As Christmas approached like a high speed train, I thought it would be a good time to send a note out to our clients.  A lot of things have happened in the past several months. It was high time to tell the clients.

While drafting our e-zine, I came up with several objectives for our business in 2008.  They have now been jotted down as our business “New Year Resolutions”.

Our business turned 3 years old.  In terms of a business, there is a lot of maturing that is done in the first few years.  Talking to Tom Malin of Party Machine yesterday, we were chatting about running a business.  Tom is considering a business blog.  We agreed that there are very few business owners that don’t have something to share in terms of “learning”.  One of our resolutions for 2008 is to continue to encourage our clients, the members of my peer group, and the members of our networking groups, to share their experience.  I am going to work closely with one of my mentors, Stuart Crawford, to encourage business owners to start a blog.

We are growing… Sandy Thoen has joined us as an Internet Consultant.  Sandy is a graduate of the U of C Web Design & Development program.  Sandy has already brought several high profile clients to eKzact, including Brewers Distributor.  David Fradette joined us in September as project coordinator. David’s role is to ensure we turn-out customer requests in a timely manner. Our design/development team also continues to grow. We add design and programming resources as needed to keep up with demand. Moving into 2008 we will continue to grow.  We have a very clear sales objective for 2008 and have developed plans to acheive these goals.

On a side note…We moved…

eKzact Solutions has moved. Our phone numbers have not changed.  The e-newsletter to the clients was just sent, in order to get our new address out to them.  Mail sent 10 minutes ago – 15% opened, 3 bounced, 4 visits to our website… I love how measurable and email campaign can be.  I certainly do not get stats like this from the Yellow pages.  I’ll check the campaign results again tomorrow, and will know exactly how many people have read my note.  I’ll also look at the analytics for eKzact.com to see an increase in unique visitors as a direct result of the newsletter.

We have updated our clients on a number of plans that we have for the new year.  I’m not going to write about each of the programs we are introducing in this blog entry – but stay tuned.  We have a series of objectives for marketing to our own clients in 2008.  This is one of our “New Year Resolutions”… market to our own clients. This growing group of valuable supporters is often overlooked by business owners. 

What are your business resolutions for 2008?  Give yourself some clear objective goals, make them measureable, and then test them out.  You just may be surprised at the results.

All the best to you for the Christmas Season and I wish you all continued success for 2008

David A. West

We are in the process of moving our offices to our new location near Heritage & McLeod.  One of the important tasks on my move list was to contact Shaw and make sure that our Internet connection could be moved without interruption. 

I apprehensively made the call to Shaw’s business support desk today. 

As you may have read in one of my recent posts, my current cellular company uses an interactive voice response system that causes me extreme stress when I call, I half expected a similar experience from Shaw.  I am elated to say that Shaw’s support was excellent.

• Call starts 1035 am.  On hold message advises me to wait for the first available person.
• Soon after, a voice advises me that if I would like to leave a 10 digit phone number, they will call me back in the same order as if I were to stay on the line.
• I think about it for a minute and am about to put my number in and something huge happened…
• An operator answered the phone and introduced herself. 
• Total lapsed time 4 minutes.

So, already I am having a better experience with this process, than with the cell phone people.  Imagine my surprise when she told me that I am not too late and that they have people available on the weekend to support their customers.  Not only did Shaw answer their phone, they are going to send a technician to our new offices Sunday. This will ensure that our connection is ready to go for Monday morning!

I wonder when Shaw will offer cellular phone services?

Cheers

David A. West

Here are 15 questions that a prospective website client should consider when shopping for a website developer.

1. Do you have a service guarantee? What can I expect from you with regard to service levels?

A quick search on Google for the keywords “Calgary website designers” returns a result.

A quick search for the term quarantee, or service guarantee on the home pages of the top natural search results shows that no-one talks about guaranteed service levels.

2. Will I have access to my website statistics, and can you help me to understand them?

So many of our new clients don’t even know about website statistics. Evey web server tracks visitors to a website. Most website hosting companys provide statistical reports through an online link. You need to review your logs and make you online marketing “measureable”.

3. What process do you use to guarantee me that I will not receive an invoice that I am not expecting?

Several times over the past years, prospective clients have commented to me that their previous web designer “nickle & dimes” me to death with little bills. We made an effort to ensure that this doesn’t happen, by implimenting a process. It is important, as a client, that you understand that you have to pay for services from you website designer. The onus is on your web developer to ensure you know how much your request will cost.

4. Do you answer your phones or do you use a conveluted interactive voice system that will cause my heart to pound?

If I have to call Rogers Cellular service (my soon to be previous cell phone provider) one more time, I am going to spit nails. 50% of the time, that I phone them, my call is dropped. Some of the time I get through to a person, and some of the time, the department that I need is closed.

Trying to get ahold of one of our clients recently – they had an IVR, dial 1 for this, dial 2 for that… I tried 5 different phones and evey one of them was unrecognized (the tone) for this system. I could simply not get through to the person. I finally email him and asked him to call me.

I will never use an IVR for our customer support lines.

5. How many designers do you employ? Will my project include the creative talents of more than one person?

The depth of your web designers resources can impact the quality of the results.

6. What is your refund policy? Do you have policies?

A good question. Find out what will happen if you decide to end your project. A number of website projects fail to get completed for any number of reasons, including business closures, inability to produce content, or a change in business plans.

7. Do you ask clients to sign a contract, before begining a project?

I believe that the more clearly documented a project and service level expectations are, the better the project will proceed. All website development projects should be documented in an agreement.

8. How will you bill us for our new website project?

ie: deposit, any progress billings, when is final due?

9. Will I own my website when it is complete?

Here is an article that I wrote, some time ago, called “Do you really own your website? Maybe not.”

10. Can I have a CD with a backup of my website when it is completed.

11. Will my website be developed using industry standard codes and databases, so that in the future, should I choose to change service providers, there won’t be any issues?

As a prospective client you don’t have to be technical. No acronyms here please… just make sure that the code-base your site is developed with. is widely used and that the code is not encrypted. You need to be able to move-forward if you web devleoper does not.

12. When you lose a client, are you graceful, or do you hinder their ability to move forward? Tell me about the last client you lost.

Hmm. Wonder what kind of response this question will drive. We have transitioned several website owners from their previous website developers to our company. It is not always graceful and professional. Some developers make it very difficult. On the same note, not all clients who leave their website developer have left on good terms. In some cases they have treated the developer poorly, been rude or in the worse case – not paid their outstanding debt. Graceful works only when both parties are capable of being professional.

13. Does your business have a continuity plan, so that if “you” get hit by a bus…

14. Do you have designers, programmers and marketers on staff?

Designers are designers, programmers are programmers and online marketing is online marketing. Very few designer are programmers… very few programmers are designers and so on. The depth of talent that your website company can provide is important to acheiving goals for your online business.

15. Will my website be search engine friendly if I allow your team to design for me?

I still see a lot of websites that are being deployed that are over designed, under developed and using techniques that are not condusive to easy indexing by search engines. While the importance of search engines may not be apparent to you as you start your first website project – trust me, when you website starts to generate new business leads… you will thank your website developer for making your site work for the search engines.