Kermit the frog says “it’s not easy being green,” however I beg to differ. Last week a new potential client called and asked if we would be interested in working on a website for a “green fair” that he was putting together. I thought it sounded like a good project and I set up a meeting.  I was telling my wife about it and she was surprised we received the call because she didn’t perceive that our company is particularly “green.”  That got me thinking.

I think there is a perception in the business community that green companies have to be “so green that it hurts” in order to genuinely be green.  Then of course they need to qualify for some sort of certification to prove their green-ness.  They can then proudly wear it not only as a badge of honor, but also as a notice to perceived unethical bloated resource wasters that their green company is superior.  On the flip side of this there is a perception of disdain for “green washers” who trump up their claims to green-ness for marketing purposes while not truly subscribing to green ideals.

I’d like to try to do my part to break down these perceptions by submitting that there is a “new green.”  Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think it would be better described as the “old green.”  It’s a common sense green that means that stewardship is important in all areas including the environment.  To that end I believe there is a title wave of green businesses (a silent majority if you will) that quietly go about their daily work making significant environmental contributions that are never acknowledged.

Here is a list of “green” items that I found while conducting an audit here at bpwebdesign.com.  I think the important thing to note is that I never set out to have a “green” business.  I simply wanted to have a responsible business that took care of our client’s needs as well as our own.  I think it’s that type of attitude that can popularize the green movement.

• recycling receptacles through out the office
• print-free project management system (web based)
• print-free billing system (web and email based)
• print-free staff time clock (web based)
• staff can telecommute (saves gas and car/road wear & tear)
• Modular office furniture salvaged from a closed office
• Exclusive use of NiMH rechargeable batteries
• Water cooler instead of bottled water
• We use doors/windows and our ceiling fans more than our Air Conditioner

I’m sure I could dig up many more, however I think you get the point.  Honestly I have no idea if we would qualify for some sort of green certification and I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  My point here is, it’s easy and fiscally responsible to incorporate many green functions into your business,  many times without really trying.  So….three cheers for all you accidental greenies out there!  Keep it up!

Over the years I’ve noticed a tendency for folks to build websites out of order. By that I mean that sometimes they will build before they plan, or choose a particular technology without thought to their overall goals. Your website will never achieve your goals if you don’t know what your goals are and adding flash to a website doesn’t automatically make it “cool.”   With this in mind, here is a procedural list that I recommend when developing a website.  Certainly there are many details that could be changed depending on your particular circumstance, but the underlying premise of planning and ordered development should stand up in most situations.  Please note that all steps must always support the overall site goals. 

1. Determine site goals
2. Determine general communication that needs to take place to achieve the site goals
3. Develop online marketing strategy (search engines, social networking, etc.)
4. Develop specific content and logical grouping of this information
5. Determine specific technologies to be used to present content
6. Determine the graphical needs to achieve your desired goals with your specific audience
7. Develop the graphic design
8. Build out the site shell and develop interactive programming
9. Implement content in site
10. Proof site and take it public
11. Implement off-site online marketing plan
12. Implement regular site updates and maintenance
13. Analyse results, modify approach as necessary

I’m often asked by potential clients about the cost of operating a website.  Here’s the spiel that I’ve come up with that (in my opinion) is comprehensive:

1. Domain name - approx $10/year
   You pay this to a domain registrar (like godaddy.com) to have the right to use a name like:  yourcompany.com.
2. Website Hosting - approx $20/month
   This service makes your website available to users all over the Internet.
3. Initial Website Development (custom, professional) - $1,000 to $100,000 and up
   Generally speaking this is what you pay a web developer to build the website itself.  Personally I recommend that you find a developer that will give you a hard quote for this service rather than merely an estimate.
4. Maintenance  - variable
   For a custom site, maintenance costs are usually limited to irregular changes, like an address or staff change or the addition of a new service.  Some websites can go quite a while without any changes and some have a steady stream of updates that need to be made. 
5. Promotion - variable
   Most sites should have an ongoing campaign to drive traffic.  We’ve worked with clients who have been perfectly satisfied with a $20/month budget, and alternatively we have had single clients for whome we’ve managed $1,000/day budgets.

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to run through this list to see how it would specifically apply to you.

Two quick motivators on why you should blog:

1) Blogs are fantastic online PR tools that are inexpensive. They make it easy to reach out to your audience, set yourself up as an expert in your field and the search engines love them. Regularly blogging is a great way to work on moving your website up Google’s natural search results.  It has this effect because it allows you to easily add quality content to your website on a regular basis.  Having good quality up-to-date content on your site is one of the important variables with regard to search engine placement.

2)  So now that you know why you should blog, let’s deal with why you don’t.  I think usually it comes down to time management and prioritization.  Out here in the real world there is often a fire that needs putting out and it can be tough to get your blog to the top of your list.  Here’s my easy solution:  KEEP IT SIMPLE.  Keep your blog articles really short.  People don’t read long articles anyway!!!  A couple paragraphs is fine.  One of the reasons that I put off blogging is that I build up the job in my mind into something much larger than it really is.  So my advice is to tell yourself…I’m going to take 15 minutes and bang out my most recent insight, then I’m going to move on to the next fire.  Oh…and remember to run it through a spell checker when you are done.

As you may know, our slogan here at BP is “making the Internet an effective business tool.” With that in mind here are some online tools that I’ve found useful lately:

• Google Voice - http://www.google.com/voice/about
  This is a free service from google that allows you to have a single phone number that rings to any/all of your phone numbers.  Depending on who the caller is you can have different phones ring, and have different voicemail messages. Voicemails are delivered via email with a written transcription.  The transcriptions can be pretty bad, but you can also listen to the actual recording.  My favorite use for this service is to make notes to myself when I’m on the road.  I leave myself voicemails and the messages pop up in my email when I get back to the office.  There are many more useful features of Google Voice.  Go to their website to check it out.
• Remember The Milk - http://www.rememberthemilk.com
  This is another free service that allows you to keep your to-do list online.  It offers many options and many interfaces.  I’m a list guy so this is a very valuable service for me.
• Free Conference Call - http://www.freeconferencecall.com
  As you may have guessed, this service will allow you to run conference calls with no fees other than the cost of the call.  My experience has been good call quality.  They also offer the ability to record phone calls which is a feature I’m going to be using in the near future when I plan to conduct an interview with a client that I’ll want to share with my staff.

That’s it for today.  Please feel free to call me if you’d like to discuss more ideas about how we can make the Internet an effective business tool specifically for you.

Studies show that the vast majority of all web users arrive at any particular website through the use of a search engine. That being said, the inner-workings of search engines are very complex and busy business people can have difficulty finding the time to get up to speed on how to use search engines to their advantage. The purpose of this article is to give an executive summary of how search engines operate and how to get a website to appear in search results.

Dissecting the Search Results Page

There are two different ways that a website can appear on search engine results:

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) results appear in the sponsored results area which is generally on the very top and along the right side of the results page. Advertisers pay to have their links appear in that area through a bidding process.
2. Natural results appear in the main content area of the results page. Results in this area are determined by the search engine’s proprietary formula and cannot be purchased by advertisers.

I should also take this time to state that almost all search engine traffic comes through Google and Yahoo!. For 95% of websites in existence those are the only two search engines that matter right now.

How does Pay Per Click work?

Paid advertising through search engines is pretty strait forward. You bid a given amount for a specified keyword or phrase. When someone searches for one of your keywords or phrases in the search engine you are advertising on, your ad is displayed. If a user clicks on your listing to visit your website, you pay the search engine your bid price. Often one can set up a campaign and start seeing results in less than a day. Google and Yahoo! have excellent budgeting tools that allow the advertiser to closely control their budget. Results (web traffic, leads, or sales) can easily be tied to your spending which makes the bean-counters in all of us happy.

How do you run a Pay Per Click campaign?

1. Set up an advertising account with Google or Yahoo!.
2. Craft a list of desired search keywords and phrases and ad copy to be displayed.
3. Determine a workable testing budget, and start bidding based on that budget.
4. Watch the campaign results and make adjustments as necessary.

How are natural results chosen?

Search engines maintain their own proprietary formula for determining the order that natural search results are displayed. The exact formulas are very closely held secrets, however there are a two factors that experts agree the formulas utilize:

A) Website Content The most important thing in getting a website to appear early in search engine results is to have quality content about the given search phrase on the website. Content quality can be determined by volume, age, the search engine’s ease in reading the content into it’s database, format, organization, etc. It’s as simple as this…if you want to have your website to show up when users search for the term “frogs”, you better have a lot of good information on your site about frogs. Search engines make money by selling adverting space. The more people find what they are looking for using a given search engine, the more they will use that engine and the more advertising the search engine can sell. Therefore if you want the search engine to choose your site to come up for “frogs” then you need to put yourself in the user’s shoes and make sure that your site is the site they would want to find when they search for “frogs”.

B) External links to your site One of the best ways for search engines to determine (in an automated format) the quality level of your content is to see how many other websites are linking to yours. All other things being the same, if your frog website has 2 websites linking to it and your competitor’s site has 200 websites linking to it, your competitor’s site will come up before yours.

How do you get your site to rank higher in natural search engine results?

Ah that the rub isn’t it? The process of working to get a website to rank higher in natural results is know as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Unlike PPC, an SEO campaign is a long-term process that can take a long time to gain traction and is difficult to track spending to traffic/leads/sales. Of course, the upside is that you are not paying for traffic on an individual visitor basis. That alone usually makes it a worthwhile effort. Due to the secrecy of search engine placement formulas there are a dizzying array of opinions about how an SEO campaign should be run. That being said, at the most basic level there are two things that all successful SEO campaigns should have in common:

A) Website Content Seeing that search engines place a premium on quality content, then part of any SEO campaign should be to provide quality content. This work could include-

• rebuilding the site so it is easier for search engines to read (using more text and less images/flash animation)
• adding fresh content with search phrases strategically placed
• setting up a schedule to constantly add new quality content (blogs can be an excellent way to achieve this)

B) External links to your site Seeing that it is agreed that search engines rate the quality of your content by the quality and number of websites that link to your site, it makes sense that a thorough SEO campaign would include an effort to recruit inbound links. There are a number of different ways to go about this which could include, valid participation on other website’s blogs/forums, press releases, offline marketing campaigns, participation in community based (Web 2.0) websites, etc.

SEM Diagram

Most successful SEM campaigns will utilize both the PPC and SEO model. I need to mention that this article is just the tip of the iceberg. It would be easy for me to develop each sentence in this article into another article. I have greatly simplified many concepts here so keep that in mind before you start running too fast with that newly sharpened pair of scissors. Please contact us if you have any questions or you would like to discuss what it might entail to have BP manage your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign.

The first decision you make about your Web site is critical - the developer you choose to design and construct your Web site can make or break the project’s success.

Before you begin your search process, it’s important to understand that there are different types of developers that offer different services in different price ranges. The custom web development industry breaks down into three categories. It’s important to keep in mind that each category has it’s purpose.  I am not proposing that any one category is better than others. What’s crucial to you is to determine which category is the best fit for your company.

1. 95% of Web developers are one-person shops. While these developers offer the least expensive option, they approach projects from a single, limited, often technical perspective.
2. 2.5% are mid-sized operations, typically a team of three to 10 experts (graphic designers, programmers, copywriters, marketing professionals, etc.). Developers in this range - including Bright Productions - offer a complete panel of services, plus a marketing focus.
3. 2.5% are large-scale companies, developing six-figure projects.

Here is a checklist that can help you determine whether the developer you’re interviewing is right for your needs.

• Can the developer offer a firm quotation rather than a broad, ballpark figure? (This assumes that your Web project is already well defined.)
• Is the developer’s proposal well written, detailed, and professionally presented? Does it address all the issues in your RFP?
• Is the developer experienced? Is the firm a full-time operation with a substantial, successful track record?
• Can the developer provide referrals, references, and testimonials?
• Does the developer approach your project from a strategic marketing perspective, and not strictly from a technical point of view?
• How does the developer handle unexpected problems? Will they resolve issues no matter what happens?
• What is the developer’s process - what are they doing when you’re not looking?
• Is there a single responsible party? Someone you can contact easily and quickly; who has authority to act; who understands your issues?
• Does the developer demand payment in full up front? (50% deposit is standard in the industry.)
• Will you own your site once the final invoice is paid? Will the developer give you all the source materials and release necessary copyrights to you?
• Can the developer host your site if you so desire (one-stop-shopping)?
• Does the developer have any special expertise in search engines or online marketing?  Are they certified by Google?