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!

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

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

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!

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?

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

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.

Since we do lots of forums for larger groups, we thought it would be a good idea to set out some guidelines for site owners. Now let’ say you are sitting in your private forum and suddenly you see another member in there that is not allowed. Oh my God, what to do. Well first of all don’t jump to conclusions about your security system, feeling you’re being hacked or worry that there is anything amiss. The best thing to do in any business is to first, take a breath, investigate and then proceed. Hopefully you have all your wits about you, and are not too stressed, sleep deprived or overly paranoid before you go jumping around concluding things that may not be true. You don’t want to start harassing site visitors and announcing that they are hackers when this might all be just a misunderstanding on your part, and geez, worse yet – don’t tell anyone you are going to file criminal charges for something they had nothing to do with. In the legal world I’m not sure how the courts will view this, but likely they will feel that you did not do your due diligence before making the accusations and this could lead to a big legal action against you. You don’t want that now, do you?

Most professionals have two sets of IT eyes on things to ensure they are not making rash decisions when it comes to forum security. It’s likely part of your obligation as a provider of services and you might consider it an important aspect of business especially if you are a large company with possible legal exposure.

Now, Can people access a private forum? A little googling will answer that for you. Not really but yes they can “appear” to be there. Anyone who is wandering around with time on their hands can put your url into the browser and start switching around numbers to see what is out there. A hidden forum or a private forum might appear, but likely they will only see a login or an error message. While you, sitting in the forum will see them browsing simply because the call to show who is browsing is higher on the list than the error message or login form. Fear not. You are safe. All those wild thoughts about hackers and site violators can be put to rest. Nothing is amiss except the subtle reminder that you need a qualified professional to explain to you what is going on, and possibly a lawyer if you’ve already banned members and jumped to conclusions, pointed fingers and made wild accusations about someone trying to find out what you’ve been thinking or worse yet, accused anyone of trying to take down your website. If you’ve already gone that far my advise now is put a nice apology in writing and last but not least get a lawyer.

If things haven’t deteriorated to this point and you need more help and don’t have a Phpbb forum site admin or web designer, check out our services or ask your host for more help.

Any questions?

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index. 

Ouch! That means that if you were an innocent site owner hiring and SEO and they used some trickery to get traffic to you, it’s your fault for being that stupid and not investigating their tactics. That makes sense. (no sarcasm here).

Meanwhile, we noticed some pagerank drops in sites and pages being pulled down in rank completely since last week – although still indexed, their ranking is gone. Why? The most obvious reason floating around is purchased text links, but in this case the only payment involved in the links on the pages I’ve noted are cj.com links, which relate directly to the site promoting a related product, and links to other related sites. This makes one huge reason to have a single website that handles EVERY aspect of your company as Google’s robot can not seem to differentiate between your other companies, your revenue production and pure spam out there. Linking between your various sites can give the impression of spamming text links to the index. The best recourse is therefore to only list those “resources” on a single page not related to any other content on your site, lest you find your entire site gets caught up in the mix.