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.

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.

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.

We anticipate our market for Contribute website templates to be end users and developers alike. Our basic Contribute template will be an excellent starting point for further development and third party application integration by web developers.

At this point, we would like to invite input on features and functions. Please share your wish list of top features with us. We also invite fellow Adobe Dreamweaver template gurus out there to chime in . . . and/or participate in development. Contact us to discuss getting in on the ground level of development.

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.

Through a close dialog with the client, the site was mapped and a design, modeled after select premier online retailers, was mocked up for review and an enthusiastic approval.

TheTeakHut.com was built on the Dreamweaver template structure to give the client full site management control with Adobe Contribute. With our developed template platform in place, The Teak Hut was able to take the reins right out of gates and begin adding and removing content, creating new pages and optimizing their keywords for search engine placement.

The shopping cart application of choice was Ecommerce Templates, a robust and versatile cart that could be customized to meet The Teak Hut’s needs. Integrated throughout the site, a smooth shopping experience was achieved by seamlessly weaving the dynamic shopping cart functionality into every page on the site.

With sixty unique product categories and a very large, and growing, list of products, the ability to integrate the online shopping cart with the company’s Quickbooks POS system was an absolute must. The project required several e-commerce customizations and third part integrator, and in the end a one-of-a-kind solution was tailored for The Teak Hut.

For additional information on e-commerce websites

For additional information on Adobe Contribute, 2

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.

Contribute CS3 is a website editing software program for the PC and Mac, developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Contribute is designed to edit and “contribute” to sites originally built with Adobe Dreamweaver templates. The program allows users to update content, add pages, files and media without any technical expertise or HTML knowledge.

When built on a robust Dreamweaver template structure in conjunction with other select web technologies, Contribute enabled websites are given the legs of a full content management system (CMS). Based on clean HTML/XHTML, CSS and search engine optimized code, Contribute sites are offered some great advantages over other popular CMS platforms. Notably, traditional content management systems rely on server side technology and database counterparts that make customization and ongoing system management time intensive, technically complex and costly. Contribute sites on the other hand, once put into place, get better mileage between maintenance and have the huge advantage of simply having less parts to break—1. a premium Adobe program that comes with support and 2. straight forward server files—it doesn’t get any more simple than that.

Read how Adobe Contribute CS3 has helped Hopalong Animal Rescue save time, keep their website up-to-date and ultimately save the lives of more animals.

Applied Web Vitals’ Contribute CS3 website templates will incorporate a host of common small business website features and will come SEO and cross-browser compatible. Years of best practices, scripts and cutting edge techniques will make this line of Contribute CS3 website templates an exciting addition to the market.

If you’re paying someone else, an html developer perhaps, to update your content, then a CMS will quickly pay for itself. Or maybe you’re simply at the mercy of someone with technical skills to update content. No matter. Consider the opportunity cost, which for a small business translates to real money, real quick—sometimes before the close of business.

Fundamentals
Content Management Systems (CMS) are the website platforms that allow for end-user administration and automated content organization. A website built on a CMS can be edited by someone without web programming skills.

There are countless content management systems out there, each with there own merit as well as limitations. CMS functionality can be custom built into a website or provided through the integration of a CMS software application. Per software, both server-side and client-side applications exist. Server-side software reside entirely on the server and is accessed via a web browser. Client-side is accessed via workstation-based software.

Our CMS of choice for standard websites is the Adobe Contribute platform. Contribute is a workstation (PC or Mac) software application that incorporates hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) for Internet browsing and file transfer protocol (FTP) for file uploading.

The two standout features of Contribute are 1) breadth of design freedom and 2) ease of page editing.

1. With the CMS functionality built into the software application and not into server page structure itself, the developer is offered design freedoms that are either unavailable or costly to achieve in other content management systems. Consequently, page code can be kept clean and light for fast loading and cross-browser compatibility. [Note: Adobe Dreamweaver is used by the site developer and Adobe Contribute is used by the “contributor” or client.
2. Contribute initialy operates like a browser to navigate, then functions much like Microsoft Word to edit a web page. This WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) functionality incorporates easy to identify icons and menu options that virtually everyone understands and have become accustom to. The process from start to finish: browse the website, make the changes, and click Publish.

ADVANTAGES of Contribute are numerous:

• Developed by Adobe Systems, Inc., the software is well-built and continually upgraded, more than justifying the $169 one-time software license fee
• Creating and saving drafts prior to publishing is a feature that many people find indispensable
• Permissions enable administrators to define who can edit and publish content on a website or within a specific web page.

Whether you opt to go with Contribute or another CMS, we recommend making the move. Not until you’ve actually taken control of the content on your website, will you realize that you’ve been sitting in the passenger seat this whole time. Take the wheel with a CMS and see what your website can really do for your business.