Posts from: 11/2008
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Troubleshooting large vendors
We recently launched http://trailwear.saranac.com and http://schultzanddooleyonline.com for Saranac Beer. Both websites are custom Shopify ecommerce stores. After two weeks of successful store operation, however, shoppers reported that both Shopify-driven stores were suddenly inaccessible in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer7. Until this point, both stores operated and displayed perfectly in all major browsers including Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, and Safari.
We first triple-checked our own code, and we concluded that nothing was wrong with our Shopify template's HTML or CSS. Next, we browsed the official Shopify forums. According to recent forum posts, Shopify performed maintenance on their web and statistics servers the previous day to optimze their servers before the expected holiday rush. These changes unexpectedly interrupted many customers' Shopify stores the following day. We emailed the Shopify technical support team alerting them of our own situation, and they confirmed our issue was likely due to the maintenance issues and that they would correct the issue within two or three hours.
Several hours passed, and our client's two Shopify stores were still inaccessible in IE6 and IE7. We emailed Shopify technical support once more alerting them that our issue persisted, even after they had fixed the previous day's server issues. Their response: our templates may be requesting a resource that did not exist. But wouldn't this return an HTTP 404 Not Found error code? We again checked our template's HTML and CSS calls for non-existant resources, and we were confident this was not the issue. Our HTML and CSS were fine. After all, the two stores were working perfectly for two weeks before this issue arose.
We knew it was not an HTML or CSS issue. We knew the error was an HTTP 406 Unacceptable error (when a web browser receives the content but does not recognize the content). This led us to believe the content returned by Shopify did not have the correct mime-type. We searched through our HTML and CSS once more until we found the resource in question.
We referenced a file called "csshover.htc" in our IE6-only CSS stylesheet to enable the :hover psuedo-selector for all DOM elements in IE6; by default, IE6 only recognizes the :hover psuedo-selector on <a> elements. Many web developers use the "csshover.htc" technique to enable semantically correct dropdown CSS menus in IE6. Shopify's nginx web server served the "csshover.htc" file with the "www/unknown" mime-type causing IE6 and IE7 to diplay the 406 error. Instead, Shopify's web servers should serve ".htc" files with the "text/x-component" mime-type.
A quick Google search found http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306231. This URI provided the solution for this issue. We emailed this solution to Shopify and are awaiting their official response.
This brief case study demonstrates the depth of our technical expertise and our desire to provide detail-oriented services to our clients. We also try our best to find answers to and provide proactive solutions for the problems we face, even if the problems are caused by large and reputable vendors like Shopify that we have come to use and trust for our day-to-day needs.
Please note that this case study is not a negative criticism of Shopify. Instead, this case study is a critical analysis of a large vendor's technical issue that we experienced and the proactive process we took to solve the problem. Shopify's customer support is top-notch. All of our support emails were answered within 15 minutes, and Shopify's designers and engineers have been alerted of this issue. We stand by Shopify's steller service and support, and we will continue to use them for our future ecommerce needs.
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Gmail's New Default Theme is a Step Backwards for Usability
This week, Google has been rolling out a new theming feature into Gmail. This is likely a welcome and overdue addition for many people who didn't like the default look of Gmail. Unfortuately for everyone else, along with the new feature, users are automatically updated to a new 'Default' theme for Gmail. This has happened in the past, but for the first time, this default appearance change is a step back for usability.
Fortunately, the new theme selector allows us to select the 'Classic' theme which returns Gmail to its previous appearance. With this ability to switch between the new 'Default' and the previous 'Classic' we can look at some specific ways that 'Default' is less usable than 'Classic.'
Contrast is Reduced on the Important, Increased on the Unimportant
Menu Text and Content Borders
In the 'Classic' theme, text is darker and stands out more against the white background. Additionally the border that runs around the body of the page is lighter. It does its job, separating the dynamic content of the view from the static menus and gets out of the way. Since this border isn't directly useful, it should be subtle, deferring attention the content.
Email Listing Text
Here the text has been changed from black to gray and the background has changed to a gray as well. If we use a contrast calculator, we can objectively compare this change. From the 'Classic' to 'Default' themes, the foreground to background brightness difference and the foreground to background color difference is reduced by 28%!
By default, Google is pushing people to a new theme with much worse usability. The contrast of interface elements has increased while the contrast of text has been reduced by over 1/4. It is good that gmail allows users to return to the classic theme, but it should not be necessary. The new 'Default' theme should be opt-in instead of opt-out because of its reduced usability.
Update: (11/25/08)
Kevin Albrecht has created a Greasemonkey script to force the listing text to black. To see screenshots of the change and download the script, head over to his blog.
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Small, Agile Agencies Are Ideal Partners in a Tough Economy
In today's economy, a lot of companies are looking at ways to reduce their marketing expenditures, in order to preserve precious capital and brace for an "R word." However, research shows that brands who continue advertising through tough times benefit by gaining market share and increasing ROI.
If only there were a way to cut your overall marketing expenses, but maintain or increase your current level of marketing. While at first glance, this idea may seem impossible - there's actually a very practical answer for many companies. The solution lies in making sure that you're investing your marketing dollars with the most efficient vendors, whether PR firms, ad agencies, web firms, etc. In the creative industry, efficient usually means smaller.
It's just the way the cards fall - when you spend money with the big agencies, all of their superfluous overhead is passed along to clients like you. This overhead includes everything from fancy offices adorned with modern art to every executive having multiple secretaries. While there are certainly some larger firms that do a great job of being efficient with capital, the typical scenario is that as an agency grows, so does its ego, overhead, and costs.
It's really important to take a close look at the companies that you're investing your marketing dollars with and make sure that you're paying for results for your company not expensive executive retreats.
The fact that we're a small, Raleigh web design firm doesn't mean we don't create big results - it just means that we can do it more affordably than our big competitors. We keep our offices in Carrboro, don't have a fancy space, and answer our own phones. We do all of these things to keep our overhead low - both for our own bottom line and our clients'.
There are a number of ways to increase your marketing efficiency during these tough times, whether it's investing your marketing budget online, being more careful with ad buys, and many others. However, I think one strategy that doesn't get enough attention is shifting your marketing dollars to smaller firms who are more affordable and use your dollars more efficiently.
Again, there are big firms out there that do a good job of being efficient with an organization's budget, but we have oft been the witness of the scenario where someone chooses an agency due to their name and size, and then have their budget blown apart as the large firm's prices are hyper-inflated.
Make sure to do your research before choosing your agency to make sure they'll be careful with your capital and don't be afraid of working with one of the small guys.
Would love to hear feedback in the comments from big firms and people who have had either good or bad experiences working with large agencies that carry a lot of overhead.
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Raleigh Area Creative Agencies Are Thriving
Nov 17, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Design | Comments (0)Our office is located in Carrboro, NC, our entire team lives in Chapel Hill, and we call ourselves a Raleigh web design firm - so, needless to say, we have a lot of pride in the Triangle area, especially when it comes to the creative, advertising, technology, and marketing sectors. So, we wanted to give a shout out to McKinney, a large advertising agency in Durham, for their recent work on the Gold's Gym Account.
McKinney's creative was recently featured in the New York Times, which is super cool. While many people consider Raleigh a small market, that doesn't mean the creative sector isn't booming. We have the pleasure to frequently work as a strategic web partner for ad agencies in the area, as they use our Content Management Software. Having been on the inside of their planning sessions and seeing the work they generate, I can definitively say that the creative coming out of Raleigh is as sharp as anywhere else in the nation.
Just in the area of Raleigh web design, we've seen a good number of competitors move to the area recently and set up a second office down here. This new competition doesn't frighten us, but rather excites us. More firms moving to the area is the ultimate affirmation that they see Raleigh as a center of innovation with great business opportunities. Also, as more firms come down, the tech community will only get stronger, leading us all to develop better work and release slicker applications. Of course, we also think that our combination of great design, affordable prices, and powerful technology also make us a more than formidable competitor to anyone who comes down to our neck of the woods. It's a really exciting time for the area.
Again props to McKinney and everyone else who works to make sure that the Triangle keeps churning out great work on the local and national levels.
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SEO and Political Campaigns Done Right Requires Planning
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covers a number of strategies that can be used on a website to help it appear higher in search engine results. Smaller political campaigns generally underutilize SEO as a cost effective way to drive a message and save on ad spending. This lack of planning is a shame, as SEO is a completely free way to gain exposure to voters. Like any other component of a campaign, SEO should be addressed strategically so that maximum results can be achieved with a campaign's limited resources.
The first part of the strategy should be defining the keywords that are important to your race. This should include combinations of the candidate's name and the office he/she is running for, along with combinations including generic political terms and issues that people may search for. To get an idea of the kind of search volume your terms generate, you can use the Google Keyword Tool. It will also suggest keyword variations that might be useful. It can be a challenge to measure volume since interest in a campaign can be low initially. A good tip to determine relative importance of keywords early in a race can be to check you generic terms for a higher profile race.
Once you have defined your keywords, you need to execute on your strategy. For information on how to approach SEO in general, a good place to get information is straight from the horse's mouth: Google's SEO Starter Guide. Below are some tips specifically for political campaigns and the challenges they face.
- Start your website early.
Seeing results from an SEO campaign takes time -- at a minimum a couple of months. The earlier you begin your strategy the better off you will be. In political campaigns, typically the site is being built from scratch as well. This means that a new domain will likely be used and Google will need to index and rank it for the first time. We recently launched votethesite.com and got all kinds of awesome inbound links but it still took Google a month to give it a rank. - If possible, blog, blog, blog.
By frequently updating a blog, a campaign will continually be adding additional content to Google's index. This content will make it easier for visitors to find the campaign's site through a keyword search. Additionally, a good blog will motivate supporters to be more active and possibly blog about the candidate themselves generating links to the campaign site. - At a minimum have a news section.
If blogging isn't possible for the campaign, at least have a recent news section that is frequently updated. The more often a site is updated the better it will perform for search engines. - Candidate and State/Race in title.
The keywords that you use in the titlebar of your site as well as main headings will be the keywords that search engines most associate the site with. Be sure to use the candidate's name as well as information about the race in these areas to perform best for those crucial keywords. Your Content Management Software should give you control over at least your title tags – if it doesn't, make sure the developers make it the default for each page to contain the candidate's name and district. - Get social.
If you're campaign website is innovative you will get noticed. Take advantage of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter at a minimum. These venues can be a great way to drive traffic to your site and motivate supporters. If you create especially creative content you can even capture the attention of social news sites and drive massive donations. This was done in the last cycle by a candidate running for a Kansas State House seat.
There's nothing worse than having your name Googled and bad press showing up at the top of the rankings above your actual campaign website. This mishap is completely avoidable by putting forth a little extra effort and making sure that your site is optimized for Search Engines. A golden rule of campaigns is to always be in control of your own image – a SEO strategy allows you to shape the first impression that voters get of you when doing their due diligence.
- Start your website early.
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The Success of Our Microsite Marketing Strategy
Nov 12, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Microsite, New Media Campaigns, Social Media, VoteTheSite, Web Marketing | Comments (0)We launched our microsite votethesite.com exactly 7 days before election day. We had grand ambitions of gaining thousands of visitors and thousands of votes to the site, hoping to be able to figure out the correlation between a successful online campaign and an actual election victory. We knew that this was a bold undertaking that had a chance of failing, but we were excited about the prospects of the project and thought it could gain some traction. Also, before launching the microsite, we put together a comprehensive strategy on how to successfully market our microsite and reach our traffic goals.
We adhered to our strategy and were able to accomplish our goals for the site. My original goals with votethesite.com were to have 2,000 unique visitors and 10,000 votes. I thought these were lofty goals that would both achieve a significant sample of data and also gain our company some recognition. By the evening of the election, we had over 3,000 unique visitors and 14,000 votes, exceeding both goals by more than 30%! Beating our goals was extremely exciting, but it would not have been possible without our original microsite marketing strategy or a group of others that helped spread the word about votethesite.
We first sent the site to our friends and family, encouraging them to check out the site and make it their Facebook status, Tweet about it, etc. This was a great first step - it got us around 300 initial visitors and 1,000 early votes. This group was even more rock star than we ever expected when it came to discussing the votethesite on social networks. In the end, votethesite.com was the Facebook status for more than two dozen people (leading to 155 unique visits), tweeted about more than 50 times, and linked to from various other profiles and away messages. These friends and family were able to help us get off to a quick start, and they demonstrated the importance and reach of the individuals in your immediate network.
From there, it was time to engage strangers and see if they liked the idea as much as our friends. We sent the site out to all of the campaigns that we featured on the site. We didn't expect much out of this and were surprised when we immediately got emails from candidates thanking us for featuring them and for having us update their screenshot. When anyone asked us to update their image or include different information, we were quick to oblige, because we knew that if we took care of them, they were more likely to pass it along to others.
The strangers that really helped us take off were news aggregators and the blogosphere. We submitted the site to Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News. Digg never really caught on - a visitor of the site submitted it without us know and didn't insert a descriptive name, just the link to the site, so people weren't really pushed to click it. However, we made hard pushes on the other two networks.
We submitted the site on Reddit under the title "Vote for Politicians Based on Their Web Design" and got more than 30 ups. One important thing is that we submitted it in the Web_Design thread, making sure that it was in front of the most relevant audience that would be interested in the topic. More than 7,000 people subscribe to this feed and it shot to #1 in their feeds, which was a great push for us. In the end, Reddit pushed almost 500 people to the microsite and engaged them to the point where they spent more than 8 pages/visit on the site. Similarly, on Hacker News, we referred people to our blog posts about the site and pushed them to go directly to the site. It's hard to know the exact number of views that HN generated views, but I would estimate it was around 1,000.
Finally, we were fortunate enough to get some love from the blogosphere. None bigger than being featured on the homepage of Download Squad, which ended up driving nearly 400 visitors to the site. Also, several other, smaller blogs picked up the site, accounting for around 100 visits.
I know this doesn't add up to the 3,000 unique visitors, but the majority of the visits came directly to the site - I would wager that most of them saw it on one of the news aggregators, a social network, or a blog and just typed the URL in rather than clicking on the link.
We had a great rush of pride after accomplishing our goal, but it was accompanied with a sense of graciousness for all of those that passed our site along. It just goes to show that if you create something interesting or continue generating good content, your idea can get traction on the web. It's good to approach every marketing situation with an executable strategy, but the most important part is that you really believe in the idea and how it could help/entertain different people.
Thanks again to everyone and stay tuned for the final voting results from votethesite.com!
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Congratulations to All of Our Candidates
As a campaign website designers, we had our eyes glued to the TV last night, monitoring elections in numerous states where we had candidates. Overall, it was a good night for our team, winning 12 out of 17 races that we were involved in, which is over a 70% win rate. The wins ranged from Congressional down to local judges; we think each of our candidates did an exceptional job in their races and we were honored to be involved in each of these races.
One accomplishment that pops out is that we won in every levy or ballot issue that we were involved in. We had ballot issue websites in Arizona, Florida, and Ohio, winning a total of 6. These victories pop out to me, because I think frequently ballot and levy issues overlook the importance of having a strong web presence. However, I think it can really make the difference when educating people on what can sometimes be very complex ballot language and mobilizing supporters from across the state. Vote Yes for Polk County and the hometax Amendment in Arizona are two campaigns that really embraced the web as a medium to educate and mobilize voters from around their state.
One race that didn't turned out as we hoped, but I still think deserves praise is Larry Joe Doherty's campaign in Texas. LJD ran in a district that no Democrat was ever supposed to be competitive in, and he was able to make the race extremely close, losing 52-48 (UPDATE: LJD Actually ended up losing 54-43 after all votes were counted. Thanks to Bob for the clarification). The campaign embraced the website by putting a priority on having us design a robust and attractive campaign website (as verified by www.votethesite.com's results). They leveraged email marketing techniques, pushing people to their site, raising tens of thousands of dollars online, and signing up hundreds of volunteers. While the race didn't end up in the W column, we want to commend the campaign for doing an amazing job and catching the attention of politicos from across the country.
We're thankful that we were able to work with such a great bunch of candidates and wish the victors all the success in their new positions.
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Financial Services Firms Online Marketing Not Up to Par
A new article at MarketingVOX based on surveys from MarketBridge and SourceMedia reveals that financial services firms lag in digital marketing. The survey found that financial services firms have been slow to embrace key new online marketing strategies such as Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and Social Media.
The results show that financial services marketers are certainly aware of digital media, with half of those surveyed expecting digital marketing "to be an integral part of the marketing mix within the next two years." However, even with this anticipation, the shift of their marketing resources to digital mediums has been slow and hesitant. A MarketBridge Senior VP summed it up by saying:"These findings show that the foundation is in place for marketers, but they are not shifting budgets fast enough to fully understand the value and impact of these new tools and platforms"
These results are extremely surprising to me, as I view digital marketing to be a key step for financial services firms. More and more financial services are moving online, meaning that people are seeking out vendors from that medium more often than ever before. Think about it - when was the last time you waited for your bank statement to come in the mail rather than just looking it up online? Or when you were searching for a good interest rate, you most likely Googled for different rates and banks interest policies.
When an industry is naturally trending to a medium, it only makes sense that it's marketing should follow suit. One of the first rules of marketing: be where your customers are. The financial services needs to catch up and get to where their customers are - search engines, social media, and online in general.
We were lucky enough recently to design a financial services website for a new firm in Charlotte, NC. The firm, XBS Global, has a focus on electronic payment services. They understand that many of their clients will find them online - so they prioritized a website as one of their first marketing expenses and are now launching an aggressive Search Engine Marketing campaign. From SEO to PPC, they're working to get where their clients will find them. We've helped them with their SEO and are currently building landing pages for their PPC campaign.
We're definitely lucky to have XBS as a client and it's great to see them outfoxing their industry - I'm just surprised that so many other financial services firms haven't figured it out yet. Thoughts on why they haven't or other industries that have some catching up to do? -
Be Sure to Go Vote
Nov 4, 2008 by Clay Schossow | Filed in: Politics | Comments (0)Just a friendly reminder from our team here to make sure you go out and vote today. We pride ourselves on being pretty big political dorks and already have plans to have an office election party tonight and watch the returns come in together. Even if you're not too much of a politico - it's important to get out there and vote so your voice is heard. Our office is one block away from a polling place and our parking lot was jammed full this morning of people walking down there to cast a ballot.
We'll step down from our soapbox now. Happy Election Day!
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