Brent's blog

Notice in the title that I said “web presence” and not and the value of a good “website” or “web marketing”. I said presence because a good website alone adds little value to your business. Having a good website without good marketing is like owning a four-star restaurant, but building it on a deserted island hundreds of miles from civilization. How much sales would that restaurant generate?

Most web site development projects fail through lack of communication during requirements gathering. A disconnect between clients and programmers often occurs due to software being an intangible object. Unlike purchasing a car, developing software relies on clients describing desired functionality and programmers interpreting that description to create a tangible product.

Managing the consistency of a brand identity system is facilitated by documented standards and guidelines that are easily accessible to all internal and external partners who have the responsibility of communicating the brand. While the range and formats of these documents may include CDs, posters, fact sheets, PowerPoints and PDFs, I've found that PDFs tend to be the best format for ease of creation, delivery and security.

I was having dinner with my mom the other night and we started walking down memory lane. She started telling stories about my brother, Jon, who was a notorious escape artist before he turned two years old. Jon's first escape was through our living room window in the middle of the night.

Have you ever read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People”? If you haven’t I highly recommend picking it up and if you have I recommend reading it again. The invaluable information found within its pages can strengthen your relationships, improve your identity, and carry you or your business up the ladder of success.

What specifically interested me and prompted me to write this article were the 6 guiding principles for making people like you instantly. Those principles are to:

Whether your company is launching a new product, is changing its name, is repositioning or has merged with another company, branding plays an important role in building awareness and extending customer loyalty. While many people think of their brand in terms of identity, brand is so much more.

While the aggregation of content has been around as long as the World Wide Web and the ability to filter aggregated content has advanced considerably over two decades – as seen through search engines, news websites, personal feed aggregation, etc. The ability to disseminate content across multiple networks has seemingly been slow to develop.

Through the years I’ve noticed a trend that more experienced, senior designers are much more productive than junior level designers. I first noticed this when LevelTen would hire junior-level designers based on a great portfolio, but ultimately get less productivity from them because it took twice, sometimes three times as long for them to create a site design comparable to a senior designer’s.

From a business perspective, this inefficiency not only causes bottlenecks in production and budget increases, but also can harm morale of the team.

For those of you who woke up to a flurry of frustrated customers or shocked that your website images were not displaying...Some shared hosting companies including Hostmonster and Bluehost have disabled symlinks (symbolic links) used by Drupal and other content management systems to display images. Hosting companies choosing to disallow symbolic links have changed the .htaccess file, which ultimately breaks your linking structures.

As an anti-trender (which has actually become quite trendy), I’ve made a personal pledge to dodge the norm even at the expense of dropping some of my favorite bands because they grew too popular. However, a trend I’ve noticed and can definitely get behind is building better looking themes for Drupal.