The big challenge on this theme was the fact that there wasn’t a header/logo/menu layout built into Pro Photo to accommodate the layout the client (Tiffany Kelley Designs) was going for. So instead we had to choose the closest fit we could find, wrap and break and position and pad the content until it looks like it does now, seamlessly wrapping around the masthead area.

The bio area was also a lot of fun to work on. Again, lots of custom CSS and a dash of absolute positioning to get all of our elements where we want them on the page.

Still, if you look close enough you’ll see a lot of custom backgrounds using advanced CSS positioning to place them in the correct spot in the Pro Photo theme. Pay close attention to the footer areas, content borders, date background and the masthead. Lots of really small elements that bring together a wonderful design without being too in your face with colors and textures.

Once again, this is a Tiffany Kelley Designs custom theme we were lucky enough to be asked to code into Pro Photo 4 and WordPress.

This was a particularly interesting design to work on. Because of the limitations in Pro Photo, we had to use a lot of custom CSS to manage the mis-aligned navigation menus and social media tag.

In either case, we had lots of fun, as we always do, when working on designs with Tiffany. She’s a real superstar and is a blast to work with.

Details:
Some of these projects are super-easy (I bet you’ve heard that before), with just a few small graphic elements needed to complete a design.

Other projects may require a full 1-page Layered PSD for us to use as a template for the client’s design.

In 100% of the instances that we need custom design work, the project manager will always provide you with a rough draft done in Photoshop so you’ll never be working without some pretty solid visual guidelines to help.

So what does it pay?
We won’t ask you to do anything that won’t take at least a few hours. The projects we need help with will range in price from $200-$600, and all payments are sent via PayPal.

Are you a good fit?
We work on fun projects with amazing clients, and strive to provide them with a fast turnaround time on their sites. If you already have a very busy workload, then this may not be a good fit for you.

Other than that, why don’t you email any specific questions you have, share a bit of your work with us and see if we can’t get this party started: resumes@oturia.com

Lisa’s photographic style is classy and elegant, and she needed that “look” to come through while presenting her work in an editorial fashion.

Be sure to check out her new blog site, and if you haven’t already signed up for the 2012 Seniorologie Tour where Lisa will be one of the speakers, get to it before they run out of spaces.

So it goes without saying that photographers are dream clients of ours. So what could be more dreamier than having a major photography community site like Clickin Moms ask us to redo their online store for them?

The ladies over CM know their stuff, and we were happy to help them customize their new e-commerce site with amazing (and in some cases previously unavailable) features. As a part of their re-launch, they’ve also got some new products available as well as some great specials coming up for holiday shopping.

Be sure to check out the Clickin Moms custom designed store for great deals on gifts and supplies for the photogs in your life!

After the meeting was over, a few of us stayed and chatted about how common it is to take the wrong approach to developing products and services, which led me to want to talk about what I view as the 5 most important parts of developing a new product or service.

Quit Focusing on Monetization

Two words… critical mass. If there aren’t enough people to use your product or service, you’ll never monetize anything. Focus instead on making the product the best at what it’s designed to do or be, then opportunities to monetize it will present themselves.

Think Facebook.

When we decided to focus entirely on WordPress development and support, a lot of people were concerned about whether or not we could get enough interest to keep the company afloat. There was a lot of talk about finding alternate ways to profit from our expertise by joining the ranks of theme and plugin developers.

But instead we created one of the only (and certainly one of the most popular) WordPress support companies on the market, and the opportunities to monetize our services have been abundant to say the least.

Let The Product Develop Itself

Don’t ever presume to know exactly what your target customers need or want. Certainly it’s possible, in fact necessary, to have a good idea of these things, but don’t let your preconceived notions dictate the development of your product.

Early on, we really thought we were going to serving primarily the “I tried WordPress but couldn’t figure it out” crowd. While a lot of time and money went into marketing from that perspective, we never let ourselves be driven only to serve that need.

Over time what we realized was that more and more savvy do it yourselfers were contacting us for help with smaller needs, and many graphic designers who just needed someone to turn their designs into fully-fledged sites. Our willingness and ability to adjust to what the market was really looking for allowed us to develop a much more successful product.

Recruit Your Demographic

Most people you know you need to hire smart people if you want your company to be successful. I agree with that statement. What a lot of people don’t realize is that you need to do more than hire smart people, you need to hire smart people who are a part of the demographic of customers you’re targeting.

When we saw more and more photographers flocking to us for help with their portfolio and blog sites, we knew right away that the best person to handle these new customers would be a photographer. And to this day with we use photographers to help with all of our marketing and project management to help us better understand and service that demographic.

Identify Your Real Competitors

Another major mistake people make when developing their products is to look for people doing the same thing as they are, and viewing them as their competitors. While there’s some merit there, it’s important for you to understand that a competitor is not necessarily a company offering the same product or service, it’s anything that acts as an alternative to what you have to offer.

Who is the Yellow Pages’ biggest competitor? I’ll give you a hint… it’s not another phonebook company, it’s Google.

Who is Facebook’s biggest competitor? Not MySpace, or Google or Twitter. It’s all of their users’ employers, families and other responsibilities. Facebook doesn’t need to worry about another social network, they need to worry about all the other time commitments that keep their users off of the site, and their success has been founded in their ability to get people to spend more and more time on their network.

Our biggest competitor wasn’t another design firm, nor a theme or plugin developer. We knew almost right away that our biggest competitor were the free WordPress forums, and nearly every aspect of our support department was built around outperforming the support found for free there.

Promote a Cooler Mouse Trap

Technology certainly has made the world a lot smaller, and truly original and innovative ideas aren’t completely absent, just fewer and farther in between. Not being the first at something, or being the one to have a truly unique idea, is not necessarily a deal breaker. What we’ve seen more and more these days is that it’s not always the best product that wins the largest market share, but instead the best marketed product.

Build up a culture around your products or services that is exciting, fun and cool. Hire exciting, fun and cool people. Market to exciting, fun and cool customers. See a pattern here? It’s really a simple concept… people don’t want a lame but perfect quality product, they want an awesome and high quality product.

Think iPhones. Forget that, think anything iEverything. High quality products, but certainly too full of flaws to be called perfect. But the culture surrounding the product illustrates my point exactly.

I would give an example of how we’ve done that here, but everyone knows it’s not cool to call yourself cool.

Conclusion

Building a great product or service isn’t rocket science, it just requires you take a different approach than what you’ll instinctually want to do. Define what you want to do, let the market guide you, hire your customers, dig deeper for your customers alternatives and build a kick-butt culture that you let your customers be a part of. The rest will take care of itself.

Customer Service Starts with The Sales Process

What a lot of companies are starting to realize is that there’s a huge disconnect between sales and support teams. While the sales team is responsible for convincing the prospective client to spend money with your organization, the support team is charged with keeping them happy with their decision to do so.

Start your sales process off with a prospect as though they already were your client. At Oturia, our sales team IS our support team, which makes for a better all around experience for customers. Here is an example of what one of our recent sales reps did to close a deal:

Working on closing a local client who owned a massage business, she was concerned about investing the money when she hadn’t even had a chance to have a sign made for her shop window or business cards to pass out to customers. In fact, she mentioned she was losing business because people were coming to the shopping square looking for her but weren’t able to find her office!

Our rep forwarded the clients email signature to our graphic designer, had them blow up their logo and make a legal-sized business sign. He took it to the UPS store, had it laminated and picked up about a sign hanging kit for about $5.

He brought it up to the customer’s shop, hung the new business sign for them and they signed the design contract right on the spot, all for just an hour’s worth of work and maybe $15 tops!

When you give a prospect a taste of what it’s like to be your customer, they’re far more likely to want to come on board.

Show Interest and Knowledge in What Your Customers Do

Yes, we all know what you do is very scientific stuff and prospects are entering into a realm full of complexities they cannot fully fathom. But that doesn’t mean you have to remind them of that. They’re still prospects, and like any other human being, they want people to show an interest in what they do.

Study their website. Maybe even order something from them anonymously. Take a half hour to read about them or their industry.

Make it a point to illustrate how your products or services can help them with what they do. Ask them questions about the customers they serve in their industry. Make the conversations with them more about them and what they do.

Educate Your Clients

One of the things we’ve found that makes our customers so happy is that we don’t just “do” and then bill for it. We try to help our customers understand what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how it affects them (without getting too technical with them).

A customer who knows what they’re getting, and why they’re getting it is going to come out of the situation feeling more knowledgeable about what you do. This means that they are more likely to feel good about their purchase with you, and are also more likely to spread the word about your company because they can speak intelligently with their colleagues about how it helped their business.

Setting the Right Expectations

You can’t under-promise too much and still expect to close the deal, but you have to make sure that you’re setting reasonable expectations with your clients before they write you a check. If a customer knows exactly what they’re getting into, when you deliver just that they’ll feel like they got what they paid for.

Be clear on how long it will take. Be clear on how it will look when it’s done. Be clear on what what they’ll be charged for. You can exceed those expectations if you can, but never underdeliver. Even one bad expectation can leave a customer feeling like they didn’t get what they paid for.

Treat Every Client Like Your Biggest Client

It’s not the sum of the project fee that makes your company tick, it’s the sum of your customers. We found out early on that one of our biggest and most profitable markets was serving customers that needed light programming done. Once we harnessed that, we were able to triple our company’s revenue. It wasn’t the big, custom design projects that got us to where we are, it was the 100+ customers who spent smaller amounts with us each month. Without any number of the smaller customers, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Show excitement with every new customer. Let them know how happy you are with having the chance to work with them. Work your tail off on the project and thank them for their business when you’re done. You never know when one small customer can lead to dozens more.

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a lot of extra effort to produce happy customers, you just have to start the process early on. However, if you can instill a culture fanatical about happy customers, you’ll find them fanatical about referring new customers your way!

Making matters worse, a lot of clients who may want to take a risk on a newer designer may not exactly have great tastes, and your best work might not be displayed on these first few projects. Hence, no new items added to the portfolio.

Some people suggest developing a few projects at no cost as a way to build up your portfolio. This is also not a great idea because not only do you attract a lot of customers from the previous paragraph, but you’re also setting the expectation that you work for free (or for cheap), neither of which is good for business later down the road. So, guess what? No new items added to the portfolio.

No clients, no portfolio. No portfolio, no new clients. It sounds like a catch 22, but it’s not if you consider doing a few sites for your favorite client… you!

Now, before we go any further, I’m not talking about your actual firm’s site, though that should be indicative of what you are capable of doing. No, what I am talking about is building 3-4 separate sites, all on different topics, with custom designs you’ve developed.

Why do this and how will it help me?

Trust me when I say, there is no better way to launch your web design career quick, fast and in a hurry by just doing some in-house work to start with. Here’s why:

You’ll Create Some of Your Best Work for Yourself
Working for yourself means that the creative process is less stifled than in more collaborative situations. You have no one else you’re designing for but yourself.

Just get to work creating an amazing design and the final product is what you want it to be.

People Want To See Your Work, Not Your Clients
Yes, there is a certain trust factor a potential customer gets from seeing that you’ve made other customers happy. But the truth is, they just want to see your work when they’re looking at your portfolio.

When you design the sites, in the footer area where the copyright info goes, just list the site’s name as the owner of the site (i.e. Copyright 2011 MyTestSite.com | All Rights Reserved).

The Most Affordable Entry-Level Marketing
When you’re first getting started, your portfolio is going to take you a long way. Fewer people view our portfolio than they did years ago as most of our work is done through graphic designers and other design firms. But when word-of-mouth isn’t yet strong enough to pay the bills, your portfolio is going to be a dealmaker (or breaker if it’s weak) when building up your clientele.

Considering that you really only pay for the domain names and your time in designing the sites, you are looking at spending less than 50 bucks to add a few sites onto your portfolio.

Conclusion
In then end, there really isn’t any reason for you not to have a solid portfolio built up, especially since you’re completely capable of coming up with your own site ideas. Just pick a few of your favorite things, design a few static sites around them and add them to your portfolio anonymously!

As a side note, some of our readers are graphic designers who don’t actually handle their own programming. We’re always happy to see other designers succeed, and have a special program just for this kind of situation.

If you are interested in how we can take 3-4 portfolio site designs and convert them into web designs and host them for you all for one affordable, flat rate, use the contact form in the sidebar and let us know you want us to help you build your portfolio!

The problem is that even reasonable requests can sometimes get drowned out by this “here we go again” feeling, even if the basis for the plea is a sound one. Valuable feedback and insight can get lost in that immediate inclination to explain away suggestions your client might have for your website.

One of the things we’re very careful about at Oturia is listening to feedback about comprehension and usability. You see, as designers and project managers, we’ve been conditioned to understand all of the elements that go into web design, and being a part of the project only heightens our understanding of how it all works together.

But from the outside looking in, especially for clients viewing the site for the first time, they are a far better representation of the demographic their website will be serving. And for that reason, you need to keep your mouth shut and ears open when someone starts talking about things on the site that may not make sense to them.

You see, some customers will be very outspoken about things they don’t get or don’t like, but others may mention it subtly or merely by asking questions that to you may seem very simple. In either case, when you’re going over the (near) finished design with the customer, pay especially close attention to the questions they ask about how things work or why certain things were done a certain way.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you should go adding a scrolling marquis across the top of the header. You still have to find a way to sort through the feedback they provide, defending basic design principles and standards, while picking up on the items that perhaps you should be re-evaluating.

Example

The other day, a client mentioned to me that their website had “a bunch of code at the bottom of my blogs”. I looked briefly at the site and saw exactly what I anticipated seeing: The instructions that go at the bottom of the WordPress comments box explaining what HTML tags someone can use in their comments.

It’s a pretty simple thing to read as a graphic designer

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=”" title=”"> <abbr title=”"> <acronym title=”"> <b> <blockquote cite=”"> <cite> <code> <del datetime=”"> <em> <i> <q cite=”"> <strike> <strong>

My initial response was tell them the same thing I had told a customer a few weeks ago, that these are just tags you can use in your comment.

But I didn’t even get past the first word before the end of that thought struck me: I had told a customer the same thing a few weeks before.

You see, it was very clear to me what the snippet of commenting instructions was saying, and it probably did make sense to plenty of younger, tech savvy readers, but my customer didn’t fit that description and neither did the demographic they were serving.

The point here is that everything will make sense to you as a designer or programmer. And yes, from time to time you will be asked to do ridiculous things that make no sense. However, if you find yourself getting any feedback about usability or comprehension of what something means or how it works, pay close attention. After all, your customer knows the web from their perspective far better than you do.

Near the top of this list of sacred commandments is a simple but profoundly critical statement:

We Will Not Do Business With People We Can’t Make Into Winners.

With nearly a decade of executive management at various start-ups under my belt, one of the most important things I’ve learned is to protect your brand, at any and all costs. And while a majority of the brand protection effort is applied towards product delivery and customer service, one of the most critical (and most overlooked) areas that can prevent brand smearing is in “Customer Selection”.

Graphic Design Customer Selection

The idea of Customer Selection is a hard one to fathom for a lot of start-ups and small businesses, especially when operating under the “Any Business is Good Business” philosophy. But let’s face it: no matter how bad we may want or need the revenue, almost all of us have had customers that we really regretted taking on.

These types of resentments are varied, and can range from “They’re too nit-picky” to “Oh, please Lord make it stop”. But, in most cases, once the job is over and the check is in the mail, we look back and tell ourselves that it really wasn’t that big of a deal.

And in most cases you would be right to think that. In most cases.

There is one type of customer that you always have to avoid, no matter how big the project, no matter how much money is involved, not matter what your horoscope said that day. There is one type of customer that you have to say no to, regardless of what is at stake, and that customer is the one that you can’t help become a winner.

The (Not) Winning Customer

So the customer has this brilliant idea to sell unique, custom pocket knives that you can’t buy anywhere else (except for every truck stop in America), and he needs you to build an e-commerce site for him to sell his million dollar idea. What’s better, is that when this works out then he has lots more ideas he’ll contract you for, like his one-of-a-kind online leather jacket consignment shop.

You can recognize this customer by an eerie sense of calm, like they’ve already made the million dollars and just need to get this website up so they can start fulfilling orders. Other tell-tale signs of the born-to-win type is the repetition of memorized sales figures (I really only need to sell like 346 of these a day to make it big time) and an eagerness to remind you that you’re very lucky to be working on this project.

Okay, so this is an extreme characterization (but not a fictional one). But the point I’m trying to illustrate is that there are people, and sometimes not people but just their ideas, that aren’t going to work. Or have astronomical odds of working. You’re a graphic designer, not a bookie, and the odds aren’t in your favor in any of these cases.

But you’re still going to get paid, so it’s all good, right?

Wrong.

You’re the One to Blame

You knew you weren’t going to be able to make that person/that product/that service a success. Yet, that person was convinced it was going to be and, by default, you agreed with them by taking on the project. So you’ve got a customer who was convinced it was a winning idea, and you’ve reaffirmed that, so clearly you think it’s a winning idea, and when it doesn’t become a winning idea who is clearly the person to blame for it not being a success?

You guessed it. You are.

And customers who have their ideas ruined by a web designer fill obligated, if not driven by some chivalrous fervor, to tell everyone else they know to stay far, far away from that designer.

There is no damage control, no way to appease this customer. You can’t refund them their money, because they only paid you a thousand dollars and you ruined their million dollar idea. There is nothing you can do but accept that you’ve let your brand get smeared by a customer who felt like they were screwed over by you.

Stop These Projects Before They Start

Before every giving out a price quote, before ever entertaining the idea of discussing deadlines, talk about the idea. If you don’t think the idea has a reasonable chance of success, don’t take on the project. Don’t think the person has any real idea of what they’re getting into? Don’t take on the project.

If you can’t make a customer a winner, you won’t be doing anyone any favors by bringing them on. Build up a portfolio of winning customers, and you’ll attract more winning customers.

One of the best places to start is the WordPress codex. They cover a lot of information here, both for beginners and for novice users as well.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress

Another place you can check to get additional information on operating WordPress is at www.wpuniversity.com. If the tutorial you are looking for is unavailable, you can easily request one and they will add it to their library. What’s even nicer is that they also offer a cost associated with doing it if you’d rather have a a WordPress guru take care of it for you.

If you’ve had a custom theme developed for you, ask your designer for a WordPress manual. As a standard part of our package, we offer a “getting started” guide that comes with each one of our custom websites. We also offer a free, one-time training session that lasts about an hour to make sure that our clients fully understand how to utilize the various elements of their new website.

No matter what you’re level of computer savvy, WordPress is by far the easiest website management software available, and taking advantage of the various free tutorials online can help you get up to speed regardless of your experience level.

The question you should really ask yourself is the benefit of running a self-hosted site versus using free publishing platforms like Blogger and WordPress.com. If you’re serious about your business, blog or product, you really should invest the small amount it takes to get a custom domain name and a WordPress hosted website.

There are many webhosts that offer fairly easy WordPress setup, and even some that offer free WordPress installation so that you can just jump right into blogging immediately after purchasing your hosting account.

Also, with the abundant number of both free and premium themes available, it’s quite easy to get a very unique site going for under $150 a year. With a price that low, the benefit of having a self-hosted site well outweighs the expense.

In either case, if you’re trying to decide between Blogger vs. WordPress, I would definitely recommend exploring getting a self-hosted WordPress website.

Theme Forest WordPress Website Templates

I like Theme Forest for 3 main reasons.

1. Variety of themes – There are literally like thousands of designs on their site. It’s easy to get lost browsing, but they have a lot of variety in color schemes, layouts and functionality which makes it the first place we always look for themes.

2. Variety of Designers – In our experience, the same designer working along is going to have a repetitiveness in their theme designing. I like the fact that there are hundreds of designers on the site to give even more variety from theme to theme.

3. Standards – To post WordPress Website Templates on Theme Forest you have to update theme, support them and meet some basic design standards which you can’t really enforce elsewhere. Plus it’s got a rating system so if someone is developing crappy themes you can tell before you buy them.

Templatic WordPress Website Templates

Templatic makes somewhat plain templates, but what they lack in deep designs the make up for with deep functionality. Themes with built in e-commerce, classifieds, question & answer systems, just about anything you could think of, these guys are all about delivering a high level of functionality in their WordPress Website Templates. They also have great support and an easy to use billing system.

Elegant Themes WordPress Website Templates

Kind of the opposite of Templatic, these guys really do make some (pun intended) elegant themes. They have some additional built in functionality like shortcodes and such, but not to the level of Templatic.

What you will get is a lot of great CSS, though. These guys are excellent at pulling together WordPress Website Templates with great typography and excellent use of styling.

For those that created their own logo or worked closely with a designer on it, there can be a lot of sentimental attachment to it. It’s something they are proud of, worked very hard on and may view it as their graphical representation of who they are and what they do as an organization. Choosing not to use this logo could be viewed as a failure to express your company’s identity on your new website.

For those that paid to have an expensive design firm create the logo, the same feelings of attachment apply, along with additional concerns of squeezing value out of something they paid a hefty fee for. Not using the logo you paid for as your logo on all marketing materials seems anti-intuitive. I mean, why would you call a taxi when you paid all that money for a luxury sedan?

For local businesses, however, designing for the web may not have been in their original plans when their first logo was created. Other companies we’ve worked with in the past have been in business long before the advent of the internet, and most of them are still using the same logo their parents or grandparents were using when they first founded the company.

But despite these things, the concern of what logo design to use on the internet is valid one, and one more often ignored than it should be.

Consumer trust is built on the quality of the products and services you provide, and your web presence should reflect this same quality and professionalism. When a potential customer visits your website and, amidst a clean and professional design, a hand-drawn logo dominates the site’s masthead, it’s not hard to believe why someone may not take the rest of the site’s message seriously.

But if I can’t use my logo, I’ll need to rebrand everything in my store, my other marketing materials and even those name badges we had made at the UPS store! This is going to cost me tens of thousands of dollars!

Not having a web ready logo is not the end of the world. There are a lot of things you can do to brand your website without having to embark on an entire rebranding campaign for your brick & mortar store.

Let’s discuss some of the things you can do to create a beautifully designed website that is not hampered by the lack of a web-ready logo.

Don’t Use a Logo

This may seem absurd, but a website doesn’t have to have a logo. In fact, if your existing logo is not very classy, or just isn’t in a web ready format, you can use a styled text logo instead of a visual one. With this option, focus on using a similar font as found in your existing logo, possibly even the colors. The main benefit here is that you don’t have to pay extra for a new logo and your site’s content and other imagery can communicate your company’s products and services just fine without one.[/toggle]

Have Your Logo “Tweaked” For the Web

For a lot of businesses, their logo may be either just a little outdated or possibly just in need of some freshening up. If this is the case, you could submit your existing logo to a site like Logo Tournament and ask them to clean it up and make it more web-friendly. In some cases, your designer may be able to do that for you as well.

Consider Variations In Your Branding

If you have a consistent font and color scheme, you can gain a lot more flexibility in the different types of online marketing efforts. For instance, where your website logo may be more horizontally oriented, your logo could be tweaked to a more square layout for Facebook, something more vertical for Twitter, and perhaps just a small icon for your site’s Favicon or shortcut/web app link.

Regardless of what you do, try to be objective about whether or not your logo is really suitable for your new website. No matter how much it may mean to your personally, your website is designed to appeal most to potential customers, and to you second. If you aren’t sure, poll a few of your friends or business colleagues and ask them for their honest opinion.

Many social marketers teach us that using social networking to promote your business means that you are competing for space in your followers’ news feeds. Posting too seldom could make it difficult for your fans to be exposed to your message. Posting too often could dilute your message and possible cost you fans and followers as they may grow tired of redundant and excessive updates.

So, as a small business owner, how do you know what to post, how often to post and the easiest ways to post these updates?

First off, there is a very easy answer to how often a local business should be posting updates: You should post as often as you have something valuable to say. If you have two or three very important things to say in a day, it’s okay to post them. If you only post a quality update once a week, there is nothing wrong with that.

For both Facebook and Twitter, you should post a link to any new blog post or article added to your website. Here is an example of a quick tweet we did for a new blog post:

Choosing a domain name for a local business can be tough. Here are a list of a few guidelines to help you: http://tinyurl.com/49y49po

For Facebook alone, posting once a day or once every other day is probably the most you will want to do without overexposing your fans to your message. In fact, our own analytics have shown that many Facebook pages lose fans when they post too frequently. For others, their fans may just hide your updates from their news feed which means they won’t be exposed to your message at all, even though they still show up as a fan of your business.

As a local business, you should make an effort to update Facebook at least once a week. If you are open on the weekends, you could an update Friday afternoon with an event or special deal taking place over the weekend.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a medium that allows you to get away with posting much more frequently. That still doesn’t mean you should be posting tweets for the sake of keeping your brand in your followers’ faces. Quality is still the key here, as you can lose followers if you exchange relevancy for quantity.

There are lots of small businesses that use Twitter for posting time-sensitive deals to help drive business during traditionally low volume days. For instance, if you were a small restaurant owner and were experiencing a slow Thursday, you could post a quick tweet notifying your followers that you were having a buy one get one free entree special for that night only. With enough local followers, you could turn a low revenue day into a profitable one without the need for paying a newspaper to print a coupon for that day. These types of deals and offers are instant, far reaching and easy to manage for a small business owner.

These are just a few ideas on how often to update your social networking profiles, but the biggest thing you should take from this is the knowledge that posting frequency should be tied directly to the value of what you have to say and the ROI you can expect to receive in return for the effort put into it.

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that getting your website to rank well takes time and sincere effort, not some magic pixie dust. Any one that touts the ability to get your first page rankings in weeks is someone that is a) not being truthful with you or b) engaging in SEO practices that will get your new website penalized if discovered.

Another thing to consider is that your new website may go through a probationary stage some people have dubbed the “Google Sandbox”. While Google rarely confirms such things, our own research, as well as those of thousands of other professional search engine optimization gurus, have shown that your site may rank organically low for many of your most important keywords for up to the first year your site is in operation. Speculation reflects that this is a way to weed out fly-by-night type sites that are only in it for a quick buck, a long description for what Google calls “web spam”.

So, the short answer is that it could take up to a year, even with a well optimized site. There are, however, things you can do to reduce that time as well as promote and optimize your site so that when you leave the sandbox you will be better poised to compete with other websites for key search terms.

1. Register your domain name for more than a year. This can have a huge impact on the amount of time your new site spends in the sandbox. As a matter of fact, we’ve tested this theory with a few of our own websites by registering domain names for up to ten years, and have seen the sandbox time shorten to as little as 4-5 months. Granted, this is not all that we did, but it was one of the most significant factors in our opinions.
2. Build links slowly, and locally. We highly recommend link building efforts early in the stages of development of your site, but it’s important to not go overboard, or waste your time chasing worthless links. For local businesses, we suggest that you target the top 5 or so local business directories (such as Merchant Circle, Yellow Pages, etc…), your local chamber of commerce and any professional organizations you belong to. Don’t forget to set your Google Places listing up as well.
3. Look into pay-per-click. We aren’t exactly recommending an expensive campaign to start with, but if you are looking to bring in some instant results for only your most basic search terms (Indianapolis Dentist, etc…) or perhaps your company name, use Google Adwords to help drive some initial traffic to your site. We don’t recommend starting a major campaign until you’ve at least had a chance to work out some of the major SEO kinks in your existing site, but this will give you some initial boost in website traffic which won’t exactly hurt your rankings
4. Make sure that your site is hooked up to Google Webmaster Tools and has a site map submitted so that you can ensure you new domain is being crawled and indexed by Google.

Don’t bother with search engine submission tools. They are quite literally pointless if you have submitted a site-map. Automated submissions can also look like web spam to some search engines, so go easy on companies offering this service. Also, keep in mind that submitting your site to a search engine is perfectly free so be wary of a company offering to submit your site to “hundreds of major search engines for the low cost of XYZ”.

It is also helpful to engage in some social networking to help promote your site.

Other than that, sit tight and wait. You have to understand that your site will rank well in time if you’ve done the right thing with creating useful content and following the basic SEO principles for local businesses.

Furthermore, the things you “want” from a website may not at all be what you really need and can help to drive up your costs and lower the effectiveness of your new site. We see a lot of people request moving graphics, music and lots of functionality that they think would be really cool but often don’t realize they just don’t align with their end goals: retaining existing customers and obtaining new ones.

If you can go into a web design proposal prepared, it will not only improve the working relationship with a potential designer and help identify those that will be able to truly help you, but also lower your overall costs. We suggest preparing a list of elements you want from your website and your new developer. In our opinion, these should include:

• A content management system so you can update content yourself. If they have their own proprietary CMS system, ask them if they can build the site in something open source like WordPress so you are not trapped at the same firm for the life of your website.
• Ask them to set you up with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools so that you can track the performance of your website. This is a free service offered by Google and shouldn’t cost you more than $30-$50 or so for them to set you up.
• Prepare for them a list of pages with some initial content that you’d like included on the site. Your developer should have a copywriting service that can improve upon your content for SEO, but no one but you can truly know your business. This will also help you determine a navigation structure for the site.
• Think about a single image you’d like to see on each page. Unless you have high-quality and professional photos taken of your business, opt for stock photography instead at a place like I Stock Photo. These photos should cost you less than $5 or so and will greatly improve the look and feel of the website.
• If they are offering logo design services, make sure that they can provide you with a high-res (300 DPI or greater) so that you can use it on printed material as well. If you want professionally designed logo submissions from dozens of designers and have 30 minutes a day for 7 days to manage the process, try using a service like Logo Tournament. We have, as well as our customer, had great experience with them before.
• Don’t ask for, or allow them to make any readable part of the website in Flash. Flash technology does not work on all devices and cannot be read by search engine robots. Adding a small area to the site is okay, but never use it for main headers, navigation or any other text-based content. Also, keep in mind that Flash ads very little value to your site but can drive your costs up tremendously, making it an overall poor investment for a new website.
• Do some research and find a few websites you like before contacting a web designer. Keep in mind, you should be looking at colors, functionality and overall layout. Share these ideas with your prospective designers but don’t ask them to copy their sites.
• Ask them if they can help you set up social networking accounts for your business. For sites like Facebook, ask if they have experience developing custom landing pages for Facebook to help you make the most of new visitors. Also, don’t disregard this item just because you think social marketing isn’t relevant to your business. with over 152 million people in the United States on Facebook alone, if your target demographic isn’t at least partially on these major social networking sites, there is something very wrong with your products and/or services.
• Ask them for some initial on-page SEO services. You don’t need anything major to start, but it would help to make sure that they can offer you a good on-page structure geared towards the most probable keyword searches for your area.
• Ask them to help you get set up on and optimize a Google Places page listing. With integrated website and places results on Google, having someone find your Google Places listing is almost just as good as finding your website, and can really help drive a lot of extra traffic for you at no extra cost.
• Ask them about their web hosting options. All most no one, no matter what they say, really have their own servers so ask them where they host their clients sites. Most often, designers use cheap services like 1 and 1 or Dreamhost, and are usually an affiliate so they make a little extra money on the side from the hosting fees you pay. While shared hosting is usually okay, get it through a reputable company like Bluehost.com or WPcloudservers.com, and always be sure to ask for a dedicated IP address before the design process begins.

If you can be prepared with a list of these types of items, you will avoid getting yourself into a situation where designer is unable to help you accomplish your goals, but also avoid expensive redesigns later on down the road after you’ve had a chance to get your feet wet with your first design experience.

We’ve helped hundreds of small businesses establish and grow their online presence over the years, but we weren’t always able to get to them before they had selected domain names. Sometimes these companies had done a great job in selecting their domain name, while others made some pretty bad mistakes.

Now, the thing about domain names is that they do have a cap on how much damage they can do to your online marketing campaigns. I mean, it really is just a domain name and the whole site doesn’t necessarily hinge on that one thing. However, lots of studies show that a domain name can significantly impact a person’s perception of your company, their ability to remember you and in some cases their ability to find you.

This article will act as a simple and straightforward guide for selecting a domain name.

If you aren’t familiar with searching for available domain names at all, I would recommend GoDaddy’s domain name registration service. You can easily search for available names on their home page.

Choose Your Company Name

This is always the best option. However, due to the fact that there are no standards for registering non-trademarked business names from state to state, there can sometimes be several other companies operating with the same business name. Here are some examples of ideal domain names, using our own company as an example:

• www.Oturia.com – This domain name is ideal, as it is short, and not easily confused with another domain name. But let’s pretend that there is a hot dog company in New York by the same name, and have already registered this domain. Our next best option would be…
• www.OturiaDesign.com – This domain name is still short and memorable, and also helps a little to explain what it is that we do. Another option might be…
• www.OturiaWebDesign.com – This is borderline on length, and would probably be our last attempt at registering our company name.

If none of these options are available, it might be a wise idea to abandon the idea of using your company name for your domain.

Some people use abbreviations for their company name, but this is not recommended and in our opinion is a bad idea.

Choose Your Business Type & Location

This is our second choice for a domain name, but not because it’s any lesser in quality. In fact, for some businesses, this might be a better option. Nonetheless, we prefer the branding associated with using your company name for your domain.

Some examples of this type of domain format would be:

• www.SpringfieldDentist.com – The key to this type of combination is length and complexity. If your city name is too long, or sometimes mistyped because of its awkward spelling, don’t use it.
• www.MichiganBeverage.com – If your business is something with statewide appeal, it might be okay to use the state name. Be reasonable when deciding on whether or not your business truly serves a statewide audience. Being a popular video rental store with dreams of dominating the state’s new release market is not an ideal candidate for the use of a state name in your domain.

Choose Your Business Name & Location

This is our last choice for domain names for local businesses. This is still a really great option, especially if your city has a commonly used abbreviation (i.e. KC for Kansas City). If you do this , try to put your abbreviations at the end of the domain name. Here are a few examples of this type of setup:

• www.CrawfordsKC.com – This is a great alternative to securing a domain name with your company name it.
• www.DelongsofAustin.com – This also might work if your business name isn’t too generic (like Mike’s).

Do’s & Don’t of Domain Name Selection

The above ideas should be flexible enough to get you a great domain name that’s easy to promote. Based on some of the suggestions from SEOMoz’ original article on the subject, here are some guidelines for local businesses when searching for a domain name.

• Only Choose Dot Com Domains – Unless you are a non-profit looking for a .org domain name, stay away from EVERYTHING else. A lot of people will argue with this, but you’ll thank yourself later for sticking to your guns. It’s okay to own the .net version of a domain name, but all of your main traffic should be driven towards the .com version of your domain name.
• Don’t Abbreviate Part of Your Domain – This is just plain confusing and very difficult to promote. If your company name is too long, don’t try to squeeze it in by adding only the first letter certain words. (i.e. Mark’s Travel & Hospitality Center as www.MarksTHCenter.com).
• Don’t Put LLC In Your Domain – While Inc., Corp. and several other business titles are usually acceptable, stay away from using your limited liability status in the domain name. Even though they are a completely legal and reputable form of business, people don’t tend to view them as such.
• Keep Your Domain As Short As Possible – There are very few 1 word domain names left, and not many more 2 word domains. People are getting more accustomed to seeing and typing longer domains, but you still want to try to keep it to 3 or fewer words whenever possible.
• Don’t Use Hyphens or Numbers In Your Domain – This is one of the easiest ways to lose traffic to another website, or make marketing your site too difficult.
• Don’t Steal, Infringe or Try to Copy – Aside from the overall lack of ethical behavior behind trying to copy someone else or piggyback off of someone else’s brand recognition, it can get you in a lot of trouble or cost your your domain name later down the road. If you’re not sure about whether or not someone has a trademark on the domain you want to use, check the online US Online Trademark Database.

Selecting a domain name is an important first step to putting your business online. If you have questions about the best domain name for your business, please feel free to contact us with your questions.

When we were approached to redesign ACI’s website, little did we know just how bad things had gone for them up to that point.

They had been working with a designer who was literally nickel and diming them to death, and after thousands of dollars and two years worth of development on the website, it still hadn’t even gone live.

After they were quoted another 4 digit price to make a few small changes, enough was enough and they called Oturia in to clean up the situation.

For less than they were quoted on the changes alone, we moved the whole site over to WordPress, optimized the site and pushed it live in just a few days of working on it.

You can view a screenshot of the site below, or visit them here.

We love working with quirky, eccentric young ladies who have a passion for what they do. The team at Wedding Daily Times is actually composed of a few gals from a couple of different companies that all share that same quirkiness. But don’t let their fun-natured and pleasant demeanors fool you, these gals knew exactly what they wanted to accomplish with their WordPress website and came ready with some design mockups of their own.

We had to tweak a few things here and there to get them to fit in with the laws of web design, but I was actually quite impressed at how well laid out there mock-ups were and how easy it was to get them converted into a WordPress website.

You can view a screenshot of the site below, or visit them here. I would also like to point out that the graphic elements on the site were originally pieced together by a wonderful gal over at Be True Designs, a print design firm I think is one of the best in business today.

And I never get tired of it, not even a little bit. I love building sites, whether from scratch or using a template a customer has come to us with. I think I’ll always love building sites, even if the web design industry itself makes me sick.

I’ve always harbored a bit of animosity towards other designers, especially those who engage in price gouging and crap work. But there are worse evils in the web design industry today, and I’m finding myself face-to-face with them more and more each day.

There are so many people building sites that customers have a hard time differentiating between those that know what they’re doing and those that are just saying they do. There are blog designers who get in over their heads and take on projects they had no business touching. There are “IT Gurus” who buy a content management system, 150 web templates and call themselves a design firm, charging $70-$110 per hour for their work.

Really? $70-$110 an hour? Are you kidding me? That’s more than a doctor of internal medicine makes a year for the first few years of his career. And that same doctor went to school for 8+ years to make even that much.

I’m dealing with a client now who was working with a “web designer” on her online store. $5,000+ and a few emotional breakdowns later, every piece of work this subject matter expert has done needs to be fork lifted so we can do it again from scratch. For a third of the cost.

Someone I know was talking about the “great deal” they got on this site. As soon as I saw the site I knew I had seen it on Themeforest.net just a few weeks before. After some research, sure enough, there it was for sale for a whopping $32.

Guess how much this other company charged to install a template, using a pre-configured template without even bothering to change the colors to better match their logo? $1800. That’s right. Now, I’m not going to name names, but companies like Ebway Creative Solutions pull this kind of crap all the time. They take a $32 theme which has been skinned for Adobe Business Catalyst (WordPress that’s not free) and sell that same theme with their logo dropped in at an extreme markup.

You can’t get that kind of profit margin selling crack-cocaine. Heck, they didn’t even design their own website or half the stuff that’s on it, and couldn’t be bothered to spellcheck the headers in their PDF brochure on the site.

But they do what a majority of “web design firms” are doing now-a-days… prey on companies that don’t know better and trap them into these horrendous websites for the cost of a gently used Kia. Using that same template and putting them up on WordPress would have cost them probably $150 to do it themselves including hosting, and it would have cost them something like $400 to have us do it all for them, including hosting them on our Rackspace servers.

So, was their any point to this rant? Not really, I suppose. I have a great deal of respect for some of the great designers/developers out there and have thrown my share of money their way when I client has wanted a site from a template they’ve done. However, you cheap-skate, low-rent fake design firms leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth about web design… you days are numbered. People are going to get wise to your ways and your little dog and pony show will go the way of mullets and tape cassettes.

If you are a customer looking for web design work, please get another quote. If not from us, from someone else, but be sure to shop around. Go with a firm where the web designers are full time designers. Steer clear from anyone who designs websites as a “hobby” or in addition to something totally unrelated, like horse training or crocheting. Chances are they’ve not taken the time to master either of their hobbies and won’t be able to deliver the kind of website your company truly deserves.

I was really happy to have had an opportunity to work with the ladies over at Sunshine, especially Vanessa and Rebecca.

Despite having a limited understanding of web design practices, they hit the ground running on this project and brought us lots of great ideas and feedback, culminating in a site that looks great, functions like it’s supposed to and was a lot of fun to build.

I was really happy to have had an opportunity to work with the ladies over at Sunshine, especially Vanessa and Rebecca.

Despite having a limited understanding of web design practices, they hit the ground running on this project and brought us lots of great ideas and feedback, culminating in a site that looks great, functions like it’s supposed to and was a lot of fun to build.

Their primary line of business is All Ages Home Health Care, and their team is a compassionate bunch. If you’re in Kansas and know someone who needs home health care, be sure to check them out.

The site is done in WordPress, starting from a generic three-column theme. They wanted it to feel warm and friendly, with big, colorful pictures. The layout is designed to be readable by just about anyone with ease, and if they did happen to have a vision disability, we installed a modified version of  the WordPress Font Resizer Plugin to allow dynamic resizing of the text via the font sizer in the header.

Another norm on all of our new sites… speed enhancements and WordPress hosting. We host all of our custom built WP sites on super fast servers with a particular emphasis on MySQL, the usual culprit when it comes to slow WordPress sites. We also removed as many of the php queries as possible and added compression and caching to the .htaccess file to reduce page load times.

The site shows as a “B” in Y-Slow, and is currently loading at just under 2 seconds.

Enjoy!