Microsite vs. Infidelity
→ by Scott on August 19th, 2008Sometimes you hear about men who take on a mistress. Recently there was that New York District Attorney that got caught up in a prostitution scandal.
I guess men take these women on because they’re going through something internally. Maybe they’re not happy with their wife, their sex life or they’re just plain “crisising”.
Ultimately it seems these stories end with a lot of money spent on something they probably shouldn’t have let go on so long. At the end of the day they still have a neglected wife and no real resolution to the core issues.
For some reason this reminds me of microsites.
It’s been my observation that when a client isn’t happy with their website, how it looks or they just don’t know how to say what needs to be said in it, they build a microsite.
The truth is, this story ends the same: A lot of money spent on something that shouldn’t have gone on so long and a neglected corporate site that really just needs some extra attention to turn it into something you’re attracted to again.
37Signals Switches to Git
→ by Scott on August 18th, 2008Long time Subversion shop 37signals is migrating their code management from SVN to GIT. GIT is a code management system originally developed by Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system.
Jamis writes about why they’re making the switch to GIT and says:
Branching and merging in Subversion are painful. If you’ve never used it, you don’t know what I mean. If you have, you do. Branching and merging in git, though, are wonderfully, blissfully straightforward.
Check it out over at the Signal vs. Noise blog.
Free Analytics with Interesting Feature Set: Woopra
→ by Scott on August 5th, 2008
Woopra is a Google Analytics competitor with a few interesting features that set it apart from our old friend. Notable is the real time stats, which should please a lot of site owners (myself included). I might give it a go if it’s something I can install in the shared hosting environment that drives this site.
For a list of their key features, check out their feature page over at Woopra.com.
Using Social Media: Sprint Instinct
→ by Scott on July 31st, 2008The idea is Sprint puts you in a contest for including their product in your movie.
On the surface it seems like a pretty basic way to get exposure (impressions), but the interesting thing is you can’t place the product if you don’t have it. That means two things:
- Sprint has now gotten their existing clients to evangelize their product
- They’ve added a ‘got to have’ aspect to their Instinct product.
Thought this was clever.
lolhtml Back From the Dead
→ by Scott on July 30th, 2008Thanks to my own failure to back things up regularly lolhtml! is a bit of a time warp. Guess I’ll have to get writing again.
I tried out ExpressionEngine. Pretty powerful, but way overkill for this little black n’ white site.
Why is a Rockstar Better at Social Media Than Agencies?
→ by Scott on June 30th, 2008Lately Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has been making a great effort at changing (thwarting?) the traditional model of making money as a musician.
In the last few months he’s produced 2 albums worth of content, fired his record label and used his popular website to sew it all together.
The interesting part isn’t the website itself, but how he’s managed to pull together a lot of very popular social networking sites and concepts into the site to spread his music and tour dates around the net.
Reznor does have one thing going for him: His audience is by-and-large technically savvy so this single type of medium would have good results for him. But regardless, there’s a few things we can learn from Trent at the agency level.
- Social media isn’t about you publishing content, it’s about you releasing compelling enough content for your audience to circulate
With “Lights in the Sky Over North America” there were standard ad banners for use on fansites (as well as some backgrounds and even chat avatars) included alongside 4 MP3s. Like most things that come out of Reznor and his team these banners & wallpapers were stylish pieces that most NIN fans would happily use.
- The promoted content is small, focused and clear
The entire purpose behind the promotion was very simple: Make people aware of tour dates. All the media is based around this. There’s a site setup with the core information about the tour dates and the shareable packages.
- External social sites are already in place driving to the main informational site/system
In addition to the microsite there are also sites set up at YouTube and iLike driving back to the main NIN site. By promoting on all of these sites Reznor has increased his frequency and likelihood of being found. This is a well thoughtout network with a good microsite strategy in place.
Overall the concepts promoting the “Light in the Sky over North America” are a good model that has many applications in agency level marketing. While the concepts are certainly not new, they are elegantly executed meshed overtop a long running marketing strategy. The fanboy in me wonders if Reznor knows he’s been campaigning for the last 2 years.
Copywriters, Content and Editing
→ by Scott on May 30th, 2008A great article on the often elusive task of getting content for your web projects over at AListApart.
In the vast majority of website projects that I have managed during my ten years in the industry, content is often the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We’ll spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, wireframes, designs, schemas, and specifications—but content? It’s a disrespected line item in a schedule: “final content delivered.” It’s the perennial cause of delay and the stuff of myth (I once shelved a project for three years while the client “wrote” his content.) It’s a malaise that needs fixing and needs fixing fast.
New lolhtml! Powered by Wordpress
→ by Scott on May 27th, 2008All new lolhtml! is powered by Wordpress. I removed almost all the bells and whistles with the idea that searching is better than navigating. I’m also using the “tagging” method of categorizing posts (a la alistapart) instead of categories proper. I’m going to base any kind of post navigation on tags.
Right now there’s a server problem that prevents me from submitting information with % signs, meaning I can’t set friendly URLs. Hopefully I can get that worked out with Travis over at meticulo.
[update] - Thanks Helperoo & Meticulo. Permalinks are now Search Engine Friendly.
Your Audience is Watching
→ by Scott on May 7th, 2008To make the most of your website or web application you’ve got to know who’s going to be visiting it.
It’s not that difficult a question on paper, “who are we talking to?”; but somehow it always seems to get muddled, generalized or just not answered. Worse in large campaigns or across many small ‘random acts of marketing’ it gets copied and pasted from brief to brief, same as the last one even when the goals have changed.
I’ve sat on the side of the table asking the questions many times. It’s not uncommon for the client on the other side to claim their audience is everyone. I’ve heard them say it across a lot of industries from tourism to industrial manufacturing. I can’t tell you if it’s ego, wishful thinking or if they just don’t think it’s important - but I know it’s bad news.
We’re targeting men and women, 25-40 with education varying from high school to university and household incomes of 35 to 100 thousand a year.
What?
You can count the number of companies with products that have that kind of appeal on 1 hand.
Nope, chances are there’s a much smaller segment of the population you’re after. More importantly there’s a much smaller part of the population that’s willing to listen.
But that’s why we get hired. It’s our responsibility - the agency, account executive, developer, freelance designer, contracted project manager - to push back and insist that the audience be better defined.
It’s my experience that coming across the table and proclaiming, “No that can’t be right”, isn’t going to get you anywhere. To get that audience profile down you’ve got ask leading questions for your client.
- Who’s buying right now?
- Who do we want buying?
- What do your clients buy that you don’t sell?
- Where do they live?
- What do they do in their spare time?
You’ll notice there’s a lot of these questions you couldn’t answer without talking to a client personally. But in most places I’ve worked for there’s always a few people on their team that know these answers intuitively. They’re salespeople, receptionists, account managers & tech support people. Your client stakeholder can canvas these people.
In the early parts of a project, knowing your target audience is essential to determining the right next steps. Which tactics make sense, where the media should be bought, what bells and whistles are going to appeal, which technology options are viable: All of these things hinge on who you want to talk with.
Tracking Your Website
→ by Scott on May 4th, 2008You’ve slogged through the design revisions, worked out most of the bugs; hell it even seems to work in IE6 the way it works everywhere else.
Now all that’s left is to watch the traffic roll in.
A lot of clients that come through the door at my shop are very interested in knowing how many people have come to their site. And I don’t disagree with them, it is interesting information. It validates your spend and effort; it is important information.
But the number of people who’ve come to your site isn’t a success defining metric. In almost all cases you’ve built your site for a reason, and your visitors interaction with that reason is something you should be tracking. Your total visitation becomes the baseline. That’s how you measure your site’s success.
Most analytics applications have functionality that allows you to set up goals for your site.
What goals allow you to do is define an action (or series of actions) on your site that are specifically tracked by your analytics application. By breaking these actions out - by segmenting them - you have have a number to compare against your total visitation. This number is called conversion.
Let’s say, for example, you have built a website to promote the sale of your home. You’ve set up a contact form on the site so people can book a showing with you, along with your home details and a photo-gallery.
What you really want is for people to buy your house. The site is just a conduit to that goal.
Chances are no one is going to buy your house without coming to see it. And since you’ve built a site where they can’t purchase the site online, your point of conversion is the contact form.
To track the real performance of your house-selling website we should monitor how many people are visiting the contact form (goal #1), and then one step further, how many people fill it out (goal #2).
Now we have use for our baseline information (total visitors).
If 1,000 people visited the site and 100 went to the contact form our conversion rate for goal #1 is 10%.
If 10 people filled out the contact form then our conversion rate for goal #2 is 1%.
Because we’re tracking 2 different actions individually we’re able to determine more than just conversion as well. If 100 people hit the form and only 10 filled it out, why did the other 90 not bother?
Properly tracking specific points of conversion in the site allow us to make new assumptions and identify areas for improvement. In our example, perhaps there’s an issue with the form that fell through cracks. Maybe we’re asking for too much information from our users. It could just be tirekickers, who knows? The point is we’re able to ask these questions because we’re able to stay focused by understanding our goals.
By understanding what we’re trying to accomplish on the sites we build we’re able to track the actions on the website that meet our business goals. Once we’re aware of how users behave around these interaction points we’re able to refine and improve our work to get the best possible results. It’s a process that’s 1 part math and 2 parts speculation.
