Without it, your website wouldn’t exist in the first place.

You would never build a house without a plan. Even before you meet with your contractors, you have an idea of what you want out of your house. The same goes for your website.

Not allocating the time and resources necessary to strategically plan your website is the biggest mistake companies make. While these steps will vary based on your company’s needs, here’s what a well-developed tactical Web strategy should look like:

Step 1: Establish Your Goals

Before your Web design agency starts creating a website, make sure you’re clear on the basics: What are you trying to achieve with your new website? What is your website’s main purpose?

Ask your key stakeholders:

“What’s the biggest goal of our website?”

Everyone is likely to have different answer to this question, and you’ll want to discuss all input. But you’ll need to reach a consensus so there’s one clear-cut vision. A good way to do this is through Card Storming.

Let’s say you have four stakeholders. Pass out note cards to everyone, and give them three minutes to write down as many brand/business goals for the website they have, with one goal on each card.

Then pair up and each team has three minutes to decide on the top three goals out of  their bunch. Do that as a whole group so that, in the end, you have a consensus on the three main goals for your new website.

Step 2: Define Your Audience

Your audience will play the biggest role in your website, so you need to know everything about them. The basic demographics of age, gender and profession are good, but don’t stop there. What do your users like to do? What social networks do they use? How technically savvy are they?

This user research could include focus groups, competitive analysis, surveys, interactive exercises, or existing and potential customer interviews, depending on how in-depth you choose to go.

Step 3: Set Your Brand

The last thing you want is for your website to give your audience mixed messages from a confusing brand image. How do you want customers to feel about your brand? Be sure to adequately explain that to your web designers so they can choose color schemes and other elements to best convey that emotion.

Every color elicits a different emotion, so you want to settle on a scheme that properly conveys the tone of your brand.

Step 4: Design For Your Users

You spent that time learning about your audience. Now that knowledge needs to be implemented in the design. Make sure your agency focuses on user-centered design when building your website. This should include:

• Information architecture to organize your websites’ content.
• Intuitive navigation so your users easily flow through your website.
• Strong call to action so your users complete your designed goal.

Step 5: Track Your Results

In the end, you want a website that looks great. But you also want one that accomplishes your goals. In order to do that, make sure you have installed an analytics tracking system so you can see just how people are using your website.

Google Analytics will do just that for you.  Make sure the goals you identified in Step 1 are tracked here.

Your project is only as strong as the planning that goes into it. A proper strategy ensures effective design and development, and avoids costly setbacks.

At the conclusion of a well-developed strategic process, not only will you have a great product, but you will also have a comprehensive blueprint document to use as a basis for future expansion.

The future of your business is too important not to do it right the first time.

Web Design Photo via Shutterstock

The post The Strategy Behind Web Design appeared first on Small Business Trends.

OK, it was a trick question. While more than half of small business do have an actual website — temporarily ignoring the fact that that means there are still about half of small business that don’t have a website — the majority of them aren’t doing enough to proactively make sure it’s working. You shelled out the chunk of change to choose a web design company in the first place, so why wouldn’t you get the insurance to protect it?

Because of limited budgets, companies today are being more careful about where their IT dollars go to, and as a small business, you may not have the resources to devote to a full-time in-house monitoring system. And frankly, when your website is working right now, it’s not high on your to do list.

“Effective network monitoring is much like a disaster recover plan,” said David Nizen, vice president of business development at iGLASS Networks, a network monitoring service provider for small businesses and larger corporations. ”You only need and appreciate it when a disaster strikes, but if you keep putting it off, you’ll eventually get burned. Often that disaster will turn out to be way more expensive than it would have been if you planned ahead. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. (Ben Franklin said that.)”

How bad can it really be?

You know how imperative  your online presence is. It’s the heart of your overall marketing initiatives and a significant source of leads and revenue for your business. And supporting all of that is your business’ core IT network. Your network is the foundation upon which your business is built, powering and supporting your website, email, point of sales and so much more. It connects your customers to your services and goods, employees to sales and support systems they need, and management to the data and applications they need to make critical decisions.  So what if it in the middle of the night, while you are slaying dragons in your sleep, your network drops? How bad could that be?

Loss of employee productivity. Loss of customers. Loss of revenue, about $1.7 billion each year according to CDW survey. Customers ill-will from a bad experience with your business. Loss of business opportunities to competitors who are just a click away… The list goes on. In short, pretty bad.

“Some of the worst things that could happen are outages which idle employees or prevent customers from doing business with you,” Nizen said. ”The most painful ones, from your boss’ perspective especially, are outages which could have been prevented, had you only known about the problem ahead of time.”"

What problems could I see?

While network problems come in all flavors and sizes, Nizen identified some of the most common issues that could happen:

• Full disk drives
• Systems running out of memory
• Too high system load
• Key applications or processes dying
• Key websites failing to load
• Physical hardware failures
• Network outages (fiber cuts, rooting loops, touring snarls)
• Network latency

Still, the worst problem that could happen is one that could have been prevented (or resolved faster). The runner up is just not knowing it’s happening at all.

What can I do to prevent them?

The good news is that there are a few precautions that small business owners can take to ensure that network downtime is at the utmost minimum. The SLAC National Accelerator Library at Stanford as a running list of network monitoring tools, but it boils down to four options:

1. Hire an in-house IT guy: This will get expensive as tech support is not cheap, and you have to hope that he does not need to sleep in the 24 hours a day, 365 days year that you need your network to work.
2. Free software: Yes, the free word is inciting, but don’t call it a day yet. Just like stock photography, you get what you pay for, and you or someone on your staff will still need to get up to speed on deploying and maintaining which ever package you decide to gamble on.
3. Paid software: You get a more robust option and can customize it to fit exactly what you need, but you’ll still become your own IT guy trusting that a computer-based program will maintain a computer-based network program will skillfully maintain and monitor a dynamic, changing IT network.
4. Outsourcing: It’ll still be pricey, but it’s the most cost effective option that gives you full protection since you’ll have engineers doing the monitoring while you’re running the business. You also won’t have the headaches associated with training, vacations, sick days and attrition

What can I do to  keep it all in check?

1. Don’t ignore syslog and traps: Many monitoring platforms do a good job of polling using protocols such as ICMP ping and SNMP, but many folks fail to invest the time to set up syslog messages and SNMP traps. This kind of telemetry can be invaluable in catching errors and critical issues that are reported by key components such as servers and routers. You’ll need a trap collector to process and alert on this data, but it is well worth the effort.
2. Important data deserves thresholds: Too many times customers deploy monitoring systems that collect tons of data, but don’t have any thresholds specified. It’s great that you can look at pretty disk utilization graphs, but if you don’t put a threshold on it, you’ll never get that alert at 3:00 AM telling you you’re about to run out of space.
3. SNMP isn’t always the best method: SNMP is usually the workhorse providing the majority of our data collection. That said, some equipment either doesn’t support it or had done a poor job implementing it. Often times there is a call level interface (CLI) or other protocol more suited to collect the data you need in order to do the job right. For Windows servers especially, use WMI/WinRM for data collection and a utility like SNARE to forward Windows Events as syslog messages. The platform you choose needs to be flexible enough to incorporate multiple methods of data collection.
4. Don’t rely on agents: Agent-based systems require you to install a small piece of code, or program, on the machine to be monitored. If there is a problem detected on that machine, the agent sends an alert to the monitoring system, which then typically sends an email or SMS to you. The problem with agents is that if the machine fails and goes down, so does the agent. Use a system which is independent of the network it intends to monitor.
5. Consider using synthetic transactions: How many times have you gone to a website just to find out that you couldn’t log in, post, download, etc. Just because a site is up and accessible doesn’t mean it’s actually working. Synthetic transactions allow you to do a ‘deeper dive’ and actually put a site or application through its paces. The automatically, and systematically, test for availability and correct functioning of key systems. For example, a synthetic transaction may simulate accessing a website, logging in to the site, downloading a file, then logging out – every 5 minutes.
6. Have a backup plan: To guard against disaster, you need backups. Whether it’s the configs on your routers or the files on your PCs and servers, there are numerous services out there to help you get back on your feet in the event of a catastrophic failure. If you’ve ever had a disk drive fail on a PC or laptop, this one should be obvious to you. Companies like Carbonite and Mozy make inexpensive backup services available to the masses for as little as $50 a year for consumers and just a little bit more for small businesses.
7. Ease of working together: That foreign-based company may have some killer pricing, and even an effective monitoring platform, but when they call you at 2 AM will you be able to understand them?

Proper monitoring can be tricky to implement and it does require a great deal of time, effort, and skill to maintain it. There is hardware and software to buy, analysis and development to be done, implementation and customization, and then the ongoing updates, upgrades and maintenance.  But don’t wait until you’ve gone through an outage once to take the steps to put some sort of system in place.

Question Photo via Shutterstock

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Now, web design companies are as common as the websites they create.  Google returns more than 961 million results for the search term, but as most everything, those 961 million results aren’t created equally. And when you actually choose one from the pile – one that is likely ranked on the first page, if not in the top 3 results – your work has just gotten started.

Sure, a good ranking could help you make your decision, but if you just stop there, you’re getting a company who’s really good at SEO and maybe only partly good at the actual web design part. There are so many other things that should fall in the decision making because it’s not one that should be taken lightly.  This task is also probably handled by a marketing professional who is already overwhelmed with dozens of other “top” priorities.

So how do you know that the company you found in Google is the right company to be responsible for your online image?

Do you like their site? 

First impressions matter.  You wouldn’t go to a dentist you had terrible teeth, right? No, you wouldn’t. You are looking for someone to help you with your first impression, so you need to be impressed with theirs.

Do you like their work?

Direct industry experience doesn’t matter — or, at least, shouldn’t matter as much. Even if they haven’t done a slew of sites in your direct industry, don’t discredit it. You know what you like, so what matters is seeing things you like in their portfolio. The work should stand on its own.

Does their sales person know their stuff?

Do they need to be the actual developer? No, but they should be able to understand your problems and be able to articulate how their service can address those problems. It’s surprisingly easy to spot people who are just talk. If you’re not overly techy, try looping in your IT department so they can help you make some sense of it.

Do you believe their story?

It’s not that people actually try to deceive someone, but if you are having a conversation about your needs and their ability to deliver on those needs, you should just ask yourself simply, “Do I think that they are shooting me straight?”  If it’s timeline, budget, technologies, expertise, or whatever, the story needs to add up.  If you trust your gut, you will make the right decision.

Who does the work?

Sales people are great, but the designers and programmers are the ones actually building your website. Ask where they’re located and if they’re full-time or part-time. What you don’t want is to get into a relationship with a company whose employees are all contractors or working oversees because if there’s a problem with your site, you want it fixed now, not the next time they punch in.

Who owns the code?  

This one is big.  If you don’t own the work at the end of the process you should run, don’t walk, from that firm.  You will have more problems in the long term with a company who owns your stuff.  You want to know that they are going to be there for you after the launch because you want them to not because you have no other choice in the matter.

In this industry, the adage that you get what you pay for is by far the truest of all truths. There is no checklist or silver bullet when it comes to this kind of decision, but the above will help steer you in the right direction.

Pondering Photo via Shutterstock

The post Choosing a Web Design Company appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Sure, a good salesperson knows how to sell, but how often do managers sell? They may still hit their numbers — hey, they may even surpass them — but the rest of your sales team is left struggling to hit their full potential because they’re not being properly managed.  And if your sales team isn’t hitting their full potential, neither is your business. In fact, Cisco Systems estimated that bad bosses cost firms $12 million annually. Imagine how much you could grow your business if even just a fraction of that was filtered back into your businesses? Ready to start looking for the real candidate for your sales manager?

“The characteristics of a good salesperson are money motivated, large ego, and a bit selfish,” said Greta Schulz, founder and CEO of Schulz Sales Consulting. “These are the opposite of what a sales manager should be.”

So, what qualities should you look for in a sales manager? Glad you asked. Schulz suggests finding someone with these three qualities:

1. Strong coaching: The last thing you want in any type of manager is a big ego because it can’t, nor should it, always be about them. You need someone who not only knows what to do, but can teach it to others and understand what happened — and why it happened — if a sale didn’t go through.
2. Leadership: No one likes being told what to do. The best sales managers will ask their team questions to help them realize on their own what they should do. That way they’ll figure out the answer on their own, and when they do, it’s ingrained in their memory.
3.  Accountability: Sales beckons a do-it-yourself mentality, but even though they’re on their own, they still need management. Your best sales manager will keep the rest of the team accountable for their activities and coach them through each step of the process to get them closer to the close.

When you find someone whose skills check out, whether they’re homegrown or an outsider, you’re not free from red flags just yet. In order for them to succeed, they need some support from you. You need to give them:

1. Proper management training: This is especially the case if your new sales manager has never directly managed a team before.
2. The right responsibilities: Your sales manager is not a marketer or an office manager. You promoted them to lead, not to be stuck behind grunt work. They’re there to create the your sales process; staff and train the department; set company sales goals and track progress; and finally, lead and motive the team to hit those goals.
3. Freedom to manage their way: Sales managers are the epitome of a middle management role: They have people reporting to them, but ultimately will be reporting to you. Instead of you being involved in every decision, step back and let them lead. Giving someone the freedom to make mistakes will help them learn from their mistakes and correct them.
4. Time to learn: One of the worst things that can happen to any manager is them becoming complacent.  They get stuck doing the wrong responsibilities, and they lose the designer to learn and better the department.  Sales managers need the time to effectively learn what happens between sales call and closed sale, and stay in touch with resources so they keep evolving.

While it’s important to look to other outlets to find the best person for the best job, don’t immediately rule out your best sales person because they may have all of the qualities mentioned above. And if they do, your job just got much easier.

Sales Manager Photo via Shutterstock

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