ENTERMEDIA cofounder Ethan Worrel and our Head Drupal Chef Nick Lewis will be the speakers tonight at the July meeting of the Austin Drupal Meetup on the interrelated topics of UX, The Client, The Project, and Drupal.

The meetup will run from 7-10p and held at UT’s ACTLab (4th Floor CMB, Studio B, corner of Guadalupe and Dean Keeton).  Ethan and Nick will take turns presenting their brief remarks and then open the floor for questions and comments.

Without giving too much away, here’s a sampling of what you can expect to hear tonight from two of our own most thoroughly enlightening and well-mannered professionals:

UX:

• Fully leverage everything the user already knows
• Display the most valuable data…let users dig for the fine detail
• Make decisions so your users don’t have to

The Client:

• Guide them to think in terms of page types
• Demand supporting content early and often
• Most of the time, you are the client

The Project:

• Making tough choices that pay off in the long run for both parties
• How to use the Website Price Estimator 5000
  

Drupal:

• Clients can figure out how taxonomy works well enough, but how taxonomy fits into the concept of view arguments?  That’s a different story…
• [pause for laughter...the audience will think its funny...]

A few years ago, we built a simple brochure website for an Austin-based client in the construction business.  At that time, we created a geo-targeted Google Adwords campaign aimed at driving qualified leads to the site and converting them into online contacts.

This pay-per-click campaign was quite successful.  For a scant few hundreds of dollars per month the client paid Google for ad clicks, he received enough good leads submitted through the website that the first year, annual  revenue jumped from low six-figures to mid six-figures.  In the second year, the client broke seven figures for the first time ever.

The client had so much new business in the pipeline, it was all he could do to keep up with demand.  It that’s a problem, it’s a good one, right?  Unfortunately though, amid all the activity he neglected to pay his $300 AdWords bill one month and, of course, Google turned his campaign off.  The client figured:  no worries…I’m so busy anyway…

Two years pass.  The client came by our office last week and reports:  business is dead…zero…we’ve got to update the website, buy some radio, tv ads, something…the recession’s taking me under!

Our reply was predictable.  He could pay thousands on a radio spend but it’ll be expensive and hard to measure.  Alternatively, we reminded him how well he was doing with his cost efficient pay-per-click campaign.

We told him:  just pay your bill…turn your ads back on…it’s the epitome of low risk, high reward.

He took our advice.   Over the weekend he got two good sales leads through the site within the first $45 spent.  He’s undeniably great at what he does from there, we’re sure he’ll turn those new leads into business.

Imagine that.

Check out these corny/quaint early interface designs of some of the world’s most popular websites pulled together by The Daily Beast in honor of Yahoo’s new homepage design.  Some of these will make you laugh…like whitehouse.gov circa 1998:

“Good Morning,” beamed the White House’s Web site in 1998. “Welcome to the White House.” (Whether this message changed as morning changed to afternoon and evening is unclear.) Beneath the cutting-edge waving flags and photo of the fountains outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., a visitor to Whitehouse.gov in the late ‘90s could learn more about Bill Clinton and Al Gore: “Their accomplishments, their families, and how to send them electronic mail.

Website Flashbacks - The Daily Beast

We are getting excited about Google Wave, coming later this year.

What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

There will be a meetup tonight to discuss what this Google Wave thing might mean for Austin and our local tech community.  Come join the discussion!

Went to buy a mattress from a local organic bed manufacturer/retailer this past weekend. Got a fair price, and the mattress and box spring set works great for the guestroom in question…but that is not what this post is about.

What was fun and unexpected during the final transaction was hearing the owner/operator enthuse about his store’s website and what it means for their small business success.

Here’s the back story. He asked us how we happened to hear of them initially, and we replied that we were just driving by the day before and stopped in to see some pricing. Later that night we visited their website and learned all about their business:  how long they’d been around, how they make their mattresses individually to order, why that delivers a better value to their customers, the delivery process, etc. Standard website stuff, but competently done. This gave us a good impression and the next day we returned to the store to make a purchase.

So when the store owner heard we had checked out the website and this was a factor in our decision,  the man actually pumped his fist like he had just holed a long birdie.  He proceeded to share the following anecdotes about business before and after the site:

• Before the “internet happened” they had to compete with everybody else trying to get on TV, radio, or newspapers for expensive advertising time.
• Before, TV mattered most and good ROI was never a given…especially in a bad economy.
• Now, they do no TV which saves them tens of thousands in marketing costs.
• Now, they get qualified leads through organic search results and a well-maintained Google Adwords campaign (pay per click) who bring their undivided attention every day and all night.
• Now, newspaper and radio have slashed their advertising rates and are almost begging them to come back. They’re not interested.
• His dad, still an owner, has been selling beds for over 50 years, and has never known a game-changer like website traffic and pay-per-click advertising for small business.
• 70% of their annual business now comes from website traffic.

It was just really validating to hear this story offered up so freely and randomly…and that it would match so much of what we tell our small business clients about the value of having a strong web presence. I suspect that, for this savvy and adaptable business owner, having a website that converts has insulated his family’s small business from the worst effects of this recession at the very least.  All I really know is there are about ten bed stores in the vicinity of this one, but the owner of this one was making an easy sale on a hot Sunday afternoon that the competition wasn’t making…and his website was a big reason why.