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The View from our Condo

The Quick and Dirty Guide to a Successful Website Deployment: Part 3 – Design

The overall design of your website is one of the most important parts of the entire deployment process. If the “look” doesn’t match the tone of your content, you’re going to lose readers…and revenue.

So, take your time with this step.  Research the market.  Get a feel for the type of impression you’re trying to make (see Part 1).  Then, make sure that impression resonates with your target audience (see Part 2).  Allocate a decent portion of your budget to this step and GET IT RIGHT!

For the sake of this post, I’m using “design” as an umbrella term that includes such things as: logo, CSS, branding, site colors and site images (buttons, etc.).  Site design should NOT be confused with site content, as this is an entirely different topic of discussion (which I’ll cover in a future installment of this seemingly perpetual “guide.”).

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The Quick and Dirty Guide to a Successful Website Deployment: Part 2 – Objectives and Strategies

Objectives and Strategies

This is the portion of site planning that can either make or break your deployment effort.  This is the foundation for success…or failure.

I once had a professor in ad school teach me a very important lesson:  you can have the BEST creative in the world, but if your objectives and strategies suck, your efforts are wasted.

Simply put, objectives are WHAT you plan to achieve and strategies are HOW you’re going to do it.  So, in true action plan format, I’ll now present you with another round of analogies!

Objectives

Ok, say you’re building a website that sells golf clubs.  You’ve already establised that your
target audience is 40-65 year old males in the middle and upper-middle classes.  Now what?

Your preliminary objectives will state modest and attainable goals for your site and your audience.

So, let’s say you want to:

Generate $500,000 in sales within the first 24 months of operation Generate 2,000 unique page views per day within the first 24 months of operation Establish a unique brand presence and brand awareness within the first 24 months of operation

Now that you’ve got your objectives, how will you see to it that these goals come to fruition?  You guessed it!  Strategies!

Strategies

This portion generally caters to marketing and advertising vehicles, as these will be your primary
methods for generating a response from your target audience. So, with that being said, let’s say our primary strategies are as follows:

Purchase a 24-month flight in Golf Digest that consists of a well designed, well written and well placed ad that notifies the market of your existence Purchase specific keywords through Google that target specific search queries (with a maximum bid of .25 cents per click) Start a golf-specific blog that is sponsored by and affiliated with your website Create a Twitter/Facebook/Social Media presence to allow a more extensive opportunity to connect with your audience

Although purely for the sake of example, we can now actively see how objectives and strategies work hand-in-hand and how they can determine the performance of any given brand.  If you give extra attention to this portion of the deployment process, success is almost inevitable.

The Quick and Dirty Guide to a Successful Website Deployment – Part 1: Research

So, you’ve been charged with the responsibility of giving your company website a facelift. Your logo looks as though it was designed by a six year-old, the overall design screams, “1998,” and the blinking text effects are starting to cause problems with your epileptic readers.

Let’s be honest. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you and the next 3-4 months are going to suck. But, before firing up the ol’ Photoshop, before nesting 37 div tags into a single wrapper, and before punching your fist through the wall, consider the following bits of advice that may make this project a bit more tolerable.

Research

Every time I embark on a new site design, I always go hunting for prime website examples within the industry at hand. The goal here isn’t to start ripping off the competition’s site design, graphic design, copy or product images. You’re looking for ideas and inspiration.

Perhaps Company “X “ has a great slideshow that engages the user the moment he/she visits the site. Perhaps Company “Y” has some very helpful widgets on the homepage that display their newest and most popular products. Perhaps Company “Z” has an exceptional method of generating leads (such as a non-intrusive “Request for Information” form that’s shoved in an I-frame or Lightbox). You get the idea.

Your goal is to create a general site layout in your head and have a running tab of ideas you can present to the development team BEFORE the coding and design processes even begin.

If you can pull it off, you’ll be hailed as a brilliant project manager that KNOWS how to get things done in a timely manner. If you fail, prepare to be called every name in the book. Prepare for your co-workers to doubt your abilities and prepare for your bosses to doubt your competencies as a manager.

ECS A785GM-M

FYI, The ECS A785GM-M 1.0 does *not* have a speaker connector. Makes it difficult to have a system beep without the built-in speaker.

Using Thunderbird and Zimbra together with tags

If you’re trying to use Thunderbird to tag messages, you might notice in Zimbra‘s webmail that the tags are called $label1, $label2, etc. The way to make these “right” is to edit the prefs.js file. Rename the $label1, $label2 values to “important”, “work”, etc. Make sure they start with a lowercase letter, else they won’t be recognized. Just some food for thought.

LXDE, Menu, Panel, etc

I’ve just gone through hell and back to share this information with the world, thanks to a little help from phillw on freenode.

I was trying to determine where LXDE stores menu items for the applications menu, and wasn’t having any luck. But here’s what I found. Read more

Helena Bonham Carter

I swear that Helena Bonham Carter has a career because of Johnny Depp. She’s a terrible actress that seems to appear in every movie he’s in.

Iron Man 2

We saw Iron Man 2 over the weekend. The movie had some solid special effects, including some high speed flying chases. However, I disliked the character that Mickey Rourke played.

He came across as the “typical” Russian super-genius (beginning example, genius bruiser also), capable of building anything, taking control of anything, an surviving almost anything.

I didn’t like the movie as much as the first one, even though it opened up some more story lines within SHIELD.

I’d give it a 3 out of 5.

Databases and backups

Yesterday, I managed to delete the primary database that we use at work.  I won’t go in to how this happened, other than to say: Fuck you MySQL Workbench.  I was trying to get a map of the table relations within the database.  Needless to say, it didn’t work.  After the immediate pants-wiping, I restored the database from the backup. But the backup was from the previous morning, as the current backup hadn’t finished.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the files from the mornings backup.

In short, losing data sucks.  How often do database “pros” backup their data?