Best Practices

Aug 6th, 2008

Fork in the Road

photo credit: tonystl
In the past year and a half, I’ve done a fair amount of web work for a local marketing company, Silver Square. For a variety of reasons (foremost the quality of the people there) the organization is growing at a healthly clip. So much so that they are looking to bring someone internal [...]

Apr 9th, 2008

Give Your Expertise Away

You have a lot of information locked up in your skull. Think about it. How often do you come across a web site and think to yourself the person in charge of this could make it 500% better if they just made a few simple changes? That’s unique information that you have and they don’t. [...]

Mar 26th, 2008

We vs. I

When I was first starting this company, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I had the technical chops to build web sites, but I didn’t know much about running a business. Sales? Budgeting? I was just proud that I had completed the paperwork so that the state of Indiana recognized me as a [...]

Jan 17th, 2008

Leveraging Fresh, Original Content

One of the most difficult and valuable things to create on a web site is original content that is regularly updated. You can design a stylized layout that will draw visitors in, but if there isn’t relevant content that is regularly updated, visitors aren’t going to stay long. Yet most business owners did not start [...]

Nov 7th, 2007

Is It Easy To Do Business With You?

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed I was running low on business cards. When I first started my business, I threw together a simple card design and went with the cheapest printer I could find on the Internet. (VistaPrint is what I found, if you’re curious.) My business has grown quite a bit since [...]

Sep 21st, 2007

Gracefully Outgrow Your Customers

If you stay in business for very long, there’s going to come a time when you outgrow some of your previous customers. As your business develops, you will begin to notice that certain types of work and certain clients are more profitable, rewarding, or in some other way more desirable. When your days begin filling [...]

Sep 12th, 2007

All I Want For Christmas Is To Reach My Customers

I came across a post in my RSS feeds today that talked about saving money on Christmas cards for your clients by doing a custom design. That got me thinking. I wouldn’t normally use an e-card as communication with a customer. Because they require so little effort and are somewhat generic, they don’t convey that [...]

May 16th, 2007

New Business From Existing Customers

Conventional marketing wisdom tells us that it is cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to find new customers. For businesses with products and recurring services, it’s usually obvious how to generate new income from past customers: they buy another box or another haircut or whatever. While there are exceptions, a lot of web [...]

Apr 4th, 2007

Tell Your Small Clients About Standardization

I came across a good article yesterday with the title, The business case for Web standards-based development. I like the break down at the end of the article of all the benefits that come with designing a standards compliant web site.
It got me thinking about the clients I’ve had in the last year. Most of [...]

Feb 21st, 2007

Don’t Guess What Your Customers Want

My guess would be most web designers learn this lesson pretty early, but I’d like to add it to the Best Practices canon anyway. You design web sites all the time for all kinds of clients. As a result, you’ve built up a good deal of knowledge about what does and does not work in [...]

Dealing With Clients