In a recent BusinessWeek article, “Can Ford’s “World Car” Bet Pay Off?”, David Kiley describes Ford’s efforts to create a more universally appealing car model.  Drawing inspiration from BMW’s 3 Series, one of few successful examples, the auto maker is attempting to design a car that transcends cultures and meets the aesthetic, functional and budget needs of its target market the world over.

So what do Ford’s effort and BMW’s success with car design have to do websites?  Bear with me for just another moment as I set the backdrop.

As I’m sure you’re well familiar, the auto manufacturing industry is in dire financial straights at the moment. The current hardships aren’t limited to just the U.S. auto makers though – all the global giants are feeling the pinch. Contributing to these woes are consumer tastes that vary significantly from market to market, leading manufactures to create unique product lines—and consequently, entirely unique factories, processes, work forces, and so on—for each of the car models.  The economics of this one-off approach, establishing and maintaining entire resource streams, either sets prices out of reach for many consumers or forces the companies to take a loss to maintain market share.

The success of the BMW 3 Series, in equal demand in Shanghai as it is in New York, Rome or Moscow, suggests that there is a common set of needs and wants that can be met through a single, well-built and intelligently-designed solution.

Now applying this universal appeal approach to website design.

What do higher education institutions and independent schools need and want from their website? Blackbaud Internet Solutions recently asked the question . . . and then delivered.

Much like Ford’s quest to unlock the formula for a universally appealing car, Blackbaud Internet Solutions set out to design a website platform that would meet the very specific needs of a broad segment of the education market.

The solution: NetCommunity Grow for Higher Education and Grow for Independent Schools. First unveiled on July 15th during the Higher Ed Webinar, Blackbaud’s school website solution received fantastic reviews from the many organizations in attendance.

So what do schools want from their website? To engage alumni, drive advancement, cultivate donors, extend their brand…?  All of them . . . and not necessarily in that order and not all in the same proportions.  Additional wish-list items and ‘must haves’ were decentralized work flow, an adaptable/brandable website design and a short project timeline.  By addressing each of these functional and design requirements in the Grow line of website solutions, Blackbaud was able to deliver a versatile, low fixed-price offering with a dramatically reduced deployment time.

Not stopping there, Grow is accompanied by Blackbaud’s Internet strategy services.  Not only do you get the car and training to use it, but you get upfront and ongoing performance review and advisory sessions on how to best to use such a powerful tool.

In his article, Kiley eloquently states, “The danger of building one car for multiple tastes is that you wind up dumbing it down: Rather than being impressive, the vehicle is merely inoffensive. The trick is to aim higher aesthetically without alienating anyone.”

To this end, Grow was built on to the latest web standards and designed with versatility in mind.  Starting with a sharp, modern design, Grow is set up to accommodate each organization’s color scheme, visual assets and unique branding.  Unlike the final form of a car when rolled off the assembly line, websites have the tremendous advantage of being living, accessible and adaptable properties—but only if originally built to be so.

NetCommunity Grow is worth a look, whether you’re a Higher Eduction Institution, Independent School or virtually any other 501c3 non-profit organization in need of a website.

I’m looking to help a Charleston area non-profit get 2009 started with a gift of 8 hours of professional web design, development and consulting.

Anticipating a positive response to this offer, I’ll be accepting submissions only until midnight Saturday, Jan 3rd—only about one day!

To be considered for this pro bono web work:

1. Be a non-profit organization with a direct impact on the Charleston, SC area
2. Be a direct contact at the non-profit requesting consideration
3. Be available for an introductory conversation by the close of business this Monday, January the 5th.
4. Submit your organization

That’s it! I look forward to speaking with the winning organizations this Monday.

A mentor early in my business career impressed upon me that personal pride has no place in business—I couldn’t agree more. But when does pride and defending your hard earned reputation cross paths?

I’m writing this post after recently being served some unsolicited criticism. Naturally, the first reaction is defensive. Recognizing this knee jerk reaction from a sensitive pride, I set the email aside and read it again later to hopefully learn something from my ‘e-lashing’ by the anonymous critic.

From this person’s perspective, the missing or misplaced website elements from particular portfolio projects appeared to be poor workmanship and a general lack of skill and knowledge. Of course, what is anything without proper perspective? Well, it’s your own reality.

So after digesting the feedback, I thought it better to give my critic a better understanding of my work and that scope and budget, among many other project factors, can influence a final product . . . not to mention the natural aging and evolution of a live website.

I replied, not as a mater of pride, but in an effort to correct a misperception of the services and quality that I deliver.

Everyone receives negative feedback. Most often it’s an opportunity to learn and improve. On other occasions it’s a chance to be humble. But some times, it’s a case where the record needs to be set straight.

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

Dear Client:

Following are steps and corresponding documentation for setting up Google tracking links for your website. The specific example that we discussed was to set up tracking links from Clear Channel radio station websites, but this method will work for any inbound links where you can provide the custom tracking link to the source – website, email, or anywhere a link can be displayed.

Google Tracking Link Documentation:

How does campaign tracking work?

How do I track my Links?

Understanding campaign variable: The five dimensions of campaign tracking.

Tool: URL Builder.

Back-end Google Tracking Link Setup:

• Go to the Google Tracking Link URL Builder
• Enter the destination URL – for the radio stations we discussed using the splash page (http://www.yourwebsite.com/welcome.html)
• Fill in the five campaign variables (source, medium, term, content, name)
  • The variable “Campaign Name” will be used to group the traffic data together for reporting. So enter a single name for the traffic that you want to group together. For example: if you would like to group all radio station traffic into a single campaign, use something like “Clear Channel Radio” for all links
  • “Campaign Source” could simply be “Clear Channel”
  • “Campaign Medium” could be used to separate different types of source links. For example: if you will have both text links and a banner ads being displayed on their site, you could provide tracking links specifying “text link” or “banner” as the medium.
  • “Campaign Content” will let you differentiate between two different graphical banner ads that you may rotate on the same site. This will allow you to see if the yellow ad with brown text was more effective than the image of the smiling business people . . . for example.
  • “Campaign Term” is something you may or may not want to use. This refers to which term or “keyword” you’re paying to have the ad display for. Your Clear Channel ads are not keyword or term specified.
• Provide special tracking links to the source (Clear Channel).
  • If you’re going to provide multiple links for multiple banners, it can be helpful to do so in a consolidated spreadsheet, with each ad on a single row, with respective info – i.e. | name | link | graphics | description |. It can also be helpful to use a date in the file name so that updated files are easy to identified.

Google Tracking Link Reporting and Analysis:

• Log into you Google Analytics account
• In the left-hand menu, go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns
• In the main body, all traffic sources will be presented.
  • Those that haven’t been set up under a campaign will be presented as (not set) – for now it represents almost all of your site traffic
  • I had set up a test campaign link under the Campaign Name “test promo”
• If you change the “Dimension:” from the dropdown menu in the header row of the table, you can see the various tracking link variables (source, medium, campaign, keyword (term), and content). Under dimension, you can also separate traffic by city, region (state in U.S.) and more.

If you have any questions about the process, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thanks,

Dominic

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

I’m working remotely today from cafes in Charleston, SC—a needed change from the home office. In search of a free wi-fi connection, I left a Starbucks for another cafe down the road. From a business owner’s perspective, I couldn’t help thinking about the customers that Starbucks looses by offering a pay wi-fi service while others give it away.

Surely it’s not because the mega franchise can’t afford to give it away. Which begs the question, do they charge just because they can? Or are there other considerations involved. Maybe it serves as a way to shew away squatters that plant themselves for hours on end. But the squatters at cafes are generally caffeine addicts that chain drink. I’m on my third cup now, not to mention the breakfast sandwich, bottled water and 1 lb. bag of coffee beans that I purchased.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing Starbucks. I’m actually a fan of franchises and admire their finely tuned business model. So I’m left to think that the free vs. paid wi-fi decision must have been run through “the formula” and the pay service option came up the winner.

On a side note, didn’t the company just announce the closing of over 600 stores due to changes in in-store traffic? …changes in traffic just like my relocation to another local cafe for free wi-fi? Perhaps not, but you have wonder.

So how does this example apply to your business? What is the relative cost of providing a service or feature that would keep customers at your store or on your website, vs. the added revenues gained by simply keeping that customer around a while longer?

To be sure, there are cost-benefit considerations to any and every service that you offer. A recent example with my business was discontinuing our email marketing service. The time and cost of maintaining the back-end applications outweighed the return we were getting. Now I refer clients to third-party email marketing services. While I can’t help thinking that I’m sending business elsewhere, I know that I made a business focus decision that made sense for my business at the time.

From a consumer’s point of view, the Starbucks paid wi-fi decision seems like a poor one. But is it?

I turn the question to you. What are some cost-benefit decisions that you’ve made recently with your business?

Why Adobe Contribute? Because Contribute works well with other applications . . . with ease! What we accomplished in this new client site, Netblaze.us, could very well have been built on another platform, but not with all these features packed into the budget.

The design for this site was drawn up and then coded from scratch. Using Contribute as the base for the site platform, all the special features chosen for integration, like flash animation, multiple javascript elements, web forms, Google Maps and more, could simply be plugged in where needed. Unlike the considerations with other database CMS (content management systems), Contribute allows us to start with a blank canvas and quickly build according to our best practices.

To back up really quickly, for those who aren’t familiar with Contribute or how it works, here’s a quick overview. Contribute is a workstation-based computer program (like Microsoft Word for lack of better example) that accesses websites via an FTP (file transfer protocol) connection over the internet. The real power features of Contribute are realized when the websites being managed are built on the Adobe Dreamweaver templates structure. So start to finish, the process would be 1. an experienced Dreamweaver template developer builds the website and launches it; 2. a website owner edits, publishes to and manages the website with Contribute.

I have to plug the Contribute platform once again for being virtually bulletproof. When I launched this site recently, I did so with full confidence that it—like the Contribute client sites before it—would be stalwart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of several server-side database application, like WordPress and ecommerce templates. But with databases and server-side components, comes added complexity and the need for more maintenance down the road.

So in short, when the project calls for a custom design, client publishing capability, integrated applications and a long, long life span between developer intervention, Adobe Contribute is the hands-down platform of choice.

Netblaze Systems, Inc., located in Walnut Creak, CA—inland from the San Francisco Bay Area—is a network consulting and integration services provider.

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

Thank You Body, located in Myrtle Beach, SC, offers a broad selection of spa services and products. The company has been in business for several years and have steadily improved their web presence.

Like many businesses, they found the build-it-yourself website tools provided by their hosting company to get them by for a period of time. That period of time recently came to an end! The company needed to rebrand their online image to reflect the quality of services that they actually deliver. Thank You Body contacted Applied Web Vitals to design and build the new e-commerce website for their spa and product business.

The Thank You Body website was built on an advanced Adobe Dreamweaver template structure for full Adobe Contribute accessibility. A database e-commerce application was installed on their server and integrated into the website design, providing a seamless shopping experience for their customers. Some of the special requirements for this spa website were dynamically generated gift certificates, an integrated affiliate program, a product vs. service segmented hierarchy . . . and of course, the ability to edit and manage everything without special technical skills.

Thank You Body health spa now has direct and easy access to their website at any time. Whether they need to update their company information or run a discount on spa products for the week, the business now has full control of their website.

Specs: PHP, CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, MySQL, Adobe Dreamweaver templates, Adobe Contribute website, Ecommerce Templates

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Dear Client:

I’d be happy to explain the different considerations when choosing a platform or service to deliver your email newsletters. As we discussed, it’s possible to use your blog or a third-party email newsletter marketing service.

In many ways the technology behind a blog and an email newsletter management service are the same. They both contain a back-end database to store data like addresses and names and a front-end website component to collect the data. Both offer a way to deploy emails, but a specialty email newsletter service will allow for highly stylized html emails.

The major divide between the two platforms comes in the email delivery and management process. Third-party email newsletter services, like Constant Contact and Email Labs (more listed below), specialize in meeting all the technical hurdles involved in successfully delivering email. Some of these hurdles include spam filters, ip blocking, and so on. Another difference is the ability to deliver a high volume of email and track usage and overall campaign effectiveness.

It’s worth noting that email marketing is a highly monetized segment of the industry and generally carries a hefty price tag (est. $25-100+/month). There are different fee structures used by the third-party services – i.e. pay by the number of subscribers, pay be the number of emails sent, and everything in between. Knowing how large your database is or will be and how often you intend to send e-newsletters will help to select a service.

So should you use the blog or a third-party email newsletter service? If the newsletter is a simple, text email and you’re subscriber database is under 5,000, then I would recommend starting with the blog. For a stylized, html email and a database to exceed 5,000 subscribers, I would recommend a third-party service to use from the start.

Here is an expanded list of email newsletter and e-marketing third-party services:

• http://www.constantcontact.com/
• http://www.benchmarkemail.com/
• http://www.boomerang.com/
• http://www.emaillabs.com/
• http://campaigner.com/
• http://www.myemma.com/
• http://www.graphicmail.com/
• http://www.icontact.com/
• http://www.mailbuild.com/
• http://sendloop.com/

I hope this was helpful in your decision making process. Please feel free to reply with any questions or comments.

Regards,
Dominic

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

Dear Client,

I’m writing to recap our conversation yesterday regarding improving your website’s visibility in the search engines. The following is a detailed description of SEO (search engine optimization) techniques as they apply to your website and practices in general.

As we discussed, efforts in SEO can be broken into two basic categories, external and internal. External efforts are those actions that take place outside of the website and are designed to drive traffic to the site. Internal efforts include structural and contextual changes on the website that are designed to improve the relevance of the site to search engines and subsequently, pull traffic into the site.

External SEO Efforts

Also known as SEM, or search engine marketing, external efforts take shape in a broad comprehensive marketing campaign that targets other websites, directories, news agencies, etc. Several examples of external marketing efforts include:

• Press releases written for and distributed to online PR channels – these are specific to online media in that they contain dynamic web content that may not necessarily translate to print.
• Content contributions to popular, high traffic, relevant websites – an example would be contributing articles to a legal blog, where the topic is specific to a choice keyword/key term (i.e. real estate law) and the article contains a link back to a corresponding website page that is geared towards the same keyword/key term.
• Utilizing social media outlets like facebook.com and linkedin.com (among many others) to create additional traffic channels to the site from other high traffic sites.

Internal SEO Efforts

We covered all the internal page structure elements that need to be in place to best position a page for search engine relevance. Regarding specialty SEO pages, it’s important to remember that no single page can perform well for many keywords/key terms. To that end, each page will be built around a single word or term. The page we looked closely at was for real estate. Following are the page elements that need to be in place and revolving around the single keyword or term. [some specific instructions are for Adobe Contribute website template, but can be applied universally]

• Page name: “keyword or term”.php – for example “realestate.php” or “real-estate-closing-negotiation.php”
• Found in Template Properities
  • Page title: titleBar_pageName – “keyword or term” i.e. “real estate”
  • Page title (extra optional): title_pageMsg – short message, perhaps an abbreviated versions of the meta description, including keyword or term
  • Meta Description: meta_description – a summary of the page under 250 characters, including the keyword or term. This description can be pulled and displayed in search results
  • Meta Keywords: meta_keywords – “keyword or term” and synonyms, along with other relevant terms like South Carolina or private practice, under 200 characters. Remember that plural forms aren’t necessary.
• Found in the body or content of the page
  • Page Title: This is the first editable region on the page. It is significant in that it is a Header 1(code <h1>), telling the search engine that the text here is the header for the content to come. You can think of this in terms of an outline. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3
  • Section Title: These editable regions have been set to be Headers 2. To continue with the outline idea, break the content of the page into sections and give them each a Section Title that contain the keyword or term or a synonym. If you’d like to subdivide the page further, manually enter a Header 3, 4 and so on within the Section Text region of the page. Be sure to keep the outline logical without skipping a header, for example Header 2 then Header 4. This structure is significant because it meets the accessibility guidelines of the Section 508 and enable text readers to better deliver the information.
  • Use of keyword or term in the copy: consider using each the following styles or forms at least once
    • Bold
    • Italic
    • Hyperlink
      • to an external, popular, relevant site – do not use “click here” use “keyword” as it appears in the natural flow of a sentence
      • also link back to internal pages, such as the Practices page
    • Header – covered above
    • Image name and image alternate text (alt text)
• Site map: after creating the page, be sure to edit the site map (sitemap.php) to include the new special SEO page just created. The significance of this is to make sure the page isn’t buried deep in the site where search engines assign a lesser value to the page. Note that the sitemap link in the footer of the home page (and every page) makes each link just two levels away from the root domain.

Blog

Internally, we also discussed the value of a blog. Blogs (derived from “web log”) is a database-driven, server-side application that allows for the easy creation and distribution of editorial content. Blogs are built to catalog articles or posts chronologically and have been constructed to syndicate the content automatically. An example of syndication is the use of RSS (real simple syndication, also known by other names), whereby anyone out on the web can subscribe to receive real-time updates of content on your site. This content can be received by an individual users’ pc or automatically published to another website. For this reason, it’s important to include a link back to your site inside each article.

A great deal of the value of a blog lies in the frequency of updates. Search engines record how frequent content on your site is updated and adjusts their return frequency accordingly. Frequently updated sites are crawled by search engine spiders more frequently and are subsequently considered more relevant than sites that sit stagnant. So the combination of frequent updates and the cumulative mass of relevant content on the site is a powerful tool to improve the site’s ranking with search engines over time.

Per adding a blog to the site, I would purpose customizing the design to match the site and integrating special features to maximize the reach and functionality of the blog. Again, the real value of a blog is frequent content contributions. So someone or several people within the organization would need to commit to a frequent or semi-frequent updates to get the most out of it. Publishing an article a week would be advised, even if just two paragraphs centered around a single keyword.

I hope this was helpful and please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Best regards,
Dominic

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

The day has come that search engines edge out Yellow Pages for local business searches. According to a study by TMP Directional Marketing, search engines have taken over Yellow Pages as the more popular way for people to look for local businesses, 31 to 30% respectively.

Worth noting however, the decline in Yellow Pages use from 33% in 2007 to 30% in 2008, resulted in an increase in Internet Yellow Pages use from 17% to 19%. So with that, the 3% lose in Yellow Page use went online with 2% going to going to Internet Yellow Pages and 1% converting to search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Also interesting, despite the advancements in mobile technology, handset functionality and mobile broadband speeds, local search on mobile devices did not see an increase from 2007 to 2008. Curious! I’m not a mobile Internet user, so when I watch TV advertisements and read tech articles, I’m convinced that more and more people are going that direction.

The Take-Away: Local businesses can no longer rely on print alone to get in front of customers. A web presence is increasingly more important as local business search trends migrate to online resources.

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.