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Web strategy links and Rescources for July 17th

It looks like everyone liked my little collection of links from last week so I’m putting another list together. These are links that I’ve saved on Delicious or sent over Twitter since last Friday that you might find useful. Everything relates back to web strategy in some way or another whether it’s improving your design, improving your code, or improving your technique. I want to help you get the most out of the web and the best way to do that is to keep learning. So, read.

50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills (saved on Delicious )

Smashing Magazine puts out an unbelievable amount of useful and free content. This collection of sites and resources is a great example why I would subscribe to a printed version of this website. A big part of web strategy is representing yourself well across multiple profiles, networks, and sites. The best way to do that it to make sure you have a solid grasp on the English language, particularly as it relates to the internet. The better you can write, the better you look online… period.

We collected over 50 useful and practical tools and resources that will help you to improve your writing skills. You will find copy writing blogs, dictionaries, references, teaching classes, articles, tools as well as related articles from other blogs.

The Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials of all Time (saved on Delicious )

There are an unbelievable about of Photoshop (and Illustrator and web design and…) tutorial sites and posts out there that it’s hard to keep up with them all. Well, I can’t either so I don’t. I realized recently that, unless you have tons of extra time to walk through these and nothing better to do, you should look for a tutorial that helps you with the project you’re working on. How does this relate to web strategy? Part of a cogent presence online is how, visually, it represents you. Pick up a few ideas or try your hand at Photoshop… it can’t hurt.

With hundreds of Photoshop tutorial sites around these days it’s easy to forget some of the classic posts that have shaped and inspired the community for years. These kinds of posts are in a sense timeless, and have inspired countless designers (including myself) to begin writing their own tutorials.

12 Essential Security Tips and Hacks for WordPress (saved on Delicious )

I’m a big, huge, unrelenting, obnoxious fan of Wordpress. The more I learn, the more I love. I’m always looking for ways to improve on what’s there and create a strong, secure, easy-to-use web site for my clients. This article covers both back end changes as well as admin panel changes that can be made in Wordpress to make sure you keep people out of your installation. Beginners should concentrate on 1, 4, 5, and 7. If you feel comfortable with any of the rest, do it.

WordPress being open source means that the chances of malicious attacks being successful are higher because the project’s source code can be easily obtained and studied for vulnerabilities. This article highlights several tips and hacks that you can use to secure and lock down your WordPress site and to fortify it from attacks.

10 Must Track Google Analytics Goals (saved on Delicious )

I’ve been getting deeper and deeper in to website analytics and having a lot of fun playing around with data and trying to come up with coherent and useful conclusions. I was once told “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (a Peter Drucker quote). That may not be the best advice for every situation but, for web analytics, it holds true. The more you understand about how people come to your site and interact with what you’re offering, the better you can serve them. If you’re a true beginner with Google Analytics or not sure where to start, check out Smashing’s timely article.

The definition of Google Analytics goals has always been clear to me – a means to measure business objectives, reports and improve on them. Google Analytics has transformed itself over the years from a ‘nice to have’ analytics software to a ‘must have’ analytics software …

Twitter links

Web Do’s and Don’ts: I think this site is great! On one side, you have the “do’s” of modern web design and, on the other, the “don’ts.” People login, add their own, and vote on others. Very simple but some great reminders for people of all skill levels. I’d like to think I’d score pretty well on here…

10 UI Design Patterns You Should Be Paying Attention To: Another Smashing article… if you’re even flirting with the idea of putting together a web application, start here. Also, if interactivity is your bag, check out a few of the examples they show.

21 Fonts That Shouldn’t Be Free But Are: I’m a sucker for free fonts and I know you are too. It used to be that free fonts were a “get what you pay for” kind of deal but, within the last year, some incredible free fonts have exploded out onto the market.

5 Tasks in the Morning: Chris Brogan shows us the five things he does in the morning. My five would be Gmail, Gmail, TweetDeck, Facebook, and a quick trip to Popurls.

101 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog: Are you getting traffic and not sure what to do with it? This post is almost 2 years old but gave me a lot of ideas to go with for online monetization. Great place to start if you know a little bit but not sure where to go.

12 Ways to Use LinkedIn Today: Great (and succinct) piece on using LinkedIn to stay connected and do a little personal branding.

Are there any links you’ve found recently that you can’t live without? Anything you’ve learned from above? Let me know… I’m always looking for more bookmarks!

Trying to learn Photoshop? Here’s what to concentrate on

A while ago (at this point, a long while ago) I asked a question on the Art & Design forums on VWVortex.com (seems like an odd place to get advice but there are some very talented individuals). I was stumbling through Photoshop and wanted to know what I should learn next. With all the tutorial sites out there these days, the problem isn’t finding something to learn, it’s figuring out which skill to concentrate on.

So I asked the question, if someone was learning Photoshop and wanted to get the most out of their learning time, what should they learn? I left the poll open (hence the lens flare joke) and got a few interesting answers I wanted to share.

I assumed that people would recommend learning the Pen tool and/or advanced path methods but, sure enough, the winner by far was “learn more about what the software is intended for.” Surprise surprise.

If this is interesting, you’ll probably find the whole thread to be useful as well: Most important Photoshop skill to learn and perfect

Josh Can Help: Helpful web strategy links for July 10th

This is a new thing I’m going to be doing every Friday. I bookmark and Tweet out a lot of different links for various reasons. I keep everything generally related to understanding web strategy for small businesses but I’ve been known to tangent a bit. Every Friday, I’m going to collect the best links I’ve saved and sent out and list out the ones I think the are the most useful. If you’re interested in receiving this list every Friday via email, get send me a quick note and let me know… I’m judging interest now!

Saved on Delicious: Privacy Policy Generator

Documents like terms of use pages and privacy policies can be easily overlooked by groups wishing to get their web site live as quick as possible. It seems like a bunch of legalese and who wants to deal with that? Well, I’ll be honest, it’s usually the last step but I understand the importance of putting these together. Your privacy policy tells website users what information you collect and what you do with that information. For most minor websites, the most you collect and use is an email address and a name. Even if that’s it, you should still be telling people both inside and outside of your organization what you’re doing with this information. This handy little form asks you all the important questions and then generates a document that can be posted on your site. It’s so easy now, no excuses!

Saved on Delicious: Sara’s Sanctuary animal shelter

Sara’s Sanctuary is run by an amazing woman who cares for her animals more than anything. I’ve never seen such dedication to a certain cause in my life. If you look at her site, it’s hurting a bit. It’s hard to navigate, poorly coded, overly-complicated, and not geared towards the most important thing: getting help for the sanctuary. Sara’s is 100% donation run and money is tight. I took on this pro-bono project as a way to flex my web strategy muscle and see what I could do to improve her donation income. Stay tuned for a fresh, new design, a new Wordpress structure, and some great social networking additions. Also, if you’ve got a few dollars to spare, Sara’s could use it!

Saved on Delicious: Facebook for Business SuperGuide

I think I found this through Twitter but it definitely made it to my bookmarks page. This page has about [insert big number here] links to articles, videos, blog posts, and PDFs on the subject of Facebook. I’m a fan of Facebook (no pun intended) for personal interaction and making sure that my friends and family see a little bit of what I do professionally (I love personal referrals). Marketing my business on there, however, has never been a priority for me. I think Facebook is great for some and not terrible useful for others. If you want to figure out which group you’re in, I’d start on this page.

Twitter links

17 Remarkably Professional Looking Free Fonts: I’m a sucker for free fonts and I’m continually impressed by what’s out there. That’s not to say that I won’t buy one when I need it but a lot of the time you can get by with the free stuff.

Create letterpress text using only CSS: This is a very creative use of CSS to get a certain text effect. A little technical for most (meaning people who aren’t using CSS everyday) but unique to be sure.

Transparency (or Lack Thereof) on Kohl’s Facebook Fan Page: A cautionary tale about using Facebook correctly. If you’re going to post on your own page, that’s fine but BE HONEST.

Building Respect for Usability Experience: For the usability geeks out there, another fantastic article from the Nielsen group about teaching other (stubborn) folks about usability.

Wolfram Alpha for Web Designers: Short and sweet article showing a few things Wolfram Alpha, the new, intelligent search engine, can do for web designers. Fairly basic information but nice to have it at your fingertips.

Five outstanding corporate blogs: very well-thought-out analysis of, well, five outstanding blogs. Chris picked some great examples and showed that corporate america DOES have what it takes to compete.

That’s all for now! Your feeedback is, as always, appreciated. So are your own web strategy links so comment away…

Tooting my own horn – Email marketing presentation

I just recently gave an hour long talk on email marketing titled “6 Questions to Ask Before Sending an Email Campaign [Piece].” This was based on two blog posts I made recently. The posts actually came from the presentation preparation so I got to hype them a bit during the talk. I thought I’d toot my own horn a bit and post the feedback that I got.

I felt good about it because I felt like I had everyone’s attention. I really wanted to add some value to these folks and introduce them to a few things they had never seen or heard about. I was speaking to college admissions professionals which, for the most part, are expected to be jacks of all trades. Great questions were thrown out there and I was pulled aside a few times before and after by audience members which means I sparked something.

Anyways, the proof is in the pudding:

And the comments:

• This was excellent! Lots of great ideas, very concise information.
• Wow! Lots of great info (and thank you for so many outside sources that we can check out later)! I have a lot to learn.
• Great information, clearly communicated. Josh did a great job.
• Even after [bulk emailing software] webinar a lot of useful information and good resources. Informative but humorous- great job!
• Very useful for thinking about ways to make email marketing fit your needs for different purposes and how to best customize.
• A lot of good ideas.
• Would have been nice to see examples of good emails vs. ones that get spammed, landing pages that work with emails (live).
• This is so great! I’ve got tons of new ideas for our campaigns.
• Good as an overall look at email marketing, but would’ve been nice to be a little more [product] specific.
• Interesting content. Presented well. Could have been enhanced by including examples of the six questions (i.e. Good and bad examples).
• Great presenters, good info.
• Updated/learned good information.

I provided a hand-out that summarized what I covered during the presentation which is basically a summary of my two blog posts. Feel free to download it and spread it around!

Download:
“6 Questions to Ask Before Sending an Email Campaign Piece”

Website performance and health reports

Google Analytics (GA) and Webmaster Tools (GWT) are used to determine the health and performance of any public website. A small snippet of code is added to the very end of each website page which reports back to GA both quantitative and qualitative data about each site visitor. GWT uses the Google search engine to test and report back errors on the site and sitemap.

Using these tools in conjunction on a regular basis provides very detailed information about the following site attributes:

• How much traffic the site is seeing
• How many errors users are experiencing
• What keywords are driving traffic to the site
• The pages on the site are performing the best/worst
• How many incoming links the site has
• Where website traffic is coming from
• Detailed information about site visitors

Without close monitoring and regular reporting, websites run the risk of losing traffic, accumulating errors, and becoming difficult to search.

Tasks to complete

1. First, the website needs to have GA installed and a sitemap created (if it was not already completed) and submitted to GWT.
2. Both tools will need a couple of weeks to gather data before any useful conclusions can be made.
3. Once GWT has enough information, the fixes will be clear. All critical errors and issues should be corrected immediately before moving on.
4. An incoming link and keyword report can be made using the information in GWT. This is information gleaned from the search engine spiders.
5. Next, GA is used to analyze the overall traffic of the site using visitor, page view, and bounce rate metrics.
6. A top content report can be pulled to show pages that are performing well (seeing a lot of traffic and directing it to other parts of the site), pages that are performing poorly (low traffic or high bounce rate), and how people are reaching these types of pages.
7. A traffic source report can be pulled to understand where visitors are coming from and how they got to the site in the first place. Traffic is divided between three categories: search engines, direct, and referrals.
8. If needed, a visitor report can be created to show a cross-section of the people who are viewing the site. This includes technology, geographic location, and language.

Additional Analysis Tasks

In addition to GA and GWT, other tools should be used to find presentation, browsing, and search engine problems.

• Sites should be scanned and optimized for loading time. This includes script minifying, image optimization, and code bloat.
• Web site code should also be validated across the site. Invalid code can lead to accessibility problems, display issues, and on-screen errors.
• Broken links on the site should be scanned for and corrected on a regular basis.
• Search engine optimization including keyword strategy, keyword placement, and meta information should be examined and reviewed on a quarterly basis.

Lost already? Contact me and we can work together to get your site up and running great!

What Is Web Strategy?

When I started Josh Can Help, I billed myself as a “technology tamer,” boldly fighting overcomplication, annoyance, disconnection, and frustration across the battlefields of the small business landscape. I wanted to fix computers, build websites, design documents, teach people mobile technology, and construct networks. I would do it all!

While I gained more experience over the last year, I realized my passion really centered around the web but it was more than just laying out sites and coding them. I was enthralled by how people could connect to one another, use simple tools to solve their problems, and create a name for themselves or their business in a way that was never possible before. What motivated me was how anyone could leverage fairly simple technology to reach their goals. I realized that my energy was amplified when I was talking about WEB STRATEGY.

What is Web Strategy?

For all I know, I could be stealing a term from someone else so I apologize if this has been coined in some way before. It’s important to me to know what everyone else thinks about this term as well so your comments are appreciated (but, you know, read this post first).

"Seafaring Cities and Knights of Catan" by P M M on Flickr

In one sentence, web strategy is creating a track-able, improvable, and repeatable plan to achieve a specific goal on the internet. If I could add another sentence I’d also say that this strategic plan would always seek to provide a clear return on investment and would be simple and (relatively) inexpensive to execute.

That sums the term up nicely but there are very important components to creating a plan that works for your specific situation. I’m going to give you my take on the subject and I invite you to help me come up with more components.

Web strategy … is scientific

At my core, I am a scientist. This would explain my chemistry degree but it goes beyond that. Scientists use the scientific method which is a rigid, iterative, step-by-step process:

1. Come up with a theory (hypothesis) based on existing research to explain a particular phenomenon.
2. Design an experiment to test that hypothesis (the important word here is test… not prove); a critical part of this design is data collection
3. Organize, combine, and report this data as completely as possible
4. Parse and deconstruct this data objectively and completely as it relates to you hypothesis
5. Rinse, repeat

In a perfect world (or lab), this method is driven by the desire to DISPROVE your hypothesis. Experiments are designed to find where the hypothesis fails, where the logic is flawed, and where more research needs to be conducted. If, during the course of this process, the evidence supports the hypothesis then you have a solid foundation to move your research forward.

Hopefully you’re seeing how this relates to the web but, if not, let me show you how the scientific method can be used in web strategy.

Building an effective (read: successful) website starts with a goal. Let’s start with a popular goal for people on the web – increase sales leads/inquiries. This goal can be achieved a number of different ways so let’s say we’ve decided one of the ways to increase leads is to create an easy to use contact form. So, we have our hypothesis:

Creating a simple and easy-to use form will increase sales leads.

I think you see where this is going. The experiment, in this case, is to design a simple form using suggestions from people who have done the same. You could try a few different forms and switch them out occasionally, collecting data from each one. The data is the number and quality of sales leads generated from the form and the analysis will speak to whether the form increased the number of inquires, increased the quality of inquiries, or did nothing.

Designing your plan like a scientist keeps you focused on the goal, objective about the results, and ready and willing to start over and try something new.

Web strategy … is focused on returns

I consider my aesthetic sense very pragmatic. I like looking my best as much as possible but you’ll never see me in a pair of shoes that hurt me throughout the day. I’m also a big car nut but I just wouldn’t enjoy driving a car that isn’t comfortable or one that I was filling up twice a week.

Relating this to what I do professionally, I’m always seeking to place function in front of form in all of things I produce – documents, websites, logos, etc. I start my designs in a text file mapping out the information structure and the content organization before I ever open Photoshop. An idea of how I want the site to look appears in my head very early but I don’t make that design come to life until I know what the underlying structure will be.

This all relates back to RETURNS. Spending money on any kind of web technology before you’re clear on how that technology can help you achieve your goals is wasteful and definitely not strategic.

Seeing the returns on your web investment can be difficult or easy, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. If you set out to receive more sales leads and, after a complete redesign, you are getting more leads, that’s great. If you set out to increase brand awareness, it’s a bit more difficult (but not impossible).

But it’s more than just “yay, I did it!” You need to ask yourself a few questions (using the sales lead example from before):

1. Did I increase the number of leads AND the quality or just one component?
2. Do the website leads become sales or are they just vague inquiries?
3. Am I properly set up to react to these leads or am I dropping the ball?

Spending money on a website or spending time marketing your business online is not just due diligence. Have a outcome in mind and be sure that what you’re doing online helps you reach that outcome (unless you’re just screwing around on Twitter because that’s fun sometimes).

Web strategy… makes things better, not worse.

Chores: I hate them. Washing the car, taking out the garbage, cleaning the bathroom… I just feel like I have better things to do with my time. The have-tos in life are a drag, that’s for sure. Why create more of them?

Being truly strategic on the web means that you’re not creating two hours of extra work each day. Being strategic means finding ways to automate repetitive processes and outsourcing (however that’s defined) boring or unappealing tasks. It’s also about finding time in your day by using great, online tools that make your life easier.

But I’m going to take it one step further. Web strategy is about doing new, fun things. It’s about connecting with people in and out of your industry. It’s about expressing yourself in a new way and putting yourself and your ideas out there. It’s about learning new things, sharing your domain knowledge, and getting to know your customers and clients.

The online world is a vibrant, amazing, supportive, strange, and fantastic community. Building your web presence and connecting to that world should be fun and eye-opening. If it isn’t, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Web strategy… is what I do

When I wrote this, I was on a flight back to San Diego from a visit to friends and family in Seattle. I find my trips home very restorative because of the quality time I spend with the people that are so important to me.

This trip back found me in a conversation about the web with almost everyone I saw. People wanted to know why I was on Twitter, how the web could help them promote their business, what that interesting link was that I posted on Facebook, and how my own web strategy was going.

Everyone I talked to was really energized by what I told them about what this limitless online world. One friend made me iterate through each site that I use and why I used it. My dad wanted to understand blogs, LinkedIn, and Twitter better. My mom wanted to know how we could use the web to promote this great idea she had. Another close friend was all ears as I told her about how we could increase the amount of money coming into her non-profit. No one was bored, everyone wanted to know more.

The web is one hell of a place right now and it’s poised to improve without bounds. Sure there are thieves, viruses, hackers, assholes, and problems on the web but what you can achieve and learn there is worth the effort.

If you’re excited as I am about this whole thing and just don’t know where to start, contact me and I’ll get get the gears moving!