If you happen to host a website with Spigot’s hosting company Cinch, you’ll know that we also provide email hosting with your account that is connected to your domain (e.g. joe@joes.com). It’s a decent service, but very basic. And I mean very basic. Here’s the account specs: We limit each hosting client to 5 email accounts, and each account has a mere 50mb inbox limit (We’ll often bump those numbers up if you need it, but that’s the basic set up). We’re careful to let everyone know that this service is basic, and if a more robust email hosting is needed, there are many options that can be looked at.

The Google

One of those options is Google Apps, a free service that not only provides email, but calendars, online documents, and a few other services are also provided. The email service is a definite step up from what Cinch provides, with unlimited email accounts and a whopping 7gb storage per account. You’ll also gain access to Gmail’s excellent webmail interface. Cinch also supplies a webmail interface, but compared to Gmail, it’s clunky, non-intuative, and bug ugly.

But perhaps the biggest benefit is having Gmail’s superior spam filtering engine on your side. Most spam will be caught before it even gets to your inbox, and what does get through can be flagged, reported, and teacher will post their names on the blackboard. neah neah.

We’ve recently switched all Spigot emails and calendars over to Google Apps and couldn’t be happier. The extra space is nice and the spam flow has all but stopped. Highly recommended if you’re having any sort of email issues.

If you’re a DIY’er here’s a link to getting started with Google Apps. If you’re too busy running your own business, give us a call and we can help you make the switch for a reasonable price.

UPDATE: Two weeks into the switch I find that emails coming from people who are on the same server as us (which would be most of my clients) are getting lost into the ether – Nothing arrives in my inbox, and the sender gets nothing bounced back. Turns out I didn’t turn off the email services within my hosting configuration. I also missed a few CNAME records and failed to delete an A record. If this all sounds like Greek, here’s a couple links that may help if you’re having issues:

1. Creating Your MX Records & CNAME Records for Google Apps: (mt) Media Temple
2. Creating an SPF Record for Google Apps

Of course a web design agency would say that

At first, that may sound like a web agency simply trying to get more business, but if you take a look at some of their arguments, it may make sense for some businesses. Their point is basically that a site owner can get caught in a cycle like this:

1. A website owner decides he needs a new site and pays a web designer big dollars to scrap the old site and build a new one.
2. The designer goes away after the project, and the site slowly deteriorates as it gets neglected.
3. The site owner eventually stops promoting the site and decides it’s time for a redesign to bring it current.
4. The cycle begins again.

This cycle becomes a large waste of resources and can potentially confuse users due to dramatic changes in the design of the site.

The long term partnership approach

The antithesis to this cycle is to form a long term partnership with a web designer. This gives a site owner a web professional on the team, someone who’s dedicated to keeping the site up to date on an ongoing basis. This gives the designer a better understanding of the business and how best to reach their customers. The need for a full fledged redesign will be reduced, opening up the opportunity to realign rather than redesign.

The article goes into greater detail, and is worth the read if you’re a site owner who’s tired of this cycle.

You can also contact us for more information on our maintenance contracts, and how Spigot Design can become an ongoing partner with your business.

Stop the leaks with a CRM

As a client-based small business it’s very important to keep track of clients and prospective clients and the communication between them. Emails, phone calls, in-person meetings, tasks, follow ups, introductions, handshakes, and games of charades – losing track can mean losing business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps are designed to help wrangle all this information in easy to update and easy to digest ways. Finding the best one depends on your needs and your workflow.

Why use a CRM?

For anyone who deals with more than just a handful of clients on a daily basis, the question of why use a CRM is obvious. There’s simply too much information flying around to remember it all. Before I began using a CRM, here’s how the interaction with a prospective client could (and probably often did) transpire:

1. Prospective client calls on the phone about a website project. A meeting gets scheduled.
2. Meet with the client and discuss project. Leave feeling good about the prospect.
3. Proposal is created and sent.
4. Two weeks go by without hearing from client.
5. Prospective client gets forgotten.
6. Weeks later a vague recollection of a prospective client haunts me. What have I forgotten?
7. Prospective client is lost to the ether.

With only a few clients a prospect or two here or there this probably doesn’t happen. But once two, three, four new prospects a week start calling, it soon becomes impossible to stay on top of who said what without a little help.

CRM Software to the Rescue

Sure you could write it all down on sticky notes or in a notebook, but with the way our devices are synced these days with calendars, voicemail and apps, finding a good CRM application makes the most sense. Using a CRM and taking the above scenario, my interaction with a prospective client now transpires like this:

1. Prospective client calls on the phone about a website project. A meeting gets scheduled.
2. New contact get entered into CRM with as much detail as I currently have. Client is tagged as ‘prospect.’
3. Meet with client and discuss project. Leave feeling good about the prospect.
4. Project details are entered into CRM, task to send proposal on specific date is created.
5. Proposal is created and sent. Task created to follow up in one week created.
6. A week goes by without hearing from client. CRM sends reminder to follow up.
7. Follow up email is sent. New task is set to follow up again in one week.
8. If two weeks go by and client still hasn’t contacted me, a final follow up task gets created.
9. If client still has not contacted me after final follow up, client gets tagged as ‘dead prospect.’
10. More likely however, client has gotten busy, and by the second follow up has contacted me and the project begins. Client is then tagged ‘client.’

Finding the CRM that fits your needs

Finding the right software is a matter of your needs. I’ll be writing a comparison of the two that I’ve used extensively in a future post. For me though, a good CRM should be able to do the following:

1. Easy entry of a new contacts, including up/downloading in the standard vCard format – both single and multiple contacts.
2. Tagging or grouping of contacts for easy sorting.
3. Notes – there should be plenty of room for keeping date based notes.
4. Email/file attachments.
5. Date and Time based task lists.
6. iCalendar subscriptions to task lists.
7. iPhone/mobile application

I don’t claim to have used most of the CRM software out there, but of the ones I have, they all easily fit the above criteria.

Output = Input – or – You Reap What You Sow

Once you’ve found your software solution, it’s time to start entering. Every correspondence you get should immediately go into the CRM. If you take good paper notes of phone calls or networking encounters, you could also set aside time each day dedicated to keeping your CRM up to date. For some, this might seem like a waste of time. Yes, I  spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time looking at, updating and referring to my CRM – but since I’ve started using CRM software I’ve landed more jobs simply because I’ve been able to stay in front of my prospects minds, with timely follow ups and gentle reminders.

What do you think?

Do you use CRM software? Do you have a solution that works better for you? I’m famous for spending an hour to save 5 minutes, so I’d love to hear what you’ve been doing to stay on top of your prospects and client tasks.

Small business R&D

The term ‘R&D’ is usually heard in context of big industrial corporations and the pharmaceutical industry. It also brings to mind big budgets, big spending, big dollars, big big big. The most successful big companies in the world all have a Research and Development division who’s sole purpose is to push the limits and find new innovations and technologies. Governments give out grants for this kind of research because it’s well known that innovation drives a big portion of our economy. There’s no reason these same ideals can’t be similarly implemented on the small business scale.

Big Ideas

Let’s add another ‘big’ to that list in the context of small businesses: big ideas. Even though small business owners don’t have big budgets or a dedicated R&D division, carving out time to stay ahead of what is new and innovative in their industries is essential to staying viable and in the vanguard. Finding efficiencies; New ways to sell goods; Expanding into new markets – these are the ideas that expand businesses and drive local economies. Most business owners and entrepreneurs understand this, but knowing where to find the innovations isn’t always easy. Here’s a few things to take to ensure you’re not falling behind:

Research the Competition

To know how you stack up to what others are doing, start by finding out what others in your industry are actually doing. A simple Google search such as ‘Your Industry blog’ will turn up links to who’s saying what about what you do. Not every cutting edge business will necessarily have a blog, but more and more industries are finding each other and creating communities online where collaboration and innovation are pushing everyone up: a rising tide raises all boats sort of thing.

Join the Conversation

These new communities are in need of industry experts such as yourself. Become a part of the conversation by leaving relevant comments on articles you come across. If you have something of worth to say, it will be appreciated when it’s said. You won’t always agree everyone in the community, but that is the point. Hash out the bad ideas, harvest the good.

Another benefit of leaving comments on others articles is that it gives you an opportunity to leave a link back to your website or blog. This is the new way of ‘link sharing’ that is more natural and conversational that the old way of link farm sharing (yuk). What? You don’t have a blog or a website? Then the next step is for you.

Lead the Conversation

Joining the conversation on another site is a very good and important thing to do. But even better is to start a conversation on your own site. Blogging is simply the term for writing about what you know – Or in my case, what I think I know :).

If you don’t already, seriously consider adding a blog to your site. There’s no need to even call it a blog – in fact I call my blog a ‘Notebook.’ The point is to have a section of your site dedicated to starting a conversation about your industry – what you know about it and how others can benefit.

I was standing in the shower thinking

Everyone has a place that they do their best thinking. Mine’s the shower – a place that I can just think without distractions. It takes cultivation, but listen to that voice inside when you’re able to let the mind wander. There are ideas there – be sure to write them down, perhaps in your new blog! They won’t all be great, or even good ideas, but know this: In the design process that I go through when creating a new site or logo, etc., there are bad ideas that need to be hashed out before the good ideas come. The bad ideas are usually the easy, or obvious ones. If I stopped at those ideas, I’d never get to the good ones. The process for great business ideas is the same, in my opinion.

The point is to take time to do this. Yes, you are busy running your business, but keeping up is important. Waking up tomorrow to find your business has become irrelevant is enough to push me

Obvious, or insightful?

If you’ve made it this far into this article, perhaps it was insightful for you. I also wonder if most business owners would find this obvious. What do you think?

No hate for Flash

Let’s start by stating that we’re not Flash haters. There’s as much to love as there is to find distasteful, but Flash is just a tool. If you look at some of our early Flash-based work, you’ll find there was nothing about those sites that really needed Flash. The animation was limited and relatively unnecessary. The effects used could just as easily been created with unobtrusive javascript. At the time, it was simply the way we built a site.

While Flash still has an important role to play on the internet, our focus has shifted. It no longer fits our design sense (and never really did) and it doesn’t fit with how most of our clients need to use the web.

A story to sum it up

Here’s a story that pretty much sums up why we don’t do Flash much anymore:

At our CSA end-of-season pot luck dinner last week, a conversation was struck with a fellow member. He and his wife had pulled up stakes from their corporate life and moved to Park City for a more relaxed lifestyle and to pursue a new business venture. His wife is considered an expert in her field, and they developed a solid plan on how to bring that expertise to a web-based business model. He explained the long site development process – over a year of thought and effort to get system just right. A large portion of that time was spent in designing how the site should function, perfecting the navigation, and streamlining the overall user experience. It took a team of 6 a little over a year, and the site was launched last April. The process went very smooth, and they are very happy with the results. The only problem, he said, has been the lack of satisfactory search rankings – and the resulting lack of business.

Since the site had been launched only 4 months before, I reassured him that it was probably only a matter of time before their search position picked up. High rankings do not happen overnight, after all. His concerns that too much of the site sits behind a members-only wall that the search engines can’t see should be mitigated by the fact that they have a regularly updated blog. Which should give ample opportunity to tickle the search engines fancy.

I asked him if the development firm had talked much about the coding process, or how it related to search engine friendliness. He couldn’t recall a conversation along those lines, but I still just brushed it off and reassured him that it was probably just an oversight. I told him I’d take a look at the site and let him know what I thought.

You can probably guess where this is going – Yes, the entire site was built within Flash. From the home page to the membership pages to the blog, it’s all Flash. There are bits and pieces of straight (search engine loving) html in there, but it’s too far and too few between to matter. Throw in the fact that there’s no doctype, limited metadata, the page titles are the same on every page, and the result is there is little for the search engines to see. Search engines still cannot see what’s inside a Flash based site. Technically speaking this means they cannot index this site. (Google is making attempts at better Flash indexing, but there are still best practices that need to be followed. From our experience, most Flash sites don’t follow them). So they don’t know what’s there. So they can’t point anyone to this site who may be really interested in what they have to say (sell).

The business model they have is solid. The website they’ve staked that model on, unfortunately, is not. Without a large and sustained marketing effort it’s likely that the site will never achieve results they are hoping for. All the time, effort, and capital, are potentially wasted.

You can’t get there from here

So what’s a business owner to do in this situation? Keep forging ahead with the mentality that you’ve come this far, might as well just keep at it? Or do you cut you’re losses and start over, with the hope that this time it’ll be done right?

There are others out there who will tell you that we’re full of it – that a Flash based site can be just as effective as html. Don’t buy it.

Research research research – then buy

For this couple there is no easy answer. I can’t say for certain that starting over is the right choice. It would have been better to have never gone down that path in the first place. Right there you’ll find your best bet – be as sure as you can that you’re making the right choices in the first place. Ask lots of questions – to at least 3 or 4 developers. Be certain that they understand your business and what you are trying to accomplish. Then choose the the one who understands the web – or more importantly the business of the web – and sleep well with the security that you’re in good hands.

Website creator favors simple, clean & modern

By ANDREW KIRK Of the Record staff

Language purists may not appreciate that “Googling” is now an accepted verb, but the reality is that Google and similar search engines are the primary means many people use to find things they want or need.

Website designer Bryan Hoffman understands that, and believes it makes him the right choice for small to medium-sized companies in Park City hoping to get noticed.

A website has many functions, but getting noticed and indexed on Google is the primary one for many businesses, he said. Hoffman’s company, Spigot Design, focuses on creating sites with the right characteristics to be prominently featured as a result of Internet searches.

Spigot Design began in late 2007 and is run by the husband-and-wife team of Bryan and Kari Moe-Hoffman. They moved to Park City from Minneapolis for the outdoor lifestyle, he said, but it’s also the perfect sized community to build a reputation for quality and reliability.

“I don’t know that I could run a business like mine in a big city,” he said. “Here, people are so outgoing, you get to know others pretty easily. Word of mouth spreads faster here.”

Although analysts say the end of the recession is not yet in sight, Hoffman said his call volume is actually picking up. Advertising is one of the first areas to recover when financial situations improve, and a website is not only essential for that, but does far more, he said.

“A website to me is more than advertising. It’s a 24-hour showcase of your business. People realize that,” he added.

To grab people’s attention, many sites use Flash to create busy, fast movement. Spigot Design does not. Using Flash can make it difficult for search engines to identify the key terms listed in a site that result in connections between sites and search queries, he said.

Hoffman is careful to not interfere with that identification process, but also creates features that will enhance the probability of being found – like blogs.

“You don’t need to call them that. On my site I call mine a notebook. But it’s a great place to keep your site updated with fresh content. Every time it’s updated, it’s an opportunity for owners to add key words their clients will be looking for,” he explained.

Hoffman describes his style as clean and easy to use. As website building gets more complicated, it’s increasingly important to make a site user- friendly. Business owners should be able to update information without difficulty.

He also prides himself on meeting deadlines and returning calls promptly. That’s expected in the business world, he said, but sometimes small contractors like himself take that for granted. The world of design is changing so fast that no schools teach what he’s currently doing.

That specialization is no reason to neglect customer service, he said.

“That’s super important to me,” he said.

Two working sites Hoffman is proud of are chiropracticworksofparkcity.com and ParkCityArchitect.com.

“They took pride in providing personal service and added a creative edge that as a business tool, continues to garner a highly effective web presence for my business. Our site continues to maintain a top search listing presence. It was a pleasure working with them and I highly recommend them to other local business owners,” said Bradley Mimlitz, president of Park City Architecture.

Hoffman is currently working on a new site for the Park City Museum. Emily Beeson with the museum said he’s been great to work with.

“He’s very clear, very artistic. Gave us exactly what we were looking for,” she said. “He does clean design and it goes along with whole redesign that we’re doing.”

UPDATE on 5/19/09 – I guess the Park Record doesn’t archive their articles for free, so that link is now broken. I’ll repost it here after I get permission.

1. Support

The biggest strike against hiring a nonprofessional to design and develop your site is their reliability. Are they going to be there for you when you need them the most? When your web designer heads off to college, will they be there to answer your phone call that your site has mysteriously gone down? Or what about updates, like a small change to your office hours? Or a large addition like adding a new section? What if you just got an email from your registrar informing you your domain is about to expire. Do you have the login information? Do they?

A professional will be there for you, to fix and keep your site up to date. They will be up to speed on the latest changes to the web and have ideas on ways your site can succeed. They will be a partner in the growth of your business. Most importantly, they will have the time to devote to you.

You can also be assured that they will have all your information (web host, ftp, domain registrar and site admin logins) neatly tucked away and backed up for instant retrieval.

2. Professionalism

One of the most important benefits a website brings is a 24 hour glimpse at your company. If that site doesn’t reflect the same care and professionalism you put into your business, you will lose potential customers. A website that is hard to use, a pain to navigate or is just plain unattractive will reflect those same qualities onto your business.

Does this mean Jimmy down the street can’t build a professional, well-designed site? Not necessarily, but you can almost guarantee that a trained professional will know how to design a site that is easy to use, attractive, reflects your expertise and connects with the customers you are trying to reach.

The internet is fast coalescing around a set of standards. It’s highly unlikely that an inexperienced designer will be up to date on the latest coding techniques. When the day comes that you’re required to turn the site over to a new designer, will it be coded in a way that the new designer can figure out without having to spend hours (read: $$$) de-coding?

A professional designer will know the latest coding standards, and will understand that one day you may choose to hire a different designer. They will code and organize your site in a way that a new designer can easily understand.

3. Cost

Yes, I said cost. You can very well bet that your initial costs are going to be low to get the site up and running. This is the reason you decided to hire this kid in the first place, right? But the combined long term costs of points one and two will trump those early low numbers, potentially by the thousands.

How much lost revenue does a single irretrievable customer who leaves a poorly designed site incur? What about 10? Or 10,000? If your site goes down and your designer isn’t available, what will the costs be to hire someone to fix it at rush rates?

Hiring a professional up front will increase your initial costs. But a site that is built right, customized to your business and your customers, will most certainly be more effective, and more cost effective in the long run.

Conclusions

Perhaps more questions were asked than answered here, and that’s partially the intent. Asking questions like these now, before you’ve had a site built, can save you time and capital in the long run. Even if you’ve already had your site built and find yourself in a situation like those addressed above, hopefully this article will help you avoid future pitfalls.

FontCase vs Font Explorer X Pro

Font management has thankfully been something I haven’t had to think much about in the last few years, ever since Linotype came out with Font Explorer X for both the Mac and PC. FEX was free, and it worked – while others on the scene at the time such as Extensis Suitcase were wracked with problems, and you had to pay for them.

Can a font management app cause a scene?

So when I began hearing the buzz surrounding FontCase I was pretty skeptical of upsetting my font management workflow. I was perfectly happy with what I had. But the buzz continued, I’d read a review or two about it, and decided to take the 30 day free trial plunge. 

Note: I won’t be going into real depth here on a review of the app. If you’re interested in that, check out the Smoking Apples FontCase review.

Overall, my experience with FontCase was fairly smooth. The import process went ok, the interface was nice to look at, and organizing and finding fonts was straight forward and easy. So why didn’t I rush out and plunk down for this app once my trial was done?

Accountability and transparency

The thing I liked best about FEX was that it didn’t really bother me. I could launch InDesign or Illustrator and it would pretty much automatically activate the fonts I needed. And if I needed a new font activated, I could do so and not have to restart the app to be able to use it (with Photoshop being a notable exception to this).

This was not the case with FontCase. Auto-activation of fonts became manual–and even though I had FEX deactivated it still wanted to come in and rescue me when a font couldn’t be activated. And that was it. My mind was made up. If I had to think about my font management, then the app isn’t doing its job. 

Font Explorer X goes Pro

In amongst the buzz about FontCase, I was hearing rumors that FEX would cease to be free and a ‘Pro’ version was coming (this isn’t the case, as Linotype will still offer the original version, but drop support for it). I headed on over to the FEX website to see what was a-brew.

Sure enough, there’s a new version, and there’s handy 30 day trial, which I’m currently in the midst of. So far I can’t really tell a difference between the Pro and Original versions, but I suspect that’s because I’m back to forgetting all about font management. One noticeable new feature is the addition of a Photoshop plugin. This could be the start of something heavenly.

And the winner is

I can’t say I gave FontCase the testing it probably deserves. For all I know I may have been doing something wrong. It is a very aesthetically pleasing app, and may serve your needs perfectly.

But FEX has been treating me well for so long, for free, that I’d feel something akin to an adulterer if I jumped ship now. FEX Pro seems to be a minor upgrade to the Original, but I’ll be sticking with it. Until the end of Feb it’s 50% off the final $79 price tag, so go grab it now.

No related posts.

1. Solid SEO 

You may have heard that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) costs a fortune to implement, but that is just not the case. Yes, there are SEO professionals out there who can tweak your site for a fee, but the basics of SEO can be accomplished by any website owner. It boils down to:

1. Writing good content 
2. Writing good keywords/keyword phrases

In a future article, I’ll go into further detail on SEO, but for now, check out What is Search Engine Optimiztion (SEO)? from about.com

2. Search Engine Submission

You may have heard about companies that will submit your site to over 1000 search engines per month. This is all fine and dandy except that the three biggest search engines handle over 93% of the traffic (Google – 72%, Yahoo – 18% and MSN – 4% as of Dec 2008), and each one spells out how easy it is to submit a site to their index. They have also agreed on uniform support for sitemap submission. Simply add the following code to a robots.txt file located in the root directory of your site:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

And if you don’t already have a sitemap generated for your site, get one generated for free. This file will also be placed in the root directory of your site.

3. Blogging

Creating a blog on your site is a powerful promotional tool because it hits on several web marketing strategies at once. Having something to say about your industry will keep your content fresh, and the content will be rich with keywords related to your site. By becoming an active member of the blogging community, you’ll have the opportunity to build strong relationships as well as reciprocal links.

Blogging Tip:  When reading blogs that are relevant to your industry, take the time to comment and become part of the discussion. By leaving relevant remarks you’re getting another opportunity at free website marketing while becoming more well known within your own blogging community.

4. Social Networking

Social Networking isn’t just for the young. Sites like LinkedIn and  MerchantCircle offer business related networking for free. Yes there are other networks such as Facebook and Twitter that are more for chatting or personal relationships, but even these can help promote your site. You never know if that long lost high school friend might be in need of your services. For a large organization or community group, Twitter in particular can be a quick and easy way to keep existing members updated on new content, as well as provide those members with a convenient way to spread the word about you.

5. Reciprocal Links

Perhaps reciprocal links should have been placed higher up on this list, as it’s been well know for some time that it’s an important part of how a search engine ranks your site. The problem is that while most advice you find on the subject mostly just mentions how important it is, but fails to mention how you go about doing it. Quality trumps quantity in this case, and it takes time and patience. Blogging and Social Networking are two great ways to begin your link lists, which is why I feel they are more important than more direct link sharing techniques (usually by contacting another site owner via email and asking to exchange links). These links are important for search engine rankings. Far more important to me however, is the quality relationships you get by building these links from the ground up. There are places where you can purchase reciprocal links, but I would very much avoid this, as Google has a long history of punishing techniques that are trying to game the system. And besides that, it isn’t a free technique.

Like with most endeavors, you’ll get out of these techniques what you put into them. If you select even just a couple and really concentrate on them, you’ll have a solid foundation for consistent and increasing site traffic.

We’re no where near the Great Depression

Expecting to hear the same dire news the media has been doling out, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Mr. Karlgaard speak of optimism as the key focus going forward. He feels the economic situation we are in is more akin to the 1973 depression than the 1930′s saying,

The media does a horrible disservice promiscuously throwing around the Great Depression. It was beyond anything any of us has experienced and to refer to it is to needlessly scare people…

Even though most of us didn’t experience the Great Depression first hand, there are plenty of stories from the older generation about the hardships they endured, saving every scrap of this and that just to get by. I don’t see that now, and I don’t really feel we’ll be seeing it in the near future either.

Rich’s message highlights

The Park Record has a pretty good rundown of Mr. Karlgaard’s presentation, but here were some of the highlights from my perspective:

• Bashes Hank Paulson for being inept and sweaty
• Bashes Paul Krugman, calling him a ‘little twit’
• Thinks a few simple rule changes at the SEC will solve the current problem
• Thinks the stimulus is more of a political stunt than a real solution
• Worried more about deflation than inflation
• Warns that we should expect inflation to follow once the recovery starts

The Recovery

Rich also had a few ideas on what will make the recovery come to certain places quicker. He believes the two keys are:

1. Proximity to University Education, particularly a research university
2. Regional focus on economic development

Luckily for Park City, we have both, plus a whole host of other things like great weather and an active lifestyle that make us so desirable. The PC Chamber Bureau continues to promote the area around the country, so I’m optimistic that things will be getting better sooner than most expect.

Continuing to be optimistic

As a business owner, the only real option is to be optimistic and continue to move forward. Continue to work hard and promote yourself.

Making it through this downturn will only make the business stronger coming out the other end.

No related posts.

It cost me all of $15.

• Estimate by people hours.
• Duplicate invoice.
• Quarterly recurring invoice.
• Optional project notes.
• Department for people.

I don’t personally use the invoice feature, and my organization is too small to be split into ‘departments,’ but the project notes and ability to estimate by people will come in handy.

When asked what I do for a living, my response is generally, “I’m a web designer.” And while it’s certainly true that I spend the majority of the time building websites, I also spend a lot of time running my business. I don’t have a full time business manager or accountant, so finding the most efficient and effective systems are a priority (see this post on my dream system). I thought I would outline my business related workflow here by following a fictitious client, Joe, as he travels through a typical Spigot Design job flow.

Joe is looking to get a website created. He searches in the Google for local web designers, and is impressed with the great work we do (yeah, it’s my story, so I’ll embellish it a bit). So he sends us a note through the contact form to inquire about getting a quote for his skydiving company. He’s in the System.

Enter the Matrix – Step 1: Highrise

Tool description:

Highrise is a web based CRM, or Customer Relationship Management tool.

The website contact form sends me an email with Joe’s request. It also contains his email address. The first thing I do is to get Joe’s info into Highrise. I enter his name and his email, but that’s all I’ve got so far, so the rest of it, like company name and phone, will have to come later. I also enter his request into the notes section. Here is where I keep a running list of notes about Joe – how I first made contact, what my response to his request was, what his response back to me was – all listed out by date, with the latest note at the top for easy reference.

Making contact – Step 2: Reply from Highrise

Highrise allows me to respond via email directly (sorta) from the system. I click on Joe’s email address, which opens my email client (Apple Mail) with a message to Joe. In the BCC field appears an email address that looks something like this: dropbox@12234.youraccount.highrisehq.com. This is a nice little feature that sends a blind copy of the email back to Highrise, and lists it in the same notes history section I mentioned before. Sweet!

When Joe emails back to say he’d like to meet, next Monday at 11, I immediately copy the contents of that email into Highrise. So far, I have a complete history of my dealings with Joe, kept neatly in one place. He’s also given me the rest of his contact info, so now I’ve got that entered into Highrise as well.

Time and place – Step 3: Schedule the meeting.

Tool descriptions:

iCal is my calendar application (Mac only).

gCal (Google Calendars).

BusySync allows automatic synchronization between iCal and gCal.

MobileMe is a service from Apple for sharing all sorts of stuff, calendars included

iCal is Joe’s next destination. I’ll enter there the date and time of our meeting, into my ‘Spigot Design’ calendar (iCal allows me to keep multiple calendars). Joe then gets to take a wild ride as all of my various calendars get synced-in: From iCal, BusySync sends Joe’s meeting event to gCal, Google’s free, web based calendar. I use gCal to allow easy sharing of calendars with my business manager, who also happens to be my wife. And since we share our gCal calendars, she’s now up to date as well, including her iCal since she’s also using BusySync. And if she needs to make a change to Joe’s event, updating it in iCal starts the process again, back through BusySync, to gCal to my gCal to BusySync to iCal. Whew.

And since I use MobileMe, my iPhone calendar is updated almost instantly with ‘push’ notifications. Any calendar I look at now will tell me when and where I’m meeting Joe.

Update: BusySync is no longer necessary for syncing iCal and gCal. See Google Calendar CalDAV/iCal syncing now official from TUAW for more information.

Let’s get this project started – Step 4: The PMS.

Tool descriptions:

Project Pier – Open source project management system

I skipped over the part where we present a proposal for Joe’s project, so let’s just assume that he’s psyched to go with us – he’s accepted our proposal and signed the contract – and handed over some green.

The next step is to get Joe’s project set up in the PMS, ProjectPier. PP is an open-source and self-hosted application that keeps me abreast of everything that’s going on in a particular project – including messages, comments to those messages, file uploads, tasks and deadlines. And since it’s open-source, I am able to build my own theme, with the look and feel of my own website.

Setting up Joe’s project is a snap. I create a new client, Joe’s Skydiving, add joe as a user – which will send him an email with his login credentials, and then I create a new project – Joe’s Skydiving website. I’ll create a welcome message to Joe, orienting him with the PMS and encouraging him to have a look around.

As the project progresses through the design process, the PMS is where comps get uploaded and discussed, and it is where Joe uploads items such as copy or images. Once the design phase is complete, and Joe is head over heels on the design, I create a special message titled – Final Design Sign-off – to which Joe will reply that he approves the design, and we can move on to the development stage. This is an important message, as it’s now ‘in writing’ and any changes to the design from here on out are beyond the scope of the contract – and charged at an hourly rate. Luckily Joe and I went through the contract carefully beforehand, and he understands the consequences of changing the design once development has started.

Keeping the train on track – Step 5: The time tracker.

Tool descriptions:

Harvest – Web based time and expense tracking

Even though I bid Joe’s website on a project basis rather than by the hour, I still want to know how much time I spend on it. That’s where Harvest comes in to play. Joe gets plugged in there too, as a client, and as a project. Within his project I have several tasks already set up, such as – Comps, Comp Revisions, Programming, Project Management, etc. This allows me to track time spent on Joe’s project in great detail. I’ll know how long the design phase took – how much time was spent in meetings – how much time was spent internally on the project. This information has been invaluable in bidding projects accurately.

Harvest also allows me to track any expenses Joe’s project may incur, such as stock photography, or fonts. I also have an internal project set up, so I can track expenses that aren’t directly attributable to Joe. That new Apple Cinema Display I’ve been coveting comes to mind.

I’ve written before about how much I like Harvest, and I’m still hoping that Iridesco comes to the rescue and builds my dream app.

Rolling the dough – Step 6: Get paid.

Tool descriptions:

Quickbooks – Lesser of all evil accounting software

I’m going to say right up front that I hate Quickbooks. It is what it is, and until Iridesco comes to the rescue and builds my dream app, it’ll have to do.

Invoicing and accounting get done through QB, and Joe will be getting a pdf version of the final bill.

And that’s all I really have to say about Quickbooks.

Checking the feedback – Step 7: The follow-up.

Following up with Joe is important, thanking him for his business and checking in to see how happy he’s doing. I’d also like to get a testimonial if he’s willing, so I’ve put a nice reminder to myself in Highrise to send him a thank you note a week or so after the site is launched, as well as a note to contact him in a couple of months to get feedback.

Conclusion

The best part of my job is the design part. The business part I’m not so good at. Thankfully I have a system for that. It may not be the best system or the most efficient – I often find myself wishing there weren’t so many tools to keep updated – but the important thing here is that I have a system. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without it.

Now, as much as I love a good text editor for programming websites, writing a new post and adding the html markup by hand feels somewhat archaic, and I thought there must be a better way.

So that’s why I’m giving MarsEdit a go. I’m sure there are others out there, but I’ve head good things about this one, and I’ve heard that Gruber uses it.

So this post is being written using it, and so far so good. I’m able to easily add html tags to headlines and paragraphs as well as easily add a link. There was no unordered list tag in the default set, but adding my own ‘custom markup macro’ was a snap. I now have a list item tag opening and closing tag as well as an unordered list set.

The other thing I’m concerned about is adding an image. The MarsEdit logo above was submitted through the app, so we’ll see if and how it gets posted. I wasn’t offered an alignment options, so I had to manually add an “alignleft” class.

Ok, so here goes. I’ll leave the layout and styling as is, published directly from the app. If anything looks funny, feel free to blame Red Sweater Software, makers of MarsEdit.

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Let me start by saying that I love Harvest. It has saved me a ton of time in billing for projects and tracking how much time each aspect of a project takes. I agree completely when you say it’s the ‘worlds best time tracking application.’ It’s worth every cent of the subscription costs.

Which is why I think you are the company best equipped to build my dream application.

Because as much as I love Harvest, I find myself wishing it did more. What I really want is an application that does all of my business related business. Accounting. Time tracking. Invoicing. All in one application. I’m tired of doing things twice, such as entering information into an invoicing app, and then entering it again into my accounting app. I know I can export to Quickbooks or Excel, but I don’t want to do that. That’s still doing things twice. Here’s how I want the workflow to go:

1. Enter a new client and a new project to the system.
2. Track time and expenses for that project.
3. When the project is complete, set up an invoice according to the project settings. Invoice is customizable.
4. If the invoice needs to be edited for any reason, such as offering a discount, I can do it on the fly while setting it up.
5. If I have additional line items to add to the invoice, they can also be added on the fly.
6. Invoice can be emailed directly from the application, attached as pdf.
7. Accounting app records invoice as an Accounts Receivable item.
8. If client is late in paying invoice, invoice tracking app sends notification of late payment.
9. When client pays invoice, I deposit check into business checking account.
10. Accounting app connects to my banking account, and sees that there has been a deposit. Since the deposit is the same amount as a pending invoice, app asks if the two are related and if I would like to reconcile it.
11. Invoicing app marks invoice as paid.
12. At the end of the year, the accounting app spits out the reports I need to get taxes and such done.
13. And its all web based for multiple users.

Expenses will work in a similar manner, with the application able to connect to a credit card account and quickly and easily reconcile any business expenses. Even if those expenses aren’t directly attributable to a particular project or client.

I realize this is a big app and maybe a lot to ask. But this is what I want, and I’m guessing there are a lot of folks out there who want the same thing. I’ve been on the Quickbooks forums and have felt the frustrations I find there first hand. Small businesses want this. There are apps of this kind coming out in other countries (Xero.com in New Zealand and Australia) that look promising, but I’ve yet to find something similar here in the U.S.

Iridesco, you are uniquely situated to fill this niche. The care you put into usability and UI design far surpass others I’ve seen. I would love to see the thought and care you could put into an application of this sort.

Thanks again for Harvest, it truly is indispensable to me,
Bryan Hoffman
Spigot Design

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Checking the stats for spigotdesign.com today revealed that less than 10% of the visitors here are using Internet Explorer 6. This is great news!

This means we can now officially drop support for this outdated browser, at least on this site. Now that I’ve reached the vaunted 10%, and with newer browsers continuing to improve rendering consistency and support for standards based techniques, continuing to support an aged browser simply doesn’t make sense.

I’ve come to this decision with hesitation, and also relief. I hesitate because I pride myself on designing websites with accessibility and usability in mind. Dropping support for any percentage of users doesn’t jibe with those ideals. I’ve continued on in this decision because I’m confident that while I’m ostensibly ‘dropping support’ for IE6, users of that browser will not notice a difference in how this site looks and functions than it did yesterday. Freedom and relief are what I feel when I realize that I will not have to spend countless future hours, at least when working on this site, on supporting a browser that doesn’t support me.

What does this mean to you?

For most of you it means absolutely nothing. For the 90% of you that are viewing this site on a modern browser (including Internet Explorer 7) – spigotdesign.com supports you. For the rest of you – you don’t have much to worry about either. ‘Dropping support’ sounds so harsh and violent, but I’m really just trying to make a point. I won’t be pulling out my .png fix support, nor will I take out my IE6 specific stylesheet. In fact, you won’t notice any difference from my previous ‘IE6 support’ days. In the future, however, I will not be going out of my way to make sure this site looks as good on IE6 as it does on any other modern browser.

Of course, I will continue to support IE6 for all of my existing and future clients sites. 10% is still a large enough portion of visitors on any site. Completely leaving them in the dark would be counter to our philosophy of building sites that are as usable as possible for as many users as possible.

Some helpful links

Get yourself a ‘modern’ browser

• Firefox
• Safari
• Opera
• Google Chrome (Windows only)

Join in on the IE6 bash

• Facebook Uninstall IE6 Day
• 37signals phases out IE6 support
• Apple’s MobileMe drops support for IE6
• LessEverything drops support (Good explanation on why they’re doing it)

Counterpoints of view

• Stop the Hate – IE6 Isn’t So Bad!
• Actually had a hard time finding any more… sorry.

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