Idea Market

I recently spoke in Olds (with video conferencing to another group in Sundre) and Red Deer on the topic of “How To Get a Website Without Losing Your Hair”. In it, I tried to identify the problem areas in the web development process; the stuff that makes both designers and clients crazy, delay projects and ultimately end up costing someone money. By knowing what to look out for and avoiding these hazards, perhaps we can all be happier and richer at the end.

OK, so here are the six points I made in my presentation, along with some notes for those who were too lazy to do so at the time (just kidding – I love you):

1. Planning

Both sides need to do some careful planning. If the client skips this part (or doesn’t do it well), the plan will undoubtedly change along the way and the designer is going to end up frustrated. If the designer doesn’t plan effectively, things likely aren’t going to get done on time and the client will be frustrated.

For clients, we provide a bit of guidance on this with our website project planner. It covers things like goals & objectives, success criteria, target audience, competitive analysis, etc. Even if you don’t use Idea Market for your site, going through something like this will help focus your thinking a bit. On the design side, make sure your designer has a clear work plan with dates for each major milestone. This will help keep the schedule on track.

2. Roles

Don’t get the slide? It’s from Jerry Maguire, which includes the famous line “you complete me”. Here’s the thing: the client-designer relationship has a tendency to be somewhat antagonistic at times. The evidence?: the design industry has an entire website (and book) dedicated to complaining about clients. Part of the problem is that each side fails to recognize the value of the other and they step all over each others’ feet. I get it: design is fun and clients want to be a part of a fun project, especially when they’re so personally invested in it.

So what’s the solution? We promote a collaborative approach where both sides are involved at each step and each party is recognized for what they bring to the table. I’ll talk about the process bit later, but the mutual respect bit is equally crucial. Each side is an expert; designers know about design and technology and clients know about their particular industry and their audience. Listen to each other, respect each other, trust each other.

3. Picking a Designer

Make sure you get this part right because you might be stuck with each other for a while. And I’m not talking about obvious stuff like whether or not they can fit your budget and meet your timeline. I’m talking about this stuff:

1. Do they truly care about you and your project? Make sure they really want to get to know you and give you a unique design solution tailored for your business or organization.
2. Do you like their design style? Check out their portfolio and make sure they’re going to be able to deliver what you need, visually.
3. Do they have a good track record of experience, both in general and within your industry? Do they specialize in the type of site you need?
4. On a related note, are they stable? If you need something for your site a year from now, will they still be around?
5. Do they keep current with web technology? Things are moving fast out there; make sure they are up on the latest stuff.
6. Finally, a probably most importantly (maybe even more than timeline or budget): do you have a good rapport? Do you get along and communicate well? Don’t underestimate this factor.

On the designer side, a couple questions we at Idea Market ask ourselves before committing to a client are:

1. Will we be proud of this project and this client when we’re done? We want to work with people that we can really brag about.
2. When we have that first meeting (preferably over food), did we laugh at some point? If not, there’s a good chance it’s not the best fit for us.

4. Process

Different designers will have different ways of doing things. I’ve blogged about a couple options recently, if you want to check that out. For us, the key to a smooth process is making sure that the designer and client are working collaboratively, step-by-step, towards the same end goal.

5. Content

Content should be your number one priority. It’s the heart of your site and everything else (design, functionality, etc.) should be built around it. People (generally) don’t come to your site for fancy graphics and a nice layout; they come (and return) for your content. If your content doesn’t meet the user’s needs, nothing else matters.

Be aware that your online content should be different than content for other media. People read and interact with the web differently than, say, a brochure, so things need to be planned and organized differently for your website. They also read less, so take that into account as well. As Steve Krug puts it in his book Don’t Make Me Think, “get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Take that with a grain of salt, but you get the point.) Finally, if you’re not quite up to the task yourself, don’t be shy in hiring a writer. If you truly believe that your content is the most important thing, you will recognize that it’s money well spent.

One final comment here: a lot of clients seem quite willing to spend good chunks of money on search engine optimization. I’d argue that you’re better of spending that on making sure your content is top notch. See a previous blog I wrote about SEO vs. quality content for more on that. Bottom line: if people like your content, Google will, too.

6. Communication

If there are going to be problems anywhere, it will most often be traced back to communication issues. Clear communication is key. So how can we address it? I thought of five ways:

1. Project management. Value it, pay for it. Having a good project manager running the show will be more than worth it.
2. When possible, meet face-to-face. If that’s not feasible, try video conferencing or at least a phone call. E-mail is great, but it also opens up the door to lots of miscommunication.
3. Document all your communication in a central place that everyone has access to. Idea Market uses a project management website that tracks all discussions, schedules, files, etc. so that we’re all on the same page at all times.
4. Have a single point of contact on both sides. This person needs to have the authority to make decisions and give the official sign-off on various stages of the project.
5. Have a shared focus. In other words, keep in mind who you’re building the site for (its users) and do what’s right for them, regardless of personal opinion.

Other resources

How To Get a Website Without Losing Your Hair booklet (PDF)
10 Tips For Ensuring a Better Site Design (by Paul Boag)
Wee Nudge – Teach your clients about the mysteries of the web

I attended the Alberta Downtowns Conference right here in Red Deer yesterday. For seven hours I was assaulted with golden nuggets of knowledge, hurled with equal parts enthusiasm and brute force. (Put that in your testimonials section, Roger Brooks!) The focus was on downtown development and marketing, but a lot of it applies to marketing any sort of place, really. Here are some of the highlights, randomly and in point form:

• Focus on developing/marketing for your community members first; visitors will follow. If the locals don’t want to spend their time or money somewhere, neither will visitors.
• Define a strong brand for yourself. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Make sure you can deliver on your brand promise, though!
• Your area needs to have an “anchor tenant” or “primary lure”; something people will drive an hour or more for. Note that an historic downtown is not a primary lure – it’s ambiance.
• Make sure there are things to do at night. 70% of all consumer spending takes place after 6pm and overnight visitors spend three times as much as day visitors.
• Create good first impressions. Put community gateway signage where you will make that best first impression. This is rarely at the city limits. Oh – and make sure the signage is attractive.
• It’s about a feeling. People need to have an experience. Activities and entertainment should be part of that.
• Tourism is one of the fastest-growing sectors in Canada. It’s a gateway to other kinds of economic development.
• Things that baby boomer travelers are looking for include culinary tourism, the arts, ethic education, home & garden-related and public markets. Echo boomers are after mostly the same things, plus environmental tourism.
• Signage and curb appeal for individual businesses accounts for 70% of first-time buyers.
• Provide specifics of what makes you different or better, not generalities. You must stand out from the crowd.
• Make the internet your number one priority. Your marketing budget should be 45% internet/social media, 20% PR, 20% advertising, 10% collateral materials and 5% other.

I just realized that every one of my highlights were from Roger Brooks, so I better give him some love here. He’s a super smart guy that does really good work in a no-nonsense sort of way. Check out his website at: www.destinationdevelopment.com

I had been planning to write a little something about search engine optimization versus quality website content for a while now. Then what do I discover this morning? Someone else has said pretty much the same thing, only with a much sharper point. But before I humbly link you over to him, let me regale you with a story from the recent past…

When we send out quotes, we try to break things down into detachable parts so that if a client doesn’t have the budget for a certain feature, they can decide to leave that out or perhaps just postpone it. One of those parts used to be search engine optimization. So for a certain price, we would undertake various tasks that would help them rank better in Google, basically. We stopped having it as a separate item after his conversation with a client:

“So… this search engine optimization stuff… You’re going to do blah and blah and that’s going to cost $x?”

“That’s right.”

“So what if I don’t opt for this part? What will you do differently? Will you not do these things?”

“Ummmm….”

You see, the “blah and blah” there were really basic things like properly titling pages and adding alt tags to images. Of course we were going to do those things anyway; that’s just part of building a website (the right way). There are other things you can do, of course, but the more I analyzed those other things the more obvious it was that they were more about creating quality content than SEO tricks.

Think of it like a resume. Your “quality content” are the facts about your education, experience and other qualifications. Sure, you can embellish it with fancy fonts and half-truths, but even if that gets you the job, if you can’t live up to it you won’t have that job for very long.

Bottom line: there are two very simple ways that we approach “search engine optimization”:

1. building your site properly
2. helping you with your content

Now back to that other guy that says all this much more directly (and more harshly) than I ever would. Please welcome Derek Powazek to the stage with his brilliant article “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” and its equally blunt follow-up: “SEO FAQ“.

This week I attended the Growing Rural Tourism conference in Camrose, which is always a great time of networking and learning. Since the Lacombe Regional Tourism Association was so nice to send (and pay for) me, I had their particular situation in mind as I listened to the various speakers. That said, I’ve tried to generalize my thoughts on it a bit to make it useful for other areas as well. Note that what follows is really just a combination of notes from three smart people (Ian Hill, John Young and Ed McWilliams); I don’t take any credit for any of this (except where I’m wrong).

I heard three key messages over the conference as it applies to branding and marketing a region:

Figure out who you are.

What do you have to offer? What is your “differentiating factor”? What will entice to people drive an hour to see you? There needs to be enough reason for people to come visit and there has to be enough support services (accommodations, dining, shopping, entertainment, etc.) to round out the trip. Don’t think simply in terms of goods and services, though; people want experiences that then turn into memories.

The key here is that it must be authentic and you must be able to deliver on it. There cannot be a gap between the visitor’s expectations and their experience or they will leave disappointed and your marketing will look like exaggerations or lies.

Deliver your experience.

Assuming that you’ve identified who you truly are and what you can offer people, the next step is to deliver your experience effectively. According to Young, you can provide visitors with experiences in four ways:

• Engage (make it interactive and fun)
• Enrich (educate people)
• Captivate (provide an escape from the norm)
• Sensate (appeal to the senses)

It’s not enough to just meet expectations, though. You must deliver those experiences extremely well. Exceed expectations. Give your visitors something worth talking about when they get home.

Get the word out.

The nuts and bolts how to spread the word is a design and marketing function and is worthy of a whole blog article itself. However, two points that came up at the conference were:

1. Embrace partnerships. Strong destinations (think Las Vegas) have their tourism stakeholders partner in their marketing efforts. The point is to just get people to the area; eventually they’ll spend money at your individual place. In Central Alberta, the Sweet 16 project is a great example of a regional partnership.
2. Leverage social media. Get your visitors to tell your story for you through Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, etc. Make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

There was of course, much more said at the conference, but these were the highlights for me. For more excellent comments and resources, check out the Growing Rural Tourism conference page.

Louise:

Graeme:

Mike:

1. The session “Techies Can Save the World, Why Aren’t They?” Insight into how techies can translate their app developing skills into solutions for environmental and humanitarian issues.
2. The interesting cross-over of film, interactive, and music at one conference. Plenty to listen to, watch, and interact with.
3. Learning about HTML5 (politics included) and how we can use it to build a better internet.
4. The great taste of brisket straight from the Texas grill.
5. The endless amount of free stuff, no matter where you went.

Thanks to everyone who came to our colour theory workshop and special thanks to Dave More for leading it. We knew we were going to learn a lot when he started off in the Middle Ages! My favourite line of the day (heard many times) was: “And here’s where it gets really interesting!” Dave obviously has a passion for colour and it rubbed off.

If having a three-week course compacted down into four hours wasn’t enough (or if you didn’t attend, tsk tsk), here’s a list of resources to push you over the top. (more…)

If you’re interested in getting to know and take part in social media, Twitter is an excellent place to start.

What is it?
Microblogging. Short messages, links, conversations (140 characters) to/with a dedicated audience (your “followers”).

Why it seems useless: because you don’t care, nor have time for, what so-and-so had for dinner.

Why that’s a misconception:

• What you put in = what you get out. Sure there are vapid and useless “Tweeps” (or “Twitterers” or even “Twits”) out there. Don’t follow them.
• Instead follow people in the same industry (your peers) who you can learn from. Follow people who would be interested in your product/experience/ideas (Hopefully they follow you back). Follow people in your city, follow those you admire. Just stop following people that make you want you to leave the site and follow those that make it worthwhile.
• Practice what you preach. Don’t tweet about vapid and useless things (all the time, at least- I doubt one link to a cute cat video would send followers flocking to the “unfollow” option). Like blogging, keep your content fresh and as relevant as possible. (more…)

Finally a post-modern self-referential blog entry. Let’s cut to the chase (people on the internet are akin to those with ADD) and start off by saying, “There is a point to blogging.”

What blogging looks like: A self-indulgent past-time to applaud yourself and your projects/skills/conquests.

Why it’s actually more than that: (more…)

I just got back from yet another great Travel Alberta Industry Conference where I learned a lot, ate extremely fancy food and rode a mechanical bull. I have the notes, the extra pounds and the giant bruise to prove it. But probably the highlight of the conference was a keynote talk by Scott Stratten, of UnMarketing (un)fame.

His book, consistently entitled UnMarketing is about re-evaluating traditional marketing, focusing instead on relationships and making meaningful connections with people. That makes it sound a bit unInteresting – trust me, it’s not. As proof, here’s a random sampling of quotes from his talk:

• “Cold calling is lazy. Plus, you’re a jackass.”
• “If you suck, you just suck harder on social media.”
• “If business is relationships, you need to make relationships your business.”
• “What’s the ROI of Twitter? What the return on relationships?”
• “When you’re authentic, you have no competition.”

If you’re serious about marketing in a new and different (and better) way, check out Stratten’s blog and book. Or, you know – just keep doing the same old stuff that your competition is doing. Either or.

In our never-ending pursuit of knowledge, the Red Deer team here (and guests!) just participated in Paul Boag’s webinar entitled 40 Better Ways to Deal With Clients. Of course, we already do a lot of what he was preaching, but there were several great tips and reminders when it comes to customer service and communication. A few that we discussed internally after the session include:

• Be excited about your clients’ project. Who would you rather have working for you: someone who is pumped about working with you or someone for whom this is just another job on the pile? If we can’t get excited about the work we’re about to do, we shouldn’t be doing it.
• Face-to-face meetings with clients are important. We’ve always believed in this and try to do this as much as possible. I’d also add that eating together is a good way to start a project.
• Educate your clients. At another point, Paul emphasizes that “clients aren’t stupid”. We know design and code, you know your business; we both bring something to the table and we need to share our expertise in order to succeed.
• Always present your designs as opposed to just attaching it to an email. It’s important that there’s context to the decisions behind the design. I fully admit that we need to make more of an effort here (and will!)
• Always do a de-brief at the end of the project. This is another area that Idea Market needs to improve. We need to discuss how things went, good and bad. And we need to take the time to celebrate our hard work at the end!

Thanks for all the great info, Paul!