Tag Archives: Elizabeth Gray-Carr

About 4374 days ago E-Commerce

Hiring a Web Designer: Advice from Award-Winning Sites

We spoke to Inc. Web Award winners to learn how they chose designers for their exceptional sites. Maggie Smith spent three months researching what she wanted to do with her Web site before she hired the designer she met through a networking group. Surfing the Net and reviewing other sites enabled her to present her designer with a list of 25 sites she liked the look of — graphics, type, icons, design, visual appeal — and 25 she liked the functionality of. “Designers know Web design, but not your industry,” said Smith, whose company ArtSource (1999 Inc. Web Award winner, Design) supplies artwork for corporate settings. The industry is traditionally tied to paper catalogs, and she expected having a hard time transitioning customers to Web sales. “I know how my customers want to buy. Virtually no one uses credit cards,” she said. ArtSource.com doesn’t take online payments or list prices online. Smith couldn’t have relied on a designer to make that decision. “Define your business in a solid sentence and present that to your designer,” recommends Raymond K. Lemire. In 1995, when he launched his mail order and online pasta business Flying Noodle (2000 Inc. Web Award winner, 2nd place, Marketing), he called everyone he knew and asked them to recommend designers. “I wanted someone who understood selling; it’s a selling site,” he said. When he met with the designer, he brought instructions — to make using the site as easy as using a print catalog. He also wanted a designer with a sense of humor, and believes that personal rapport is very important. “Who you choose to put together your site depends on how you like to work. We wanted someone who could create a site that was fun, whimsical, and not take it too seriously.” A couple of final words from Lemire: No matter how big or small your budget is, save room for redesign work because it’s bound to happen. The best way to find a designer is to marry one, joked Tom Carr and his wife and partner Elizabeth Gray Carr. In 1996, the then full-time information services manager at a local bank armed himself with books on Web design and spent his weekends designing the real estate site callelizabeth.com (2000 Inc. Web Award winner, 1st place, Marketing). Carr also looked at other sites and culled lessons from WebPagesThatSuck.com. He determined what he didn’t want — flash and animation — and what he did want — virtual tours and an unlimited number of pictures. Understanding the user base of home-sellers and buyers was critical. Carr knew they weren’t necessarily Web savvy, and pictured them as passing through this site — maybe once — at a particular period of time in their lives. This helped him create the right site to meet his customers’ and the business’s needs. “I needed a lot of work done and needed to give it to somebody I could trust.” That was the bottom line for Brad Luebker, director of marketing for software company Ives Development Inc. So he hired one of the first graphic designers he’d ever worked with to do a visual redesign of the site, teamstudio.com (2000 Inc. Web Award winner, 2nd place, Customer Service). The redesign was done about two years ago when it was determined the company wanted a brighter, more open and friendlier look for the site than it had originally. The back end of the site, including the navigation, was done by another company, and again, Luebker knew what he wanted — based on employee and customer comments — before he brought in that team. Six weeks after Charley Biggs, COO of ecamps.com (1999 Inc. Web Award winner, Design and Return on Investment), hired a large design firm, he realized it was not a good fit. Neither the work nor the communication was terrific, and he said a lot of money got wasted. So he stopped the work and put the word out that he was looking for someone who wanted to take a break from their full-time job to do something on their own. He contracted with an individual with a background in engineering to do the site programming. “We had a good idea of what we wanted and he came up with a lot of good things on his own,” Biggs said. The pros of working with an individual contractor, says Biggs, is that they had access to him 24 hours a day and had more control over costs. The experiences of these Inc. Web Awards winners can be summarized with this checklist: Do Your Homework Surf the Internet and look at sites both in and out of your industry. Note what you like and don’t like in terms of the look and functionality of other sites. Online go to WebPagesThatSuck.com, “Where you can learn good design by looking at bad design.” Know Your Industry Define your business in one solid sentence and present that to your designer. Understand how your business will translate to the Web. Know how your customer base operates. Look at your competition to see what they’re doing on the Web, and determine if you’d do it the same or differently. Network to Get Recommendations Work with someone you trust. Assess your designer’s experience. Make sure you can communicate well with the designer. Phone references and ask about timelines. What did the designer do well and not so well? Did the designer stick to the plan? Look for someone whose personality reflects the type of site you’d like to present. Copyright © 2001 inc.com LLC Related resources at inc.com:A Web Tale: Site Development, Spam and Search Engines

About 4586 days ago Online Marketing

Digging for Gold

User’s Guide The third week in September was a long, hard, gray week at the Inc. offices. Too many of us had stayed up to the wee hours slavishly watching the Olympics. Like my colleagues, I couldn’t tear myself away from the games, despite our many criticisms that this year’s contest was overproduced. I had to keep watching as the Romanian women took the gold in gymnastics, pushing the Russians out of first place. I was alternately fascinated by Svetlana Khorkina’s good hard sulk after she slipped off the uneven bars and cheered by the open smiles on the Chinese women’s faces as their bronze medal was announced. But through the next few tired days, struggling to concentrate through the dim fog of my Olympics-laden brain, I started to wonder: What are contests good for? Why do we care so much? Beyond the sheer joy of winning — and the curiosity that grips most of us about who’s first, best, strongest, fastest — awards should be good at illuminating what works. At the extreme, the Olympics showcase world-class techniques for running, swimming, and swinging over parallel bars with grace, efficiency, speed, and creativity — not to mention good sportsmanship. In business, by observing how the best operate, we should be able to glean how to run our own companies with more grace, efficiency, speed, and creativity. And amid some wincing, we should also learn a lot from the mistakes of the losers. For the second year in a row, Inc. Technology readers submitted their companies’ Web sites for rigorous evaluation. This year we asked a panel of outside judges — all experts in their fields — to assess how well the entrants’ sites supported their businesses. We identified five broad but fundamental categories in which Web sites could help entrepreneurs grow their companies: customer service, marketing, return on investment, innovation, and community. What we learned — with a few hurrahs and winces of our own — were the following six invaluable lessons for creating a world-class bricks-and-clicks business: You cannot succeed at what you do not measure. Entrants in the return-on-investment category had to show that their sites provided a significant bottom-line impact or that they allowed the company to introduce a profitable new product or service. But most entrants — and even the winners — were not nearly thorough enough in their measurement of ROI to satisfy accountants or potential investors, at least according to judge Nicholas DiGiacomo, former vice-president at Internet-strategy consulting firm Scient Corp. “Saying ‘I got a lot of new business when I put up my Web site’ is not the same as saying ‘I measured a 23% yearly increase in my bottom-line profits after taking into consideration all the fixed and recurring costs of establishing my Web presence,” he said. He counseled the need for the nominees to calculate the numerous ongoing costs of running their sites, including customer-service outlays, for one example. He stated sternly: “If they ignore the cost of their own time, they can’t calculate their bottom line. Such businesses will not survive for long.” Most banner ads are like diamond-studded dog collars: expensive and useless. Raymond K. Lemire (a.k.a. the “Big Parmesan”) spent a whopping $30,000 on banner ads for his pasta-club site, www.flyingnoodle.com (which took second place in marketing), only to discontinue them when he discovered they weren’t producing any visitors. All traffic is not equal. Thomas Neckel Sr., CEO of Sumerset Custom Houseboats (the general-excellence winner), does use banner ads, but he places them where they’ll do the most good — in his case, on sites that attract his affluent (and water-loving) demographic. Forget “share of market” (unless you’re selling cereal or toothpaste). In the words of judges Don Peppers and Martha Rogers of One to One Manager fame, it’s “share of customer” you should go after. In other words, solve your customers’ problems, and those customers will be loyal forever. Hence, they will buy more and more products and services from you. Toward that end, you should offer goods and services to your present customers that allow them to do things they haven’t been able to do before and cannot do elsewhere. Treat your customers personally. The more you can do to make your customers’ lives easier, the happier they’ll be. Consider, for instance, the way real estate agent Elizabeth Gray-Carr saves time and hassles for the people whose homes she sells. Each seller gets a personal Web page on which he or she can review advertising schedules, home visits, and even the reactions of visitors. Sellers can even fill out the necessary paperwork on their personal Web pages. For anyone who’s ever suffered the headaches of selling property, that kind of convenience — not to mention the personal attention — is incredibly appealing. Innovation and glitz are not synonymous. We should all know that by now (but apparently we don’t). Sites that opened with animated intros and other media-heavy graphics annoyed the judges. The truly innovative sites presented new ideas and services in more down-to-earth ways. Dandelion Moving & Storage, for example, won third place in innovation for CEO Bret Lampere’s DickerABid service, which allows small moving companies to bid, in reverse-auction style, on cross-country jobs. Although there’s nothing flashy about DickerABid, the new service is an inspired idea that’s proved to be profitable for Dandelion and useful to small regional competitors. The Web Awards program required a concerted effort by a large number of people over many months. Special thanks go to Cheryl McManus, Inc.‘s editorial administrator, for taking on the mammoth task of entering into a database hundreds of applications, and to the staff of Inc., many of whom spent days and nights reading incredibly detailed entry forms and evaluating Web sites to choose the finalists. To our panel of judges, who took time from their own work to select the winners, thank you — and please don’t hang up when we call you again next spring! For the skinny on the winners, click here. And please visit www.inc.com, where you’ll soon find instructions for entering the 2001 awards. Start training now. – Elaine Appleton Grant, editor Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.