Under the blogdar

If Technorati is the blogdar of the blogosphere, and posting keeps your blog’s blip on the horizon, then I have either crashed or gone into stealth mode. I disappeared again. Yet again, I’ll blame workload as I’ve been finishing up five simulatenous large projects.

Hopefully May will be a more balanced month for me – some projects, some blogging.

There isn’t any better way to get back in to the swing of blogging like a streched metaphor and a heavy dose of jargon.

In the next couple weeks I’ll be posting about my latest projects, getting a couple of post ideas out of my system. I’ll also have a Google Apps for your Domain tutorial|editorial.

Nevada Opera Site Launch

We built a lush, visually appealling website for Nevada Opera that is driven by our easy-to-use content management system. The staff at the opera is able to publish and unpublish sections and pages, modify the navigation, post events and news items, and control the images in the website template.

I encourage you to visit www.nevadaopera.org and support their performance of La Cenerentola on February 9th and 11th!

Set Priorities for Your Online Presence – Part 2

The everything-in-one-bucket approach to website or internet marketing.

In this approach, everything you do with your website is driven by Internet Marketing. Ideally, everything you do on your website (blog, email, MySpace, etc.) does hopefully build your overall Internet Marketing strategy –but thinking about each step as as equally important limits your ability to build your content and strategy in an effective manner. If everything is equal, then what comes first?

The heirarchical approach to website or internet marketing.

Category 1 – The website strategy.

This category is the most important – it should be defined before your first web design meeting, before your web developer creates his first template, before you send your first email. It is the roadmap that tells you how all the other categories work together. This portion has goals and objectives or milestones. Don’t worry if you don’t have this part and you are six months into your website/email/blog – you can still create one and change what you are doing over time, incrementally – every day is a new day. Your keyword research and optimized content also falls into this category.

Category 2 – The well-built website.

The well-built website has:

1. Defined goals and objectives.
2. Metrics for analyzing website traffic.
3. A system or process for modifying the website that is clear and easy to follow. (Note that I don’t say a content managment system – because you might not need a CMS, you may just need a scripted process of making updates. Besides, you need this process whether you do the updates yourself via a CMS or through Dreamweaver, or by communicating with your web developer.)
4. A clear navigation. Keep it simple – remember that a clear navigation does not always conform to your sitemap on a one-to-one basis. All the sections of your website don’t need to show up in the first level of your navigation. I like to think of the first level of navigation as the ‘call-to-action’ level.
5. A well-formed document model, as ADA compliant as possible.
6. A sitemap to help visitors and search engines penetrate all the layers of your website.

These items are in order of importance for me. They are all really good ideas, but if you only do a couple, then do them in order.

Category 3 – Subscription Publishing.

Every good website should have one item from this category. Subscription publishing is the medium in which you publish regularly scheduled, targeted content to a base of subscribers. Items in this category are email newsletters, blogs, press releases, forums, podcasts, product listings etc. Can you have more than one? Absolutely. Businesses with really advanced online presences combine two or three — the same content with the same message extending your brand and keeping you in front of your customers. I am NOT saying ‘go get a blog’ or ‘you gotta spam your client base’. Any publishing tool on your website that is updated on a schedule or has a clear plan for gradual expansion with a focused message qualifies under this category.

Category 4 – Public and other Relations (PR).

This is a hard one. Public relations, or “buzz” is not easy to create, and the effectiveness often depends on the medium you choose. Nothing beats old-fashioned real-world word of mouth, or events, or a profile in the local paper. But if you achieve these things, be sure to link them up to your website in a focused manner. Make a landing page specific to the event.

Other online PR tactics are contests, press rooms, MySpace pages, FaceBook, Squidoo, or Linkedin. Each has different gotchas and needs. Having a MySpace page that is negelected and without focus is worse than have nothing at all. Again, this is influenced heavily by category #1.

Understanding the four categories will help you build a more balanced strategy, budget more effectively, and set priorities in sync with your goals, growth and resources – plus, you might just get your agency to slow down and help you plan instead of panic.

Set Priorities for Your Online Presence – Part 1

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on website strategies. I’m being combing sites that I consider ‘leaders’ in the field (like Marketing Sherpa and Sally Falkow’s blog) to help me refine my process and I ran accross a link to a website for an Internet Marketing and PR company. The company seems to get it but I dislike their approach.

A little priortizing goes a long way.

I find that people talking about online publishing, PR, online marketing and website strategy often like to take the “shotgun approach” (closely related to, and often executed by the “panic button approach”.) They mix up all their ideas into a bucket of must-do action items – and if you don’t do or have all of these things, well, your website and business is just missing the boat.

I couldn’t disagree more. If you think of all the current online tools (blogs, social networking, website metrics, ADA access, etc.) as being pretty much equivalent when it come to PR and Marketing, you:

1) Don’t understand these components as well as you should.

2) Can’t utilize them as effectively as you should.

3) Will have an unbalanced overall presence.

The only way to consistently excel at everything online all the time is to have a comprehesive strategy, lots of time, and lots of cash. So what are the non-supermen and superwomen of the web to do when they want to make their web presence more effective? Easy – they understand the categories of a heirarchical website and they implement a few tactics at a time from each category.

Next Post: The categories of a heirarchical website…

Record Keeping

Here is a tip that will save you a lot of money – keep goods records in relation to your web presence.

Keep three files:

File #1 – All your account usernames and passwords. Keep everything on one sheet of paper. Your domain registrar account, your web-hosting FTP account, your blog admin and password, everything. Some of these things you won’t need for years at a time, and thus the are easy to lose.

File #2 – A copy of all your invoices for web hosting, web development, web design etc. Break out this file by projects and maintenance. You should be able to break this out in your accounting software, but I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve seen who charge all this to their credit card and never look at what they spend and where they spend it – it just gets lumped into the credit card expenses.

File #3 – A file that holds one or more CD’s or DVD’s with the .eps files of your logos, the code for your website, drafts of your final emails, etc. Even if you do this, chances are you might want to back things up in other places too. Remember to refresh these disks with new copies every year, as burnable CD’s and DVD’s degrade after about three years.

Discology launches

We just launched a blog and MySpace page for our friends at Discology. Discology is a great used CD store at the corner of California and Plumas in downtown Reno.

This was a great project because we got the chance to put together a lot of solutions to make a more powerful (and easier to use) final product. We use MySpace for social networking, Flickr for images, Del.icio.us for links, Google apps for Calendaring and business email, and WordPress for publishing and tying everything together.

I have high hopes for this site – Discology already has a strong real-world network, and hopefully the new blog and MySpace page will allow the store to grow its network online.

I encourage you to take a look at the links below, as well as to stop in and see the shop. And get the word out, it’s an easy way to support a spunky independent small business in Reno.
View their website.

View their MySpace page.

I have tons of ideas brewing about how to help local businesses (the kind with character!) get online and promote themselves inexpensively.  But, that’s another post (or two, or three…)

How to write an RFP

Writing an RFP is more difficult than it seems. If its done right – you can save yourself and your business thousands of dollars. If its done poorly you can have a project destined to go awry - with hidden costs for you and your vendor.

Most RFPs I see make me want to not bid on a project because they are too vague, which means that the business hasn’t done the legwork of thinking about what they want in detail. Sometimes they ask for so much that I know the business isn’t serious about what they want built – they have a budget number in mind and want to see what they can get for it so they list all their wishes with no reguard for priority.

Not knowing what you want is okay – starting the web development process without figuring that out is not. Too often business have a rough idea of what they want but without essential specifics that define how what they want fits into their goals for the website.

I encourage all my clients to go through a project calrification and specification process. A process that ends with a formal document that defines (at its most basic):

1. The goals of the website or web application
2. How those goals will be achieved (specific steps)
3. How those goals will be measured
4. A rough outline of the business logic or functionality that results from the implementation of those goals

These four things will create a better RFP, which will result in a better vendor relationship, and greater satisfaction overall. A clarification and specification process (no matter how brief) before web development begins will bring you to a better understanding of your future site and will help you think clearly about the next step of your website’s growth.

Resurfacing

I’m back. I’ve committed an all too typical sin of blogging – I’ve neglected to keep up on my posting – and I didn’t even bother to let people know where I was or what I was doing. If you’ve been wondering why I dropped off the face of the blogosphere – I apologize for poor communication.

A little known rule of blogging (which I did not follow) – you can take a break from regular posting but you need to let people know you are taking a break. Sort of like a cardinal rule of effective interpersonal communications. Even if you can’t get back to someone – get back to them so they know you can’t get back to them.

I’ve been finishing up a very busy 2006. I’ve launched some websites, done some emergency web development, refined my production process, and lined up a lot of work for 2007. I’m going to have a very cool, very busy year and I’m excited for the challenge. I’ll keep you informed.

WDYWTK answers: Online Networking Tools – Intro

Bill Sims of the Nevada Small Business Development Center asked a great question (read full comment):

As you know we have been considering adding a forum to our site, for exclusive use by our clients, our “Alumni”. The purpose would be to provide a networking system so that they could share experiences, trade stories, seek assistance and advice from each other etc. Web 2.0 stuff, social networking, etc.

My own hesitation lies in the fact that I have never seen, nor participated in, a forum that seems to work out as intended. Most of them just sit there, great tools that are little used, or are often abused.

Are there better models out there, tools that are working? Or, is it simply another case of proper marketing, using all available channels, to make folks aware of the system and get them engaged in the conversation?

At the recent symposium we attended in New Orleans, Wiki’s, or the use of a system such as InCircle was suggested.

I think that your choice of tool for this problem depends on your goal. The three most common online networking solutions (Forums, Wikis, and Social Networks) are related but have different foci. They are not mutually exclusive. Just because you have a forum doesn’t mean you can’t enhance it with a Wiki etc.

If your goal is to create a knowledge base for alumni to tap into then I would go with a Wiki which is better designed to organize knowledge based information. This will need to be heavily moderated to prevent bad data.

If your goal is to share experiences, trade stories, seek assistance and advice from other alumni then I would go with a forum which is designed to promote threaded conversations, feedback, and advice. It can be harder to mine for information and is easily abused – the squeaky wheel can hijack conversations of value – so it to will need to be heavily moderated.

If your goal is to provide current students and alumni an online network to promote themselves or their businesses and possibly give them an ‘in’ into other industries –then a social networking service is the way to go.

One or more of these will accomplish what you want – all three have the high possibly of becoming, as you said, great tools that are little used, or are often abused. Again you hit the nail on the head – in order for them to succeed you must get your alumni engaged in the conversation and then be patient until your forum, wiki, or network gains momentum.

I’ll create five mini posts on this subject:

• What is a wiki? and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
• What is a forum? and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
• What is a social network? and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How do you get your audience engaged in online tools?
• What are the perils of user submitted content?

WDYWTK answers: A new category

I really like the idea of having a “What Do You Want To Know?” (WDYWTK) category. I asked for questions and I got them. However, if I reply to every comment under the post What Do You Want To Know?, the responses can get buried, so some questions deserve their own posts or series of posts.

All the answers to questions will be pretitled ‘WDYWTK answers:’ so you know what they relate to. I will also include a post back to the original comment.