Hey Industrial Company - Your Web Site Design Forces Your Online Marketing Plan

For almost two decades I've planned, designed, created, and deployed hundreds of web sites.

Many, because of my background, are for industrial distributors, reps, and manufacturers. One of the more "interesting" aspects of this process is the "forced marketing plan" that comes out of the web design process.

By "forced marketing plan" I mean the physical documentation, visual structure (i.e. the web site), and mental awareness of the business's unique position in the marketplace, competitive advantage, and core competencies.

Think about it. Many small industrial businesses were started by an Entrepreneur who wanted to leave their "factory job" and strike out on their own. An opportunity for a new territory or product arose and the entrepreneur jumped on it - pretty much "ready-fire-aim." Market planning wasn't something these Founders cared much about (or even knew much about). Product Lines + Customers = Orders - that's the only formula the Entrepreneur needed.

Through the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's these businesses flourished. Sales increased, more employees were hired, and new buildings were bought - signs of success for the hard work and dedication of the Founder.

Along comes the 2000's and this thing called the Internet really takes off.  The Entrepreneur is told they need a web site, so they hire a techie without any understanding of the business or market. The Founder ends up directing the design and content with an eye for what they've always done. As a result, the new web site turns out to be an online "line card".

No thought about viewer appeal. No thought about message. No thought about market. No thought about strategic or competitive advantage. No value proposition. No consideration for brand. No mission statement. Pretty much just a list of manufacturers they represent or products they sell.

A proper web design project must consider, identify and address these criteria first. But unfortunately, that's where the blank expressions and confused looks begin with many Entrepreneur-led companies.

Today, a web site is a business's number one marketing asset. As such, it needs to define the core business virtues. The emphasis on content marketing underscores this. Businesses must "tell their story" in a way that defines the business and provides visitors with a clear, honest, and easy way to know what the business does. Its imperative.

A good web development team will sort those items out in the beginning. Even if it means taking the extra time consulting, and even"forcing", the entrepreneur to confront and identify the uniqueness of their company and finally realize that marketing counts, more so now than ever before.

The Double Edged Sword of Very Popular Open Source Software

I've been involved with content management systems (CMS) now for 16 years. I've been through all the "proprietary" vs "open-source" arguments. I've argued and defended the case of open vs. proprietary with countless clients and competitors.

My stand has always been that, if the software product does exactly what you want it to do, and you have the support of an excellent vendor, and the core components (database, CSS, HTML) are freely available and widely used, then platform is secondary and shouldn't be ruled out because its not open source.

And back in December 2014 something happened that supports my position against "just because it's open and big its a safe bet".

Wordpress is the biggest player in the content management space today with 70 million web sites running on their platform had a major vulnerability discovered.

Its another case of "the bigger you are, the larger the bulls-eye on your back."

In December a "Russian malware called SoakSoak" infected 100,000 Wordpress sites. It's reported that a slideshow plug-in  opened the vulnerability. More on the issue here.

So, what's my point. Don't always buy into the argument that large, open source software is better than smaller, proprietary platforms. Consider this before you decide:

• Does the product do what you need it to do?
• Do you see value  - technical, budgetary, experience, or market - in the vendor?
• Is the code sitting on top of a widely used database and have a large pool of knowledgable coders?

If the answers to all three of these are "yes", then I wouldn't let the "I must have open source" argument drive your decision. There are many excellent, smaller platforms out there today - and in some ways - they are more immune from attack by virtue of their being under the radar.

We're Going to Need a Bigger Boat

This post title is taken from Jaws and that famous scene (above) where Roy Scheider is at the stern of the Orca and gets his first glimpse of the worlds most famous movie shark.

The job Scheider was relegated to you was "chumming". For anyone who has never fished, this is the process of spreading cut-up and ground-up chunks of bait fish over the sea to attract game fish (sharks in many cases). Its not a very glamorous job - it smells bad and there's lots of blood and guts - but its quite effective for catching fish.

Whenever I explain to a client the why's and how's of content marketing, it can get pretty wordy and maybe even confusing. Worse yet, it can sound like more Internet "black magic".

Then just this morning, it dawned on me content marketing might be more easily understood by using the chumming metaphor where the sharks are prospective customers, the "chum" is the quality content, and your blog, social media outlets and press releases are your "chum slick". The bigger the slick, the more sharks you'll attract.

There's a whole lot more to it - and we all know the magic is in the uniqueness, relevance and quality of the content. But it's nice to sometimes use a simple picture to explain a complicated process.

A Simple Introduction to Amazon AWS Part Three - Simple Email Service (SES)

Sorry for the long time between posts. We've been really busy here - which is good. But as you know, when things get busy, all the "wanna-do's" (our blog) get pushed aside by the "have-to do's".

This is the third and final part of our series on Amazon AWS services. This post is on Amazon's "Simple Email Service" or SES.

Personally, I've been involved with large scale email marketing for 10 years now. I've set up and managed email servers for clients, and I've set up and run bulk email programs for email newsletters and marketing efforts. It's actually pretty difficult to do properly.

Let's use setting up and sending an email newsletter as our example that will lead in to why we recommend the Amazon SES service.

Let's say you're the owner or president or key manager of a business and you want to use email newsletters as a way of staying in front of your customers. Great idea, but where do you start?

If you're mailing list is under 300 people, you could just "bcc" (blind copy) your whole list and send right from within your email program (assuming you just want a very basic. plain layout). For very small lists, it's not a bad method. Most programs allow up to 300 bcc's, and you don't need any special programs, servers or help. With such a small list, you can quickly remove any bounced or removal requests you get.

A Simple Introduction to Amazon AWS Part Two - S3 Online Storage

Data storage and backup are critical to any organization's IT infrastructure. Just having a large, external drive attached to your office server isn't enough. While drive reliability has gone up, and costs have gone down, local (in your office) external storage is still subject to the weird and unexpected. Disks still crash, data is still corrupted and systems can be hacked. Worse, your office could be flooded (recall Tropical Storm Sandy) or you could be hit with a fire in your building. With more and more of your business being run on software, you need to make absolutely sure you have multiple, redundant backup stored at different locations. We not only backup all our web servers and data servers fully at our data center, but we also backup EVERYTHING to the cloud with Amazon S3.

There are great backup services out there like Mozy and Carbonite. They are easy, fairly inexpensive and reliable. But for this post, I am focussing on Amazon S3.

A Simple Introduction to Amazon AWS Part One - EC2

Everyone knows Amazon.com for their online book sales and ecommerce offerings. But not everyone knows that Amazon also offers IT infrastructure for companies needing servers, cloud-based services and offsite storage. Its called Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) and it's a fantastic deal.

The next three posts are written for the small to mid-sized organization who may have limited IT staff and resources. Larger organizations most likely already know about Amazon AWS since the service has been around for sometime. In the next three posts I'll focus on the three AWS services I see as most attractive to small business - EC2 virtual servers, S3 storage and SES email services.

Dante's 10th Circle of Hell - Running Your Own Email Server

This is a very biased opinion, and is intended for those of you small businesses still running a mail server somewhere in your office. While the number of companies still doing this is declining, it still surprises me (and drives me crazy) when I come across a prospective customer still doing their own email.

Running and managing an email system is hell. Period. The risks are way too high. You can't convince me that having an aging piece of equipment, loaded with an aging piece of software, running on your insecure office network, is smart to do nowadays.

If you just consider the threats of viruses transmitted via email and the massive amounts of spam that has to be managed, this alone justifies NOT doing it yourself. Then consider the thousands of dollars of depreciating assets in your closet (server and software), plus IT costs for tweaking and maintaining, and the decision is even clearer. Finally, consider your organization's email retention policies and requirements for backing up and storing.

The answer, in my opinion, is changing to one of the cloud-based systems such as Google Premier Apps or Outlook.com.

We know, you love your Outlook client running on your Windows laptop. You've got all you emails for the last 10 years nicely organized in all your folders. Outlook has a great little calendar that ties nicely together and sends out cool little meeting confirmation emails. We've been through all the stages and have many customers who are in the various stages of email "sophistication".  We understand your concern and don't want to upset your system. But hey, things change. If you're stuck in the "local email client" paradigm (an email client like Outlook running on your computer), it's time you learned something new. There are many supplemental benefits to doing so.

In today's cloud-based, software-as-a-service, tons-of-free-or-low-cost-storage world, you can have a powerful, feature rich, SAFE (as in virus screened) and SPAM-free email system for $50 per user per year. Trust me, that's a fraction of what it's costing you now if you're running your own email system. The two products I typically recommend are Google Premium Apps and Outlook.com. Google because I know it best, use it myself, and think it's a great bargain. Outlook because I have many clients who are "crack-addicted" to their Outlook client which I "think" offers a better interconnection between web and machine systems. There are many other email providers that can offer cloud-based enterprise email.

If you have a relationship with a company who maintains your email server and office network now, ask them their opinion. If they're honest, and not interested in just keeping the email server ticket running, they'll help you out. If they tell you to keep your email server, start thinking about a new IT partner.