Sometimes people think that designers just come up with ideas…have you ever encountered a person or prospective client that throws a project/idea at you and immediately says…so what do you think? do you have any ideas? It has happened to me…and it is just funny because at that point you can say so many things, have so many ideas…and all of them can be so far away from reality.

The reality is that every designer has a process, my process lives in Moleskine notebooks.

Another funny question I have been asked is ‘and how do you use a Moleskine’ and the answer is there is not right or wrong way, depends on how you feel comfortable working, anyhow, I will share my way…

ï To-dos: It is important to know what you have to do. This is key for me, every email I get, Basecamp message, phone call, etc. I erase and write it in my Moleskine. Why? Because if you only had one thing to do every I am sure you will not forget about it, but when you have several things to do, you will forget something. Anyhow, the secret of productivity relies on not leaving anything to your memory. Treat your mind, like you treat your computer, try to have it as free as possible so it can work faster on the tasks you need it to work on.

ï MITS: Most Important Tasks. So, out of those 029472393409274 to-dos you need to know what your priority is, some to-dos might need to be done ASAP, and some others might be done in a more relaxed way. Your MITS will let you know if there is something of urgency you need to do.

ï Briefs: A new project will always be briefed, what is the concept? target? keywords? tone? so many things to think about, that if you do not have all this information in one place so that you can organize your ideas, the quality and effectiveness of your project might suffer because you missed something.

ï Research: Gather information, nowadays that we live in an overload information world, it is a sin for you to not study your brand. Research the industry, who are the competitors, learn from them.

ï Unleash your thoughts: Create roughs, very very roughs, nothing pretty, nothing like the final product…just ideas. This will be your base so that you know what direction you are going.

“Moleskine was created as a brand in 1997, bringing back to life the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two century: among them Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin.”? www.moleskine.com

The aim for most people building websites or webapps is to create a source of revenue aka to become rich. This is a shallow goal, but definitely the most important in any business. It starts by building a prototype and getting paid for it. Most people seek to monetize their efforts by selling ads, but this is slippery slope because they’ll have to compete double.

Compete double is? the concept of competing in two completely different fields. By selling ads you’ll have to compete against Google, Facebook and many more for the advertisers; moreover, you’ll have to compete against other apps in your space. For example: If I was building an app to handle project collaboration, I’ll have to compete against Basecamp, Activecollab, Zoho and many more. On top of that, I’ll have to compete against many more for the advertisers money.

Be careful becuase monetizing is a slippery slope specially is your model is based on selling ads. It has worked great for Facebook or Google, but it may be a dead sentence for many because they’ll have to compete double and create the infrastructure to sell those ads.

What do I mean by creating the infrastructure to sell ads? It starts by having the proper technology in place to count, rotate and display the ads. There are many open source software that can be use for this purpose, but this is just deviating attention from the core product. People are needed to sell the ads or build that system to support it. It just adds a tremendous burden to the entire organization. Let’s assume the technology stack is already in place to support selling ads. I believe it is equally or more difficult to get somebody to pay for an ad that is to make people pay for your product or the vision of it.

We had the pleasure of hosting Corey Haines for a week last month. It really was a eye opening experience into the practices of a Software Craftsmanship (more on that later). This time is for a video we did about starting up a company, dealing with clients and the whole designers/developers worlds.

Conversation with Ivan Acosta-Rubio and Bellatrix Martinez from Corey Haines on Vimeo.

We’ve been observing patterns on client behavior that cast some light on how a project is going to develop. By recognizing this patterns, you can avoid clients that will drown your energy, work with clients that get the big picture, advance your career and obviously make more money.

Have you observe any pattern of client behavior?

A successful web development project is the one that carefully listens to their visitors, customers and clients. There are projects where feedback starts even before any design or web development; moreover, it is not a coincidence that those are the projects that live longer or even become profitable. Even if you have not collected user data yet, you must set up a well design feedback loop if you are aiming for success.

I love how hashrocket asked, listened and crafted RMM (rails maturity model). Obie introduced it in the Rails Business list with this message (Feb, 12). Surely after, there was a rave about certifications vs whatever. All this controversy generated tons of blog posts like this, this, this and a huge twitter stream.

The feedback gathered around the information stream was priceless. It is truly an example of how we can validate our market and get feedback from users even before investing in development. It took Obie just one email. Today, they launched the app unofficially and all the drama around the certification argument was put to rest by their tagline “Rails Maturity Model It?s not about certification. It?s about success”. Be sure to notice that their tagline was gathered from early feedback.

To immature people I left the discussion on how much of a good thing is the RMM for the rails community. However, we can learn how to ask for early feedback from this example. We see a lot of value on professional development and give two thumbs up for this project. We are proud to be part of the RMM and we are honored to be among giant firms. Surely, we’ll learn many more things from all of them.

We just found this great article about how to think strategically when designing online business. Let’s face it, Web Design is not Art. The strategy ought to be designed to fulfill your business goals witch generally involve filling out a web-form - you better make them short a pretty!.

Client who saves $5,000 buying cut-rate non-semantic HTML will later spend $25,000 on SEO consultant to compensate. - jeffrey zeldman

While? SEO consultants will put in place a group of techniques to rank you at the top of Google and charge you some thousands there is a far more effective and inexpensive technique. FOCUS ON CONTENT. If you have juicy content that your target audience finds attractive, update your site regularly and get some people to talk about you, they will come and bite. Remember the 4 C’s for online success.

Resources:

Top 10 SEO Techniques @ Freelance Folder

SEO Tools at SEO MOZ

Conversion

Conversion is the art of turning an information seeker or browser into a customer. Its often hard work, but the first two Cs, Content and Credibility, go a long way to helping with conversion. The next thing you need to do is identify your conversion goals, and design you site around those goals.

Usually a site would have at least two goals. One is a primary goal first prize. A primary goal is usually something that brings in money or has significant value to your business like:

• A sale on your online shop
• A booking for your seminar

The other goal, the secondary goal, is your second place prize, sometimes referred to as the backup goal. Secondary goals are usually a mechanism to give you another chance later at converting the browser to the primary goal. Secondary goals are things like:

• A contact us form
• An email newsletter subscription

How can you enhance your chances of conversion? The key things you can work on to improve conversion are:

1. Identify and refine your Conversion funnel. A Conversion funnel is the path you identify that begins where the customer is starting down the path to conversion, and ends after the conversion is made. A funnel needs to be designed to build comfort in the purchase, not be too many steps or be too complicated, but also not be too short. Funnels that are too short result in a half-baked customer who isnt sure if they want to buy yet!
2. Use Calls to Action. A call to action is something like Buy now, Click here, or Get started today. You should include these both in your site to start users down the conversion funnel but also within the conversion funnel to drive them to action.
3. Use the secondary goal to catch people who fall out of the primary conversion funnel. By placing the secondary goal strategically in the site, you can catch those potential customers who arent 100% convinced.

Customer

Customer is the final C, and the most important. Why it that? Its because the cost of acquisition of a customer is higher than the cost of retention. For you to go out and go through the previous 3Cs and get a new customer is time consuming and requires effort and money. So the 4th C is about how you can keep your customers happier and retain their business for as long as possible, as cost-effectively as possible. The key things to remember are:

• Customers are expensive to acquire.

• Customers can find your competitors online very easily.

• Customers online are impatient they want service NOW.

• The Customer has the high ground because the Internet gives them greater power to choose and compare you with your competitors.

There are several key ways to increase your customers retention rates, including:

• Run loyalty building advertising campaigns. Loyalty campaigns are targeted marketing campaigns that leverage your knowledge of your customer. An example of such a marketing campaign is a birthday campaign that goes out before my birthday to offer me a special deal: Happy Birthday: Buy one T-shirt and get one free in your birthday month

• Provide exemplary service with fast response times. When you receive a lead, enquiry or support request, react as quickly as possible. Better yet, you should be receiving emails and SMSs notifying you of customers requests.

• Dont waste time provide useful FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) to allow your customers to find answers to their simpler questions without having to contact you.

• Build a relationship. Use the right tools to keep track of your correspondences with customers, and make sure you can share knowledge about your customers.

Each of the Cs works in concert with the others, linking together to create a winning process that helps you generate more leads and ultimately make more money out of your online business.

The 4Cs is a process developed to help business owners understand how to make the web an effective, revenue generating channel for their business. Its about making an online business successful. The 4Cs are:

Content => Credibility => Conversion => Customer

Content

On the Internet, your potential customers are searching for information, and they are using search engines to find information that meets their needs. Search engines give greater weighting to targeted, valuable content. So if you want your business to be towards the top of the search results, you need to have valuable content on your chosen topic. That means when designing your site:

Focus on the information need of your visitors, not on making the sale.

An example of this can be seen when searching for Wheatgrass on Google.

wheatgrasskits is number four on the list. How did he get there by having a wide range of varied and useful content on the topic of wheatgrass.

It also happens that wheatgrasskits successfully sells wheatgrass products, but he focused on the information need of his visitors, not making the sale.

Credibility

The net is a low trust environment. That means that potential customers will ask themselves many questions as they browse your site to convince themselves that they can trust you. As such you need to build credibility in the customers eyes. The sort of questions they will ask themselves might include:

• How do I know if this business really even exists?
• How long has this business been around, and will they still be here tomorrow?
• If I buy or contact this business, will my details be safe?
• Will I receive my purchases, or will the promises made by the business be held?
• What type of post-sales support will I receive after receiving the product?

So you need to address those questions, and design your web site to help foster trust and build your credibility. How can you do this?

1. Meet the information need first. Your potential customers came for information, so meet their needs in that department first.
2. Write about yourself how long youve been in business, who you are and why you do what you do. Even put up a picture or two of your team.
3. Display Customer Testimonials who else has used your product or service, and how good was their experience.
4. Capture Customer Feedback Give people a mechanism to contact you easily and provide feedback or ask questions.
5. Create a Community (e.g. Forums) An extremely powerful credibility tool, as it often achieves points 1, 3 and 4 all at once. Plus you allow customers to talk to each other and spread the word first hand to new customers.
6. Write you business contact details such as phone numbers and addresses. If you have some sort of business registration number, include that somewhere too.