August, 2008

In the course of designing websites, I often get requests from clients that simply go against normal design conventions. I think that the struggle that most people have is that design conventions have changed but nobody told them.

Design from the 90s like large logos, starbursts and bright, obnoxious colors were great when the web was in its infancy and pages were built by amateurs. Your clients expect more from businesses today and don't want to look at a site that doesn't take into consideration current design principles.

Remember. Bigger isn't always better... it is just bigger. More color doesn't necessarily mean better.. it is just more.

When you are redesigning or redefining your company’s image, one of the things that is very hard to do it to step back and understand who your real audience is.

Designing a logo, a website, a brochure or even something as simple as a blog post is not a task to have the attitude of, "I like it, so it is good."

The most important thing about any design is to remember your audience. Who are the people that you want to attract? When you do something personal, it is all about you. When you do something for your business, it is all about them.

When it comes to search engines, content is king. The more often you update your content and the more rich in keywords your content is, the better you will be found.

The problem is that many web developers simply don't understand some of the basics. Pages need to  be optimized... not just the site. What this means is that rather than looking at your site as a whole and trying to get all the keywords you can on all the pages, optimize your document management page for document management and your printers page for printers.

You need to make sure that you do everything you can to build in ways for the search engines to understand that you are relevant to your readers.

Here are the three key secrets that you need to make sure that you adhere to when building your site... and your pages. They are in no particular order.

Your customers are your life blood. Selling hardware and software solutions is an important part of your business, however, it is not the end all to what you do. Great service after the sale is where you really shine. Great service can make or break a new sale. Great service can define whether or not you will have a good year or a bad year.

With that in mind, you need to find anyway possible to engage your customers they way they want to be engaged.

The most common way to accept service calls is by a trained dispatch person via the phone. This is a very time consuming process and can be very costly because a dispatch person can only handle one call at a time. Since dealerships understand that it is very time consuming, they have offered webforms, email and automated services like eAutomate's e-info.

However, I would suggest there is a better way.

That is live chat. Since I think it is so important, I am going to show you how to do it... easily.

FTP, or file transfer protocol, is one of the standards for communicating large amounts of information via the internet. If you have a website to load, or just some files to load that you want to have accessible from a website, using FTP is the easiest way to get your files online via your webserver.

In order to load files appropriately to your web server, you'll need a good FTP client. There are a number of clients available, some are free, some cost money. On the Mac, Fetch is probably one of the best available... but costs a few dollars. You can use Filezilla on just about any platform. On the Windoz side I prefer to use WinSCP.

As a side note, when we build websites, we allow our clients to use our content management platform to add images and files directly to the page without having to use anything but the web browser. But, usually, there are size limitations. We only allow the upload of files less than 1mb. If our clients want to add larger files, they will want to use FTP.

As more and more content is moving web based... especially information that you want to share with your clients on your web page, I think that it is important to understand how easy it is to load content on your web server using FTP.

Since most of my clients are on Windoz platform, I'll provide simple instructions on how to setup your FTP client using WinSCP as the client, upload your files and link to them on the web page you are building.