ATILUS - Web Design | Internet Marketing

2009 - The State of Web Development

This post is primarily for web developers, but might contain some valuable information for business owners, and marketing & sales directors as well.doe

2009 is sucking!

Well, for the most part right? We’re having plane crashes, and fires galore, not-to-mention, the too often mentioned collapse of the global economy sparked from the downfall of the real estate market (and real estate backed securities) that subsequently toppled some of the oldest, and most prestigious financial institutions in U.S. history. There seems to be little hope.

But, I truly believe there is. Tight money is forcing businesses, small and large, to really take a look at themselves, and their spending, and demanding that changes be made. We’ve already started doing this and are continuing to do so on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Everything can be done more effectively, efficiently, and for lower costs if one really tries. Processes can be refined and new technology implemented to really make your company sing.

And, this brings me to the meat of this article. 2009, and years to come, will be phenomenal for the web industry. Personally, I believe this global crisis is really the match that will give blaze to the web as the de-facto way of doing, marketing, and managing your business - regardless of size or industry.

How To Grow Your (or Your Clients’) Business

Although there are many examples of the Internets power in terms of reach and exposure I can give you one simply and quickly. A client recently came to us, asking for assistance with their web development and internet marketing. This client was ahead of the curve. This particular business had a website, had some content, and had even made the time and money investment (and foresight) to participate in online marketing (pay per click marketing through Google AdWords).

Now, they were doing OK. With an average 3 - 4 leads/sales from the web per week. Not a bad deal. Does your newspaper ad bring in that kind of business? After evaluating their whole setup we came up with an action-plan (and are continually meeting with the client to refine and come up with additional creative ideas) in order to get more leads and sales in. The client is now averaging:

• 2 Leads/Sales Every Day
• Approximately $200,000 in annualized revenue per month (client service is monthly)
• At this level they are poised to bring in approximately $2.5 Million this year just from the Internet

Now keep in mind, this is over a 500% INCREASE from a company that was ALREADY ahead of the curve. Additionally, this is a COMPLETELY LOCAL BUSINESS. In this particular industry, conventional wisdom (as my team and I have come to learn) is that for this product’s consumers will never travel more than 5 - 10 miles to use it - it is VERY GEOGRAPHICALLY SPECIFIC. Additionally this does not account for sales that originate from the Internet, but are not being tracked (phone calls or walk-ins).

And this is a trend across the board. We have business owners who are finally switching their $5000 - $10000 print budgets over to digital mediums (albeit much less than before) and receiving the same or more traffic and sales. And they are bringing in 10’s or 100’s of thousands of additional dollars every month.

So what does this mean for us web developers? Well, the tides are finally turning. Magazines and newspapers are dropping left and right because they are just too heavy. Their infrastructure is so expensive and this can only be supported by expensive advertising. And, unfortunately, for the time being, the advertising is too expensive and does not get enough results to justify this expense.

So, 2009 and the years to come will offer a lot of opportunity for web developers, stemming from new and existing businesses looking to get the most from their advertising dollars. Keep in mind, it’s not about the best looking design, the best customer service, or the trendiest office, but it’s about results.

Does your marketing product (website and the steps you take to make it search engine friendly and marketable) deliver?

If the answer is no, or you simply don’t know, and you are simply trying to get your customers online as quickly or inexpensively as possible with no consideration for what your website must REALLY do Get out of the business, or start studying!

Because your website must get in front of your clients’ target audience and provoke them to act (purchase, signup, etc).

This is the direction every web developer should be looking.

Basecamp Project Management Review

Basecamp Rocks! There, I said it. If you’re a project manager, or web developer of any kind, researching collaboration software or other kinds of project management software you’ve no doubt run across 37Signals’ Basecamp Project Management system.Truth is, it has gained quite a following amongst developers, but it is a very capable project management system for any project or company

Summary (yes it’s at the top): If you’re looking for an online project management program that is very quick to learn (for everyone on your team), allows you to store files, and record time, and ALSO can be used to communicate back-forth with your customers use Basecamp! If you need something a little more powerful, and client communication is NOT a vital need for your organization - don’t. But, it will drastically reduce communication time and can help squeeze the communication hierarchy (watch out account executives!).

The Bad

Well, before I get to the meat of this review I thought I would quell some of the bad press out there about Basecamp. Although they have had some problems, we have now used them over the course of the last 2 - 3 years and the program has performed phenomenally. Without getting into too much detail, sure the program doesn’t contain EVERY feature, but that’s the point, it’s simple, intuitive and our customers are easily able to communicate with us through it - quite a feat!

Powerful enough to meet our needs, simple enough to be easy to use for our customers.

Interface

BaseCamp’s interface is very clean and VERY simple. even when you have dozens of projects, each with information, updates, files, etc. the program is organized with minimal clutter allowing you to quickly see what’s going on, or immediately drill down to only what you absolutely need to see. As far as web apps go, it certainly isn’t the prettiest, but this is allow about usability, not glitz. Basecamp rocks for its simple, intuitive navigation and clean presentation of data.

Time Tracking and Recording

Basecamp allows you to record time! If you are a web development company and you are not recording your time, first of all, what the hell are you doing? At Atilus we record our time for a number of reasons: to track the progress of a project (based on initial client expectations and contracts), to track employees, and to track our pricing for services (and adjust overtime according to our data). Everything is recorded. And, Basecamp’s open nature allows you to easily do this. You can track time for everything and anything, or not at all. Their time report exports (CSV) also make it easy to manipulate the data for additional manipulation and insight into your business and customers. How much time is spent on average for the setup of a blog, or the implementation of a pay per click marketing account? Easily determined with basecamp’s time tracking.

Pros:

• Very Simple
• Editable
• Completely Open Format (no strange rules)

Cons:

• Time Reports Are So Simple, You Have to Manually Create More Advanced Reports (through manipulation of CSV data)
• Editable - people can forget to add time, add later, or change down the road

Collaboration

Not at the top of our list, simple because I saw the TIME tab first (basecamp is open right now), collaboration is supremely important - at least for our use of a project management system. For years we were having communication problems. I receive about 200 emails/day, and despite being a neat freak when it comes to my mailbox (keep it clean of all large files, organized, and delete/archive old messages) my mailbox is still hovering around 2GB. Crazy! Stuff gets lost, misfiled, etc. And, when communicating through someone else on a project - account executive information can really get misplaced or muddled.

Basecamp solves this problem. You can provide your client an account and allow them access to any number of projects (particularly helpful for developers working beside marketing agencies). Send a message through the simple messaging interface and !voila! everything is recorded. The addition of reply-via-email (messages sent through basecamp can be replied via email and immediately the response is posted as a comment to the original message) was a more recent edition that really kicked up the collaboration factor. Clients no longer even NEED to login to use the system. They simply respond to the message you send to them via email and everything is tracked and recorded for everyone to see.

Plus, for more private messages, you can make sure that only you and your team to see with one click!

Finally, the Writeboard interface allows you to collaboratively edit documents (word-like documents) and track changes among all those who edit.

Pros:

• Incredibly easy interface for development team AND CLIENTS!
• Ability to respond via email, eliminates need for client to login (and allows attaching of files)

Cons:

• None

To-Dos & Tasks

One of the most important parts of any project management system involves assigning tasks to people in your company or organization. Basecamp excels at this in the simplest way possible. You can create to-do/task lists (with a set of tasks) at will, track time per list and specific task, and your team can even communicate back to you via comments on each task. Additionally, Basecamp offer Templates so that you don’t always have to re-create the same set of tasks on recurring/similar projects.

Pros:

• Simple task management
• Comment function on each task (team can communicate back to you with specific questions if need be)

Cons:

• Cannot assign specific deadlines (date/time) other than by including it in the body or text of your task

Overall:

Pros:

• Very Simple
• Editable
• Completely Open Format (no strange rules)
• Incredibly easy interface for development team AND CLIENTS!
• Ability to respond via email, eliminates need for client to login (and allows attaching of files)
• Simple task management
• Comment function on each task (team can communicate back to you with specific questions if need be)

Cons:

• Time Reports Are So Simple, You Have to Manually Create More Advanced Reports (through manipulation of CSV data)
• Editable - people can forget to add time, add later, or change down the road
• Cannot assign specific deadlines (date/time) other than by including it in the body or text of your task

Clearly, the pros outweigh the cons, in fact, it is because of these very cons (in some cases) that the interface is so simple and clean, and almost anyone can pick up the system in a matter of minutes. So to conclude, use Basecamp if you are looking for a simple-yet-powerful online collaboration system to connect all members of your team with your clients.

How To Get People to Respond to Online Surveys

I was asked recently about implementing an online survey onto a website. It’s a very simple process and there are a number of tools available that make reporting and compiling the results easy and hassle free. Setup being a breeze, the real question is how do you get people to respond to online surveys? Or anything you are trying to elicit their interaction with. How can you get your visitors to sign up for your newsletter for example? The answer is simple:

Incentives

Provides your visitors, customers, or potential customers incentives for assisting you and/or putting up with your crap (newsletters for example). Today, I received a great offer from Embarq:

Fill out their simple survey and they will donate $5 to a charity of my choosing!

Fantastic idea. Normally, I probably wouldn’t have filled it out for $5, but if that $5 is automatically donated to a charity, why not? Me as an individual might have wanted more to partcipate, but the donation idea realy sparked my participation. But, it could have been other things, an amount off my next bill, free service upgrade, t-shirt, embarq branded sweat pants… anything.

So, how do you get people to respond to your online surveys?

Give them incentives!

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OnlyWire Updates

You’ll notice a nice little button now on the Atilus website, on the right on the side bar. I just wanted to author a quick post about onlywire, a service I’ve personally used for years that has recently made some updates. If you’re like me you probably have multiple bookmarking services. Each services has a seperate set of friends. We all share links to cool new websites, news and information, etc. Unfortunately each account has it’s own login and keeping them organized - or remembering to post to all of your accounts can be a bit daunting. So in came OnlyWire! Years ago I found this very simple little tool that centralized the posting to all of these services. Simple create an account, input your login credentials for any bookmark services you use and post once - to OnlyWire - and it posts everywhere else for you. A huge time saver!

Now, I haven’t been adding bookmarks too much lately, Firefox’s new bookmark/star tool makes things too simple! But, I found a post on a website that I really wanted to share. So, I clicked on my trusty OnlyWire button to find that the service had been updated, and required the use of their bookmark button (hence the button on our website) for a free account. The new design of the site is fantastic and although takes a little more time now to setup an account (add the button to your website for a free account, or pay for one if you don’t want to add the button) this is a very valuable tool and I highly recommend checking it out.