snap.

CMS is all about simplicity. How much so? Let's take our buddy's words, and summarize them as though he was hosting a radio program, circa 2010:

Confucius, out. (thanks, Ryan Seacrest!)


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Friday, February 05, 2010

From Web Pages to Web Sites, or Confuciansim Part III

"Good people order and arrange" Had enough Confucius yet? 'Cause that old dude had the Internet pegged! http://cdllc.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-web-pages-to-web-sites-or.html

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Planning Your Business Web Presence, or Confucianism Part II

"Study the Past if You Would Divine the Future" - Confucius. http://ping.fm/N3Pqb