strategy

He who fails to plan, plans to fail

A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. But if you don't plan properly you may end up 2,000 miles from where you wanted to go.

Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.

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:

Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage Software gives a great presentation on Ambient Discovery and Awareness at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2009 in Dallas. Out of all the presenters, I'd say Mike had the coolest looking slide deck, which consisted of a bunch of handwritten slides. Unfortunately, I could only get the first 20 minutes of the presentation, as the battery on my Flip Mino HD died part way though. This is a great listen/view, if and when you get the chance!

Start it with a BANG! If your very first sentence can't capture the attention of your reader, all hope is lost. Besides having an engaging and thought provoking title, the first sentence is one of the most important areas of your post.

Each successful Web site development project begins with a goal in mind: for example, to gain exposure, to increase efficiency, or to do something better via the Internet. Coupled with this motivation is a set of perceived needs that the Web site could fulfill.

Our initial task of scenario making is an informal activity specifying goals, functionality, audience, and conditions of use. Then, in a more formal process, we develop the requirements needed and measurable/attainable goals which can be used to track the effectiveness of our work.

EverydayI talk to a handful of people about web development and marketing projects. For the most part, I get quite a few of the same questions and responses. This got me thinking about why I kept getting the same response to a particular question. When asked what our process was for taking on new clients, I always begin with discussing our strategy and planning process.

The End-User Needs Analysis defines the web site requirements and expectations from the customer or audience's perspective. The Internet is the ultimate open market and if you do not effectively meet users growing expectations of what a web site should offer they will find someone who can at the click of a button.

Website strategic planning is the process that determines what form and functionality your website will have.

The website strategic planning process can be divided into two phases, preliminary and core planning. Preliminary planning should be done internally to create the request for proposal. The core strategic planning should be done in conjunction with the web development group, whether internal or working with a outside firm.

When the planning is done you will have provided guidelines for:

• The look of the site
  creative brief, creative spec

Search engine ranking refers to where a page falls in the results returned by a SE for a given keyword phrase. Search engines use a scoring algorithm to rate results based on how often and where a keyword appears on a page. For example, if a keyword appears in the title tags it will rate higher then if the same keyword appears in the header tags which will rate higher then in normal body text. If the keyword appears in all three it will generally be rated higher then if it appeared in each one.

Production processing makes site content 'web ready'. Graphics are compressed into web formats, text are translated into electronic form (if it is not already), and multi-media are processed accordingly. While production processing is a fairly strait-forward process it can be time consuming.

Processing Tips

• Provide your developers source material as web-ready as possible. This will save time, money and lessen translation errors.