20 years ago, when I started working, a business typically had one or two phone lines and, that was it. There was no fax machines, there were no cellular phones, pages, email, blackberries. Executives relied on their pen and paper calendar, and another person that they referred to as a secretary. My first employer, after high school, had a telex. If I recall correctly there was one person in the office responsible to sending and receiving messages with it. The terminals that lined some areas of the offices were connected to mainframes – they really looked very important. Email, except in closed environments, didn’t exist.

In the early 90′s I sat in front of my first PC when I took a job with a real estate company in Calgary. It ran DOS and had only one program on it. It was a Word Processor. Soon afterwards Windows came out and replaced the first PC. This was the first time that our computers were ‘crudely’ networked.

As time goes, pagers made us more accessible to our employers through the 80′s and 90′s. Early cellular phones were in brief cases, cost prohibitive for most, and used only in rarely good service areas. In the mid 90′s cellular phones were being carried, as I recall, by management level personnel and above. By the mid 90′s the Internet and email started to take hold. Some companies had difficulty understanding, in these early days, that resistance was futile. In the very short years to follow, corporate email became a standard in communications. It was in this span of time that companies started laying off administrative support staff and receptionists, in favour of managers doing their own typing of letters, memos and other documents.

Today the PDA, or a Blackberry, has replaced the paper agenda and the cell phone (in some cases). Cellular phones are common place now. Almost everyone I know carries a personal or business cell phone. Some people are giving up their home phones and just relying on their cellular. Everyone, except my Father, has an email address. Some of us have multiple email accounts. The sending and receiving of faxes is on the decline. Most every form of communication we use today can easily fit on a belt.

So here we are, today, 2008, and we are almost too accessible. Somewhere along the line of advancement in communications, we have become a society that is demanding this degree of connectivity from our service providers and partners. Some time in the past decade I have lost the ability to sense a phone vibrating on my hip – apparently so has the guy in the restaurant who has the fancy music play instead of a subtle ring tone.

Along with the ability to send instant messages, short text, email and voice messages, some people have become accustomed to an instant response. It was easy to respond to email and phone messages when there was only five per day. Now that we are all connected, it is not uncommon to receive dozens of messages and calls per day. Some people receive hundreds of ‘contacts’ per day.

Unfortunately, as we were all getting connected and becoming so accessible, we have taught everyone to expect an instant response.

How did we manage business before we taught everyone to expect an instant response? It is time to slow down and find balance between great service and responding to every email and phone call as if we were an emergency service.

I’d love it if you would share with me any tips or tricks you employ to manage the constant flow of inbound communication in your business and personal life. I have some good tools in place, but am going to leave that for another entry.

Cheers,

David A. West

Own domain names to stop the misappropriating of your personality. Apparently the premier’s personality was recently misappropriated by an Alberta Blogger.

In light of daveberta’s recent receipt of a letter from our premier (whom I am afraid to name here). daveberta registered the domain name edstelmach.ca, soon after he was appointed premier of our Province (notice I didn’t say elected). daveberta then forwarded the domain name to his own blog space, where he is know to have differing opinions than our government. He in fact, uses the premiers name quite freely, when he is writing about the premier. Some might say that it is appropriate use of the name. The whole issue begs the questions – Is it your own name or do you own your name?

In any case, he is under threat of suit by the Premier’s lawyer. You can read the letter from the lawyers at this link. In daveberta’s blog he comments;

“…I am still surprised that the +150 staffed Public Affairs Bureau failed to complete the simple task of registering a $14.00 domain name ”

Even Jim Campbell, with the Alberta PC’s conceded it was a mistake not to register the domain name.

A point well made, I thought. Now, I don’t necessarily recommend running out and registering every domain name possible, but do consider managing your tradename and your “personality” on line.

If you have a unique domain name, or if you are trying to find a great domain name, consider checking the alternative extensions of the same name. I once used a domain name, in the early days of the internet, that was singular. The same domain name, but plural, lead to a porn site. I dropped the domain name. I recommend that at minimum, my Canadian clients, select the .com and .ca version of their domain names. Check to see who is using the other versions, including singular, plural and with hyphenation. You may be accidentally associated with other domains that are your competition or that promote products or ethics that could harm your corporate image.

We also, refer our clients to the Federal Government’s trademarks database. Check that your domain name and business name does not conflict with any registered trade names. While you are there, consider registering your own trademarks or trade names to protect the ownership of your domain names. If you own a domain name, and someone else later registers a trademark for the same name, you stand a chance of losing the domain name to the registered trade name holder. Many people who open a corporation feel that their corporate name is instantly a protected Trademark. This is not necessarily the case… Provincial registration of a named corporation does not relate to a proper trademark registration, which is a Federal service.

Do you own, and protect, your corporate and domain names? Do you think that it was appropriate for daveberta to use the premiers name in a domain name pointing to his blog site? Did the premier over react, or is he right to demand the transfer of ownership of the domain name to his own benefit?

After developing websites and web-based applications for the greater part of the past decade, I have distilled the process down to four potential hurdles. The hurdles, or milestones, of web development are often the points where a project will stall. After all, if you can’t get over a hurdle, you can’t make it to the finish line.

The four hurdles;

1) Planning
2) Design
3) Content
4) Finish Line

The Planning Hurdle

Planning your web development project is a hurdle that is often skipped. Many prospective website clients rely on the web developer to tell them what they need. If you skip the planning phase of your project and leave the project deliverables up to the developer, it may become hard to overcome the last hurdle, which is the “Finish Line”. After all, if the project is not carefully planned from the begining, how will you or your developer ever know that it is finished?

Take the time to review your competition online. Make notes and prepare an outline for your website. If all you need is a marketing website, at minimum, define what pages you want and what the key message is for each of the pages. A content outline will be very helpful when you attempt to take you project over the “Content” hurdle.

The Design Hurdle

Your website design team will be tasked with creating the “look and feel” or theme for you new website. The more information that you can provide your creative team, at the begining of your project, the better the result will be. We have a carefully developed process that is intended to capture the essence of our clients design needs, at the start of their project. The design creative is a document that is refined until it finally goes to the designers, who use the creative briefing as a guide to reference when creating a new website theme.

Projects go sideways at the “Design” hurdle if the client is not prepared to speak to their business both from a technical as well as a social prospective. Research, by the client and the designer, prior to the start of the design project can greatly assist getting past this hurdle. One key here is the word “before”… Do the research before the designer starts. Don’t start doing research after your designer starts to design. The injection of new ideas after the initial design is started can stall the project.

The actual design and revisioning process for a website can often take a fair amount of time and is 100% dependant on the client being able to review a design and communicate clear feedback to the designer. It is crital that the client not confuse the “content” shown on early designs as “written in stone”. Early design reviews should concentrate on the theme, general colours, fonts, font sizes – the “look and feel” of the site. Don’t worry about the words on navigation points or titles early in the design process.

One point of stall, when it comes to the design hurdle, is the client who can not be designed for. Some clients, but fortunately very rarely, can not be designed for. They, simply put, will never be happy with a design concept for their business.

I have recently written another entry in this blog titled “Planning to Buy a Website?”. Please review it, as I speak in more detail regarding planning for your new website. It may help a prospective client to overcome both the “Planning” and the “Design” hurdles.

The Content Hurdle

A website is just a pretty picture, if there is no writing on it. The majority of small business clients make the choice to write their own website content, at the start of their project. Hiring a professional writer to develop content for your website can be expensive (but it doesn’t have to be), so the choice to write content yourself is often a safe choice, in terms of keeping a project on budget. Unfortunately, writing, even just five pages, is apparently much more difficult than some entrepreneurs anticipate.

Many projects will flail to a stall when we call the client to provide the content for their new website. Some clients actually disappear. The fact is, a lot of small business owners find that writing is much harder than they originally thought. Others are simply too busy to spend the time necessary for drafting their content.

When you start your website project, please know that there are options when it comes to the written content for your website. You certainly can write your own content. Start right away, write a little bit at a time and keep chipping away at it until you are done. Ask a peer to review your writing. Or, if you don’t want to pay for professional writing you can substantially reduce the cost of a professional writer if you provide the writer with a full outline of your proposed content. The writer then acts more like an editor and can usually refine your thoughts and ideas into very professional copy. The reduced time required can save you money and the results can be quite good. The other option is to consider the true value that hiring a professional writer can bring to your project, and just do it.

I am not going to labour on about the importance of the text content on your website in this article. I will just say it once… a website without quality content will not surface on search engine results.

The Finish Line

The final hurdle to overcome is the “Finish Line” hurdle. Your new website has to go live on the internet. Some clients feel as though once their website is online there is no turning back. Once your site is live, it is not frozen in time like an oil painting. Unlike printed advertising, a website is easy to update and change. This is especially true of a website that is developed using a content management system that allows the client to make changes without the input of their webmaster.

When a website production is 98% completed, with only minor formatting to refine, set it live. A reputable web developer will allow you time to make final revisions and content updates for a period of time after a new site is launched, usually without additional fees. eKzact actually provides clients with a warrently for the post-production period of new websites. We continue to work closely with the clients to fix any content formatting or scripting issues for this “warrently period” to ensure that the client is completely satisfied with their new website.

Don’t stall getting your new website live, over minor issues. Get it live, get it working for you, and then work through the final revisions. Don’t miss opportunities by not getting your site live. This post-production grace period, that our client get, is also a great opportunity to get other people to review your new website and include some of their observations into your final revision task.

Only a Team Can Overcome These Hurdles

There are some key ingredients that every successful website design and development project requires. Two ingredients are critical, and if either one of them is missing, your project will most assuradely stall on one of the four hurdles noted above.

The two main ingredinets are a “professional developer” and “the clients participation” in the project. Without a doubt, a project where either of these two stakeholders loses interest, will not make it to the “Finish Line”.