Jacksonville Web Design | Blog | DiscoverTec

Should your business be more social?

2010-08-20T13:37:00.013-04:00

Without a doubt, few technologies have ever changed the World Wide Web as dramatically as the widespread adoption of social media. The statistics are downright staggering:

Over 500 million people are members of Facebook, more than 2 billion YouTube movies are viewed per day, a new member joins LinkedIn every second, and Twitter saw it’s 10 Billionth tweet this March (just to name a few).

Long story short, just about everyone that uses the internet uses a social network. That begs the question:

If all your potential customers are already on social networks, why aren’t you?

Image: Gregory Szarkiewicz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We get a lot of different answers to this question and most fall into 2 buckets:

1.) Takes too much time

2.) Takes too much money

These are valid concerns as resources such as time and money usually run in short supply these days. The reality is that any business can create and maintain an effective level of social networking that will result in growth and potentially revenue with a minimum amount of work and investment.

It’s all about finding the strategy that’s right for you, executing it with an emphasis on efficiency, and using some common sense to evaluate the results. Chances are, most businesses already have material suitable for posting on a social network; they just need to get a little creative with the presentation.

I’ve listed a few tips that we’ve used to help our clients establish and grow a strong, effective presence on the social web. We’ve also used these techniques on our own pages and it’s helped considerably. If you’ve got some ideas you’re cool sharing on things you’ve done with corporate social networking please post in the comment section below.

Make it Personal

To quote DiscoverTec Founder & CEO Donny Lamey:

"People do business with people, not companies."

Putting a personal touch on your business is a good move and social networks offer a great opportunity to do just that.

Whether you publish video blogs on YouTube, post photos of your staff and office on Flickr or tweet company updates on a corporate Twitter account, anytime you’re able to take the personality of your business and get it in front of potential and current customers it’s a good thing.

The Bottom Line: Social networks are a great platform to show off what separates you from your competitors… You.

Get viral with it

I’ve always found it ironic that nothing inspires fear among computer users more then the word “virus”, yet when a video is successfully distributed and consumed by a huge, and sometimes global, audience it’s considered “viral” and something you have to watch

Call it what you will, if you can manage to get your content spread out across a wide range of people, the majority of which would qualify as your target audience, you’re going to grow your brand and get results.

Case in point: the now-infamous “Old Spice Guy” twitter & YouTube based interactive ad campaign. I won’t go into the specifics to save time and but Old Spice reported their sales doubled as a result of this campaign going viral.

The Bottom Line: Start brainstorming ideas with viral potential now, even if it’s just on a local scale. The payoff could be big and the investment small so it’s worth a shot.

Do it right or don’t do it at all

You can’t fake social media, you either do it or you don’t. And savvy users will be able to tell whether or not you’re for real in seconds. If you decide to develop a presence for your business on social networks, and you definitely should, make sure you start with a realistic goal and work hard to stick to it.

For many new clients that we help with social media, one Facebook update a week is a good start. Buy a digital camera, you can pick up a good one nowadays for under $100, and start taking pictures around the office of stuff you’re doing every Friday.

Make it fun, we’ve given out prizes to people that contribute to our social networks just to ensure we always have fresh content. It’s worth it as morale gets boosted, the office is more fun to work in and over time you will get results.

The Bottom Line: Don’t put a Twitter button on your homepage and go tweetless for 6 months, take the time to set a goal then meet regularly to make sure it’s getting achieved.

Don’t be a wallflower

The key to being social online is the same as it is offline, you've got to start a conversation and make it interesting enough so that people not only respond, but find it compelling enough to remember and potentially share.

Can you think of anything that your business has done recently that would fit this criteria? I bet you can, and I also would bet bigger that you didn't share it on a social network geared at your target audience.

So what are you waiting for? Start socializing now and it won't be long before you notice the benefits. We can definitively find several examples of where we've earned new business from both existing & new customers based on our activity on social networks.

If you've got any good stories about how social networking has helped your business grow feel free to post them below, and as always, we're ready to help if you're ready to start getting your business more social.

Here's some good links that helped me write this post:

Cool infographic on social media & mobile web: http://www.pamorama.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ft-new-marketing-trifecta.png

Great info on stats and usage: http://econsultancy.com/blog/6205-revised-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited-and-20+-more

Clients say the darndest things #2

2010-08-06T14:44:00.022-04:00

Last month we started a new blog feature about some of the more memorable statements and requests our valued clients have presented to us over the course of helping them with their website projects.

In our July e-newsletter we included that post as the very last one on the page and surprisingly enough, more people clicked on it than all 5 other articles.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This told us a few things:

1. Our clients ~~have huge egos~~ like to read about themselves

2.The interaction between vendor and customer makes for interesting reading

3.These interactions need to be continually documented

In addition to being fun (and somewhat cathartic) to write about, these situations, when looked at from a high level, help teach us a lot about not only how to handle our clients more effectively, but how to manage ourselves better and provide the folks nice enough to do business with us a better experience.

I think one of the reasons so many people (the majority of which were current clients) clicked on that blog post is because on some level all of us want genuine feedback from the “other side of the table” when we’re the customer. And more importantly, I think if we got that feedback and it was honest, objective, and most of all professional, we’d all become better clients as well as vendors.

So that’s become the goal for this ongoing series of posts, because as we all know, working with, and as, clients can get a little tense sometimes. If we try to learn from our experience as both it will probably go a long way towards building better stuff and having more fun doing it.

On a personal note, I think it’s important to take the time to figure out what the client really means when they make certain statements or request. Because how I respond plays a huge role in keeping them happy, the project on track, and the final product looking and working like something we’re both proud of.

An unenviable task for sure, but one that makes my job so much fun. So here goes, and I’d really appreciate any feedback in the comments section below. If you’ve heard anything from your clients recently that would be a good addition to our next post, feel free to give me a shout and we’ll add it in.

Where are we at with the website?

This sounds like a completely valid and logical question, right? That’s because it is… until you consider the circumstances it’s most likely being asked under. The fact is, and this isn’t meant to be taken harshly, if a client doesn’t know which stage their project is in they haven’t been paying much attention to the project in the first place.

That's because in addition to our phone calls and meetings we push out email updates on a regular basis and our staging sites are on live URLs 24/7.

So why would a client need to ask this question? The answer is simple:
Who cares?

As their vendor, it doesn’t matter that our client hasn’t been anxiously awaiting our every update and responding in kind. They’re the client and they paid us, so unless it’s been explicitly stated in a contract they can engage in the project when they are ready.

We’ve started incorporating a bit more organized project buildout schedule into our proposals, but the bottom line is, the client did pay us to perform this work for them. If the fact that they’re busy running their business caused them to slip a little on following the progress of their project with then so be it.

I’m not going to lie, this is a tough one to field sometimes depending on the length of time it’s been since we last asked the client for their About Us page content, but at the end of the day this is one that needs to be handled carefully as it can really compound an already complicated situation.

Now, as a cautionary tale to clients, re-engaging with a web design or development project after an extended hiatus is no easy task. Chances are, you’ll have forgotten all those wonderful ideas you were so adamant about us including for your project. Our most successful relationships are the ones where the client is involved, responsive and most of all engaged so let’s all work a little harder to make this the norm rather than the exception.

How quickly can we get this live?

This kind of ties back to the previous point, if a client asks us this question we can quickly surmise a few key facts:

1.) You haven’t been reading my emails

2.) This is probably the first time we’ve heard from you in awhile

3.) As soon as ~~you've paid us~~ possible

We like to work with our clients to reconcile all the content for their website or application as early on in the project’s life cycle as we can. The reason is simple; it’s by far the biggest reason our projects get delayed.

Now, we can launch a website and put “Coming Soon” in the areas we don’t have content for, but aside from being terribly lame it really doesn’t do our clients justice.

That’s because when you build a website, you have the opportunity to offer people that visit it an experience that gives them their first impression of what you’re all about and everything that makes you or your company unique and valuable.

If the website has been built well, this experience will be memorable, engaging, and ultimately achieve the goals set out for it.

Quite simply, we can’t create this experience without our clients' input. They know their business and industry better than we ever will, and we need that insight in order to pull off this experience and get results.

So long story short, the answer to this question is always ASAP. However, if we can take the time to figure how best to serve the people that are going to be visiting this website everybody will be better off for it.

What do you mean this will cost extra? Don't you think the site needs it?

I’ve lost a fair amount of tooth enamel grinding my jaw to stay quiet after hearing this one. Not out of frustration mind you, but because it puts us in an awkward position.

On one hand we absolutely think all of our clients’ websites should have the best, most current bells and whistles that are out there. On the other hand, which coincidentally is the one that we use to write checks to pay our mortgages, if we gave every client the best stuff out there regardless of the budget we agreed to we’d be up the creek.

So like any dispute that ever arises with a client, our first course of action is to reason with them. In the case of this request, that usually involves an analogy. Analogies are great in our industry because a lot of what we do is foreign to most people so if we compare it to something more familiar it helps create common ground.

I remember one particular meeting where one of our larger clients asked about an additional service that wasn’t in our agreement. We went through the dog and pony show for a bit and then all of sudden the conversation went from pitching a new value-added service to defending ourselves as to why we didn’t do it already and build in the costs to the original project.

That’s when the “Well, if this is such a great idea why didn’t you do it the first time?” was finally vocalized.

Now, the answer is simple: “Because you didn’t pay for it”.

But I couldn’t just drop that response into the lap of one of our largest clients (who incidentally was already more than a little fired up).

I used an analogy that compared building a website to building a house and that while all the upgrades seem like something that would make the house nicer and more enjoyable to live in, if you didn't agree to pay the builder for them they weren't going to get built.

They understood and the tension was diffused with a few chuckles thrown in for good measure. The lesson to be learned here is that good, honest communication is critical to helping clients understand your services and pricing.

Most of the time when a client gets irrational or frustrated it can be traced back to a misunderstanding along the way that you didn’t properly or fully explain. It’s important to go out of your way to make sure everyone’s on the same page, because today’s minor misunderstanding can come back to bite you tomorrow.

Can't Live with 'em, can't live without 'em

This statement has been applied to all kinds of relationships but it's especially appropriate for understanding just how valuable our clients are. We've changed how we do things quite a bit in the last few months and it's resulted in a substantially better experience for us and our the folks kind enough to hire us.

Here's a few blog posts I read recently that deal with clients and if you have any stories or thoughts you'd like to share please feel free to comment below.

Clients Say the Darndest Things #1

How to Navigate Design by Committee

No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas

10 statements that make my head explode, and what they really mean

5 Reasons Potential Customers Can’t Find Your Website

2010-07-29T16:00:00.008-04:00

Here’s a good way to tell the economy is (finally) rebounding: more and more people are calling us wanting to get their websites ranked better on search engines. Regardless of your marketing budget, not having a strong presence on search engines is no longer an option.

When your website doesn't rank well, not only is it your loss, but to make matters worse it's your competitor's gain. If you're not ranking well it's probably because of some fairly basic things that you're not doing, and the good news is that once you start doing them you can see major progress in a pretty short amount of time.

The fact that we’re getting an influx of requests for SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is encouraging for two reasons:

For one, we worked hard when we re-designed our website to be make it more SEO-friendly and the reason we’re getting so many incoming calls is due in part to it ranking better. This proves to us that we’re doing to our website, as well as our clients’ websites, is working.

Secondly, business owners are realizing that the ROI model for SEO is so powerful that they need to re-structure their marketing budgets accordingly.

The bottom line is that as more and more people use Google and other search engines to find your products or services, the more important it is that your website is listed there for them to visit.

This post will discuss some of the most neglected SEO-based techniques we often see with new customers. Our strategy for SEO and internet marketing in general is two-fold; the first priority is driving potential customers to your website, the second is the experience they have when they get there.

The latter, which is generally referred to as the User Experience, or UX, will be covered in a separate post, for now we’re going to focus on leveraging SEO to get more traffic to your website.

1. Take your tags to the cleaners

Used to be all you had to was put some basic keywords into the tags, or the specific areas in your website’s code that describe its relevant content, and the site would rank well on search engines.

Times have changed and as the value of top SEO rankings has increased so has the competition to get there. Some tags are more important than others and they need to be consistently updated as search trends change.

Today, your customers may search for your services using one set of keywords, but in six months they may look for something different. That’s why it’s important to perform keyword research on a regular basis to make sure your site is optimized for most highly-searched terms.

If you rank #1 for a keyword that gets 50 searches a month, but then rank #30 on a term that gets over 1,000, you’re basically sending your customer right to your competitor’s doorstep. On a new SEO project one of the first things we do is evaluate the tags on a website. It’s important not to overlook them as they play a huge role in getting, and keeping, your website ranked.

2. It’s time to get your link on

Search engines have evolved to a point to where the factors and formulas they use to rank a website on a results page would make an engineer at NASA curl up in the fetal position.

At the end of the day, all these equations and algorithms are trying to answer one question: “How relevant is any given website to the keywords just entered by the user?” Relevance is a big word in SEO and it’s one of the most critical components to getting a site to rank well.

That’s one of the first questions we ask new customers, “How relevant do you think your website is to a search engine?”.

If you don’t think your website does a good job stating how important your business is to someone that is looking to use your services or buy your product, chances are a search engine won’t either.

So how do you make your website more relevant in the eyes of a search engine? Have other websites, especially websites that are related (related, relevant, get it?), link back to you. If a search engine reviews your site and finds that other websites think it’s worthwhile enough to link to, then they’ll usually rank it higher than a website that doesn’t have those links.

The good news is basic link building is easy, just pick up the phone or fire off some emails to your clients, partners, friends, family, whoever that can put a link on their website back to yours. As a plus, having links point from your site to other sites is appealing to search engines too.

Long story short: One of the quickest ways to give your website’s rankings a shot in the arm is to get some good inbound links.

3. Freshen up your content

An analogy I like to use is to compare your website to a video store. If the video store had the exact same movies to rent every single time you went, what would you do? Probably go to another video store. Well, that’s what a search will do if your website always has the exact same old content on it.

This one kind of ties back to relevancy, a search engine just won’t look at your website as a valuable, informative resource if the same material is on it for months and months. And keeping it updated is easy, just post a few news updates every month as a starting point.

Some of the more advanced work we do on our clients’ websites (as well as our own) is integrate social media such as Facebook wall posts and twitter feeds. As a plus, search engines hold these networks in high regard so having them link directly to your website is a good idea.

4. Stay on top of it

All of these techniques have been proven to be effective in raising the visibility of a website on search engines but their full benefit can’t be realized without consistent management. Now this doesn’t mean it’s a full time job, but some pro-active maintenance can do a world of good.

Things change when it comes to search engines and staying on top of those changes is important. We already discussed the value of making sure your keywords are regularly updated to reflect search trends, but the organization of the website can’t be overlooked.

As your company changes make sure you put in a little time to change your website with it. If there’s contradictory information out there about your company it can cause a search engine to unnecessarily penalize your website and rank it lower.

By staying on top of your site and making it a priority you can ensure you keep it ranked.

5. Put yourself on the map

Local Search results have become a huge benefit for local businesses (or national businesses with local branches) and unlike other forms of organic SEO, it’s absolutely free and something any business can take advantage of.

One of the most frequent statements we hear in our meetings is “How do I get listed on the map?” What this refers to is the graphical map that search engines use to display businesses in any given geographic area that is searched. The position of the map is such that it’s displayed very prominently on the search results page, thereby providing a ton of value for any business listed on it.

It also shows the phone number of the business along with a link to the website. Because the local search and map graphic has become such a powerful tool for getting leads to a website we’ve developed a comprehensive guide that shows a step-by-step process to make the most of a listing on it and we provide it free of charge for anyone that asks.

Get serious about getting ranked

Hopefully this post has helped clarified some of the key pieces of the puzzle in regards to SEO and internet marketing in general. When you add it all up, there’s a little bit of art and a little bit of science to getting a website to rank consistently well on search engines. We work hard to learn both and when you get right down to it if you put together a good plan, execute it well and make sure to keep up with it your website will see major improvement.

If you’d like to learn more about our custom SEO packages, or you have questions in general about internet marketing, let us know and or leave your questions in the comments section below.

Effective Use of Photography in Web Design

2010-07-19T10:42:00.011-04:00

I've noticed a trend lately of websites that incorporate some pretty incredible photography as a central part of their design. We all know the cliche "A picture is worth a thousand words", and not only is it true, but I've realized it's especially accurate when it comes to current web design.

When photography is used well on a website it just naturally makes you want to interact with the content. To me, Apple's website really set the standard in how they presented ultra-rich images of their products, and I think that's one of the reasons they've seen such a dramatic increase in popularity and success.

Now, many companies don't have the budget Apple does to produce these images (or the extraordinary talents of their artists), but the good news is just about every website can benefit from some well thought out, homemade photography.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the business-side of designing websites, and really any creative corporate material, the natural tendency is to use stock images from one of the big online warehouse-sized libraries.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, stock photos have come a long way. Here's just some of the advantages:

1.) Comparatively, they're much cheaper then professional, custom photography
2.) Because they're watermarked, you can preview them in your design for free
3.) There's literally thousands of them out there so you have a lot of choices

These are all great reasons for using stock, but if I had to pick one word to summarize each one it'd look like this:

1.) Cheap

2.) Lazy

3.) Generic

Looking at it in that context, these are never words I like to use when making creative decisions. Conversely, here's the advantages of using real photos on your website:

1.) Personalization, no other website on the web will have these pics
2.) Specificity, you're getting the exact images you want the way you want them
3.) Quality, now there's cameras under $1,000 that can produce amazing images

Now that list is more like it. The bottom line is, few other visual elements can have a more powerful impact on a design then awe-inspiring photographic imagery. Here's some websites I ran across that got it right, if you have some examples you've found feel free to post links in the comments section.

50Back.com

I saw this site on a Best of Week over at Abduzeedo.com and was instantly drawn to it. Not because of the vibrant color scheme, slick use of typography or naturally smart grid-based layout. Nope, it was that big 'ol beautiful bottle of beer that immediately caught my attention.

With the drops of condensation lazily rolling down the bottle and big-enough-to-grab-a-hold-of presentation, that beer IS the design. It amazes me when product-based websites don't give the product the proper visual billing it deserves (and requires).

50Back is a perfect example of the right way to do it, the image of the beer bottle is incredibly clear and sharp and it seems as the page was designed around it, not the other way around. Not to mention, the cause it represents is a great one and if I ever have the opportunity I'll be proud to take a good long swig of 50Back.

MarieCatribs.com

This site was listed in a showcase on Tuttoaster and caught my eye for the simple fact that I love everything about food. Eating it, cooking it, you name it, if it has to do with food I'm down.

Not to mention, food makes for some killer pictures. Whenever I'm in a restaurant reading a menu description I think about not only how a dish will taste, but how it will look on the plate and this is a great example of that on the web.

Restaurateurs will tell you that you eat with your eyes and that's why plate presentation has become as fussy as it is now. But at the end of the day, high quality images of well prepared, appetizing food will always create a strong visual effect.

This website, much like 50Back, does a great job of letting the product speak for itself. It just does the simple things right, the photos of the food are bigger then anything else on the page and the designer clearly went out of their way to make the textures and details of all the food in the rotator stand out.

Emerald City Guitars

This one was posted on Six Revisions as part of a showcase and I bookmarked it right away. I love music and try to play guitar but aside from Margaritaville and the first few bars of Stairway to Heaven I can't play a lick.

But I think guitars are awesome looking, there's something iconic about them and they just make great pictures. Such is the case here, and all it takes is one glance at that stunning Les Paul you can practically hear how it good it sounds.

Using full width hi-resolution images isn't a new web design trend by any means, but seldomly do designers leave the photo alone and let it speak for itself. I've seen countless websites that crowd a beautiful product image with taglines, buttons and other distractive stuff that dilutes its overall effect.

Aside from the small, monotone call-to-action button tucked away in the bottom right corner of the pic, this design let's the guitar do it's work. And trust me, a Les Paul guitar can do a lot of work.

GavinCastleton.com

Saw this one over at webdesigndev.com and after initially scaring the bejesus out of me I realized how well executed the design is. I've noticed zombies are a trend now and a pretty overdone one in my opinion but this site manages to pull off the undead imagery frighteningly well.

Images like this, when used correctly, create a strong emotional reaction that good designers are able to leverage into engaging experiences. Which I guess is a fancy way of saying that when you see something like this you don't easily forget it, and for a lot of us that's a goal with all our work.

Not to mention, incorporating people (or half-dead people in this case) into a web design has proven to be a successful way to attract the eye. Usability studies have shown that our eyes are drawn to faces before anything else.

With that in mind, it's easy to see why this design is so successful.

Is your website photogenic enough?

We've taken on some new projects where we'll be using custom photography and it's been exciting to push the creative boundaries of what can be done with it.

Here's some links to a few photography showcases that inspired this post, and if you'd like to chat about adding some unique appeal to your website with photography let us know.

Smashing Magazine: Showcase of Beautiful Photography

Abduzeedo: Beautiful Black and White Photography

Naldz Graphics: 30 Amazing Examples of Waterscape Shots in Photography

Clients say the darnedest things #1

2010-07-06T17:01:00.014-04:00

I've been kicking around the idea of creating an ongoing series of posts that chronicle my interactions with our customers. I've seen these types of posts on other design/tech blogs and by and large they're cynical, smarmy and downright negative. So I'm going to start up a nice one.

I'm sure there's some exceptions out there but as far as I know, every business needs customers. So if most of, if not all of us, need customers, why are blogs posts on them so gloomy and pessimistic? My 2 cents...

Because like anything else in life you need, sometimes customers can be a real pain in the tail. And that's why I love them so much! If customers were easy, A.) I'd be out of a job and B.) all of our jobs wouldn't be nearly as much fun.

The fact of the matter is customers can give you insight and perspective into their industry, and business in general, that will not only make the final product that much more authentic and ultimately successful, but enrich you as a professional designer of the web.

No matter how troublesome a particular client was/is, or how many times you've wanted to figuratively or literally strangle them, if you forced yourself to chill out for a second you'd learn something from each and every one of them.

They're your clients for a reason, something compelled you to do business with them in the first place. Now, your gut reaction to this may be "It's because they had money and needed my services". This is more of an endorsement then an argument to my original statement; if they have money it's because they're doing something professionally and, depending on your rates, doing it well enough to afford hiring you.

So having said that, let's show our clients some love! Without them some of us wouldn't be doing what we're doing. And besides, if they were normal and never asked for all the wacky stuff that drive us nuts our jobs would be pretty boring.

In the true spirit of turning a negative into a positive, I'm going to list some of the recent conversations/requests that I've had from customers that helped me learn how to handle new and existing interactions. I hope to keep this going as an ongoing post, if you have some material that you'd like to contribute for my next one please let me know.

1.) "I had no idea how much work this would be"

I heard this one after a web design client elected to manage their own Google Adwords campaign. I mean, if you look at Google Adwords, or the Sponsored Link results when you perform a search, it doesn't look all that scary. Write a short ad, enter a dollar amount into the interface (which is getting surprisingly tougher to use nowadays) and viola! You're off and running.

Not quite. You may be off and running, but you're also off and spending. When it's your money getting spent you realize how ubiquitous and just plain massive that search engine is. And you also realize it can take a large chunk of your available time to manage it.

This particular client is one of the largest service-based companies in town and a good percentage of their work is on the residential side. I nicely explained to them that if I needed to fix something in my house that they specialize in I could do it myself too, but since I'm not a professional (far from it in this case) I'd rather hire them.

Our value as a business partner is that we try to educate our customers as much as work for them. In this case, we're taking over the Google Adwords campaign for the client but we're also teaching them some tips and tricks to manage it themselves. After a few months, we plan to back off some and let them get more involved with it.

Sure, we may lose some business by handing off, but we increase our value as their partner and that's far more important to our long-term success as a company.

2.) "I don't know how I want it, do what y'all think will look the best"

This is some Kiss of Death-type stuff right here. Nine times out of 10, what the client is really saying is "Make a pass at it and I'll critique if I don't like it and you can change it from there". Two things wrong with this picture:

A. You're going to have to pay for it even if we change it later(something no client likes)

B. We're opening up Pandora's Box of the 3 R's; revision, review, repeat. Nothing drags out a project faster then the 3 R's

This is where you have the opportunity to really shine as a web partner. Good designers & developers can interpret this request properly and gently coax out the Holy Grail of client meetings: Actionable feedback.

I'm presently married and anyone else that is can relate to ambiguous and vague type of direction such as this. Quite often my wife will say something very, very generic and mean something very, very specific. After 7 years of marriage I've acquired a sort of "Spider Sense" to see a potential trainwreck coming if I mistake one for the other.

The same is true for clients. If one says "I'm not sure what I want, it just needs to 'Pop'" (my personal un-favorite), start browsing some sites, with them in the room, and see if they respond to any as "pop-worthy".

Or, whip out the erasable markers and go to town on the nearest whiteboard if you can. Something, anything, tangible is better then nothing at all. To quote the recently-released book Rework "You're better off with a kick-a$$ half than a half-a$$ed whole."

The language may be a bit strong but so is the message, because if you don't know how to extract good, substantial direction from your clients the final product will suffer and so will your bottom line (along with your sanity).

3.) "Everything is negotiable"

See, my background is sales so this one is kind of a stickler for me. Since 2000 I've been closely involved with the web and technology in general, but a large majority of my experience is in new business development, specifically generating good 'ol fashioned revenue. So most folks, when they say that to me it's with a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" as if I automatically agree with that nonsense.

First of all, the subtext of what's being said is simple, "lower your price". Which, as anyone familiar with sales knows, I also have to lower my commission. That's understandable, and sometimes agreeable, but that statement in and of itself is still inherently flawed.

Because secondly, and more importantly, by all means everything is NOT negotiable!

Just off the top of my head, I'd say quality, service, warranty and deadlines are not in any way, shape, or form negotiable.

If your re-designed website looks worse and more dated then your current one, will you be able to negotiate with everyone that tells you they don't like it?

Will you be able to negotiate your way out of all the business you'll lose if your e-commerce store crashes when shoppers click the "Add to cart" button because you went with a cheap off-the-shelf template solution?

Or how about putting your negotiating skills to the test when your launch deadline comes and goes and you lose thousands of dollars on the marketing you spent to advertise a time-sensitive event because the site wasn’t done in time?

Sorry, rant over. I guess what I mean to say is that if a client says something to this effect, the good news is they like you and they want to work with you, just at a lower price than you originally came at them with. So adjust accordingly if you can, but be smart about it. And the silver lining here is that you just learned how they operate in these types of situations, and this knowledge can be leveraged in a future interaction.

To me, this one goes back to integrity and standing your ground, if you respect your product, and yourself, good clients will too. And if they don't, you probably don't want them as a client in the first place.

Parenting and project management

That's it for now, as a father of a 3 year old I hear all sorts of unexpected (and not so coherent) things come out of my son's mouth all the time and that inspired the title of this post. I said in the open and I'll repeat it here, I love clients and one of the most rewarding parts of my job is working with them and hearing their praise for what we help them create and build.

I feel more successful when I help make our clients more successful and when you do it right it doesn't feel like work. When I read blog posts that are full of complaints and insults about clients, I wonder if the person writing them really took the time to put the shoe on the other foot and do a better job as the vendor to find a solution.

Having said all that, I will admit I've shared a chuckle or two over some of customer's requests. But I can honestly say I was laughing with them, and it was a laugh I appreciated.

So let's have it, if you work with clients on a regular basis I know you've got some stories to tell and some insight to lend. Leave it in the comments below or get in touch and we'll post it here.

DiscoverTec's brand new brand

2010-05-14T14:32:00.014-04:00

For the past half-decade or so DiscoverTec has incorporated @ Your Service as an important part of our online and offline corporate identity. A lot has changed since that idea was introduced and we felt it was time for our brand to change too. That's exactly what happened today when we unveiled our brand new brand.

Web Simplified.

After many brainstorming sessions, hundreds of Photoshop revisions and more than a few strands of hair being forcefully removed, that's the result. Since last year we've shifted our focus from what was at one time 7 separate company divisions, many of them service-oriented, to just one: cutting edge web services. Due to this shift we felt it was time for a change to the DiscoverTec brand.

We've learned over the years that what we do can get extremely complicated and that can be an obstacle for our brand. People are afraid of what they don't understand, and if there's one thing about web design and development, and technology services in general, is that they can be a little tricky to figure out.

We strive to offset that fear and misunderstanding by providing a unique and overall positive experience for our clients and partners when they do business with us. That's always been a major component of our identity and one of the reasons for our long-term success.

We'd like to think that our expertise and commitment to quality and innovation has been a big factor in the long-term relationships we have with our customers, but we know that's not all. It's the experience they have with us, and the fact that we go out of our way to be easy to work with, that defines what DiscoverTec is all about.

All of that needed to be distilled down into a single concept that would make up our new brand. And like many great ideas, this one started with a single impulse that gradually developed into one unified idea. It got me thinking about branding in general and this will be the first in a series of posts that focus on corporate and personal identity in general.

Over the years I’ve realized that memorable brands communicate well and that’s a key part of why they enjoy long-term success. As a Team and as individuals we all contributed different pieces to the final product and what helped me was to have fun, keep an open mind and let the ideas flow naturally.

Decades of constant bombardment by good, bad and ugly brands have clouded my objectivity and it was important to make sure I didn’t inadvertently let one that has seeped into my head make its way into my contribution.

At the same time, I didn’t want to dismiss the simple fact that if a brand stuck out to me for years and years there was something to be said for it. Chances are if you remember a brand it’s partly due to the fact that it effortlessly, and unmistakably, speaks to what it does.

I found that Kleenex is a good example of this. How many times have you heard yourself, or someone else, instinctively ask for a Kleenex instead of just “tissue”? Their brand and product type is one and the same because of effective, natural communication.

The name just sounds clean (by nature of it’s first syllable) and uses the “ex” suffix, which has an innate connotation of getting rid of something unwanted (in this case, well, you know). This suffix has been widely adopted for other successful brands, ranging from pest control (Terminex) to window cleaners (Windex).

Our goal with this effort was not to re-brand our actual company name, but moreso the idea that accompanies it. It was kind of a no-brainer to use Web since one of our primary objectives was to instantly and clearly state exactly what we do.

We felt that we now live in a time where people associate the word “web” with the personal and commercial use of the public internet. Now that it’s such an immersive part of our lives, we’re confident incorporating it prominently into our brand.

The second part was a little trickier. We feel one of our strengths as a professional web services provider is taking a technology that is largely complex and making it simple. And simple is a safe, comfortable and assuring adjective that people generally associate with a positive experience.

In short, people like simple.

If we could create a brand that successfully conveys the act of taking a medium that is considered difficult to understand and work with and demystify it to the point where it’s reduced to a simple and altogether gratifying endeavor, well then we may have something.

That’s when “web simplified” took shape, and for the most part we never looked back. It communicates the industry we work in and how we execute our work in it. Sometimes the form and presentation of a brand can mean more then the message itself, and we thought “what’s simpler than 2 words?”

All in all it was a great experience and everyone on the Team is thrilled with the result and I hope you enjoyed learning about our new brand as much as we enjoyed creating it.

If you’ve done any identity work recently and you’re cool sharing a recap please post in the comments below. And if you’re considering giving your brand a fresh coat of paint feel free to give us a shout and we can start brainstorming.

Website Pricing: General thoughts on Best Practices

2010-05-06T15:48:00.009-04:00

I'm fortunate enough to attend almost all of our discovery meetings with potential new clients here at DiscoverTec and I've realized that there's only two hard and fast rules when it comes to website pricing:

1.) Every customer wants a quote yesterday

2.) Few companies know how to correctly provide them with one.

The first rule is understandable, how much something costs plays an important role in any purchasing decision we make. As for the second rule, that's something we're constantly refining and what follows is an attempt to explain some our thoughts on quoting web design, development and SEO.

If you think about it, most websites have big "chunks" in common. Things like the creative design, code writing, motion graphics, etc. are very common price points so it's easy to look at those as a baseline for quotes. However, it's all the additional little pieces that make one website different from another that makes it difficult to offer "off the shelf" pricing.

This is where the youth of our industry can create a challenge. Unlike other services and products that have been around for years and years there's no benchmark for pricing a website due to the fact that so much has changed in our business in such a short period of time.

If you were to look around you'd find some companies that advertise free websites, some that charge $100 a month and some that won't even talk to you unless you pay a "discovery fee" which can be in excess of $1,000. Our goal is to have the best price, not the highest and not the lowest. To that end we use some general guidelines as a basis for quoting all our work.

These are by no means the end-all, be-all to fairly and accurately quoting a website. If they were I wouldn't want to be in this business. I was taught a long time ago by an early mentor and sales guru that if you sell on price you lose every time. Maybe not right away, but in the long run if your customers look at you as just another vendor, and not a valuable business partner, they'll hire someone else with a lower price down the road.

You'll probably notice that these could be applied to just about any purchasing decision and I'd appreciate it if you'd leave your opinion on quoting and pricing new business in the comment section below.

You get what you pay for

This is definitely a principle that can be applied to any buying decision. I'm a little embarrassed to admit how much of a cliche this is, and I wanted to avoid that with this post, but it's too true to not include.

There's always something cheaper out there, and if that's what you want then that's what you'll get... something cheaper.

It may not look good, it may not work well and in general it may not do everything that it was supposed to. But it would have cost less, and if that's all someone is looking for then they'll undoubtedly find it. Now, if the cheapest website will give you what you need, and that's enough, then by all means go for it. But if you think it's going to give you the stuff you want, well, make sure to read the next point.

Separate the "Needs" from the "Wants"

Cars are a great example of this one. Think about it, when it comes to a car, what do you actually need? Starting up when you turn the key is pretty important, as is getting you from point A to point B. But what do you want? That differs for all of us, but by and large we're all guilty of choosing a car based on what we want versus what we need.

Websites are the same. We're approached by prospective customers that are professional enough to share their budget with us and we work hard to put together a custom quote that covers everything we identified they need at a price that fits their budget.

This is usually where the wants take over.

"Can you put music on it?"

"Will it do one of those cool flashy intro things?" (very rarely are those cool by the way)

"Will we be able to know the name of every single person that comes to the site?"

Inevitably these types of requirements are "nice-to-have" things that will severely bulk up a quote (not to mention the last one is illegal). If an unnecessary requirement forces our quote over your budget, and it doesn't contribute to the website being more effective and/or profitable, we recommend holding off. Which brings me to my next point...

Identify opportunities to Phase the project

Sometimes when you evaluate what you need vs. what you want, a third category starts taking shape. I call it the "kinda-sorta need". These are those things that fall in between, a good example is motion graphics. Many times, customers see a website with a dynamic motion-based header graphic (similar to what we built for www.SuddathLogistics.com) and notice how powerful of a first impression it makes and they want it included in their proposal.

Now, if a motion graphic piece helps engage visitors and they convert to customers then by all means, I'd call that a need. But getting there could be considered a want, because without it you can still have a very nice, professional website that will attract new business. Motion graphics, while more affordable then ever, are still an additional cost and if you're on a budget that could be an issue.

The solution? Leave it out of the first version, launch the site, get more business, then re-invest in the site and add it in Phase II.

We do this all the time and it makes a ton of sense, in fact, there's several things we want to do with our own website and we're intentionally holding off until we're ready to do them. A brand new, modern-looking website has a ton of value in and of itself. It's smart to get one up and live, then work on enhancements. Especially when the alternative is leaving it on a test site for months and months while competitors get all the new customers.

It needs to be a "Win-Win"

I list this one last because it really is the bottom line. Everything in life needs to be a good fit and all relationships you enter into need to be a win-win, from friends to family to business. With prices that run across the board and website building processes that are even more inconsistent, everyone will find something, and someone, that is the perfect fit to help them with theirs.

And in some cases, it's better to part ways as professionals early than try to enter into a long-term partnership with a company that is a bad fit. Ultimately, a mutually bad fit usually results in a sub-par final product due to a disconnected and tense build process and nobody wins.

As an analogy, there was this one time (maybe more then once) that I observed my wife attempt to cram her feet into an ill-fitting pair of shoes because she liked the way they looked. The end result? Her feet were tore up something awful and she complained about them the whole time she had them on.

Moral of the story: In the long run how well something fits is more important then any other factor in a buying decision, including the price. Because in the end, a bad fit always costs more then a good one, and it's not always measured in dollars and cents.

There you have it, my 2 cents on website pricing. If you have some stories you'd like to share about pricing sites, funny, helpful or otherwise, by all means please post in the comment section below. I enjoy hearing other people's pricing adventures, because until our industry naturally standardizes its practices, selling websites will still be like the 'ol Wild West.

You know what though? I'm not sure if that will bother a wanna-be gunslinger like me.

DiscoverTec's Landing Page Refresh Part II: Design

2010-04-16T17:26:00.020-04:00

We saw a major milestone in the recovery of our economy recently when the Dow hit 11,000 last week for the first time in over 18 months. At DiscoverTec, one of our goals for 2010 was to put an Internet Marketing strategy into place that was more bold and dynamic than anything in our company's history.

A big part of that strategy was refreshing the Landing Pages of our website and this month we launched them live. Last month we discussed and defined landing pages in Part I of our blog feature. This month we want to cover the specifics of what we recently implemented as well as some general thoughts and observations on best practices.

We've developed an aggressive Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign to drive traffic to our website via Google Adwords. Our goal is that when anyone searches for web design, web development or internet marketing in the greater Northeast Florida area, they'll find DiscoverTec.

But as we always tell our clients, driving traffic to your website is only half the battle, converting them to customers when they get there is what really counts. One of the best ways to turn increased search traffic into increased leads through your website is by using landing pages.

For our landing pages, the key was to keep them simple and also create a foundation that could grow into different geographic markets and different product/service offerings. Whenever we help our clients launch a landing page strategy we consider the following guidelines:

1.) Match the message of the advertising source it came from

2.) There must be a clear, intuitive call to action

3.) Use segmentation to drive different users to different pages

Consistency between landing page and lead source

Believe it or not, on a regular basis we see international powerhouse retailers design landing pages that present a different idea than the advertising source they're pulling traffic from. Ads that describe a product or service and lead the user to a landing page that makes little, if any, mention of that same product or service that compelled them to click on the ad.

Plain and simple, if the copy in the ad you run doesn't match up with the landing page you'll be taking the potential customer to when they click it, you just wasted whatever marketing dollars it cost to get that click. If you're paying upwards of $10 per click to get them on that page that's a costly mistake.

For our landing pages we made sure that the keywords people used to find our ad were present on every single page of the campaign. If someone searches for a "Jacksonville Web Design Company" they're going to a landing page that has those keywords in big, bold type.

We know that due to the technical nature of our business people look to us to educate them as much as partner with them for their website projects. To that end, we designed our landing pages in a very straightforward and unassuming manner to prevent any potential disconnects and make sure our page matches their expectations.

Effective call to action

Whenever we design landing pages, for both our own campaigns as well as our clients, we try to put the potential for results ahead of anything else. Sometimes this means sacrificing a little on the look and feel of the landing page to gain a better chance of conversion.

If you're selling a product and using landing pages to receive inbound lead traffic, it doesn't matter how pretty the picture of the product is, how favorable the reviews are or how cool the page design is. It only matters if you sell the product. And sometimes to do that you have to focus more on the customer, and more importantly the customer's experience, then you would on the product itself.

Take for example the iPad. I had the chance to play with one recently and it's just an incredible, "I never thought I'd see something this cool in my lifetime" device. But when you search Google for "iPad" you go to this page. Check out how amazing that rotating photo of the device is. Look at the size of the font they used in the product title. They even offer a series of videos to see it in action. What don't they feature though?

The little, hardly noticible "Buy Now" call to action button tucked away in the top right corner.

Chances are Apple can pull this off because, well, they're Apple. But we see this on websites big and small, and if you're not featuring call-to-action buttons prominently, and you didn't spend the time to really consider what your customer expects to experience when they land on your landing pages, you could be missing out on conversions and wasting your marketing budget.

On our landing pages we clearly present the customer with 2 distinct options using large, easy-to-spot call to action buttons. Customers can use these to click through and learn more about the services they searched for (because our pages match the ads they clicked on).

Additionally, we feature our phone number on every page and use big, easily readable fonts on our brief contact form. We tried to create consistency with all our call to actions on our landing pages and we recommend it as a critical strategy for any size campaign.

Offer different routes to specific services

Good landing pages offer visitors choices, something that just about everybody likes. Whenever we're presented with options, especially options that make sense based on what we're looking for, we feel more comfortable transitioning into a buying decision. This has proven to be especially true for landing pages.

The choice we're giving people that click on our landing pages is a simple one; we can help you design a new website, or re-design an existing website. The majority of visitors to our landing pages have searched for design-based services, so it only made sense to segment the landing page into the 2 distinct types of website design.

The copy on these pages varies and each speaks to the type of design they selected. It's been our experience that when people come to us for design work they either have a site that needs a face lift or they've got an idea for something that will be brand new. We took both these ideas and wrote copy that seperated them out and gives us better information for how to approach helping them.

So far so good

The new pages have been up for just about a month now and we're already seeing a increased click-through rate and conversion rate. We're marketing our services more aggresively then ever before and these landing pages are a big part of it.

If you're using landing pages to draw search traffic to our site, please feel free to comment below on how you're doing. As always, if you're considering a pay-per-click or landing page strategy, please contact us to set up a meeting and we'll put together a customized package for you.

DiscoverTec's Landing Page Refresh Part 1: Introduction

2010-03-22T15:14:00.001-04:00

It’s hard to believe that the first quarter of the new decade is wrapping up already. People are filling out NCAA brackets, the weather is finally starting to warm up and lately it seems like businesses are starting to move their internet marketing budgets from the backburner to the front of the stove again. Here at DT that’s a good thing, and after launching our re-designed website on New Year’s Eve last year, then refreshing it yet again just this past month, we’re going to tackle our Landing Pages.

What’s a landing page and why is it important to my website?

Being that this is Part One of an indefinite amount of posts on this subject it would only make sense to start with some basic definitions. Let’s start with the term landing page, in simplest terms a landing page is any page of a website that was intentionally designed to draw traffic from very specific sources. More often than not the most common source of this traffic is from a Pay Per Click (or PPC) advertisement on a major search engine. We use Google Adwords, and our ad shows up under the “Sponsored Links” section at the top and right side of the search results page.

In theory, the concept of landing pages is very simple: you design and build intuitive, straightforward webpages and drive visitors to them by advertising your products or services in very specific ways. Ideally, the visitors will be more prone to take action and you purposefully display your contact information in very prominent ways on the landing page to compel them to contact you and start the sales process. When used as part of a PPC strategy, the ideal result is to generate Conversions.

A website’s conversion rate is it’s barometer for success.

Time for another definition: a conversion in the internet marketing sense occurs when the intended goal of an advertising campaign is achieved. For an e-commerce website, a purchase is usually considered conversion. For a doctor’s office website, a conversion could be an appointment request sent through the contact form. Conversions can vary from website to website and even from page to page on a website, but the one thing that never varies is that the true measure of any successful internet marketing effort is the conversion rate.

OK, here we go with another definition, I promise this will be the last one.

The conversion rate is the ratio of users that achieved the goal of the marketing effort versus the amount of overall users that responded. For instance, if 10 people clicked on our ad on Google Adwords and 1 of them called our office to set up a meeting and 1 filled our contact form to come visit with us, than our conversion rate was 2 out of 10, or 20 percent.

DiscoverTec’s take on best practices for Landing pages

We’ve been using various search engine optimization techniques for years to leverage search traffic into new business leads. When we started with Google Adwords our strategy was very basic and for the most part, we either drove traffic to our homepage or to a page inside our website that matched the copy of our Google ad. For instance, if someone clicked on our ad for website development, we sent them to the web development page on our site. Overall it worked well and we were happy with the results, but over time as our market and industry become more and more competitive we had to really take a close look at what were doing.

We noticed that a trend was emerging and companies were setting up separate pages on their websites to receive traffic specifically generated from search engines. It seemed like a great idea because you could tailor these pages to appeal to very specific, targeted visitors. It was at that point that we started working on our landing pages, and we’re just about ready to roll them live.

Will our landing pages land us any new business?

Time will tell, but we’re excited. Stay tuned with us as we post updates on our strategy. And if you’re using landing pages already for your PPC campagins, please feel free to post your comments below and let us know how they’re working and what your thoughts are on best practices.

New DT Blog Feature: Roundup of recent cool stuff from the web

2010-04-07T17:22:00.004-04:00

It's always amazed me to think how much the internet, and technology in general, has changed our lives. Arguments can be made all day long as to whether or not this change has been good or bad, but one statement that is inarguable, at least in my opinion, is that there's some pretty daggum cool stuff that can be found on the web.

The only downside? It's tricky to find it. I spend more time online then most people spend being awake (lucky for me it's a job requirement). But despite all that, I still have trouble sometimes tracking down stuff that I think is genuinely cool.

Sifting through all the irrelevant corners of the internet isn't easy and fortunately I've found some helpful tools. My Design List on Twitter provides me with a constant source of cool stuff that some really smart people are nice enough to share. Also, it seems like there's new blogs popping up every day that do "Best of the web" type posts (Abduzeedo's "Best of the Week" is my personal favorite.)

But I've found that with anything in life if you really want to find what you're looking for you need to do the looking yourself. I started saving links to my Delicious account so I could start to build a gallery of web designs that I thought were cool. When we re-designed our website we used these designs as inspiration (read: plagiarism... kidding!). Eventually, this whole URL-based treasure trove I was building started morphing into a general collection of anything I came across that I wanted to keep for future reference.

And that's how this Roundup of cool stuff from the web was born.

I hope to keep this going and have a new one every few weeks, but if I get too busy you can always subscribe to my Delicious feed and keep up with what I find. And if there's stuff you've found that you think would be a good inclusion here holler at me and I'll add it next time.

1.) 27 Creative and Futuristic Cell Phone Concept designs
Richworks.in

Smartphones are well on their way to becoming the standard mobile device now (my 3 year old knows his way around my wife's iPhone better then I do) and this post had some super-sleek concepts. I think it's fun to make up cool, and sometimes unrealistic and physically impossible, ways to design things better and concept designs are a great way to do that. When the Windows Phone 7 Series comes out this year I'm predicting it will be a game-changer. If it performs as cool at it looks in the demos some of the concepts in this showcase won't seem so far-fetched.

2.) Processed Identity: Sharing How You Got There / The Creative Process of Identity and Logo Design
ProcessedIdentity.com

This is an incredibly insightful blog post by Baltimore-based designer/art director John McHugh. He provides a very detailed account of a recent Branding & Idenity project he worked on for a bio-tech company. Here John takes a process that is usually extremely internal and breaks it down into a thorough and comprehensive step-by-step recap. Branding projects, and in particular logo design projects, have a nasty habit of spiraling into a triple-whammy of major client/designer frustration, overbloated budgets and a poor final product. As far as I'm concerned this is the textbook way to handle one of these projects and I took alot away from what he shared here.

3.) 10 Insanely Great iPad Apps We Can't Wait to Use
Mashable.com

Admit it, the iPad is ridiculously cool. Don't hate on it, we all know it's not perfect, but it's first tablet device ever and that in and of itself makes it cool. If you haven't read about it or watched any of the videos that's easy to do (the one about Steve Jobs and his excessive use of adjectives is pretty good), but I thought this post went a step further because it sheds light on specific apps that will really shine on this device. Mashable is just an awesomely popular, hugely-influential industry blog and this type of post is a big reason why. Apple knocked it out of the park with the iPhone and if they're looking to go back-to-back with the iPad it's the apps that are going to get it done. And to "nerd-out" for a second, if you're involved with web design in any way, shape or form, how sick will OmniGraffle be on this thing?!

4.) Tick Talk • A Web Conference About Time • 10th June 2010
ChrisArmstrong.com

I love web design that ties together the high-level branding concept of the site with the visual elements on the homepage in really clever ways. It's especially cool when those visual elements are interactive. Here on Tick-Talk, a fictional web conference poster/website that Belfast-based designer Chris Armstrong created, it uses a dynamic ticker that lets you know how long you've been on the site. Ticker, Tick Talk, get it? I do and I think it's cool, and as an added bonus there's some extraordinary typography here. Using bold, eye-catching typography in web designs has been identified as a huge new trend in 2010 and this work is a great example of how text, when treated as design, can actually replace images and styles as content.

5.) Craig Newmark: Social Networks Are Shifting the Balance of Power
Gigaom.com

Very provocative read featuring the founder of Craig's List and his thoughts on the impact social networks can potentially have in the near future. In addition to creating one of the most popular website applications of all time, Newmark has an outstanding and admirable track record of altruism and I always listen when he has something to say about trends on the web. I would recommend you do the same and pay special attention to this subject in particular. There's some interesting stuff in here and whether we realize it or not, a tremendous shift is happening on the web relative to how reputation-based information is being handled on social networks. The idea of treating information as currency is nothing new but social networks throw an entirely different monkey wrench into this concept. The most compelling question to me is if trust factors become as valuable as money, which bank will you choose to manage yours?

6.) New A-Team Trailer is here
ATeam-movie.com

"I love it when a plan comes together." If you don't recognize that quote stop reading right now because you probably won't think this is very cool. If you do recognize it, and you're not drooling over the fact that one of the coolest TV shows ever is getting re-made into a feature film, stop reading now and go watch 24 or Lost or some other new-fangled action show that takes itself waaaaay too serious. I mean, come on, B.A Baracus, Face, Hannibal, Murdock, the freakin' VAN? There's no way this won't be awesome and I'll be one of the first in line. And I pity the fool that won't!

That'll do it for this Roundup

I hope you enjoyed it and found at least something you thought was cool. If you didn't, my bad, let me know if the comment section below and I'll add it in. Well, what I meant was I'll add it if I think it's cool enough...

Understanding Goal-Based Web Design

2010-03-31T12:50:00.000-04:00

Most of us are taught from an early age that having goals is an important part of becoming successful at anything. Whether it's personal or professional success, more often than not it's acheived by setting, working towards, and ultimately accomplishing a goal. This same principle holds true for a website.

Defining a Goal

Much like in life, the first step in achieving a goal is figuring out what it is before you start. For a website, it may seem obvious, something we hear pretty often is "I just want something basic that's better than what I have now.". Vague as it may be, it's still a goal and one we feel we're perfectly suited to help someone achieve. But like everything in life, when it comes to goals the devil is in the details.

When we help our clients define the goals of their website we try to steer clear of any that are subjective in nature. For example, "something better than what I have now" could mean 100 different things to 100 different people. We need to "drill down" and get more specific before we're ready to tackle this goal.

How do we do that? By asking quesitons and more importanly, by listening to our clients' answers.

When you say better do you mean more modern-looking? Or, by better do you mean making the website more prone to capture new business? Or do you mean both? (most of the time they do). The answer to these types of questions can go a long way towards defining the goal of a website and subsequently, help us formulate a plan to achieve it.

Short Term vs. Long Term Goals

Generally, once a goal is defined, it tends to "sprout" new goals as a result. For instance, we recently started work on a new website for a client and intially, all they wanted was an updated look and feel for their website with some basic Search Engine Optimization. We worked with them closely to re-design their old site, performed some fairly straightforward tasks to try to get the website listed higher on search engines and launched it live.

Their customers liked it and for the most part it got rave reviews. This made them happy (as an aside, one of our biggest goals at DiscoverTec is making our clients happy). Then they started getting new business leads through the website, because when their customers searched for their services the site came up pretty high on Google. This made them even happier.

It didn't take long for a new set of goals to work their way to the surface. Now that more people liked the website, it made sense to create an e-Newsletter campaign to keep visitors updated. Also, now that more traffic and leads are coming through, it made sense to start talking about e-commerce. These long-term goals are a product of the initial short-term goals being accomplished.

For this particular example, the short-term goals for the website were to update the look and feel to something more modern and visually appealing, as well as provide a solid foundation to develop new business opportunities and increase traffic. The long-term goals were to create a consistent vehicle to keep their business "top-of-mind" with their customers (e-Newsletter campaign) and turns leads into sales right on the website (e-commerce implementation).

Combining a solid, cost-effective short-term goal strategy with a measureable, success-based long-term one is how we've always recommended leveraging the potential of your website. This case study is a great example of that.

Never forget the importance of asking "Why?"

This is an important one that I'm sure we can all identify with. Whenever we make a decision to change anything in life, we should always take a minute and ask ourselves why. Why? Because if we don't, we run the risk of setting a goal for the wrong reasons. This is especially true when it comes to websites.

"I want more 'wow-factor'"

"We need to rank higher on Google"

"I want a bigger presence on Facebook and Twitter"

Whenever we hear our clients come to us with goals such as this our first question is why. Why do you want more wow-factor? Because you think your visitors genuinely want to be "wowed" when they view your website? Or, it is because your biggest competitor is doing it?

Putting your website's goals through the wringer is great way to see if they're worth pursuing or a by-product of something that would be nice to have versus something that you need to have.

Ranking higher on Google is definitely a positive, but if your website is not designed to accomodate and effectively capture new leads it really won't do you any good. And if you're not going to develop an ongoing strategy to keep your Facebook and Twitter pages updated with quality information, it probably won't help your bottom line much.

Set the right goals and stick to them

Very few websites consider and set the correct goals and even fewer follow through on them. No big deal, it happens to us all. Think about how often you've slacked off on your New Year's resolutions.

The good news is when it comes to your website there's always a fresh opportunity to come up with and achieve new goals. Our industry is changing faster than ever before and companies that are willing to keep up can realize tremendous growth by taking advantage of new trends.

If you feel like it's time to knock the dust off your website and re-consider the goals you had for it, let us know and we can set up a time to talk. If you've got some stories you're willing to share about using your website to acheive your overall business goals, please tell us about it in the comment section below.

Press Release: Biker Blast a huge success

2010-03-15T11:24:00.000-04:00

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (February 28, 2010) – It started 3 years ago with the first Rotary Club of Southpoint Biker Blast. The event was created as a way to kick start the notorious Bike Week in Daytona while simultaneously raising money for local charities. The first Biker Blast of Jacksonville was held at a local motorcycle dealership, less than 200 people showed up, raffle tickets were purchased to win a new Harley and the proceeds were donated to Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital.

Fast forward to February 27, 2010, add a few more hundred people, live music and the Jacksonville Landing, and you have Biker Blast III. After raising over $10,000 at the event, the proceeds were able to fund the first patient room at Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital.

“It’s been so exciting to see the Biker Blast grow every year and become as big as it is now,” said Donny Lamey, President-Elect of the Rotary Club of Southpoint. “Our goal was to create a fun, family event that was for a good cause that the whole community could be a part of and Saturday was a great success.”

As the President & CEO of DiscoverTec, a Jacksonville-based web design and technology company, Lamey has always made giving back to local charities a top priority as a businessman. As a motorcycle enthusiast that rides at least twice a week, the Biker Blast was a way to combine the two. Past Rotary Club President Charlie Sheppard, Karen Wolfson, Don Wolfson, Dr. Philip Aldana and Alex, a patient and Trauma Survivor at Wolfsan’s Children’s Hospital were key participants at the event.

“If it wasn’t for the dedication and support of the local Southpoint Rotary group and Donny this event would not have been a success,” Karen Wolfson said as Lamey opened up the event with a speech thanking local patrons for their support.

As luck would have it Donny himself was the Grand Prize winner of the 2010 Harley-Davidson Sportster Iron 883. He opted for the cash prize of $5,000 rather than the Adamac Harley bike giveaway and donated the entire amount to Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital.

“It was tough to give up that Harley,” he chuckled. “With the crunch we’ve all been feeling with this economy it’s harder to give back and it was my pleasure to donate the prize to Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital. I only hope that next year we can make the event even bigger and raise even more money for charity.”

If the smiling faces that filled the Landing last Saturday were any indication, the Biker Blast is set for another successful year in 2011.

New Website Launch: Parent Approved

2010-03-05T13:28:00.001-05:00

This week we launched a custom-developed website that helps parent find quality childcare online. Parent Approved was founded in 2006 by Denise Coons and offers an innovative system for parents to search for accredited childcare facilities and accredited childcare providers to create and manage an interactive profile on the website.

From a design perspective, one of our main goals for www.ParentApproved.com was to create a look and feel that was fun, casual and helped to put parents at ease as they use the site’s features. In addition, we wanted to drive users to register with the Parent Approved and to that end we worked to craft intuitive, easy-to-use call to action buttons and a clean, natural user interface and process flow.

Each page of the website has a unique look and feel that features different color schemes and images of children and on every page it’s easy to register with the website. In addition to a user-friendly design, the other main piece of this website is the cutting edge, custom-built parent, provider and administrative portal. We implemented an advanced messaging system that allows administrators of the Parent Approved website to be updated real-time on any interactions that parents & providers have with the website.

All content that is posted by parents & providers must be approved by administrators and they can manage coupons, special offers and other content-based areas of the website. We also integrated the search functionality with Google Maps so that parents can view location-based information on the accredited providers and providers can upload photo tours of their facilities.

Now that the design and development has been completed on Parent Approved we’re working with their team to launch an aggressive Social Media Optimization plan as well as market their services through search engines with both paid and organic search engine optimization. Stay tuned for updates, and as always please post your comments on the site using the form below.

Press Release: Doing one thing and doing it well

2010-02-23T10:37:00.000-05:00

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (February 22, 2010) –– In one of the worst economies of the past half-century a Jacksonville business owner went against all his entrepreneurial instincts that helped him build a multi-faceted, multi-million dollar company and got back to his roots. After 16 years of seeing unprecedented growth in both revenue and market share, DiscoverTec founder & CEO Donny Lamey sold off all his primary service departments except the ones that got him where he is today.

Over 16 years ago, Lamey, a Mississippi native, founded DiscoverTec as an information technology company shortly after graduating with a BS in Management Information Systems from the University of West Florida. Early on he saw the huge, unlimited potential of information technology and the world wide web and built DiscoverTec into a multi-million dollar company throughout the 2000’s. At its peak, DiscoverTec had over 80 employees, 2 offices and over 6 primary service departments including web design, home automation, security systems, virtual offices and inside wiring.

Fast forward to 2007, Lamey was faced with an economy that was showing signs of serious decline and many business owners around the country saw a potentially devastating situation on the horizon. However, Lamey saw opportunity and made the decision to focus in on what drew him into starting DiscoverTec over a decade earlier, cutting-edge technology services like custom website development and IT solutions.

“As we grew I started to see a split between the construction world of home automation and the hospitality world of virtual offices and then there was the technical world of web development, I couldn’t focus in what I really wanted my company to be,” Lamey said in a recent interview. According to www.DiscoverTec.com, the company’s Vision Statement is “To be the Southeast leader in Technology Services”. To that end, Lamey has sold off every division of his company with the exception of the two divisions that are technology-based.

Today, DiscoverTec is a Microsoft Gold Partner offering web design & development, internet marketing and IT solutions. Lamey said that while his company is about a third the size it used to be in years past, he still realized steady growth in 2009 when most of his competitor’s struggled just to stay in business. “We actually grew our team and by streamlining our product and service offerings it allowed me to get more involved with our customers and I was able to be more hands-on with the day-to-day operations,” said Lamey.

Staying busy has never been a problem for Lamey, who was named one of the Top 40 under 40 “Up and Comers” and is honored to be President Elect of The Southpoint Rotary Club and serve on the board for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. On February 27, 2010, The Southpoint Rotary Club is presenting Biker Blast III, an event Lamey founded in 2008 that sees its primary proceeds go to the Wolfson Children’s Hospital.

“Being active in the community is how I built this company and it was difficult to stay active as we grew. Now I have more time to dedicate to that and giving back has always been very important to me,” stated Lamey.

For Lamey, going back to his roots helped his company take a huge step forward.

New Website Launch: Workplace Solutions

2010-02-19T17:21:00.001-05:00

We've been fortunate to enjoy a busy 2010 so far and this week was no exception as we launched another website live. Workplace Solutions is a Women-Owned business that provides commercial interior products and services and specializes in government contracts. They have been a loyal customer of ours for over 5 years and we really wanted to show them how much we appreciated their repeat business by building them an amazing website.

Workplace Solutions is in an extremely competitive industry and their projects are very large in scope, we needed to provide them with a professional looking site that had a certain "wow" factor that instantly captured the attention of their users. One of the best ways to create this effect is by using Motion Graphics and for this site we pulled out all the stops.

We created custom transitions that matched the linear look and feel the client wanted and used clean, specialized stock photography to create an engaging effect that captured a visitor's attention immediately. The branding they wanted to incorporate was smart and to the point and we were able to integrate using a fading text effect that served as a narrative for the entire piece.

Overall we're very proud of the end result and Workplace is pleased as well. Another key feature of the site is an interactive project map that allows prospective customers to get an idea of the scope and geography of their work. For this we implemented some cutting-edge JavaScript so that when a user mouses over the various projects on the map they can view the details in a mini pop-up overlay.

Please check out the site at www.Workplace.us and as always let us know how did in the comment section below. Have a great weekend!

New Website Launch: Pete Morgan & Son Builders

2010-02-11T13:15:00.000-05:00

For over 30 years former Orange Park mayor Pete Morgan has been in the residential and commercial construction business and wanted a new website that highlighted his experience, expertise and commitment to quality work. DiscoverTec worked closely with Mr. Morgan and his son Haley to design and launch the site and we're very pleased with the final product.

We often compare building a website to building a house so it was a natural fit to work with the Morgan family. They wanted a casual, easy-to-use site that had a clean, professional look and feel and really let people experience their unique, hands-on way of approaching building and remodeling.

We also installed a cutting-edge Content Management System on the site so that Pete & his team could update the info whenever they need to quickly and easily. Head on over to www.PeteMorganBuilders.com and check out the site, and we'd appreciate it if you'd leave your comments below to let us know how we did.

DiscoverTec Gives Back

2010-02-05T12:43:00.001-05:00

Giving back to the community, whether on a local or international level, has always been a high priority for DiscoverTec. President & CEO Donny Lamey has consistently made it a point to organize fundraisers, sponsor non-profit events and directly donate money to help various causes over the course of his company's 16+ year history.

With the recent tragedy that struck Haiti DiscoverTec organized a donation drive that raised over $600 that was sent directly to relief efforts via the Southpoint Rotary Club. Lamey than personally matched the raise bringing over $1,200 in relief after a series of devastating earthquakes struck the already poverty-stricken nation.

DiscoverTec's employees, clients & friends all chipped in with whatever they could to help. If you'd like to contribute to our efforts please visit our contact page and let us know.

DiscoverTec Sponsors Rotary Biker Blast III

The Southpoint Rotary Biker Blast benefits the Wolfson Children's Hospital and other local charities. This event is in its third year and is expected to be a huge success. Due to an incredible growth in popularity this year the party is being held at the Jacksonville Landing, on February 27th. Join us for live music, great food, and the chance to win a Harley! Visit www.rotarybikerblast.com for more information.

New Website Launch: VestaVu

2010-01-22T11:01:00.001-05:00

Our latest site launch marked a major milestone for DiscoverTec. In an industry that moves as fast as web development we don’t celebrate many “firsts” too often. That’s because by the time we’re done celebrating , the "first" is old and something new has come along. We made an exception this week when we launched the beta version of VestaVu because it marked our first website application developed using Microsoft Silverlight.

Silverlight is a website application framework that Microsoft released in 2007. It provides website developers with a powerful tool to create rich internet applications (RIA) and have a much more seamless interaction with the graphics and presentation layer. In the past, we’ve used Flash to develop web apps with motion graphics and the developer had to hand off to the designer, and vice versa, and there was no true collaboration. With Silverlight the connection between functionality and design is so natural that we’re able to modify designs, add features and go live with both in a fraction of the time we’re used to. The only problem was, we needed a project to use it on.

Enter VestaVu. We met with the folks from VestaVu over a year ago to learn more about their industry-changing idea to revolutionize real estate property tours. Initially, we tried to steer them towards Action Script, a powerful, but somewhat limited, motion graphic technology that leaned heavily on Adobe Flash. Over time they developed their idea and we paid attention to what Microsoft was doing, and then there came rumblings that a new, substantially more powerful version of Silverlight was coming down the pipe.

Fast forward to Fall of 2009 and VestaVu is ready to go. The first week we started architecting the question was posed “Why aren’t we building this in Silverlight again?” It’s a new technology so there’ll be learning curve. The adoption rate is still low. Will it do everything we need it to? Since we love a challenge and pride ourselves on being on the “bleeding edge” of the latest and greatest technology out there we decided to jump in with both feet and go with Silverlight.

It paid off.

The learning curve was there, adoption is less of a concern now with Windows 7 having Silverlight pre-installed and it does everything we wanted it to do and so much more. We’re in beta now and there’re some rough edges here and there, but it’s exciting to us that this is just the tip of the iceberg. As of this writing, there are only 801 Silverlight applications live around the globe (we’re submitting ours to be #802). It’s very rare in our industry that we can truly say we’re one of the first teams to implement a new technology.

So if you have a few minutes and want to check out something that you won’t see every day on the web, cruise over to www.VestaVu.com and take it for a test drive. We’d love to hear your thoughts, again we’re in beta so go easy, but we’d appreciate any feedback in the comment section below.

New Website Launch: Krungstock

2010-01-15T14:26:00.000-05:00

After months of development Krungstock.com has been launched live. DiscoverTec partnered with nationally-recognized Jacksonville-based photographer Paul Figura to build a state of the art stock photography website that will serve as a “one-stop-shop” for buying and selling premium stock images. The website features a robust image search engine with fully-customizable keyword tagging, complete e-commerce shopping cart functionality and advanced sales/order management system.

Our goal with this project was to provide the Krung team with a way to market top-quality images that would appeal to buyers while at the same time attract the top photography talent nationwide to market their work through Krungstock. Not to mention, we wanted the site to look as great as the photos on it and function faster, better and smarter than anything else that’s out there. Most stock photo websites are overloaded with average images and photographers and buyers alike get frustrated with their “one size fits all” limitations.

Krungstock is completely custom-built specifically for Paul's needs and from his unique point of view as an experienced professional photographer. We focused heavily on ease of use for both buying and selling of the images, as well as Krungstock’s ability to manage every aspect of the website as efficiently as possible. We’re proud of the final product and had a blast working the Krung Team, stay tuned for updates and as always, leave a comment below to let us know what you think of the site.

New Year, New Website for DiscoverTec

2009-12-31T14:57:00.000-05:00

We've been working our tails off to get our brand-spanking-new website put together and live before the New Year and in just a shade under quittin' time we were able to get it launched. For me personally, the majority of this past month has been spent staring at this thing for hours and hours every day and to tell the truth I couldn't be more stoked with how it came out.

This website represents everything, both as a company and a Team, that we feel is good about website design & development, SEO and social media integration. There's a saying that has something to do with devils & details, and let me tell you, after many devils and even more details, we feel like this website truly captures all of the things that make DiscoverTec such an incredible company to be a part of.

One of our main tasks with this redesign was to create a "Web 2.0" look and feel as well as integrate different technologies that fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella. Like many terms in our business, Web 2.0 is one that gets tossed around like a football at the tailgate party and with about as much concern for where it lands. As a company we've developed our own views on Web 2.0 and wanted this site to reflect those views and offer visitors a different perspective on how websites should be built. Not to mention, we wanted people that visited the site to think that we’re pretty darn good at what we do.

Last year we were fortunate enough to attend the annual Web 2.0 Expo in New York City and spent 3 days learning all about the infamous buzzword that the conference is named after. I don’t think it would be an understatement to say that it changed the direction of the company in a lot of ways. It also made us realize how important it is to stay current with our industry as it continues to progress faster and faster. And one thing that I personally learned from attending that conference (other than the fact that New York is not so much a different place than Jacksonville but a different planet), is that everyone’s definition of Web 2.0 is different.

That's actually fairly common in our industry, and as a non-technical person myself, I realize how mind-numbing it can be to not be able to summarize a complex idea into 2 or 3 definitive sentences. The "godfather" of the term Web 2.0 is Tim O'Reilly and from a very high level I took away the following definition from his Expo presentations:

Web 2.0 uses the World Wide Web as an open platform rather than a centralized application. By nature of its very name, it represents the next level of interacting with the internet. It relies heavily on user-generated content and allows website architects to enhance their applications based on feedback from the people actually using them. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Web 2.0 creates a rich user experience that pushes out more value to the visitor than what’s pulled in from them visiting the website.

Think about it, Google, Facebook, Twitter, three of the most widely used websites around the world, and the one thing they all have in common is that they're free to use! Not only that, they couldn't be simpler:

- Type in some words that represent something you want to find and press enter.

- Connect to a network of over 350 million people in less than a minute.

- With less than 140 characters you can let the whole world know what you're up to.

Huge, mind-numbingly complex applications that are free and easy to use and give people all kinds of cool information without getting much in return.

That was one of the main questions we asked ourselves when we sat down to plan this new website... "How can we use the site to grow our business and be more successful, while at the same time create a platform for people to use as a resource and gain valuable information from on a regular basis?" Surprisingly, there wasn’t an easy answer to this one. After many meetings and much consternation (and more than a few cold beers), we figured out what we were going to do:

1.) We’re going to design a site that looks clean and professional that visitors will enjoy interacting with.

2.) We’re going to optimize every single line of code on the site so that anyone that searches for our services will be able to not only find us, but have an easy way to learn more about how we can help them.

3.) We’re going to push out all kinds of useful information about our industry, intriguing current events, and just plain cool stuff.

4.) For #3, we’re going to use the most popular social networking technologies available to do it.

5.) We’re going to crack a ton of jokes (mostly at each other) and have a bunch of fun building it.

I can promise you #5 happened, and I feel real confident that we nailed the other 4 too. But in the true spirit of Web 2.0, we won’t know how we did until our users tell us. So, after you’re done ringing in the New Year of course, cruise on through our new website and let us know what you think. If it’s not too much trouble, we’d appreciate it if you’d post your comments below, that way everyone can see what you had to tell us.

And last but not least, Happy New Year from DiscoverTec!

Biker Blast III is live!

2010-01-06T18:15:00.000-05:00

The Rotary Biker Blast is going into its 3rd consecutive year and is bigger and badder than ever. We launched the new website this week and in my humble opinion it's the best one yet. Partial proceeds are donated to the Wolfson's Children Hospital. Every year this event has grown bigger and bigger, and on February 27, 2010 we're taking things to a whole different level. Live music, awesome food, and oh yeah, the chance to WIN A HARLEY!

For the past 2 years the event has been held at local motorcycle dealerships and we're proud to say that this year we're going all out at the Jacksonville Landing. To be a part of this special event visit www.rotarybikerblast.com to learn more and a purchase a ticket. Remember, it's for a great cause and you could ride off in a brand new Harley. See you there!