Building a website is thought of mainly as a design and development challenge. And it certainly is. That’s indisputably the bulk of our business…ninety percent or more of our leads come to us seeking “web design” or “web development”, or both. Now those broad terms can mean all kinds of things when we start asking our questions. Every project is different. But ultimately that’s where the demand is, and that’s what our business supplies: web design and web development.

However, at some point (earlier the better) the client, the designer, the developer, or (oops?) the end user will each have to stare down the words on the page, and evaluate the message they comprise (or the damage they cause). There is nowhere to hide when it comes to content. If it stinks, the user will give up on you. So you work on it too make sure you don’t waste your time and money on a fancy website that speaks gibberish to the customer.

Would you believe that very often, almost always, the content strategy task of building a website can be just as involved with and urgently important to your ROI as any aspect of design or development? If that is overstating the case, it’s not by much.

What is “content strategy”, you ask?

In this excellent article published recently on one of our favorite websites, A List Apart, Kristina Halverson writes eloquently on “the Discipline of Content Strategy”:

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants. (See: your company’s CMS.)

Content strategy is also—surprise—a key deliverable for which the content strategist is responsible. Its development is necessarily preceded by a detailed audit and analysis of existing content—a critically important process that’s often glossed over or even skipped by project teams.

At its best, a content strategy defines:

• key themes and messages,
• recommended topics,
• content purpose (i.e., how content will bridge the space between audience needs and business requirements),
• content gap analysis,
• metadata frameworks and related content attributes,
• search engine optimization (SEO), and
• implications of strategic recommendations on content creation, publication, and governance.

There’s a lot more to digest in this very enlightening article, plus many others on the subject of writing for the web you should really check out.  We can’t recommend A List Apart enough if you really want to know what goes into building a better website.

Safe travels and warmest wishes to all our clients, contractors, neighbors, friends, and family members!

Peace on Earth.

We’re big believers in open source code. If you’re not too familiar with what that entails, don’t worry, it’s not hard to understand and even better to use.

According to the Open Source Initiative:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Apache (web server), PHP (web site application language) and PNG (file format) are only a few prominent examples of the open source development model smoothing out online experience–so much better now than only ten years ago when most everyone had to count on Microsoft to play and display nice with others.

We develop using open source programming languages and software packages, in particular Zen Cart (user-friendly ecommerce shopping cart software), the aforementioned PHP (makes web pages dynamic, widely used), MySQL (fast, reliable, easy database used by Google, Yahoo, et.al.), and Drupal (consistently ranked as the very best content management platform).

It was cool to read this article on CNET over the weekend that none other than the U.S. Department of Defense agrees that open source is the hands down best way to go. Apparently the Pentagon is preparing guidelines to leverage even more open source into U.S. defense than they already have.

If there’s anyone left out there who would still tell you open source isn’t safe or advisable for your business because it’s not “protected” or not “legit” enough, what are they going to say when the CTO of a powerful agency within the USDoD declares the following?:

Open source brings to us the ability to have collaborative and agile development environments….Additionally, open source benefits the Department of Defense through…simplified licensing…and security….Security through obscurity just doesn’t work.

As CNET’s Matt Asay puts it, “if your country trusts your physical security to open source, isn’t it time to trust your business’ security to open source?”

We’ll have a few important questions to answer before we can accurately estimate a price for your project.

You can help us immensely in this early phase by fully communicating your ideas and preferences. Once we are certain we know what exactly it is you want, what we will be responsible for, and what contributions you’ll be available to provide along the way, we can move forward with deliberate speed.

For start-up or higher concept projects there will be just a few more questions to consider before we can act with confidence. Projects such as these require analysis to uncover the right approach that will achieve the desired result, and it is always time well spent to do so. We are happy to provide plenty of free advice if you want/need it.

Some clients come to us knowing full well the requisite effort and investment that goes into creating quality and long-term interactive assets such as websites, e-commerce stores, and flash presentations. Some come to us knowing exactly what they want and how to expedite the process of getting it done on time and on budget.

We also realize many of our clients are not as familiar with the design process and development costs associated with building a custom website. We’ll explain it all to you. It’s not exactly cheap, it’s not exactly expensive. It’s not overly complicated, but it’s not easy, either. Just as we allocate time at the outset to learn about your business and how you go about it, we hope you’ll be inclined to learn about our business and who we are, too. In many ways, this is one of the most rewarding aspects of our job: the creative working relationship we enjoy with clients along the way.

Please read our testimonials. We’ve turned around flash presentations in 1 week and entire websites in under a month. Alternatively, we’ve iterated on a single aspect of one project for several months. Often we’ve finished a project and later been asked to maintain an ongoing arrangement as the client continues to discover new potential in what we can do. The point we are making here is that there we are flexible in our service engagements and proud of the quality we deliver.

We encourage you to view our portfolio and see the services we’ve provided for past clients. All of these enduring and professional marketing assets began as cocktail napkin drawings, phone conversations, email strings, etc…

Do you have a potential project you would like to talk to us about? Let us know your project goals, target dates, and budget range and we’ll be happy to create a draft proposal just for you.

(note: this message used to be in our about section, but it’s probably better here.)

We’d like to explain how we go about pricing our projects and offer suggestions for getting the most out of your budget.

Pricing our work can be a challenge, because every project is different. We always quote the fairest price we can, based on the probable hours ENTERMEDIA will spend working directly on your project. We only charge for our time. You get all our ideas and collaborative synergy free, essentially. With the custom nature of the work we do, it’s best to keep it simple like that.

In our experience, focusing on goal accomplishment rather than running down a list of technical requirements is a better way to build an action plan around your budget. It allows all parties to explore creative approaches within this collaborative process to balance and accommodate your budget while still delivering the goods.

We make every effort to anticipate and inform you of the potential ‘gotchas’ in your project that might threaten to waste your time or money. Likewise, we brainstorm and recommend options for satisfying an objective through simpler means. If we can do more with less somewhere, resulting in a smaller bill for you, we will. If the original project scope has changed such that we will exceed our original time estimate, we’ll make that clear. For our part, we just want to be as cost-efficient a business as we can be, and keep our clients happy.

Finally, there is more than one way to put a dollar amount on the work we do. We design and develop towards long term value and scalability. How do you put a number on that? In the end, how much an accomplished goal is worth is relative to how completely it was accomplished and whether it was a worthy goal in the first place. We do know the prices we charge are extremely competitive compared to what other firms of our skill level and professionalism would insist on.

Bottom line: we build you the kind of assets that justify their labor cost many times over.

Greetings!

Subsequent to much thought and not much ballyhoo we’re turning on our blog. We’re excited about it.

Excited to have such thoughtful and creative clients these days. You probably know how nice that is when it happens.  Excited that the projects we’re getting a chance to work on just keep getting better. More challenging but exponentially more rewarding.

Excited about our team here in Hyde Park. We’ve really got a complementary and skillful crew in house now with Chris and Nick the indefatigable code warriors, Ethan and Ryan handling the bulk of the strategy and project management, Bryan making the pictures pretty and the transitions seamless and Campbell dottin’ dem i’s and crossin’ dem t’s. It’s a tight group of individuals and we lean on each other to get things done.

So after four years going on five … [pause for reflection] … we feel like we’ve been doing what we do long enough and well enough that we have something to say about this web design and development business.

No, we haven’t seen it all. Of course we learn something new every day. Surely we’ve not arrived to where we want to be–not yet. But that’s what this blog is going to be about…the day to day work of what we do. And the value in it for us as professionals and for our clients engaging us to help them run and grow their business.

It is exciting.

We’re going to take our own advice and get to the point quickly. So even though we could go on in regards to intro and caveat, we’ll leave it for now as “more to come.”

See you on the interweb.