I thought to write an article about how we handle a new customer and the process behind meeting their needs with a new website or revamping their existing one. To put it simply, we follow a short list that seems to work every time:

1. Get to know the target market: who are we trying to attract?
2. Understand the goal of the website: what do we want the customer to do when they arrive?
3. Design a mock-up: a first draft image of what the web site could look like.
4. Begin coding: sending links to the client when pages are ready for review.
5. Keep optimization in mind: always making sure it will be readable by search engines.
6. Complete, test, and launch: the site is live and ready to work.

Let’s look at these steps in some detail and see what’s going on.

1. Get to Know the Target Market

When thinking about marketing a business and how to get the company message across, a starting point is to start thinking like the customer and what would be attractive to them. A common mistake is to design the website that you want. I know that sounds strange, but you’re usually not the one buying your product. You should be designing the website that your customer wants. With a little research and creative thought, a good website will speak directly to its market and leave out any personal aethetics. An obvious place to see this in action is to take a look at your successful competitors and how their websites accomplish this.

2. Understand the Goal of the Website

Once we know who the website is made to attract, we should look at what we expect them to do when they get there. Most of the time the goal of a website is to get the customer to pick up the phone and dial the number. Other times it might be to get the customer to take out their credit card and checkout. This request for the customer to “do something” when they’re at your website is called a “call to action” and it should be loud and clear, and on every page of the site. This is another simple idea that is effective and often overlooked. If a website is a brochure-style site that gives information about the company and its services, the customer’s call to action could be to call for an appointment. It’s good practice to tell the customer that you want them to do that and encourage them at the end of every page. For example, the last paragraph of a web page about your sevices could read, “to find out if our service is right for you, please call us today at 1-800-555-5555.” and possibly include a link to your contact page. This may seem obvious but it’s just the sort of thing that is left out of service related websites all the time.

3. Design a Mock-Up

An example of a mockup done for Martoni's restaurant

Taking the above into consideration, we’re ready to put together an idea of what the website could look like. This includes how the visitor is going to navigate the website, what colors and photos will be used, and of course typography and layout. The mock-up to the right was created for Martoni’s Restaurant and was modeled after their restaurant interior. Click on the image to see it full size.

The idea behind the mock-up is to see how close the designer can get to the final product without actually coding the XHTML needed to create the website. It’s a lot easier to make changes to a Photoshop document than to try and code everything before we know if the customer is happy with the design. This is the time for development and change to the overall site. The mock-up is either put up on the web for the customer to see in their browser, or else emailed to them for review. Changes are communicated through emails and updates to the mock-up until the customer is happy with the design and it’s ready to be made into a website.

4. Begin Coding

This is the bulk of the project for the web people. Using standards compliant XHTML and CSS styles to recreate the mock-up, the website is built to resemble the mock-up in every possible way while using as much readable text as possible (readable by search engines and humans alike – explained more in the next section). This is where drop-down menus are added, and cool web components that make using the website fun for the visitor (and fun for us web geeks to code and get working the way we want!). The Martoni’s website can be seen here and hopefully you’ll see the similarity between the actual site and the Photoshop mock-up we did.

5. Keep Optimization In Mind

To be clear, we’re not talking about being listed on the first page of Google. That’s called Search Engine Marketing, and it’s a value added to a website that is separate from basic website optimization. Search Engine Optimization means that the website is using basic methods, if not every method, to be readable and understood by search engines looking to index the website along side it’s peers. When a search engine finds a website it reads the back-end code to figure out what the website is about. Some ways a web designer can help a search engine do this is by giving every page a title that accurately describes the content within that page. The same thing goes for the page description. I should write an article about SEO and be more specific there, because the topic is extensive. The main idea I want to convey here is that when we design a website, every effort is made to keep the website readable by search engines, even if the client is not interested in being on the first page of Google. A website that is read easily by search engines is going to have cleaner, more organized code than a website that has ignored SEO.

Let’s not forget about the customer here, either. After all, they are the ones we’re concerned with the most. Google isn’t buying anything from anyone. The content should be good, informative, informational. It should say what the customer came to read about, and hopefully entice them to make the next step.

6. Complete, Test and Launch

The client (like a movie director) should have final say on how the site looks and feels. Any last minute changes are made here. The website would be fully tested at this point – all links checked and verified, and all components testing positive. The final step is to get the site live on the web for customers to use. In order to do this there needs to be a domain registered and a hosting package setup for that domain. We can take care of this for the client if they have not done so already, but it’s a simple and inexpensive process, and there are many competing hosting companies that can take care of everything. Uploading a finished website to the client’s hosting package takes just a few minutes and once it’s completed the site is ready to go and visible to the world.

Following this basic checklist has been very successful for us, and has left our clients happy with their new websites. I hope this has been helpful in getting to know more about the process of creating a new website from the ground up. Please leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on the subject. Thanks for reading!

A really common question I get is what to do with  a computer that’s slow and, sometimes, outdated. The answer depends on many factors, but I’ll give a few scenarios that might be close enough to home to help you make the right choice regarding your laptop or desktop computer.

Scenario 1: The family computer is riddled with spyware and viruses

This is the computer I see most often. In some cases it’s just slow and unresponsive, but in other cases it won’t connect to the Internet at all. And most of the time the computer is not that old. I’ve received computers that won’t allow Windows updates due to spyware, and others that wouldn’t print until all traces of spyware were removed. Depending on the severity and number of problems the computer is having,  it can either be repaired or Windows can be reinstalled. But either way, this is a problem that can be fixed. So before throwing a perfectly good computer out the window, consider this:

1. Most slow computers can be cleaned of spyware. If what you need it to do is connect to the Internet and send a few emails, it is still very capable of doing so. A good computer service company should charge about $200 to clean the computer right and get it back to you, spyware free and somewhat more protected from further trouble.
2. Even if the computer has no hope of recovery from the Internet beating that kids put them through, Windows can always be reinstalled. If you can find those installation CD’s that came with your computer (though some computers don’t ship with installation CD’s, they’re installed on the hard drive) you can give them to your local computer guy and he can save your computer. This involves a backup, done by you or by the computer tech. Just make sure you’re not backing up a virus along with your mp3’s. If you have any questions about this process, please ask at the end of the article or give us a call.
3. If buying a new computer still looks attractive, remember that your new computer won’t have any of your saved documents, music, photos, Internet favorites, and other possibly needed email and financial data. These things can be transferred from your old computer to your new one for a fee. Keep reading for info about buying new.

This is coming across as a rough guide; there are so many factors unique to each scenario. But in general what I’m writing are my findings and what your options are, for better or worse.

Scenario 2: The computer won’t start.

I don’t mean the computer is slow, or that once the computer starts you can’t see your Windows icons. I mean he computer gets no power, no lights come on, no whirring sounds, nothing. There may be hope…

In most cases this is caused by one of two things. Either the power supply has blown or the motherboard has gone bad. The good news is that a new power supply is cheap to buy and cheap to have put in. You might be back up and running for about $90 parts and labor. The bad news is that a new motherboard is a pain in the butt to get together. If you can’t find a duplicate board you’re going to be running into some problems (to put it really simply). In either case you should have the computer tested. If it’s the power supply, tell your computer guy to put it in. If it’s the motherboard you might be better off getting a new computer.

Scenario 3: It’s just too slow.

Computers today are being used to surf the web, primarily, and the web is growing – new technologies are being added to web sites, slow connection speeds are becoming a memory – probably faster than your computer can handle. Should you junk it for a new one? How about an upgrade?

Upgrading a computer usually involves adding memory. A common misconception is that you need a bigger hard drive. I’m not sure how that got started, but here’s a way to think about it: A hard drive is like a closet. You put you stuff in it. If you run out of room in your closet, then you need a bigger closet (see the previous article about backing up and storage devices). This has little to do with speed on the Internet. Even if you had a walk-in closet with shoe racks you wouldn’t be able to get dressed and out the door any faster. Memory on the other hand is like the little, flat drawer of a desk. You put in that drawer the things you need to grab, fast and often. A computer uses memory in a similar way. It puts things there that it needs to use often and the more room it has to put things, the faster the computer can be. Adding memory to an old computer can increase speed pretty significantly. Here are a few tips about adding memory:

1. Call your computer manufacturer and find out how much memory your computer can take. Every computer has a limit.
2. Ask the manufacturer what type of memory your computer needs. Write down whatever they tell you.
3. Before buying memory directly from them, do a search on the Internet for your memory type. You’ll probably find it for a lot cheaper.

Scenario 4: We really need a new computer!

Sometimes, no amount of care is going to help bring your computer back to life. At least back to the modern life it’s expected to live. The first place I tell my customers to look is www.Dell.com, and I’m not getting a cent for saying so. Their computers are cheap and they work as well as any other computer make that I come across. Check out their three tiers of computer prices and you should find a pretty good deal.

The ugly truth is PCs are not made to last. Every manufacturer is selling a computer made with hardware from different companies from all over the world, none of whom are trying to make a product that lasts forever, but want to keep their price down low enough to keep getting their business. Hard drives are particularly flimsy lately. But I’ve seen every part of a computer stop working, all by itself, for no good reason.

What I can tell you about buying a new computer is what to look for. If your computer will come with Windows Vista I suggest 2GB of memory, but you’ll be happier with 3 or 4GB. Your computer will run faster and will handle basic processes with ease. This, along with processor speed is what will increase both the speed and the cost of a new computer. The faster the processor the faster the computer is and the longer it will be able to keep up with the tasks to come. Don’t worry about hard drive size. Any 80 – 160GB hard drive is going to handle most music and photo needs for years. If you’re anticipating a lot of music, photos, and especially video, then consider adding extra storage. But an external hard drive can always be added later. A 500GB external drive will cost you about $100.

Then there’s mac. What can I say other than they’re the best computers made to date? Try this: “we have figured out the computer: it’s a mac.” If you don’t want to learn how to use one, stick with a PC, it’s what I use! If you’re still fresh at using the computer and are interested in a mac, head over to your local Apple store and try one out. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

One more thing…

A main concern for me is the environment. The U.S. throws away so much technology every year, it’s staggering. The idea of throwing a computer in a garbage truck, just because it’s got spyware is insane. See what the cost is for cleaning it up first, and ask if it can be upgraded while you’re at it. If your computer can’t be saved your local computer guy might want to take it off your hands. I’ve gotten plenty of computers from customers that didn’t want to pay for repair, so I turned them around (wiped clean of course) and gave them to the YMCA. If you can’t give it away, take it over to Staples. They’ll recycle it for you there.

I hope this article has helped give some good information about what to do with a slow computer. Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment.

And looking around on the web, it’s going to depend on who you trust for advice. The problem lies in how and when the computer is writing to the drive. Obviously unplugging something when it’s in use is a bad idea. For USB hard drives (and flash/thumb drives) there is usually an indicator that the drive is in use. For my Toshiba drive there’s a little blue light that blinks when in use, and stays steady when it’s not in use, but plugged in.

I’ve been pulling out USB devices out of computers since USB was made available, knowing well there was a “safer” way to remove it – click once on the little green arrow icon, and click the option to remove the drive. I’ve never had trouble doing so with Windows XP and USB devices. In fact, I’ve never heard of anyone having trouble pulling out a device that was sitting idle. So why would stopping the device first be safer?

The Microsoft response to this was written when XP was still in BETA, and you can read it here. The article says that older operating systems – Windows 2000, 98, 95 – used to write to the drive at different times, called a “caching policy”. The idea was that it could give the computer user more control by writing to the drive when the computer was less busy. And with previous versions of Windows we would see a warning that we did not safely remove the device. Kind of scary! This has been removed in XP because they got rid of the caching policy that delays writing to the drive. This is getting more technical than I thought it would, so I apologize for the jargon.

So what did we learn?

1. If your device (hard drive, thumb drive, etc.) has an indicator that lets you know that it’s just sitting there, idle, feel free to pull that USB cable with confidence. There’s no harm.
2. If you need to unplug your device while it’s busy, use the safely remove hardware icon to help you. Otherwise you risk corrupting the data, possibly making the drive unreadable. Bad for backups!
3. Finally, it comes down to habit. If you’ve seen that warning about yanking out the USB cable (and once could be enough) you might be using the “safely remove hardware” icon to be safe and not sorry. And if you do, it won’t hurt your device one bit.

I’ve recently implemented a straight forward backup method I think anyone and everyone should be doing. So today’s article is going to try and convince you to start doing those all-important backups at home and at work (if you’re not already backed up some other way). The idea is simple, get a hard drive with plenty of capacity and plug it in. Then tell it what to back up, how often, and viola, you’re ready for catastrophe to strike.

For me, I purchased a Toshiba USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive from TidgerDirect.com. First, an external hard drive is just another name for a big closet to keep all your stuff. When you get one, you just plug it in and the computer sees another hard drive (or closet) and you can put your stuff in it. External hard drives can be used as extra storage, but I’m going to use it to make an extra copy of everything just in case the computer goes kaput one day. I bought it on line from Tiger Direct because they’re reliable, have quick delivery, and great prices. But you can pick up an external hard drive at Best Buy or Staples if that’s more convenient for you.

Another word about External Hard Drives, there are 2 types that you might come across. One is a big, hefty looking thing. This type of drive will be available in large storage sizes, and needs to get power from the wall (in other words, it comes with a power adapter you need to plug in to the wall to turn it on). The second type of external drive is smaller and might say “portable storage”. These drives are indeed smaller and more portable. They also get their power from your computer, so you only need to plug the USB cable into your computer and you’re ready to go. The portable drive I got from Toshiba is 500GB which should be enough storage for the next 2-3 years.

Now to install the drive and get the computer talking to it, you just plug the USB cable (included) into your drive, the other end into your computer and you’ve just installed your hard drive. The next trick is to get the drive to backup your important things – music, photos, documents – and have it do so on a schedule. My Toshiba drive came with software installed on the drive already, so I’ll be using that. But if you’re looking for something that will do this job, there’s a free program called SyncBack I highly recommend, and you can download it here from Download.com.

Because every backup software is different, and to explain how to set it all up is going beyond this article, you might check out the manual for the software (there should be a PDF somewhere) for a detailed explanation. The main idea is to tell the software what you want backed up and how often. An example might be to backup the entire My Documents folder, which includes your My Music and My Pictures folders. Then tell it to backup every Friday at 5pm. If a weekly backup isn’t frequent enough, tell it to back up every hour! The important thing is to make sure the drive is plugged into the computer when backup time comes. If the drive is not plugged in, it will probably just skip that backup session and wait until the next one comes around.

I hope you found this article helpful. Please leave a comment if you have a question, or if you’d like to leave any feedback for others to read. Thanks for reading!

To make things more complicated, he needed to collaborate in both Word and PowerPoint.  Could he do something like this?

Luckily there’s a cool feature in Microsoft Word 2002, 2003 and 2007 called  “Track Changes”. This feature lets you make changes to a document, and as you do so, it keeps track of everything you change on the side of the screen. PowerPoint is another issue…

To turn on Track Changes in MS Word, open any Word document and click the Insert tab in Word 2007 (in earlier versions you need to turn on the “Reviewing” toolbar – click View -> Toolbars and choose Reviewing).

The image above shows Word 2007 with the Review tab selected. There you’ll see a button called Track changes. Once you turn this on, Word will start tracking all changes you make on your document, allowing you to accept the changes made or reject them and undo the changes.

Microsoft has written a few tutorials that take you through the process step-by-step. Here are a few links I found that you might find helpful:

How to Track Changes in Word 2003 and Word 2003

Track Changes While You Edit in Word 2007

So here’s the next question: can this be done in PowerPoint as well? The short answer is no, since PowerPoint does not include this feature in any version. However there is a way to keep notes in PowerPoint 2007 that might be pretty useful when collaborating. Comments, which act almost like Post-It notes, can be added to any slide in your presentation and can be saved, edited or deleted. So when collaborating on a presentation, you and your partner can make a change to a slide and leave a comment explaining what was done. The comment could be updated, deleted, or else a new comment could be added.

To add a Comment to a slide in PowerPoint 2007, click the Review tab (the same way it’s done in Word 2007) and click the New Comment button, then add your text to the box that appears. You can then edit or delete any comments on the slide.

Here’s a good tutorial on adding Comments in PowerPoint 2007 from the Microsoft website: Add, change, or delete a Comment in a Presentation

Unfortunately this feature is not the same in PP 2002, and 2003, but you are able to makes notes on slides. Though these are mostly for the speaker and can only be seen when using the print view that includes speaker notes, it is possible to make notes on slides without them appearing in your presentation.

If you have any questions on this article, or would like to leave a comment, we would appreciate any feedback you may have. Thanks for reading!