Category — websites web site design

The other day my son happened to mention that these days business start-ups are predicted more on how many iterations of the same business a person can do without running out of money.They say that the start-up is a science now. It’s not the person or the product/service, but the number of permutations you try before running out of money or quitting.

What this means is that with most start-ups, there is little money, yet you really need to find your niche and then try different things to succeed. Some find that once they do this they don’t like their new business at all and then decide to cancel that thought and move to the next thought.

Fitting in line with this thinking is the fact that if you run out of money before you find the right niche and business for yourself, then you’ll soon be going back to work for someone else. This is why it’s so important to be careful with your funds.

This leads to the question of the hour… What really is he lifespan of a start-up website?

We  see many new start ups invest money into websites, only to find out a year later that they are no longer in business.  For us this is frustrating. We develop a beautiful site, we put it in our portfolio and the link is broken in a year. (This is why we started making pictures of websites instead of links, because start-ups are sketchy. ) Entrepreneurs fail, they get bored, they want more.

For a normal business, out of the start-up phase, the lifespan is about 3 to 4 years, but for start-ups it’s an entirely different story.

I was asked recently what to do with a change in products on a domain name. Once your start-up becomes a different company basically you are looking at an entirely different website, and an entirely different investment. This is why it’s important to be careful with funds when you are starting your new business. If you invest thousands into the design of a website and a year later have to do it all over again, you are already spending precious start-up monies unnecessarily. Don’t get me wrong, most web design companies will love you for it, but as far as being successful in business, this just doesn’t count.

The easiest thing to do, knowing that this may be just a test, is to design a cost effective professional website and let it work  for a year. Does it move you? are you still interested? If so, improve that website and make it even better.  Of course, letting a website work for a year is a great idea, but remember that you have to work your website for a year. Contrary to popular belief successful websites that make money don’t just work themselves. You have to invest some serious time into promoting and marketing that website to make it beneficial and make it earn money for you.

Now you can blog from your android phone easily using the new wordpress app.  This applications can blog to multiple sites. With the new nexus phone you can also speak your new blog instead of typing every little word. Can life get any simpler then this!

After dealing with hundreds of clients, we noticed a phenomenun, part in partial with “Scope Creep” described in Wikipedia.

To eliminate Scope Creep, we suggest an “incubation” period. This will allow clients and designers a chance to review what is on the table and decide if it fits the needs. It’s much easier to change design at the beginning of a job than to try to go about making changes after development of the site has already begun.

The fact remains that along with Scope Creep comes the issue of later design changes. This type of activity can virtually cripple a web designers ability to serve lots of clients at the same time. It adds confusion to the mix and it adds costs to the ticket when it’s undertaken after a development period has begun.

The problem with design changes is that it usually creeps in after development has begun. In reality these types of changes affect more than just a simple change. Where there is one change, there is almost always another need either to conform the flow or because once we start the changing, the client see’s how it affects design overall.

Also, if you have enough clients and all of them take an hour of time each week until their site is completed, you’ll soon find out that you are way behind scheddule on all of them.. and nobody understands why.
The What If Scenario

In addition to straight out design changes, we always have the client who wants to “just see” what it would look like if we changed this or that element on the mockup. Fair enough. In the long run most of our clients return back to what we originally delivered. We know the design of web sites and our eye for placement, color and sizing is astute. Generally we make the changes of mockup and we end up with the prior result more times than not.

Incubate your web design

Now as to the incubation period it just makes sense. We do the mockup, and then we incubate. This give our client time to search over the internet and compare his soon to be baby to the other babies in the park. Short of an all out design change, he will add features and make some changes.   Subtle changes, like color and graphic images are certainly not an issue. Okay so we change a gradient, or a color, but overall it’s the same design, the same mockup .  The issue comes in most often when we do design changes that affect the layout and after we have already begun the development phase. Now you not only have an artist involved, but the entire cycle of integration on the team.

It  makes sense to do the incubation period and let things settle before beginning to install a website. We have learned over years of work that waiting a week will save two weeks in accomplishing the overall design of a website. Think about it!

When I first met Dale Miller of CanvasesbeGone.com she needed a nice ecommerce website. It turns out that Dale is a terrific woman who is both  industrious and generous as she endeavored to make just the right website for her customers.  When I got the flu about halfway through the job, Dale sent yummy soup from one of the online sellers of comfort food. What a thoughtful gift!

I thought that this gift of wonder couldn’t be topped, it was both delicious and beautiful, and oh so convenient for someone who didn’t have the energy to get up and make dinner, or lunch for that matter.

But Dale has done it again..This afternoon Dale so kindly sent a care package of my favorite things… Chocolate! specifically Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Cookies dipped in Chocolate.

It’s rare to find a client so easy to work with, not to mention one so generous and thoughtful as Dale Miller. Check out her needlepoint canvases at her website. Thanks so much Dale for your kindness and generosity, you make the world a nicer place!  …. Suzanne

Most people can not make their own html, so what they need is an online What-You-See is What-You-Get type of editor. If you’re looking for one try this.  After you have entered in your paragraphs, and used bold or other things to make it look like it should you can click on the brackets <> at the top and get the code. Use that code to paste into your form where you need some basic html.

You won’t want to try to make a website doing this, but for fast and simple html, this is worth a shot.

One of the most important aspect of successful e-commerce selling is a goal list. Believe it or not, retailers need to make a list and stick with it. Some of our most successful sellers abide by it. Sit down and plan, make a list and go about methodically taking the time to put it into practice in 2010.

Here is a basic ecommerce plan for new sellers and small shops with limited budgets, that will set you going on your Goal list.

Increase e-commerce sales by 50% this year:

Go through design and evaluate user-friendliness, make adjustments

• Focus on one or two products and make them shine, pick your most popular products
• As a customer, navigate your site in dumbed down mode, what do you see? Does your customer find the information they need to purchase your products?
• What are the benefits of those who shop with you? Put them right in front of the customer. ie: Fast Shipping, Easy Return Policy, etc.

Learn about SEO and make changes to Product Names, pages and improve content on pages.

• Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. Start with products and label them with proper keywords, then proper content. Subtle changes like this can really make a site noticeable to search engines.
• Get the word out. You should at the very least have your items in Googlebase, which is free. Do one feed at a time and do another one next month.

Set up at least one Pay-Per-Click Channel, give it a budget of at least 1% of expected revenues.

• If you don’t have a few dollars to advertise, you should completely re-evaluate your plan here. This is a business. It requires getting the word out or going viral. If you are not a guru marketeer, then pay for some basic advertising in targeted places.

Set up and maintain an email list, and send out those emails once a month!

• Probably the biggest mistake the new site owners make is to fail to collect emails of interested parties. Our most successful clients use an email list religiously.
• aSending has a great, and inexpensive tool for gathering emails and shooting out marketing materials to your prospective customers about offerings, sales and new products. Use it!

Good Luck on a Great and Prosperous New Year!

I love this RGB color picker to easily identify the color and find the RGB code for it. Simple and straightforward. Funny but we have so many clients that ask for Blue, and we say, “What Blue” – there are so many variations of a color. Next time you ask for something from a web designer, take a check here to find out the RGB equivalent and make your web designer happier.

You want it When?!

Holiday Deadlines are here. Retailers that are interested in selling for the Holidays have about seven  days left to get online and running. If you didn’t already plan for selling this year, and have no web design, may we suggest you sell on eBay?

If you have a Zen Cart and have been agonizing about SEO options, take a look at Ultimate SEO. This one works well and despite seeing all the disclaimers, we did not find any issues with making our Zen install Search Engine Friendly and safe from wierdness.

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Zen Cart made easy.

Our latest experience with oversees contractors comes from some testing that we recently ran, where we needed lots of people to click test a website that we are developing. We put an ad on some of the freelance websites and come up with 20 people who can click buttons for half an hour. We have this set just right, you show up on a particular website at 7pm Pacific time and along with a group of 20 others, you click buttons continuously for 30 minutes.

We specifically state that we need US, UK, and Russian people only. That’s simply the demographic of the site we are testing.  Instead we get India and Pakistan “programmers” mascarading as US and UK citizens.

So what’s the big deal? Well first of all none of them showed up on time or understood the directions. None of them could read english well enough to figure out what we wanted. They had their canned response to our ad to get in the door and then they were unable to understand directions. Their timing was off, needing coddling for us to email several times to tell them when the testing would begin.

This behaviour is typical of India programmers that we have, per chance, worked with before. We simply don’t hire outside the United States for this reason. Not only will the work be cheap, but none of it ever hit a single deadline established, none of the work was spell checked, and none of the work was what we had planned. Basically you can not hire from India unless you have lots of time to hand hold. So what is your time worth?

If you do hire from India, remember that they do not speak English very well. Remember that India programmers are not going to work with you like an English speaker. Throw your timetable out the window. In our case hiring India workers for a beta test event at a particular time, failed miserably. We won’t do it again.