The Open Site

Content Curation Opportunities

Craig Daniels — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:41:28 +0000

Got a story to tell? It’s a rhetorical question, we all have stories to tell and if we run a business or pilot a nonprofit we have loads of memories and case studies worth sharing with our customers and potential customers.

An example is the one I’ve embeded below titled Innovation. For this story I choose to use Storify because it allows me to quickly combine tools like RSS, Twwitter, YouTube and Soundcloud into a well designed web page. Your business could so something similar just by having your website design incorporate snippets of info with your comments.

Of course you can tap into the growing online websites that offer tools just like my example uses.There are dozens of curation sites with more coming every week. Most have a free option to get you started and many offer premium tools with more advanced features. Below is a list of 5 I have tried and like, just click and try one or two of them out. If you find you like what they can do give some serious thought to of incorporating this type of content building into your website design.

Website Design Moves Forward & Back

Craig Daniels — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:55:59 +0000

Another Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. has come and gone and along with it an uproarious celebration of unbridled consumerism called Black Friday. I thought with a stomach full of turkey I’d sit and share a bit from the web about what’s going on with website design. After all it is the tradition to reflect at years end about the preceding year, isn’t it?

It was not that long ago that people jumped onto their computers and built their first homemade websites. Many of the first website design looked just like rooms and common areas culled from stores and transportation hubs that included couches, chairs and windows inviting you to take a seat or take a leap through the looking glass. Those early websites were cute but they missed out on the fact that users really didn’t want to pull up a chair and hang out. Users wanted useful information they could grab and then inject into their lives. Time was and still is the most important ingredient in website design.

If you can present your design a user can utilize in their lives with little effort they will come back to your website over and over. The site that offers something useful and unique will be rewarded and the users time won’t be wasted.

Over at 123webdesign the author takes a considerable amount of time and space to review 10 areas in web design that are moving and shaking with new ideas and technology. It’s well worth a look and full of a bunch of quality examples.

“Successful website design demands keeping up with current web design trends. With ever-changing design trends and techniques, web designers love to experiment with things to come up with a creative and new concept that attract the visitors. 2011 has been an incredibly verdant year for web designers; we have noticed lots of changes in the web design industry. Mobile has hit the mainstream; Web typography has reached new levels of sophistication; new coding techniques have vastly improved our ability to get creative with the design. All in all, it’s been a year that’s moved fast, even by the standards of the web. However it will be tough to predict the evolution of web design industry.“

Over at Wixmobile the author Vail Joy lays out a clear path for photographers to take when considering the design of a mobile website and how people will see their work on a smart phone. The article is titled 5 moblie website design tips for photographers. Below are the 5 helpful tips that anyone can benefit from, check the piece out and let the author know what you think about it.

Design for the right scale
Let your work speak for itself and display it proudly on your front page.
Simplify your navigation
Add a compact biography
Make it easy to get in “touch”

And building on the unique and usefulness of the content and design you present to your readers, I ran across a great little article by Katy Cowan in The Guardian titled Building Trust is the Key to Promoting Your Organization Online

Cowan starts off with a simple straight forward declaration that many organizations and small businesses ignore. “Your website is the single most important aspect of your business these days. It’s a crucial first impression and will determine whether audiences attend your arts events and performances, hire you for your services or buy your products.”

The article is well written and very informative using over a dozen short bite headings to lay out a clear path any organization can use to achieve a user friendly and trustful website. I highly recommend reading Katy Cowan’s article.

Website design doesn’t need to be something created in secret by some unknown gurus who guard their secrets, no the whole process needs to be built upon transparency and a process that is fully understood by the client. Before you hire someone to lead your small business on the web make sure 100% of what goes on is easily accessible to your company and equally easily understood.

Build Your Website For Your Visitors

Craig Daniels — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:44:59 +0000

Zen often talks about how people see themselves as the center of the universe. When it comes to building a website many small businesses often have their website built and their content written not for the reader but for themselves. As a web designer I have an obligation to help a client understand that their website design needs to be useful to the visitor first, this can often create friction with the business owner if its not handled just right.

Being in business takes a tremendous amount of hard work and drive to reach success and it is just this drive that can lead a business owner down the path of wanting the website to be a reflection of what they like and not take into account the needs of the user. A website primarily is about information and not bells and whistles, the user comes to the site expecting to find answers to their questions and once they have those answers they may look around the website, but not before they have been satisfied.

Statistics can be a great place to find what a visitor is looking for and what they could care less about. Using the information produced when every visitor visits your website you can help modify and tweak your site to give the user what they want.

Here are five easy to understand statistic signals every business needs to look at at least every month if not more often. These will help you answer the question, what do my customers want from my website.

Unique visitor your website receives
Which pages or posts they visit
Total time they spend on your website
Top 5 pages visited excluding home page
Internal & External links visitors are clicking

Have your webmaster or marketing team prepare a regular report using the five items above, and have them deliver it at least once a month complete with explanation of each item.

A Blog Title Is Paramount To Success

Craig Daniels — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:21:43 +0000

The secret to capturing new readers to your blog is in creating a title and first sentence for each post that wows the reader. The reader generally only sees the title and part of the first sentence on a search result page amongst other results on the same topic.

Each title and first sentence for each post you write sits in a bowl of competitive results. Ask yourself, will my title and first sentence be good enough to lure readers to my blog? Will my carefully crafted title and first sentence elicit excitement and cause a need to know within the reader’s mind?

Ask yourself, will the wording of my title and first sentence grab the attention of the reader with enough pluck that a question forms in their mind needing to be answered, a question that causes them to click on your link and come to the your blog.

A good blog post should always be something unique in its approach to a subject and always useful to the reader. Readers are looking to take something away from their experience, something they can integrate into their lives swiftly.

You can take your expertise and use it to share thoughts about any of the following

A Movie You Just Viewed
A Book You Just Read
A Trip You Just Returned From
An Outing To A New Restaurant
A Recent Lecture You Attended
Progress On A Book You Are Writing
An Overview Of A New Client
An Anecdote About A Previous Client
Societal Parallels With Your Work

The trick here is paint a recent event your participated in and using the brush of your experience paint a picture (blog post) of that event, of that experience. Share with your readers how the movie you just saw is relevant to seeing their business in a new way.

Give your readers insight that allows them to integrate that into their lives. If you do this they will come back for more information and some of them will start sharing how they see things, with this community takes form.

A Business That Stands Out Is A Good Thing

Craig Daniels — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 14:53:58 +0000

My first job that wasn’t working for a family member is still vivid in my memory. The job was to stock shelves and generally keep the little neighborhood market clean and shinny. My boss seemed to be all about business dressed in his clean apron and bow tie as he stood behind the meat counter where he tended to the customer requests. Yet I started to notice as time went by that his real strength was in what today we would call networking and back then was called schmoozing.

My boss knew all his customers on a first name basis and more than that he knew the names of their families and neighbors as well, he knew who would graduate when and who was in or out of the hospital and even when your pesky relatives where coming for their yearly visit. It wasn’t that my boss had a photographic memory, it was that he really liked and cared about all his customers.

One day my boss came up to me with a squeegee in one hand and a soapy bucket in the other, Craig he said it is time I teach you the most important thing you’ll ever need to know in business, I knew what he was going to show me and I was excited to be entrusted with washing the front windows and door of the store. The washing of the windows each day was a task he did when he first opened the store each day, now he was giving me this huge responsibility. Mr. Payette went on to say ” the first impression of my store people passing by see are the windows and the door, if I keep them spotless and shinny they will have a good impression even if they never stop in to buy something.” Then Mr. Payette taught me how to correctly wash windows and to appreciate that windows are like the eyes of the store, people who see clean windows and an attractive window display, see a smile.

To this day I have found nothing more important then the first impression your customers make as they pass by your store or your website, each is a view into the soul of your business. Of course you don’t have to have a front window for this tip to be a huge benefit to you and your business. Pay attention to the things that matter and leave the distractions to your competition.

This morning I came across a story in the NYT that shows some businesses are giving more then lip service to this paying attention motto. Here’s the story, Would You Like A Smile With That?