When to Redesign

Posted on February 14, 2008
Filed Under Better Business Practices, Web Culture | Leave a Comment

Are you on the fence about redesigning your website? Just as with your own face, your web face tells the story of what’s underneath. Redesigning your site can mean making real changes to your business that push you to the next level. Are you ready? This article explores what critical factors indicate that it’s time for a full on redesign, or when you should start with just a face lift, and what goals you should be looking to set in either case. Begin by asking yourself some questions.

Does Your Website

If your website delivers on all counts, congratulations; you are sitting pretty. If it’s performing most of these functions for your visitors, but not all of them, it may be time for a strategic face lift. You can integrate one or two critical functions into an existing website fairly easily without disrupting the visitors’ sense of place. However, if you are missing most or all of this functionality, then it’s time to start planning for a complete redesign. But how do you know if your website performs or not? Simply put, you look to what your visitors can get out of your site. Visitor value is the most basic litmus test you can perform on your site, and should be the starting point for any re-evaluation you perform.

Web Visitors Want:

Once you have established where your weak points are from the visitor’s point of view, it’s a good idea to evaluate each of the critical functions separately. The following sections should help, whether you are face-lifting or getting a whole “new face.” Make sure at the end of the day you have addressed each of these ground-level components.

Embrace Change

Plan for your long-range goals. Effective Internet marketing is a moving target. How people use the web is changing constantly and those hoping to attract and maintain business through a website must be prepared to change with their visitors’ growing expectations.

Your business is growing, too. A site redesign is an opportunity not only to reach out to a broader audience, but also to realign your company or professional goals and vision with the image you project, organizing your site to communicate that vision to both local and far-flung visitors and to achieve your goals.

A full redesign is not like a face lift because it is a new creation—a platform that reflects your growth as a business and the growth of your visitors as web users. You are not who you used to be, and this is your chance to ask the questions: Who are we today? And: Who are we on our way to becoming?

Plan your design around the answers to these central questions and you will ensure the longevity of your website.

Make Your Website Perform

A high-performing website is your most valued employee. A performing website:

Deliver Quality

A well-designed site imparts a lasting positive feeling about you and your business by delivering quality. A quality website:

Add Value

Be personal. Develop and enhance a sense of relationship. There are too many choices in this world and most of us are constantly weeding out whatever we can to make our lives manageable. Basic needs drive our choices, and at the heart of these is the need for connection.

Use your site to bring your business into direct contact with the visitor and create a positive experience that visitors will associate with you. If you can save them from having to deal with unknowns, or having to make more choices, you are helping them in a deep and powerful way, and this creates a relationship of trust.

Enhance that positive experience by freeing your visitors’ senses, creating space, and a visual design that relaxes them, or appeals to their sense of beauty. Give them relief from the chaos of life. Choose a reasonable set of expectations to deliver on, and then deliver.

Create community to build the relationship. Give visitors a chance to add something to your website that others can see, making them part of your community. Blogs, polls, surveys, guestbooks, and user reviews of products and services are all excellent ways of building user-shared interactivity into your site, while deepening the personal connection.

Reach Out

You can create your visitors’ dream web experience, but if they can’t find you, it will all be for naught. It’s not actually their job to find you. Rather, it is your job to help them find you, to lead them to your door with properly posted signs. The days of luring customers with advertising are over. Today’s best advertising focuses simply on helping people solve problems. Make sure your advertising leads potential visitors to specific solutions.

The same goes for your search engine optimization (SEO): this is the effort you put into matching search engine results to the solutions you offer, and it can make the difference between success or failure of a sight. Paul Montalvo, of Adviseo, breaks this important function down into ten top strategies everyone should employ:

Although the concept of search engine optimization can be somewhat complex, there are a number of basic search engine optimization techniques you can use to improve your organic search results. Keep the following in mind when trying to achieve top rankings for your website.

  1. Meta Tags. Meta tags are simple lines of code at the top of your web page programming that tell search engines about your page. Include the title tag, keywords tag, description tag, and robots tag on each page.
  2. Create and update your sitemap. Developing a sitemap is a simple way of giving search engines the information they need to crawl your entire website. There are plenty of free software packages on the web that can help you generate a sitemap. Once you create a sitemap, submit it to Google and Yahoo.
  3. Ensure that all navigation is in HTML. All too often, navigational items are in the form of Javascript. Even though navigation technically still works in this format, it’s not optimized. Create your navigation in HTML to enhance internal links throughout your website.
  4. Check that all images include ALT text. Your image’s alt text is spidered by search engines. If you’re not including your keywords in alt text, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity for improved search engine result placements. Label all of your images properly.
  5. Use Flash content sparingly. Content generated through Javascript or Flash is a big no-no. Some webmasters like to use Flash because of the presentation. If you must, use it sparingly, but only after your site has been properly optimized with basic search engine optimization in mind.
  6. Make sure that your website code is clean. Keep in mind when optimizing a web page crawlers are basically only looking at your source code. When programming your web pages, having W3C compliant code can make all the difference. Run your code through a W3C validator before promoting.
  7. Place keywords in your page content. Search engines scan your website and web pages for keywords. Shoot for a keyword density of between two and eight percent. Google likes your page to be at the lower end of this scale and Yahoo at the upper end.
  8. Submit your website to search engine directories. It’s always a good idea to let large search engine directories know that you’re out there. Submit your website URL to directories like Google, Yahoo, and DMOZ.
  9. Build links to your website. Consider building a link exchange program or create one-way links to your site using articles or forum posts. All major search engines value the importance of your website based on how many other websites are linking to it.
  10. Learn the basics. Learning to optimize your website for search engines takes time and patience. Start by applying basic search engine optimization principles. If you’re new to website optimization, or even a well seasoned veteran (such as Adviseo), begin by prioritizing which pages are most important to you and go from there. Soon you’ll find yourself moving up the rankings.

Putting it All Together

Once you’ve considered all of the aspects of site design and maintenance, prioritize your tasks and timeline based on what your visitors will need and expect most. You can learn a vast amount about your visitors by studying your page stats, so don’t forget to do that. Try to think like one of your visitors, and then anticipate their next need. You will be amazed at how quickly you can gain momentum just by adding or updating the next most important functionality consistently. Set aside the time and budget to implement updates and add features regularly, as needed.

Finally, have fun. There is a natural relationship between having fun and creative productivity. This is why musicians don’t “work” guitars—they PLAY them. Integrate your passions into your site and you will maintain it better, as well as attracting visitors that inspire you further!

Create a CD Booklet

Posted on January 25, 2008
Filed Under Better Business Practices | 1 Comment

If you are a musician or band manager and you have succeeded in outlining a recording project that you hope will result in your own self-published CD, you have already got a lot of major challenges both behind you and ahead of you, and you may not want to spend hours fretting over what to put into your CD booklet. Just the same, you want it to look good, and to present you as the professional that you are.

Production houses are wonderful for telling your graphic artist how to lay out your booklet in one of their formats, but they are not the people to bug for info on what kind of content and how much should go into the booklet itself. Your graphic artist will want to focus on making the content you give to her fit into the space you want it to take, making the booklet aesthetically pleasing to look at, sending your visual-musical-entertainment message to your prospective buyers, and keeping all that within budget. And speaking of budget, if you have enough money to hire a professional writer (a very good idea if you want your CD to look professional), even the writer will be expecting you to provide him with the content to write up! Hey! Who is gonna take on the job of figuring out what goes into the booklet?

The short answer is: you are.

But where to begin? That’s what this article is about. What information do you need for your liner notes? What goes on the front cover? What about the back cover? How many pages should the booklet be? While all of these items are a matter of choice, and extremely flexible, it helps to have a way to organize your thoughts. You don’t want to be hitting yourself in the head later, when the CD is all produced and a friend quietly points out to you that you forgot to include the title track in the song list. It might sound unlikely, but these kinds of ommissions and errors happen all the time.

Not to fear. We have put together a list of guidelines to help you find your way through this critical aspect of your professional CD publishing project without missing anything, small or large, and then to sift it down to what matters most.

Gather—the First Step

Gather the information. The following guidelines are designed to help you compile the information for your CD liner notes. If you don’t have all of the information, or don’t want to include it all, that’s fine; just use these guidelines as a checklist so that you don’t miss something you would have wanted to include. Later, we will look at how much you want to keep and why. Here, we begin by gathering everything you might want. Put together a file–either a physical folder, or better still, images, and notes you take on your computer, in a directory you can copy easily to a data CD. Include:

Basic Info

Basic Data

Song Roots, Stories, Esoteric Stuff

With the notable exception of song titles and people’s names, don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or even writing finished sentences at this point (oh, and except for personal accounts by industry experts, which should only be cleaned up and not rewritten)—especially if you have a writer. The important thing is to get the information down.  Writers and designers need content to do their work, so just focus on making sure you include all of the things you want to say, and don’t worry about the right way to say them. You are of course free to be as creative as you want, though, so just relax and have fun.

Refine—the Second Step

Hone it down. This is where you should enlist the help of your insiders: friends, your graphic artist, your writer, and any professionals in the industry who have the time and inclination. But before you do, be nice to them by thinking through the process the first time around on your own. Look at the CDs of other artists in your genre, and don’t slavishly follow their lead, but try to ask yourself why they included or excluded various items from their CD booklet. Weed out anything that seems too maudlin, or overly self-indulgent. We live in the age of need-based marketing, so try to imagine what your audience will actually need from your CD (if you don’t yet have an audience, you will have to imagine them, too). Get rid of the excess and save only those items you rightfully cherish, because you know your audience will be made happy by them.

Then use the knowledge you have gained in the process to determine where within the booklet each item you have remaining belongs. Usually the front cover contains only images, title, and principle artist, for example, but sometimes a highlighted guest artist will help to sell your CD, so you might add a callout with their name. The back should have your track list, copyright info, website, bar code, and some graphical elements, at the very least, but not much more. You might also feature the logo or info for your recording studio on the back cover. Everything else goes somewhere inside. You decide.

Once you’ve got it narrowed down, go to your list of insiders and ask them for their take. Show them everything you have and see what they think you should get rid of or add back in. Write down their advice and then think about it for a few days. You will know what to do by then, so just make your changes.

Package & Meet—the Third Step

Bundle it all together and meet with your creatives. This is the point at which you will have to decide once and for all just how many pages will be in that booklet. Talk to your creatives and make sure they understand your goals. If your budget is tight, work with your writer to cut away more verbiage—a good writer can often cut your verbal content down to as little as a third and still keep the essentials, if that’s what you end up needing. Be clear with your graphic artist about how small the type can get, what needs to stand out, how much and which text/graphics per page, etc. The writer and artist should be able to raise any major flags at this point if they see a problem. Collaborate. They are trying to help you succeed, so let them do what they do best. Listen.

Proof—the Final Step

This might actually be two steps. If you have a writer, you, and possibly the artist will need to proof the textual content prior to the design phase. This is the time to proof the liner notes for mistakes or major omissions. This will be an important time to make sure everything reads the way you want it in your CD package. Go over all names first; then go over titles; and then, finally, go through the rest of the text. Try to read what is actually there, and not what you expect to see. This will help you to catch the errors, if they exist. Once the design is complete you will have only one more chance to correct errors, so take this step seriously.

When the textual content is perfect, and the artist has completed the design mockup, proof the design. This will be your last chance to fix any typos or minor issues. Make sure your artist understands exactly what you want to see. Most artists will be happy to get this kind of detailed instruction, because it saves them having to redo your design when you decide later it wasn’t really what you wanted.

Breathe a Sigh of Relief

If you have followed through on each item in your process using these guidelines, you will have come up with the very best CD booklet you possibly could, and that is no small accomplishment. If you think the old adage not to judge a book (or CD) by its cover is true, well that’s not the way of the world. Just look at how you, yourself choose books, CDs, and other products—the packaging either works for you or it doesn’t, and that is the deciding factor on whether you look further.

Using these guidlines you should have been able to relax, have fun, and do it right, without worrying about missing something or making costly mistakes—and that will take you a long way toward rocking your audience, which was what you wanted all along, right?

CompUSA is Closing

Posted on January 12, 2008
Filed Under Better Business Practices | Leave a Comment

This buy-out might be old news to a lot of people, but consider the following.

If you are the owner of any major piece of equipment purchased from CompUSA and still under the Tap warranty you also purchased from CompUSA, you might not be in the comfy position implied on the back of your warranty box.

As it happens, I am the owner of a $400 Viewsonic monitor purchased from the now bought-out company, and that monitor suddenly up and died last week. My warranty said all I had to do was to carry the monitor into the store and it would be replaced. So I carried it in, only to find out the store was no longer accepting returns, warranty or no.

But not to worry, I was told by the helpful salesperson (who presumably will soon be out of a job): you have only to enter the CompUSA support URL into your browser (assuming you can borrow a monitor) and fill out a service request and the new monitor will arrive at your doorstep in 3 business days. So I entered the data. In fact, I entered the data three times, because the form on the support page kept timing out.

Once my information was securely entered and I had my SR number, auto-emailed to me by the program that took my data, I sat back and waited.

Three days went by and my ticket remained unassigned. But not to worry–there was an 800 number on the same errata sheet that gave me the web address. So I called. And I waited a half hour for a representative to come on the line.

Oh, well, the store was mistaken, I was told. It’s not three days from the time you file your complaint, but three days from the time it is received. A subtle distinction. Okay, so did that mean I could count on it being received in the next day or two, I asked. Indeed, he gave me the impression that I could. So I waited again.

Three days later, it was time to call again, as nothing was happening, so I got out my phone and my paperwork, and a good book. Half and hour later, a representative took my service request number and informed me that I was misinformed; that in fact it takes five to ten days from the time of receipt to the actual assignation. Well, then, I pointed out, it had already been that long, so what was the deal? Were they going to assign my ticket? I reminded him that not only had I been without my most current data all that time, but also, the warranty I paid for had stated that I could walk into any store and get an immediate replacement–no questions asked. He looked at my service request on his computer and said, “Oh, well, it looks like your service request isn’t going to work anyway, because most of the data is missing.” Indeed, the program that had taken my data appeared to have thrown away almost all of it. So I made a new service request, right there, over the phone.

“Okay, then,” the representative told me, after having written down all my data and issued me the new SR number, “it will be five to ten days before this request is evaluated.”

I think you can see where this is going.

To date, I still have no monitor for my workstation, and am performing all of my work on my notebook, in the absence of a whole lot of data that I really need.

What advice do I have to offer? There is still a remote chance that my warranty will be honored, but if you have a major piece of equipment from this company, you might want to consider communicating with them sooner, rather than later. I would want to see some documentation that the buying company plans to honor the agreements of the selling company, at the very least. Oh, and remember if you are calling them to plan in advance some activity you can engage in while waiting for a rep.

Hello world!

Posted on January 11, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Welcome to the new Web People Media blogspace.

I am tired after a long day of getting this blog up and running, so I will make this short. Tomorrow I will probably post something real and delete this posting, anyway. In the meantime, here is my favorite idea for a nerdy programmer’s T-shirt:

The C Programming Language:
Where Quality is Job Zero