Beyonce is a superstar.   Everyone knows and wants Beyonce.   She’s the kind of entertainer that only needs one name…Elvis, Prince, Cher, Madonna, Liberace…the short list.

Beyonce can name her price these days. Got $2 million dollars for a one off show? You can probably book Beyonce for your next big party.

That’s why she’s Beyonce.  It’s what makes her a superstar.  She’s a scarce resource that is beautiful, dynamic, beloved, and hard-working.  She brings it.  When she was younger she toiled in obscurity and sacrificed as necessary to become the world-class performer she is today.  Now she reaps the profit of all that practice, and there’s really no stopping her.

She’s on automatic awesome, and she’s appropriately expensive.  All she has to do is show up for the gig, prepared and on time, and just be Beyonce.  It’s all her fans care about…that 5 minute or 2 hour segment where she does what she does best and earns a small fortune.

Ever wonder what her job is like between performances?  Probably not very exciting right?   More practicing, taking meetings, signing deals, getting rest, working out, vocal exercises, recording, writing, choreographing, collaborating with other artists, charity work, managing her business.  Yawn.  It’s Beyonce up on stage (or screen) that makes the people happy.

When you think of Beyonce performing live at the Grammys, you think of her singing and dancing and the crowd going wild.  You don’t think of all the work that goes into making that happen.  You’re just consuming it.  But somebody must be producing it…and at a high level.

What about the team behind Beyonce? You don’t stop to think of all the handlers Beyonce surely has that allow her to sustain her career and schedule.

There’s the agent, the business manager, the bodyguard, the choreographer, the stylist, the personal assistant, the assistant to the personal assistant, the driver, the shopper, the spiritual advisor, the personal trainer, the nutritionist…  These people are not stars and no promoter ever hires them to entertain a room of thousands.  They might even be ugly and poor dancers.  Whatever.  They come with Beyonce, help her be ready to rock, set her up for success…great.   Take them for granted because they are behind the scenes if you wish.  So what if they are good at their jobs and Beyonce likes working with them between, during, and after the gig…there’s only one Beyonce. She’s the star!

But she’s not the show.

Beyonce could not be Beyonce without a lot of help.  She wouldn’t be able to be nearly as effective nor as focused without the worker bees she employs to make her job easy.

And she needs to pay these people.  That big fee she charges for 2 hours of work?  Does that mean her rate is $500,000 an hour?  No.  She’s got to share that with those that enable her, the ones who have spent hundreds of hours doing trivial and non-trivial tasks that are just as necessary, really, as her singing the right words to her song up in the spotlight.  All the way down to the bodyguard making “only” five figures. He’s not sexy and he’s not expensive, but he’s playing an important role in the show, too.

In our business, Beyonce is the lead web developer. The lead web developer is what the people crave. He’s the star performer.  He’s the scarce resource that folks don’t mind paying for.  He can charge a high hourly rate and our clients don’t argue.

Unfortunately, some clients only budget for the development work and forget to save a little outlay for the other hours that they will need to get the development work ready to work with.

Just like Beyonce’s support team, the lead developer is dependent on the efforts of others to really succeed.  Without a well planned project with fully vetted user stories and functionality requirements, a prioritized task list, and a client who has been well-educated as to the nature of web development projects (to name only a few necessary support jobs) he is adrift and likely to fail.  His talent and time will be wasted, at least by some percentage.  And since his talents are hired out at such a high rate, a lot of money is wasted when his time is wasted, too.

Don’t waste your lead web developer…it’s like wasting your Beyonce!  You wouldn’t waste your Beyonce, would you?  Of course you wouldn’t.

Think about it.  Do you really want Beyonce answering phone calls from the worried venue manager when he thinks an email has not been responded to sufficiently?  No, you want someone else to smooth out that situation.

Do you need Beyonce to personally inspect the legal documents pertaining to insuring the show or fulfilling the show contract?  Of course, she should be briefed but she should not have to read every line of small print either.  She’s got better things to do more germane to her skill set.

And it’s the same way with the web developer.  He doesn’t need to manage client expectations or make sure the checks are in the mail. But somebody has to.

He doesn’t need to make sure the designer has time tomorrow to go over client feedback, and he doesn’t need to populate the content in the FAQs section.  He shouldn’t worry about uploading the right SEO modules.  Other, less scarce resources that can’t handle writing a custom hook that integrates with Sales Force and accomplishes X, Y, Z unique use cases can handle the more mundane stuff.  But just because it’s mundane doesn’t mean it’s not important…it’s only less scarce.  So you have to put the right person on the right job.

It’s essentially a matter of a team dividing and conquering the myriad of details that go into making a complex system look simple and work elegantly…each and every time it’s on display.  That takes teamwork and team commitment.

If Beyonce was your lead web developer, you’d be happy to pay her for her time and you’d be right to expect a knockout performance.  But you’d still be really dependent on her support team setting her up to succeed in her moment.  Otherwise, it’d be kind of a waste.

So all this is to say to clients: appreciate and enable the efforts of the team, not just the web developer.   Pay a little for the personal assistant, the agent, the stylist, the legal counsel…pay the star her higher rate so she can happily do her thing…and you’ll get your money’s worth when it counts.

DreamHost reviews

ENTERMEDIA has built a lot of websites since 2004 for clients of all types. Over the years we’ve gravitated to build practically every site with Drupal. Why is that?

Drupal is flexible.

From it’s inception Drupal was built with open source in mind. The founder of Drupal was smart enough to realize that predicting where the web will go in the future is a fool’s game, so let’s build it to be as flexible and modular as possible so it can adapt to each clients needs as well as any future developments. Remove as many constraints as possible at the outset. What this means is that you need to understand best practices for development to contribute modules that the rest of the community will endorse and adopt, but isn’t that how it should be? For instance, old site planning methodologies such as the waterfall project management approach, were concerned with concepts like knowing exactly where the main navigation menu was going to be before you would write a single line of code. With Drupal, if you decide that the main nav needs to move to the right side or left side instead of across the top you can make that change in a matter of minutes, so long as you haven’t styled the whole site prematurely.

Drupal is modular.

The devil is in the details when you are developing a website. Unfortunately, the majority of projects do not achieve the initial goal of building the entire scope on-time and on-budget. That’s because unless the developer has previously coded something exactly like what you need now, he’s having to estimate how he can get the job done on assumptions alone.  Building every simple thing from scratch is hard.

But with Drupal, ‘there’s a module for that.

Like the Apple store’s claim ‘there’s an app for that’, there’s most likely a feature rich Drupal module that does what you need and can be configured for your exact requirements. If not, there will be soon. There are over 3500 modules that can be used in Drupal to accomplish just about any requirement you can imagine.  Many times multiple modules are introduced that do the same thing, but over time the best solution emerges and the community gets behind it.  Once a module is adopted and accepted by the Drupal community it will be continuously tested and refined to fix any issues or add any ‘got-to-have’ features due to it’s vast number of implementations and specific feedback.  Developers help developers figure out these problems, and then the rest of us get to share in their solutions.

Drupal is scalable.

Drupal works with practically any type of database, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using an enterprise level Oracle databases or a free MySQL database. Without getting too technical, what you need to know is that Drupal can scale to meet your needs, but you’ll need an experienced Systems/Server Admin toproperly guide you to the right hosting a server setup. The greater point is that Drupal can scale as well as any other technology. The best proof is the number of large web properties who are successfully using Drupal, such as the economist. You can find more example drupal sites on the founder of Drupal’s blog.

Drupal is SEO friendly.

SEO is largely misunderstood from our experience. Drupal makes it easy for you to make your site follow best SEO practices.  It also allows you to write, publish, and correct problems with your site content that the search engines might not like with a little training and without needing a web developer to be involved.  Drupal does a lot of things automatically, such as provide strong internal link structure to make sure each link to pages within the site are tagged in the same way.  Drupal does not do SEO for you, however.  For more information on what you should be doing to practice good SEO, start here for a simple overview, but go here if you’re looking for professional help.

Drupal is free.

Drupal is open source and is therefore free of charge.  You will need to pay for hosting if you don’t have your own web server, and if you’re not a web developer you will probably need to hire a good team if you’re hoping for something professional.  However, you won’t have to pay Microsoft liscensing fees, the hosting for open source costs less, and the majority of the web is open source, so there are plenty of capable people in this world who can support a Drupal based website.

Drupal has momentum.

Like most movements, what’s critical to the success of Drupal is the huge adoption rate of the development community and the business community in general.  It is one of the greatest crowd-sourcing success stories around.  It is this community that will decide if Drupal deserves it’s success, if it should continue on, and for how long.  The Drupal 7 User Experience Project is a good reason to believe that Drupal will continue to be the best available option for years to come.  Already, some very big and important websites are built with Drupal, like:

• The British Government
  
• The Whitehouse
• Duke University
• Lucas Arts
• Reuters
• CNN

Drupal is simply an efficient tool.

Drupal is a content management system that allows non-technical site owners to manage their own content. It’s open source, which means it’s free as well. It still requires a high level of experience and expertise in web development practices and principles to build a professional website, which is not free unless you are one of those people. Drupal is simply the tool that allows you to do great things like build an online storefront, event listings, a social community, blog, photo slideshow, multimedia video player, forums, discussion groups, etc.

We’re proud to be co-sponsoring DrupalCamp Austin 2009!

This will surely be a cool event this upcoming Saturday and Sunday, dedicated to timely topics of development, design, and business by and for the local Drupal community.  (Note the ENTERMEDIA room where all the Design and Business track sessions will be held.)

Our own Nick Lewis will be presenting on the topic of Building Amazing Interfaces with Drupal & jQuery UI.  Oh yes.

We hope we’ll see you there. Register here!

The facts:

Who?

• Drupal Gurus and Newbies!
  
• Drupal users, developers, designers and decision makers. It’s where community ties are strengthened and Drupal’s future is decided.

What?

• DrupalCamp!
  
• Where some of the best developers and leading business owners cross paths, exchange ideas, find partners and conceive projects.

Where?

• Norris Conference Center!
  
• Three large meeting rooms for speaker sessions, keynotes, and BoFs. Located at Northcross Center (Anderson Ln. and Burnet Rd.).

Why?

• 20 sessions (10 each day)
• Two keynotes (one each day)
• Session tracks include: development, design, and business
• Dedicated Birds of a Feather (BoF) space
• Breakfast and lunch are included each day

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 great collection of interviews from the illuminating Jeffery Zeldman starting with the past, present, and future of web standards (and then on to the history of blogging, open source collaboration, and more).

We want to share this usability story with you via the excellent Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering. It’s about a login form, a big ole e-commerce site, and a $300,000,000 usability “tweak”.

How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?

The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

User tests proved otherwise.  Here’s how they fixed it.

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

That’s a spicy meatball.  When it comes to path to purchase design, we at ENTERMEDIA advocate collecting as little information as necessary and never interfering with the end goal of completing a transaction.  People really don’t like filling out forms much, and associate this with signing up for marketing spam that clogs up their inbox (and wastes their time).  They will only put up with giving out personal information if they are confident they’ll be getting something good out of it…not just the purchased goods themselves but the convenience of buying online...and so you better make sure they find the transaction process on your e-commerce site easy and straightforward.  Don’t get in the way of what the user needs with what you think they want.

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.

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.