We’ve all been in personal relationships that are going along just fine when one party decides they need to ‘define’ the relationship. You know how that can go especially if you are the one seeking the definition. Either you arrive with a well rehearsed set of questions and reasoned responses (rare result) and your relationships advances and flourishes…or you drive home kicking yourself for sounding vague, never making your point or being just plain incoherent (likely result).

Well the same is true when you think about engaging a design firm to help present your product, service or company to a potential global audience. You may think deciding about a website will be less emotional than that of a personal relationship but don’t be too sure. Remember, in today’s competitive marketplace your website serves as your business card, billboard, chief marketing tool and branding image to the public. In other words, it says everything about you so you want to get it right.

After reading that chances are your temperature is now rising, your heart may be pounding and a headache is coming on as you search for just the right words to communicate to the world what you are all about. Instead, be cam, smile and realize that’s why a creative team is here to help you. But keep in mind it’s important to be clear about what you desire because that will make the web development process a whole lot easier for you and the firm you select.

Here’s a good tip: Try to summarize what you want to communicate in sets of 3’s. Marketers will tell you that’s the best way to communicate the value of a product or of an idea. Even three words alone can sometimes be the best. Can anyone argue with: COKE IS IT. I LIKE IKE or I LOVE YOU?

Once you begin thinking in these summarized terms about your website it helps the design and programming team immensely. Remember, everyone wants the greatest website in the history of mankind…even though this tenure of mankind has only been around since the 1990’s. And, it is our desire to build you the most creative website possible but this can best be done when you are clear about what you want to say.
Try this: What is my product? What makes me (or my company) unique? What do I want to communicate to every visitor to my website?

Once this is clear you are ready to contact a web design company and we sure hope it’s ours. Because not only do we create with tremendous ingenuity…we also work with clients with a healthy dose of good humor and wit. We find this helps keeps the creative juices flowing for all involved with development of your website…of which you are the most important part. We hope you will let us help you!

To sum up:

• What is my product?
• What Makes my product unique?
• Be clear, concise, and think in 3’s

(see what we did there?)

$(‘#flashWrapper’).html( $(‘#flashWrapper’).html() );

So basically you are taking your Flash embed code and adding it back to the div that contains the, you guessed it, your Flash embed code.  Believe me, I laughed when I discovered that this was a fix for this issue as well.  So simple.  So trivial.  But the thing works.

- Blessings

There are many things that your site designer can do to help your site be as optimized as possible. But AT LEAST 50% of your search engine optimization is up to you, I think it’s more like 75%. Here are some of the basic things we do to make sure your site is optimized:
- build sites in DIVs with CSS
- include a keyword relevant, reasonable title for each page
- include text links to all main pages of the site
- include a site map
- place ALT tags on all images
You don’t have to understand what the heck we just said.  There are many more that we do but won’t go into here. Those are just some of the basics.

Honestly, that paragraph is far less important than this one. Here are some of the things that YOU can do to improve your SEO that will outweigh the things mentioned above:
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY
- Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, whatever Social Network you use – post updates there about your site and provide links
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY
- Ask friends with sites, or companies that provide complimentary but not competing services to link to you
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY

All of this stuff is explained further in the Blog Post – Committing to Your Website, take a look at it.

What does it mean to “Know your audience”?
1. You know who they are: Males, ages 22-30.
2. You know what they like: Outdoors, sports, action movies.
3. You know where they are: nationwide in suburbs
4. You know their behaviors: they buy jerseys, electronics, and mt. dew

Grassroots discussed this in relation to their behavior online, and what users gravitate towards. You can either market to people’s tendencies using google ad words and specifying your audience, and you can follow statistics on your site to see what pages people are visiting the most, what they are clicking on, where they are coming from, and where they are going.

Knowing your audience doesn’t give you a good product, but knowing your audience allows a good product to reach the people it is made for.

Blessings,
Philip B.