David A. West » Website Development

What’s Not Included in Your Business Web Design Quote?

Admin — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:05:03 +0000

Start gathering quotes for business web design – or any professional service, I suppose – and you’ll notice right away that there will be a general range for professional work, along with a few that seem to be a little too good to be true. But, in this tough economy, the choice is clear, right? Isn’t it smart to save a little money where you can get a great deal when it’s offered?

Before I answer that question, let me point out two very important things. The first is that, in web design and almost any other business, you are highly likely to get what you pay for. And secondly, especially in business web design, what you pay for your project isn’t nearly as important as what you get out of it. In other words, a site that seems a bit more expensive now is a steal later if it ends up doubling your profits.

With that being said, the one thing to pay close attention to in any suspiciously low business web design quote is what’s not being listed.

In other words, are you really getting a great deal, or is it that they’re just taking away the “extras” that are most important to your site?

Here are at least five things that should definitely be included in any business web design quote:

A search engine optimization and marketing plan. It doesn’t matter what your site looks like, or what it does, if no one can find it. Make sure it will be accessible on Google, Yahoo, and Bing at a minimum.

Ongoing service and minor updates. What happens if you need to change a page, or find that you left a typo on your homepage? It’s important to pick a business web design team that will still be there when you need them.

Web hosting. Hosting might seem like a minor detail, but it affects your site speed, performance, stability, and even search engine positioning. Make sure you’re getting a competitive rate for high-quality hosting.

Social media links and profiles. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are more important than ever, and your company is going to suffer if you don’t have a presence on each of them.

An ongoing plan to grow your company online. Remember, your website shouldn’t just be an online brochure, but an important part of your marketing and promotion plan. What is your new business web design company doing to help you make it more successful?

We all like to save money, and it’s tempting to go with the rock-bottom business web design quote. Before you do, however, make sure that you aren’t spending less at the expense of your company’s future.

If you want some of the best Calgary web design and online marketing, contact eKzact Solutions for a free consultation today!

How New Does Your Next Business Web Design Have to Be?

Admin — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 17:38:15 +0000

Psychologists will tell you that there are large groups of people who feel overwhelmed by “information overload,” or the ever-growing and expanding amount of data that’s available on the Internet. We regularly meet with small business owners who seem to be suffering from a similar effect – one we might call feature overload – where they aren’t sure which of the “must-have” tools and technologies need to be integrated into their next web design.

In other words, they often aren’t sure exactly how new a new business web design actually has to be in order to be an effective marketing tool.

Even though it might run contrary to a lot of thinking within the industry, we’re going to go out on a limb and say for the record that having the latest and greatest features on your business site isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Don’t get us wrong, there are definitely some fairly-standard features – like a good content management system, social media integration, search engine optimization, etc. – that can make your company more profitable in a hurry. But there are also a lot of things that just add to time and expense of your business site, make it more complicated for people to use, and generally get in the way of good usability.

Good design is classic. The way we code websites might change, but the basic ideas and information that most customers are looking for has remained fairly constant for thousands of years. In other words, you might use an online video to tell a potential buyer what you would have explained in a brochure 10 years ago, but the focus still needs to be on the right message, rather than on any one specific web design tool.

A good, high-quality business web design can easily last 3 to 5 years before it needs any major changes. If you find that you’re needing to redesign your business website a lot more often than not, it could be that you aren’t investing in quality layouts to start with, or are being too distracted by small changes, rather than concentrating on your most important business goals.

Having a new website for your company can be very exciting, but having one that helps you make more money month after month is usually a lot more rewarding.

When Is It Better Not To Upgrade Your Small Business Website?

Admin — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:35:21 +0000

To listen to most web design firms, the first thing you should do after upgrading or redesigning your small business website is to upgrade or redesign your small business website again. We say that jokingly, of course, but there’s an element of truth to it – it can easily feel like your site starts to get out dated the second it goes live, and web design companies are certainly happy to take your money when you decide it’s time for a change.

So when should you not decide to get a new small business website? Believe it or not, we can think of a few situations where it’s better to sit tight:

When you can’t afford quality web design work. Take it from a team of experienced professionals: trying to save a bunch of money by working with a bargain-basement web design company is almost always a bad idea. It’s not just that they’ll go through missed deadlines and ignored requirements; the end result will usually leave you wishing you just saved the little bit of money spent.

You can pay for a good site, but not enough of the features you really want. In the same way, the high-quality small business website is almost always an improvement if you have a design that isn’t working for you now. If you could wait just a little longer and get what you really need, though, that might be a better option. The last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money to get a business site that you’ll want to replace three or six months down the road.

You’re already seeing record profits and sales online, and at a time when other businesses in your industry are struggling. There’s an old adage that you shouldn’t try to fix something that isn’t really broken, and that occasionally applies to small business web design. It’s okay to want to try some new features and keep up with the competition, but if you’re already blowing them out of the water, then be careful about making changes just for the sake of making changes.

More often than not, we meet business owners and marketing managers who are reluctant to make the changes and investments their businesses really need to go to the next level. If you don’t have the budget to do it right, however, or you’re already flying high above the pack, then don’t let anyone rush you into making the wrong decision.

Need one of Calgary’s best web design and online marketing teams working for you? Contact us at eKzact for a free consultation today!

Why Good Web Design Doesn’t End When Your Site Goes Live

David West — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:07:12 +0000

It makes a lot of sense that when clients are looking for the very best in Calgary’s Web design, they tend to focus on the actual designs they see. But while looking through samples might be a good way to pick up on someone’s artistic flair, know that great web design doesn’t end once your site goes live… in fact, that’s really only the beginning.

Granted, the process of going from concepts to code, ideas to an actual, fully-functional website can be intense. But what happens once you’re online? A lot of business owners and marketing managers don’t think past that moment, even though it’s a virtual certainty that more help will be needed.

That’s because there are always going to be issues with the coding or design, updates to your company’s products or features, new security patches for your hosting software, e-mail and server issues, or any one of a thousand other things that will eventually lead you to pick up the phone. And that, as they say, is where your web design team is really going to earn its money.

What’s more, there could be challenges with your company’s website that don’t even have anything to do with “problems.” It could just be that your site becomes more popular and you need to find ways to promote it through social media, or that you are performing well in certain search engine terms but not others. Again, this is the place where the list could be endless; the only thing you can be sure of is that you’re going to eventually want some assistance.

There’s nothing wrong with evaluating designers and other creative teams first and foremost by the creative work they do. If you really want the best for your business, however, be sure to look beyond the design — because that’s where your web design project begins, but not where it ends.

If you’re looking for a team to design your company’s next website, make sure it gets found by potential customers, or simply get your business moving in the right direction online, contact eKzact — Calgary’s premier web design and online marketing partner.

4 Ways to Grow Your Web Presence This Spring

Admin — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:38:34 +0000

As spring weather starts to move in, a lot of us will turn our thoughts to green grass, warmer temperatures, and maybe getting outside on the evenings and weekends. But if you can manage to focus a little bit of your time and energy on online marketing as the warmer days come, you might be surprised at how much you can accomplish while the rest of the world isn’t paying attention — and how much easier your summer months will feel with the hard work out of the way.

Here is a quick reminder of four areas where you might think about tuning up your business website this spring:

Refresh your search engine optimization plan. If you’re not showing up on one of the top few spots on Google or Yahoo for your most important keywords, then it’s very likely costing you a lot of money. Now is a great time to think about optimizing your site for the future.

Gather some steam on your social media profiles. More followers, better profiles, and frequent updates all make it easier to use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to secure new customers. Make it your goal this spring to add one or two new contacts every day.

Add more online videos to your company’s site. Online videos don’t just help you sell more, but also create stronger brand awareness, decrease customer-service expenses, and improve traffic to your site. Why not take advantage of the new season by shooting a few high-quality clips?

Plan for some new web content. This is often the part of the year where all the grand plans and ideas people had at New Year’s start to lose some of the momentum. Take advantage of the warmer weather and give yourself a mental break, but also assess how you doing towards reaching your long-term goals and make a firm plan to get back on track if you need to do.

Want to start making your company more competitive online this spring? Find out how eKzact Web Design has helped so many other businesses in and around Calgary to meet their bottom-line goals.

Part V of A Winning Internet Marketing Plan – Putting the Pieces Together

David West — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:14:25 +0000

Part 5 of a 6 Part Series

Putting the Pieces Together

Even once business owners start to understand the major parts of an Internet marketing plan, it’s often tough to see how they can fit together into something that’s going to help their company earn more money and grow. The first step is making sure that what you really have is the plan, rather than just a wish list or set of activities.

Like any good business plan, yours should have not only the results you expect, but also a budget, timetable, and set of actionable activities that can move forward progressively. That’s an important point because, even though things do move faster online, you still aren’t likely to be successful in Internet marketing overnight. It takes time to put together a strong website, build up a reputation, let search engines find you, tweak your advertising plans so they are profitable, and so on.

With that in mind, we’re going to offer you two pieces of advice that are absolutely invaluable. If you can have the discipline to follow them, we promise that they will help you earn tens of thousands of dollars – and maybe a lot more – while greatly decreasing the stress and apprehension you feel about taking your company to the next level online:

Work on the parts of your online marketing plan that are most likely to be profitable first, and then build gradually from there.

To see why these are so important, just consider the most common roadblocks small and medium-sized businesses run into. First, after getting a taste of what’s possible through Internet marketing, they get in a rush to do everything at once. Their plans become little more than a list of all the tactics they have seen and read about, rather than a targeted set of activities leading them towards a certain kind of online customer. What they end up with is a lot of busywork that looks productive but doesn’t accomplish much.

That’s why you want to begin with – and concentrate on – those parts of your plan that are most likely to show a good rate of return in a reasonable amount of time. A trusted Internet marketing specialist can help you figure out what these are likely to be for your business, but pay per click campaigns for specific products, search engine optimization in your immediate area, and adding e-commerce functions to your site are all obvious ideas.

Once you get these campaigns started and moving in the right direction, branch out to the second most straightforward thing, and then the third. It takes a bit of focus and patience to do things this way, but as we mentioned, it can save you from a lot of costly and frustrating mistakes. There are simply too many tools and ideas out there in Internet for most companies to try to do everything effectively, and so lots of them end up trying lots of things in a pretty pointless way, or at least missing out on the bottom-line benefits they could be enjoying.

Your business wasn’t built in a day. Chances are, it took some time, lots of hard work, and an element of luck to get it to where it is today. Don’t try to shortcut the process on the Internet. Start with things you know are likely to be successful, and then let the project grow organically from there.

Part IV Finding the Right Internet Marketing Recipe

David West — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:06:57 +0000

Part 4 of 6 In a Series

As you may have already guessed, there’s no such thing as any one way to succeed in Internet marketing – what works for one company might be a losing strategy for another, and even the best ideas have to be amended and updated pretty frequently. In that way, what you’re looking for isn’t necessarily a map to promoting your business online so much as it is a recipe. And like any good recipe, you may have to make adjustments for your own personal style and tastes.

With that being said, most of the major elements are pretty consistent. While there are certainly dozens of other things you could add in, and more coming out all the time, here are the basic ingredients of most online marketing plans:

A good website design. Few things on this list, or Internet business in general, are possible until you have a quality website for your business. By that, we don’t just mean one that looks good (although yours should, if you want to attract customers online), but also that it does everything you and your customers need it to, displays well no matter what kind of computer or browser your visitors using, and can be updated easily to reflect changes in your company.

If you are serious about using the Internet to increase your business’s profitability, make sure to make a quality investment, in terms of time and money, into a website that can help you reach that goal.

A plan to get found by search engines. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a favorite topic of business owners, web designers, and online marketing experts alike. There’s a good reason for this: once your site makes it to the front page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for an important search term, your business can expect dozens, maybe hundreds, of new potential customers to show up every day. Over the long run, that kind of traffic can make an enormous difference in your long-term profitability.

Paid advertising. While many companies choose to stick almost exclusively with SEO, paid advertising (on the search engines or elsewhere) can be a fantastic way to jumpstart your business online. That’s because, unlike search engine optimization – which relies on the relatively slow methods of adding content to your site and building incoming links – paid ads work instantly. What’s more, they tend to bring more targeted, serious traffic to your site. There is the need to keep an eye on your advertising budget, of course, but few parts of online marketing work as well, or consistently, as running paid advertisements.

A blog or email newsletter. One of the interesting things that new online marketers sometimes struggle with is the fact that it’s continually ongoing. It’s never something you simply “do” and then forget about; you always have to be adding, testing, and tweaking. As part of that process, having a company blog or e-mail newsletter is a great idea. Not only does it give you a way to broadcast specials and promotions to your customers and prospects, but it gives you a tool to reach them every month or two, keeping you at the front of their minds when they eventually decide to buy.

Social media marketing. A blanket name given to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, social media differs from other parts of the web in that it relies nearly exclusively on user input and content. In other words, these sites aren’t places for people to check in with the company, but hear from each other. While the concept is still relatively new, at least as far as online marketing goes, the potential is undeniable. Facebook alone has more than 500 million users, with that number growing quickly, and more and more of them are turning to the site to find recommendations on what products to buy, and what companies to do business with.

Social media marketing is already an important part of any organization’s business plan, and that’s a trend that’s not likely to slow down anytime soon.

Online videos. Another tool that’s recently come into vogue, online videos are a great way to promote what you sell, show your products in action, communicate directly and personally with customers, or do any number of dozens of other things. To give an idea of why you might think of integrating some short video clips into your online marketing strategy, consider that YouTube is currently showing more than 2 billion videos per day on its own. Add that to the fact that there are nearly endless uses for the medium, from advertising to customer service, and you can see why it makes sense to plan on using them from the start.

Mobile websites and apps. Not everyone has an iPhone, Droid, or other next-generation mobile device, but it’s only a matter of time before most of us do. A recent study done by an investment bank predicted that in the year 2015, more people will be going online through mobile phones and other devices than they would laptops or desktop computers. What that means to you is that now is the time to start thinking about what kind of features, functions, and possibly even software apps your customers might want a few months or years down the road.

As we mentioned, these are only some of the bigger pieces of an online marketing plan, and there are certainly other elements you might want to consider and integrate. But regardless of whether you stick to the basics or develop some new ideas, remember that each of these is only an ingredient or two the larger mix. While the methods may come and go, the most popular sites and ideas fall in or out of favor, your success online is still going to come down to your ability to answer the questions we posed when you were first considering a marketing plan. There’s no substitute for knowing what you’re offering, and who the right people to buy it are.

Part III Building an Online Marketing Plan From the Ground up

David West — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:00:04 +0000

Part 3 of 6

Let’s get into the issue at hand. Maybe you picked up this report already wanting to get moving on an online marketing plan, or perhaps the numbers involved – not to mention the profit potential – have piqued your interest. How do you get started, especially if the competition already has a head start?

The first step is not to do too much. For one, starting your Internet game plan from scratch can sometimes be a great thing, since it means you haven’t made some of the most common mistakes or meandered off in all kinds of wrong directions. And for another thing, the one overriding rule of business on the Internet is that things change quickly. Just because you aren’t bringing in tons of online customers right now doesn’t mean you couldn’t be in a few months.

The next thing, surprisingly enough, is not to run out and pay big money for a new web design, buy all kinds of expensive software, or stay up late every night reading dozens of books on Internet marketing. A better approach is to ask yourself a few pertinent questions, each of which can help you get your campaign starting out profitably, and on the right foot:

Who is your perfect customer? Too many companies try to use the Internet to get more customers, which seems reasonable, but misses the point. The real magic of being able to draw in men and women from around the world isn’t to simply sell to more of them, but create accounts that perfectly fit your business model. For that reason, one of the first things you should do – before clicking a single link or paying a single cent – is to identify exactly who should be buying from you.

What’s the offer? A couple seconds later, you’ll want to give a little bit of thought as to why they would choose to purchase from you, rather than one of your competitors. Often referred to as your “unique selling proposition,” the answer to this question is critically important, since your customers don’t have to drive down the road or look through phonebook to find someone else to buy from; they can simply move on to the next webpage.

How can you reach them? This is an area where a good web designer or online marketing expert can be a huge help, but jot down any initial ideas you have about how you would like potential customers to learn about your business. Do you want them to find you via search engine optimization, or hear about you from friends? Is an ad with pricing the ideal format, or an e-mailed article?

What do you want them to do? You might not notice it right off the bat, either, but the better idea you have, coming into the online marketing process, about whether you want to ring up sales online, send information through a form, have people call you on the phone, or do something different, the easier it will be to steer them in that direction later.

As we mentioned, experts in Internet marketing can help with any or all of these, but no one knows your company better than you, so try to work out some of the basic details of where you want to go before you get started – it could save you some time and money down the road.

Next: Part IV -

Finding the Right Internet Marketing Recipe

WordPress is Easy… But is it Effective?

David West — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:35:48 +0000

WordPress sites are just about everywhere, and it’s not hard to understand why. For many, they represent the ultimate in good looking, “have it now” sites. In fact, on most hosting panels, it can be installed in just a few mouse clicks.

Instead of having to pay a designer, work on layouts and revisions, and then finally uploading your site, the budding online marketer can simply register a domain, install WordPress, pick a theme, and start selling on the web. Sounds just about perfect… right?

As someone who has designed websites and helped business owners to meet their marketing goals for more than a decade, I’m not so sure. The whole thing makes me more than a little concerned. There are a lot of reasons to think that WordPress sites might not be the fantastic value it seems to be at first sight.

Consider this:

Instant WordPress sites are easy, but they are usually far from customized. Just because something looks good at first glance doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. That’s especially true when dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other business owners might be using the exact same template. Do you really want your website to look like your competitors?

Consider also that your Calgary WordPress developer may be designing using non-design tools or WordPress theme generators that will undoubtedly restrict the potential creative outcome. Where the design and creative of a marketing website plays such an important role in converting visitors to potential clients this has to raise a red flag or two. The fact remains, just because you can open pictures on a computer and manipulate them, does not make you a designer.

And that limitation doesn’t just stop with aesthetics, either. Different sites, in different businesses, need different features and functionality. While WordPress has a large community of plug-in developers, finding, implementing and designing the look or plug-ins is not for the faint of heart.

Security can be a concern. An improperly installed WordPress installation can be a hacker magnet, not to mention a spammers heaven. A seasoned website application programmer can insure that your WordPress installation is not vulnerable to attack. Having a proper backup strategy and the ability to recreate your website should it be destroyed by a hacker is critically important and it requires someone who has more than an entry level knowledge of web applications to accomplish.

Deploying a cheap templated WordPress blog might be right for your budget now, but they’re usually wrong for the business. When it all comes down to it, this is really the big issue. For most businesses – even the small ones — the money that will be saved by using a cheap or free WordPress template isn’t ever going to come close to the amount they’ll lose by not having a professionally designed WordPress installation. While there are a lot of great ways to save cash when searching for web design or online marketing, going with something generic shouldn’t be one of them.

I can understand the pull of WordPress sites; they’re quick, cheap, and easy to put in place. But, just like most other things you could get for your business, the best investment usually isn’t the one that costs you the least and comes to you the fastest.

To answer the question, “But is it Effective?” – Yes, WordPress is hugely effective if it is properly deployed and designed with purpose.

Having a professionally installed and custom designed WordPress blog theme still does not have to break the bank. The eKzact team can help you.

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David West began began his career as a freelance designer, later launching a full service website design and development company (eKzact.com) in Calgary, Alberta. He firmly believes that quality traffic is better than quantity, and has always used “coaching” approach to the development online strategies for his business clients. David’s clients especially love his “non-tech” way of talking about technical issues.

How Does Your Site Perform?

David West — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:32:32 +0000

It is difficult, sometimes, to convince a client that their website is actually performing quite well. Clients expectations, sometimes, far exceed their websites ability to perform. Google Analytics offers an industry leading statistics engine for website owners and developers to track and trend website performance.

Using Analytics to better understand how visitors behave, we can determine how they are finding a website, what search engines are people using and what keywords visitors use when searching. We can also review bounce rates and the number of pages viewed by a visitor.

The one thing we could not do in the past was demonstrate to the client that their websites performance is good, or bad, based on benchmarking. It was nearly impossible to demonstrate that other websites of similar size and nature perform better or worse than the clients website.

Google has “stepped up” and changed this by introducing “Benchmarking”. As users of Google Analytics, we have been given the choice to share the statistical data gathered from our websites. In return, Google has made the “Benchmarking” data available back to us.

Google states that there will be a minimum of 100 accounts compared in any given category. Some categories could potentially have thousands of sites being benchmarked.

The data from participating sites is averaged and anonymized through the aggregation process, then classified into a category. We limit the effects of outlier sites from the aggregate data in each category to help ensure that the benchmarking data is most representative of the industry vertical you choose to compare your site against.

Google Analytics Benchmarking Help

Google exposes vertical categories when there are enough websites that fall into the category. If a category for your vertical market is not showing, it is likely because there is not enough data to create a direct benchmark. You will still be able to benchmark websites of a similar size.Google Analytics benchmarking currently allows us to show a comparison for the following metrix;

Visits – unique visitors to the website. Not hits… hits don’t mean anything.
Bounce Rate – did they pop in and out again…
Pageviews – total number of pages viewed during the reporting period.
Avg. Time on Site – how long did the “stick”.
Pages/Visit – how many pages a visitor viewed for this visit.
New Visits vs. Returning Visitors

We currently add analytics to all of our accounts where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Online Marketing services are involved. If you are a website owner and would like to have Google Analytics installed on your website, please feel free to contact us and we would be glad to help you.

Understanding how your website is performing in relationship to search, online marketing and in comparison to your vertical markets is critically important. If you have a website and are not measuring it’s success, you may be missing an opportunity to improve.

Getting visitors is okay – Getting customers better!(tm)

Regards,

David A. West
eKzact is a leading Calgary Website Design company.

Google Docs Are Going Offline

David West — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:19:59 +0000

I read about “off line” or “disconnected” web applications some time ago. We are now starting to see these off line applications come into production use. Google has recently added the ability to use their popular “Google Docs” applications off line.

The Google Docs applications include a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application. Up until this point, Google Docs has been an on line only application. While the apps are extremely useful and easy to use, the limitation of only being able to work while on line was at time difficult. The limitation of only being able to show a presentation, for example, while connected to the Internet was one of the biggest limitations that I found.

The advent of the ability to synchronize a local copy of the Google apps and my actual files to my local laptop has removed the limitations. I can now work on a presentation or document on line, and in full collaboration with my peers, and then take my laptop off line (say flying to Vancouver) and continue to work on my presentation. When I arrive in Vancouver and setup to speak at the convention center, I can run the off line version of my presentation during my lecture!

If you haven’t tried Google Docs, you can easily create a free Google account and give them a try. If you are looking for an enterprise solution to email, document collaboration and calendaring, then you should consider Google Apps for your business. We have helped several small business clients in recent weeks to take full advantage of Google Apps in their business. Our own company, eKzact Solutions, has been using Google Apps for nearly 5 months now. We have grown to love the Shared Calendaring, Gmail Interface and the Apps for document collaboration.

One really nice feature of Google Apps is that we get all of the upgrades Google staffers enjoy! No fees for upgrades, and no fear of end of life. Google uses their own applications to support their own business and their 10,000+ employees around the world.

If you would like to learn more about integrating Google Apps into your business, please drop us a note here.

Cheers,

David West

Photo Editing Made Easy As Picnik

David West — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:53:11 +0000

Several months ago we found a web service called Picnik. As calgary web developers who deliver “content management systems” to our clients, it was important to teach the client how to manipulate thier content images prior to placing them on their websites.

Before Picnik came along, the only option was to try to teach the clients how to use desktop software to crop and resize their images. These were the most common functions that the client needs to know. Most of the commonly needed funcitons that Picnik offers are FREE!

For an optional, and nominal, fee of $24.95 per year you can unlock the more advances features, fonts and techniques available to premium subscribers. It is well worth every penny. The team that developed, and continues to develop Picnik, deserve our support!

With the advent of Picnik, now it’s really fun teaching clients to use the web-based application! If you have a content managed website, blog or if you use facebook or any web based social network… you should give Picnik a try! (link is further down the page…)

Direct Quote From Picnik;

Fix your photos in just one click

Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results

Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time

Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun

Astoundingly fast, right in your browser

Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool

Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers

Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux

No download required, nothing to install

So, here it is… the link you have been waiting for!

Visit PICNIK.com Today!

Here are some screen shots of Picnik in action… all resized and edited in Picnik!

The 4 Hurdles of Web Design

David West — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:42:19 +0000

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”.

Planning to Buy a Business Website?

David West — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:28:57 +0000

Preparation is key to receiving useful proposals from web developers. Not only will a bit of preparation help you get more detailed propsals, but it is more likely that you will be able to compare the pricing – apples to apples.

A great number of prospective website design clients do very little preparation prior to calling web designers. They tend to search online for a web designer and then start down the list. Some call, others fill out the request for proposal “form” that is commonly found on web designers websites. The website developer will control the interview, or the form will drive the questions. There will be no consistency, conversations will go in different directions, forms are all unique – proposals and pricing will come back to the prospective client as varied as the colours in a rainbow. One of our prospective clients, last year, received three proposals for their new website, prior to choosing eKzact. The client later confided in me that the pricing ranged from $3,500 up to $10,000.00. Presumably these prices were all for the same website.

A lot of small business owners decide to research getting a website, but it seems that the first place a lot of them begin their research is at the top ranking website design company websites. While this may seem a logical place to begin, I would recommend that you begin by developing a simple specification for your website. Do a basic “needs” analysis.

Research Your Competitors

I would strongly suggest that you open a web-browser, go to Google.com and search for your competition. Look for other businesses that are online, and doing what you do. Start a list of “competative websites” for analysis by your prospective web developer. Beside the website address, make note of the following;

What you like about the site (best practices)
Are there any components on the site that will help you generate leads for your business?
Are there any forms on the website that your business should have on it’s website?
Speak to the general design of the competitors website design (look and feel)… do you like it or not? What do you like?

Do the search again mixing in demographic words like City or Province names. This will return more business websites in your industry, but not necessarily in your immediate area.

The more websites you look at, related to your industry, the better you will be prepared to tell your prospective web designer what your business needs are. A skilled web developer will do some of this research for you, but it is still recommended that you make the effort before starting your project.

Research Websites “in General”

Do another search on Google.com now… use the keywords “nicely designed business websites”, or something similar. Google will return a “result set” of websites for you to surf. I recommend that you look at lots of websites

Make more notes. This time, you are looking at the general website layouts, colour themes and textures. Try to find example websites that have a “look and feel” that appeals to your business sense. Keep in mind that you are developing a website for your business – not for yourself.

Who Is Your Target Visitor?

A business website should appeal to the prospective website visitor – not the business owner. Make note of who your typical client is and what “environment” will appeal to them. For example, if you are developing a website to attract new apprentices into an Iron Workers local, then it is not likely that rosey pinks and reds will appeal to the visitors.

Make notes about the types of images that will help to communicate to your website visitors. Visit a website like Dreamstime and search for images realated to your business and list the image serial numbers as examples for your designer. Don’t buy the images, just use the reference number.

Generation of Leads

Once the visitor arrives at your website, what do you need them to do? Is it important to you that people phone you when they come to your website? Do you want them to complete a survey and then receive a free report about your industry? Do you want the visitor to register? Reqest a proposal?

This is a critially important area for your new website. There is a multitiude of opportunities for a website to become a lead generating tool for your business. A professional website developer will have a lot of different ideas for lead generation – but come prepared with some ideas.

Conclusion

Most professional web development companies will have some strong recommendatios for you. We have the advantage of having designed and developed several websites every months. The more you prepare, prior to asking a web developer for pricing, the better the resulting proposals will be.

A company like eKzact has a full compliment of Internet Consultants, project managers, web designers, programmers, search engine optimizers and online marketers. Visit our business website here…

15 Questions to Ask Your Prospective Web Designer

David West — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:27:32 +0000

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.