2009 March | flyte blog: small business web marketing blog

Archive for March, 2009

Flyte’s Economic Stimulus Package for Small Business

Monday, March 30th, 2009

It seems like the only way you can get bailout money from the government these days is if you're "too big too fail." Where does that leave us: the small business owner, the entrepreneur, the engine of America's economic recovery?

Well, we've got to look out for each other. Which is why flyte has rolled out our own Economic Stimulus Plan for Small Businesses.

In honor of us releasing a new ProSite theme (good work, Andy!), we've taken our already affordable ProSite package and thrown in a fully functioning, complementary-designed blog at no extra cost (normally $499).

Flyte's ProSites, affordable, pre-designed Web sites, are perfect for small businesses, entrepreneurs and professionals who are looking to get an effective, successful Web site presence up and running quickly.

Once we've received your content your site can be up in as little as five business days, for as little as $1,999.

The sites built on WordPress, the popular open-source content management system (CMS), which allows business owners to update their own Web site, add pages, upload images and embed videos without any HTML knowledge or expensive software. Any modern browser will do.

These sites are completely scalable, search engine friendly, and are built rock solid by flyte new media, the official small business Web design firm. (Official status still pending; we're just waiting for one more signature at the SBA.)

Check out our newest ProSite designs, or learn more about the ProSite packages at our Web site.

Rich Brooks
Small Business Web Design

Posted in Entrepreneur & Small Business, flyte news, Web Design & Development | No Comments »

Portland, Maine Plastic Surgery at Plastic & Hand (WordPress Web Site)

Friday, March 27th, 2009

This week flyte launched a revamped Web site for Plastic & Hand Surgical Associates, a plastic surgery group located in South Portland, Maine.

P&H offers cosmetic surgery, reconstructive surgery and skin solutions for both men and women in the greater Portland region. People who have questions about cosmetic surgery, Botox, or Juvéderm can "Ask Karen", the manager of patient services, for a timely and helpful response.

For this project flyte developed layouts from local graphic designer Mark Smith into a WordPress theme to build a Web site that Plastic & Hand can update inhouse, and without any HTML knowledge.

Although many people think of WordPress as a blogging platform, it's evolved into a full fledged content management system. In fact, most of the Web sites that flyte has developed this year have been built on the WordPress platform.

If you're interested in Portland, Maine cosmetic surgery or skin solutions be sure to contact the physicians at Plastic & Hand Surgical Associates.

If you're looking to upgrade your Web site to a publishing platform that will grow with your business, be sure to contact flyte today.

Rich Brooks
WordPress for Small Business

Posted in Web Site Launches | 2 Comments »

Web Developers: Is it Time to Really Ditch IE6?

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Every Web designer and Web developer I know would answer either:

Yes!
Hell, yes! or
F***, yeah!

to the previous question.

For most of us, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is the bane of our existence. You can design the most beautiful site that works well in IE7, Firefox, Safari and across operating systems and then you go and look at it in IE6 and you just want to cry.

On average, it adds 4 to 5 hours of development time or more when it comes to building a Web site, so making sure that the site looks good on IE6 is an investment in time.

So, now that Microsoft has released IE8 can we drop support for IE6?

Traditionally, flyte’s guarantee has been that our sites look great on the two most recent versions of popular browsers across Mac & PC, and “degrade gracefully” on previous versions. After all, you can’t support every version of every browser; you’d go out of business before your first site was launched. And although it’s gotten better recently, Microsoft’s lack of compliance with industry standards has made the average developer’s life harder than it needs to be.

When I think about the hours of productivity lost because IE6 sucks so much it makes Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme pale by comparison.

OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but a few extra hours on every Web site built? It just shouldn’t be that way.

Unfortunately, dropping IE6 support may still be a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. On flyte’s Web site about 9% of our visitors are still using IE6. For one of our clients, Alaska Fly Fishing Goods, they get 13% of their visitors on IE6. For another client, St. Mary’s Health Care, it’s a whopping 28%!

Although those numbers will decline as IE8 adoption goes up, it’s not going to change overnight. If 10% – 25% of a client’s traffic is going to be delivered using IE6 it’s impossible to ignore that business. You have to make sure the site “works” on IE6.

So, what can you do?

I would suggest to all Web designers and developers that we attack the problem on two fronts:

Start charging more for IE6 compliance. If IE6 is adding 4 – 5 or more hours of production work for the developer, why aren’t you passing that time on to your clients? Although we haven’t made any decision yet, at some point we’re going to have to either stop supporting IE6 outright or giving our clients the option of buying a “premium” package that covers the additional time.
Recommend upgrading to IE8 and promoting the link. As a Mac guy I’m not thrilled with the idea of pushing IE8, and of course I’d recommend Firefox, Safari and probably even Chrome over IE8, but better 8 than 6. Tell them it’s a security issue. Tell them if they stick with IE6 then the terrorists win. Tell them whatever you need to, but get people to upgrade.

If you have any suggestions, legal or otherwise, to make IE6 nothing more than a war story to tell our kids, please let me know.

Rich Brooks
IE6 Stole My Profit Margin

Posted in Business Philosophy, Web Design & Development | 6 Comments »

The New TweetDeck Shows Facebook Statuses

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

You know, looking at that title, two years ago I'm not even sure I would have known what that means. I also wonder if the plural of status is statii. But I digress….

TweetDeck is a great desktop app — my personal favorite — for monitoring your Twitter feeds. A while back I made a TweetDeck movie, so I won't go into that much depth here. The best thing about TweetDeck is that it allows you to create subgroups of the people on Twitter you follow. That way you can follow thousands of people, but create a small subset for industry leaders, local folks, customers, whomever. It allows you to greatly increase the signal to noise ratio.

In the image above each column represents a group: All Friends, Core (industry leaders and other interesting people,) Mainers, and Replies. You can roll your own.

However, a couple of days ago Tweetdeck offered a pre-release of its next iteration, which includes…drum roll please…a Facebook status group.

Hmmm…I guess it would have been more exciting if I didn't give it away in the post title.

I won't go into the nitty gritty details here because this guy beat me to it. (And did a good job of it, too.) However, after using it for a few days, I can say that it's a great additional feature. I can tell because of the huge hit my productivity has taken.

As it was, I already give up one of my two screens at work to TweetDeck, giving over 1,700 people access to my attention. But now I've opened that portal to my Facebook friends as well who don't know Twitter from identi.ca, except that they talk about Twitter on TV. My family, my neighbors, and even my friends who laughed at me when I got on Facebook a couple of years back are all there, ready to interrupt me at every refresh.

And I love it.

It's great seeing what's going on with these people. And if it ever gets too distracting, I just minimize the screen. No muss, no fuss.

At first I wondered if this would have a negative impace on Facebook, now that people could access the status updates without having to actually go to the site, which meant fewer eyeballs for advertisers. But so far I've found the opposite is the case. I see people's status updates and I want to respond to them. And currently the only way to comment on someone's Facebook status is to do so at Facebook.com. (I'm not sure this is due to technical issues or Facebook putting the kibosh on that.)

In any case, I think it's a win for both Facebook and TweetDeck. As before, you can update your Twitter status, but now you can update your Facebook status at the same time, or choose just one to update. However, if you're replying to someone on Twitter or DM'ing them, TD won't send that update to Facebook.

Now I just need get Iain Dodsworth to add LinkedIn to the mix and I'll be all set.

Rich Brooks
I <3 TweetDeck

Posted in Social Media | 4 Comments »

A Social Media Marketing MUST Read: The Zen of Social Media Marketing

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

OK, I admit I’m biased. Shama Hyder and I are good friends. I’m a big fan of hers. We’ve eaten s’mores together.

But that’s not why I’m recommending you download Shama’s new ebook, The Zen of Social Media Marketing. It’s because the book strikes that difficult balance of introducing social media to the beginner, while providing tips and insights that even an expert can learn from.

When it comes to social media, Shama knows her stuff. Even better than that, she can explain in such a way that anyone can get it.

The book is broken up into several sections that include:

Online Marketing Basics – how social media marketing fits into other online marketing campaigns, such as SEO, email marketing and blogs, as well as explaining her ACT methodology.
Social Media Marketing – the view from 20,000′, tenets and checklists.
Facebook – details on creating a profile, pages, groups and events. I learned that I’m still learning here.
Twitter – the ins and outs of this popular microblogging platform.
LinkedIn – with expert advice from several LinkedIn, um, experts besides just Shama.
Video – with an article by Dave Kaminski of WebVideoUniversity.com.
How it All Fits Together – how to integrate your social media campaigns.
Q & A - taken from the community she’s created at her blog.
Case Studies – a number of real-life case studies that have used all these social media sites and others to grow their business.

I devoured this book. As soon as I finished it I gave it to my wife. (Shama, is that OK?) I can’t think of a better primer for understanding how small businesses and entrepreneurs can use social media to grow their business in any economy than this book. Until I get around to writing my own, ‘natch.

I like to think I know my stuff when it comes to social media, and I do. But that didn’t keep me from flipping between Shama’s book and my Facebook and LinkedIn account, continually tweaking my social media presence because I know her track record and the results she herself has attained.

Shama gets it, and she explains it in such a way that you’ll get it, too. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Zen of Social Media Marketing today.

Rich Brooks
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Posted in Entrepreneur & Small Business, Social Media, Web Marketing | 12 Comments »

The Knack – Required Reading for All Entrepreneurs

Monday, March 9th, 2009

I just finished The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up
by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham. That fact–that I actually finished it–makes it much different than a lot of other business books out there.

First a comment: why do all business books have to follow the same naming convention?

[Clever Title] [colon] [Long explanation of what the clever title actually means]

For example,

Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now
The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety
Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big (by co-author Bo Burlingham)

Still don't believe me? Check out this list of BusinessWeek's Book Reviews.

But I digress….

The book is a combination of how-to's and real life examples of what it takes to start, grow and possibly sell a business. They talk about how sales can actually be bad for your business, and how important it is to understand the numbers. They talk about the advantages small businesses have over large organizations, and illustrate their points with examples from Brodsky's business and from the many people he mentored over the years.

There's a lot of great information on cash flow, and why small business owners need to pay attention to it. After reading this book I wondered how I ever got my own business off the ground. I think I succeeded despite myself.

There was also a lot about running a sustainable business. I don't know if Brodsky and Burlingham actually ever use that language in the book, but the way Brodsky treats his employees (at least after a while) and the way he views his business as part of the community is something to be admired.

The only negative I can really come up with is that I've been reading Brodsky's Street Smarts column in Inc. magazine for years, and a lot of the stories have been repurposed from that column. If you're not a regular reader of Inc. (shame on you) or specifically Street Smarts, this won't be an issue. Even if you are, there's just too much good information in here to pass up.

Whether you were born an entrepreneur or been downsized into being one, there's a lot of great material in The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up
for your small business.

Rich Brooks
Street Smart

Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | No Comments »

How to Plan, Promote and Produce an Effective Webinar

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

For a while now I've been hearing from people who would ask when I was putting on one of my seminars outside of my home state of Maine. Since flyte's travel budget has never been what it could be, I missed out on a lot of opportunities (since putting on seminars often leads to work for flyte), and some people didn't learn what they wanted to.

For whatever reason, it took me a while to warm up to Webinars. In part, the software options were limited for producing a Webinar on a Mac, and until recently Webinars were fairly expensive.

However, towards the end of 2008 I began putting on Webinars, both of the paid and free variety, and I haven't looked back.

I put on free Webinars for flyte's clients, and paid ones for everyone else. My buddy Craig can't believe that a) anyone could sit through a 60 – 90 minute Webinar without dozing off, and b) anyone would pay for a Webinar.

I believe that if you make people pay for a Webinar you increase the (perceived) value of the Webinar and you scare off the tire kickers. When someone has to pay for a Webinar, they pay attention.

There are a lot of ways to marketing and produce a Webinar, and I'm not suggesting my way is even the best way. However, I share my "secrets" in the most recent article of flyte log, "How to Plan, Promote and Produce an Effective Webinar."

Whether you're planning on putting on Webinars for free, or as another stream of income, you should find this article a helpful primer.

Rich Brooks
As Seen on the Interwebs

Posted in Entrepreneur & Small Business, Web Marketing | No Comments »