If you’re looking to build a business that can move your market to buy from you and move your people to deliver the best they can deliver, I strongly recommend you watch the Mixergy interview below with Simon Sinek.
Simon goes into depth about why inspiring people really gives your business a gigantic advantage over your competitors, why you should talk about the Why of your company and how to build a business that others can be passionate about.
Last night I listened to an interview of AJ Vanyerchuk on Mixergy about social media and engaging your fans and customers. It was packed with some good information so I turned it into a visual mind map that I could use to easily review the info in the future. You can download it by clicking the image below. Let me know if it was helpful for you.
One of the things that bugs me when browsing the Internet is when websites ask stupid questions. Let’s start out by defining what a stupid question is. A question is stupid if it is irrelevant to my immediate task or if you already have the answer to the question. Let’s look at an example:
IBM’s Leveno website asks a stupid question as soon as I enter their website: Select a country/region.
There is no need to stop people and ask them where they are from. They already have the answer to this question. Using a technology called geolocation which is able to map a visitor to a geographic location, they can make a smart guess and automatically direct someone to the right version of the website while giving them the option to change to a different language/location once in the site.
For WordPress users, there are plugins that simplify this such as the IP2Location plugin. It allows you to customize your content based on the location of your visitor.
It’s lazy web design to ask users to answer questions to which you already know the answer. Do the work to make the users experience on your website frictionless.
One of the best advices I got relating to PR was “Ride the big wave.” For example, when Wordpress 2.9 was about to be released, we were able to get some bloggers to write about a new Wordpress backup plugin we were just about to release by framing our story in the context of “hey, you really should backup your Wordpress website before upgrading to safe-guard yourself in-case something goes wrong.”
Apple has just announced the iPad. It is THE big wave for today and probably for the next week. If you can frame your story such that it is related to the iPad, you have a fighting chance at attracting a lot of attention. However, if your story isn’t compatible with the iPad, I suggest holding off trying to gain attention as you’re really going to be swimming against the current.
Marketing is a conversation you’re having with your marketplace. When you engage in unethical marketing where you are misrepresenting the products or services you are offering, you are lying to your market.
Unethical marketing is wrong by definition but usually it isn’t a life or death matter. Subjective statements like “the most delicious” are suggestive enough to influence opinions but vague enough that it’s not directly a lie. However, in the case of Jim McCormick and his ADE 651 product, the unethical marketing stepped over the line into the realm of pure EVIL.
McCormick’s company sold a device called the ADE 651 that could detect explosives from over a 1 kilometer away. It gained tremendous success, bringing in over $125 million of sales in Iraq alone, selling for about $40,000 a piece. The only problem is that the product is not capable of detecting explosives at all. It is simply a cheap anti-shoplifting device. You can imagine the effects this device has had on it’s customers who acquire a false sense of security due to this device.
The thought alone makes me cringe on how someone could come up with the scheme to mislead people in such a drastic way just to make a profit. In my books, this is right up there with the marketers of cigarettes and Hitler’s propaganda.
I’m so glad that the entrepreneurs that we deal with everyday at Web Design Company are genuinely attempting to help, heal and serve others. You all are a special group. I hope we continue to be fortunate enough to work with generous & ethical people like you and never encounter someone like Mr. McCormick.
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King is an inspiration in many ways. To become a symbol & embodiment of the movement of a people demonstrates extraordinary congruency & conviction.
As entrepreneurs, we can all learn how to build a strong reputation for ourselves and our brands by understanding that these historic people were simply people. They became historic because of what they stood for and what they did. To engage your market with strong passion, we too need to stand for something worthy and to do things worth remembering.
We at WDC take this philosophy to heart with website design. The websites we build in 2010 will be long gone in 5 years but the people in these businesses will be around. Our calling is about helping these people become successful so they can enhance & participate in the lives of millions. Our contribution to the reach and impact of these entrepreneurs will be the legacy we cherish. I wish you strong success in 2010. Happy MLK-day everyone.
What web design tools do we use to build your website? The answer really depends on what your website will need to do.
For designing your website, we start inside Adobe Photoshop. We work with you to interactively tweak the design and make it into just what you need. Photoshop gives us the freedom to fully create a special website for you. Once we’ve got the design part of the website completed, we use Photoshop again to turn the large design into little images, also known as slices.
Once we got all the images we need for building a website, we turn our trusted text editor Textmate to code your website using XHTML and CSS. This process takes long than using a look like Dreamweaver but it produces better results. As we do the coding, we’ll browser test the page inside FireFox, Safari, Internet Explorer & Google Chrome.
With the coding completed, we’ll convert the website into a Wordpress theme. This is done again using Textmate.
So let’s recap: We designed the website inside Photoshop and used it to create the small images that will be needed to build up the full website. Next we used Textmate to code the XHTML & CSS and then turn that code into a Wordpress theme.
A clean XHTML + CSS based Wordpress theme is nice but it’s even nicer once we add some effects & interactivity using Javascript. Our script framework of choice is jQuery. We’ll often add an image slideshow and more to the home page. Javascript is difficult to test but FireBug (an extension for FireFox) makes it much easier. From there, we’ll do a second browser test inside FireFox, Safari, Internet Explorer & Chrome.
At this point, we’ve got a working Wordpress website. Once we load it to our web host, we’ll need to setup a database for our Wordpress website. As standard, we utilize MySQL. Once we’ve got the website working, it’s time for performance testing.
Performance testing on your website is done using a number of different tools. We start with Pingdom to see how the website will load for end users and how much time it will take. Next we use the Page Speed FireFox extension by Google. We’ll take the suggestions it gives and make the appropriate changes to the site.
That’s it. Once we’ve done some performance testing, we’re ready to do some user testing and start promoting the website.
I hope this has given you some insight into how we do things.
I watched an interesting training video on website conversion this week that has given me a lot of solid ideas of a few things I’m going to try on our websites so I wanted to share it with you. The video is a Web Clinic by Marketing Experiments called Clarity Trumps Persuasion. It goes through a [...]
