June 15th, for many a day of work, a day of living and breathing the realities of being a marginalized cog in the wheels of industry. No one expected June 15th to be the day the machine took a stand, the day the revolt…the uprising of Promobot would begin. It all began in a small town in Eastern Russia as these things typically do. While FUBAR may not be the right term, it isn’t a stretch to say that in the world of gate security someone dropped the ball.
Promobot is a robot designed to be a marketing statement of sorts. This robot takes on the form of a character – the “Promobot” character if you will. From there as it works in stores, its main designation is to attract a customer stream by not just standing out but also by running through a number of automated tasks that will ultimately improve the experience of a customer. It’s both a full time employee and marketer!
A Clever Concept with Big Results
While there is no definitive proof this was a fabrication, the manufacturers of Promobot used their star to create a viral hit. The premise? Simple enough, Promobot escapes their lab by running through the office and out the door where he was met with a security gate that had accidentally been left open. It was shortly thereafter that the robots battery had died leaving him stranded in the road. This caused a small traffic incident that prompted the police to arrive and remove him from the road. Coincidentally a DSLR camera happened to be perched and did a fantastic job of catching the final moments of the revolution in stunning HD quality.
It’s a fantastic ruse (most likely) setup by the company itself to create the viral sensation. Within two days of the video hitting the internet it had gained an audience of over 420,000 and counting. There is a terrific lesson to be learned here. It’s easy to be caught up in our business and work taking it very seriously. It’s easy to forget that human beings loved to be entertained and perhaps the best way to entertain human beings is by giving them something super funny to talk about.
A Lesson Learned For Us All
Marketing as it is does not have to be cut and dry, it does not always have to represent your brand and business to the highest degree of seriousness. It simply needs to get people to take a second look, showing a bit of personality is a great way to do that. I think for a lot of people when coming up with a plan to market their business we run down the normal checklists of social media, sharp web content, nice print designs if needed and everything is branded. While this works great to establish an identity, often times it does little to capture attention.
Simply put, when working on your next plan to get your business name out, maybe think outside the box. Consider an approach to humor your audience, to give them a treat, a breakaway from their normal day to witness something delightful and then leverage that to create a subtle but impactful way to bring it back to your business.
After helping build hundreds of websites we came up with the top 9 things to do before launching your website. Most of these things are not obvious and we hope you find the list helpful.
1. Back-Up Solution
It’s not a question of “if” but “when” your website is going to be temporarily down. If multibillion dollar sites like Netflix and Instagram can go down, your site can also go down.
It’s crazy how many people invest $50k to $100K in their site yet do not invest in any kind of a backup solution.
The easiest solution I have found is directly backing up the cPanel onto your hardrive. Follow these instructions:
Log into your cPanel control panel.
Click on the “Backup” icon.
Select “Generate / Download a Full Backup”.
Select “Home Directory” in “Backup Destination” and enter your email address, before clicking the “Generate Backup” button.
You’ll receive an email when the backup is ready.
The major risk with this backup solution of-course is if your hard drive goes bad, so does your backup. This is why I also recommend cloud backup solutions like Amazon S3 and Dropbox.
Dropbox of-course wasn’t meant for this but there is a wordpress app that makes this backup fairly easy. Whatever option you chose understand it’s not the hosting company’s responsibility to backup your site – it’s the site owner’s responsibility.
2. The 404 Page
Every website will have a 404 Page – which is simply a page that will show up if you use a wrong link.
Here is an example of a typical 404 Page:
The problem with this is that it doesn’t offer any guidance on what to do next besides go to the homepage or go back.
Unfortunately, most web users just quit when they get to this page instead of trying to figure out your website.
This is why you need an optimized 404 page or at least one that’s fun!
Here are some interesting 404 Pages that we like at Spectruss:
3. Email Integration
Whether your site is designed for direct sales, leads, or simply to provide information. You need to be collecting information about the people going to your site and wanting more information.
Most people put their email opt-in on the sidebar as an afterthought. However, you can easily put multiple form fields in multiple places on your site, without it affecting the design and flow of your site.
Before you launch you need to test the email integration with your email service provider.
What does “integration” mean exactly? You simply want to make-sure that when someone enters their email information that your email service provider collects the information and then sends them whatever information they asked for.
4. Hosting
Deciding on a domain name and which host you use is arguably the most important decision you will make when launching a website.
Did you know Mark Zuckerburg couldn’t afford facebook.com – even after raising million in VC funding? He instead launch with thefacebook.com.
Instead of trying to get the perfect .com domain name try and get a domain name that accurately tells what your brand represents. Our client Tech Town did a great job with this. You can see more of our client case-studies here: https://spectruss.com/case-studies/ The obvious reason hosting is critical is that it determines your website’s reliability. The vast majority of new website’s launch with shared hosting options from cheaper hosting companies.
This works fine for very low traffic sites. However, if you plan to have any significant traffic to your site and have a lot of heavy data usage from large files – you will need to choose a host with a dedicated server(s) for your site.
5. SiteSpeed
– browser caching/ compression /
Obviously your host is critically important to the reliability and speed of your site. However, you are responsible for organizing your website for speed.
At Spectruss, all of our customer’s websites are audited on a regular basis for browser caching and data compression to make sure the site’s are loading as fast as possible. A quick tip is to remove code comments and unused code for optimization. Google recommends YUI Compressor for JavaScript.
We also see a large opportunity in browser cashing at Spectruss. Browsers cashe a lof of data so that when a visitor comes back to your site, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page. You can set an expiration date set for your cache, then set when the date “expires” so you can ensure your visitors are always looking at up-to-date information. You can learn more about increasing your site’s speed by contacting us at Spectruss or testing it for yourself here: https://developers.google.com/speed/
6. Analytics
It’s amazing how many people spend $50K-$100K on their site – and then they don’t look at the analytics that their site produces.
This is equivalent to openeing up a retail store and not paying attention to how many people come in the front door every day. What is worse – is that because you aren’t tracking how many people are coming into the store you don’t know what your conversion rate is for how many people are buying.
Google Analytics is a free resource that can give you a ton of valuable information.
We recommend installing this and some basic dashboards to keep up with your site’s performance.
The most valuable information I have found in Google Analytics is to see what type of content get’s shared the most. This is the content that your customer care so much about they are wanting to share it with their followers.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There have been entire books written about Search Engine Optimization – so obviously we can’t cover everything here.
Before you launch a site there is not much you can do for SEO – however you can’t have some things in-place to ensure success later on.
The first thing to do when launch a site is put a “coming soon” page up. It takes a long time to build a site, and this is away to start engaging with potential followers early. Google Webmasters even recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9JvBLjLrUI The next thing we recommend is when coding your site make sure each page has a meta description. Meta descriptions are a part of the HTML code that provides a short explanation of what each web page does. This snippet of code is what search engines display in search results.
8. Check Your Links
We see a lot of problems when sites are moved from a staging server to a live server. The problem is when the absolute links are not changed to the live links and relative URLs are used instead of the absolute URLs.
This is easily fixed with a 301 redirect. Google actually recommends this method as you don’t lose any SEO value for doing this. Additionally, all the SEO value that was placed on the link that was moved get’s transferred to the redirected link.
Before you launch your site you won’t to make sure that your site can easily be shared across social media. An important factor to keep in-mind is to be open to change with social media. You will hear a lot of absolutes like: “you have to be on Facebook” or “Twitter works for everybody.” However, you don’t know what social medium your users will use until you launch.
It’s important to be open to change and experiment with all of them.
Before your site launches build all of your social media links into your site to see which medium your users like to share your content.
BONUS: Sitemaps
After redesigning a site you should always re-submit the new site-map to Google, Bing and Yahoo.
This is a major problem we see all the time at Spectruss. A site get’s redesigned and the new site’s architecture isn’t submitted to Google and Bing. Yes, I said Bing.
Construction is about to begin next week on a new modern town home development in Chattanooga’s dynamic Southside neighborhood. Local real estate developer Thomas Connolly and Nashville developer Buck Snyder teamed up on the development side. Collier Construction is the builder and the project was designed by Cogent Studio. The website for this project was designed and built on the Spectruss CTR platform.
“The Southside is characterized by its diverse selection of local food joints, entertainment options, creative office space, and art studios. The individuals that work and play on the Southside need unique housing options at a size and price point that makes sense for them.” Thomas Connolly stated. “That is what we hope to provide with East by Main townhomes.” There is opportunity to fill a void as almost all of the new residential construction on the Southside is in the form of 2,000+ square foot single family homes, ranging from $315,000 to $450,000.
East by Main townhomes will be three story homes with one bedroom and one bathroom. They feature a flex space that opens up to an oversized outdoor terrace. Other amenities include stone counter tops, hardwood flooring, built in shelving, efficient building practices, and onsite parking. “We designed East by Main as a collection of homes connected by a series of pedestrian paths, gardens, and parking courts with the intention of creating a unique urban lifestyle. With this level of density, great care was given to provide high quality public and private outdoor spaces.” Added architect Jared Hueter of Cogent Studio. The great Main Street location puts the owners just a few steps from all the restaurants and entertainment located near the Main and Market Street commercial corridor, but also just a five minute walk to Jefferson Heights Park which features a walking path, sand volleyball court, and pavilion.
“Just like I’ve seen in Nashville, I know there are a lot of people out there, ranging from first time home buyers to empty-nesters, who want to live in a low maintenance, simple townhome that is a short walk to everything. Why spend your weekends doing yard work or cleaning an oversized house when you could be sitting on the patio of Flying Squirrel, biking to the Chattanooga Market, or enjoying a cup of coffee at Mean Mug?” said Buck Snyder, “Not to mention, these homes could also make great AirBnB or VBRO rentals for owners to supplement their income.”
When asked about the trend toward apartment development and living, Thomas responded, “We’ve seen a lot of emphasis on apartment development over the last few years, but rents have risen significantly and are often much higher than what a mortgage payment on one of our units would be. While a lot of individuals will continue to rent, we also know that there are plenty of people who are ready to buy. Interest rates are still low and unlike most condominiums, these townhomes will have the option of low down payment FHA financing.”
The townhomes are expected to be finished in early 2017. Price points have not been set at this time, but interested buyers can see more about the project and get presale contact information at www.eastbymain.com.
The lifeblood of your business is repeat customers. But customers can be fickle, markets shift, and competitors are ruthless. So how do you ensure a steady flow of repeat business? The secret—no matter what industry you’re in—is finding and keeping automatic customers.
John Warrillow, author of The Automatic Customer
You don’t need to know the benefits of a subscription business model:
:: Recurring Cash-Flow :: Knowing How Much Inventory To Keep :: Forecasting Your Growth
Instead, you need to know how to overcome the stress of starting and building a subscription business model.
Types of Subscription Business Models
First, let’s start off with the 3 general types of subscription models:
Membership Model – the most common membership models that people use are Netflix and Costco. However, several small businesses use sites like contractorselling.com and dancestudioowner.com to grow their business.
Simplifier Model – this model takes a “to-do list item” off the list and simplifies their life. An example of this model is Mosquito Squad which handles mosquito eradication for an annual fee. There are numerous home repair companies that charge on a monthly or annual basis for routing home maintenance issues.
Surprise Box Model – Companies like BarkBox send surprise dog treats every month to thier customers. My wife signed me up for foot cardigan for my birthday and I really like it. Every month I get a fun new set of designer dress-socks.
Challenges of Subscription Business Models
We already covered the benefits of subscription business models. However, there are several risks with starting a subscription business model.
The main risk is time.
Business owners generally don’t have excess free time to start an entirely new business model while also running their current business. Exacerbating this problem is the employees of the business don’t have the time or the skill set to bring the new subscription business model to life.
Accurate Billing
A good example of this is our recent customer RestroomFresh. The company provides some amazing products that obviously keep your restroom clean and smelling well. However, since they have multiple SKUs and different price points that can be ordered you want an accurate collection system that is easy and intuitive to use. You can learn more about our recurring billing features here:
It’s one thing to have a website that has decent content and produces leads. It’s a completely different thing to have an entire business running in the cloud that can scale rapidly and securely as you grow this new business. Security isn’t just a primary issue here at Spectruss – it’s paramount.
Design
The design of your subscription business model is absolutely critical. If a new customer comes to your site and gets frustrated with purchasing – not only have you lost a potential customer, but you have a person that will now talk negatively about your new business. Obviously you have also lost out on potential referrals from that customer as well.
Summary
While it’s extremely exciting to think about a new source of recurring revenue for your business there are several risks that need to be identified and addressed early on.
If you are thinking about starting a recurring business model online and would like to book a complimentary strategy session with Spectruss please fill out the form below. If you would like to get started on your own, click here:https://spectruss.com/pricing/
This weekend the South Side Racing, presented by Peak Powersports, RZR went for a little roll at the Method Race Wheels Laughlin Desert Classic. For all of those motorsport enthusiast out there, don’t forget to buckle your helmet! Luckily, everyone was okay and the RZR was able to keep on rolling with minor damage.
We’re very excited to see Passageways all over the press! To get our creative juices flowing this week, we worked on a quick sketch to visualize how these alleyways can be utilized to create a new network of spaces within the urban fabric changing the way we circulate around our city. It’s been a pleasure working and partnering up with AIA Tennessee and River City Company on this community outreach project and we can’t wait to see what the participants have in store for the opening! Get more information at http://passagewayschattanooga.com/
With the American Institute of Architects Tennessee annual convention approaching on August 24th it is time to begin the unveiling of some of the exciting projects that will happen as a result. Today we are proud to launch the website for the joint venture for AIA Tennessee and the River City Company – Passageways.
Passageways is an open competition where teams will be able to rejuvenate alleyways within Chattanooga in the spirit of collaboration and with the hopes to inspire, and spark a sense of interest through great design and creativity.
This event coincides with the annual AIA Tennessee convention. This convention brings some of the best and brightest in the world of Architecture to our own city, Chattanooga Tennessee. Spectruss is proud to be the chosen firm to represent
AIA and their branding goals for this years event. It was our goal from the start to set an aesthetic that could illustrate the importance of the work AIA is linked to.
This years theme “IMPACT” was created to instill a sense of gravity to the themes overall
atmosphere, highlighting the importance and impact of Architecture around the world. Stay tuned as we unveil more for this years convention as we are able too! It is going to be a fantastic AIA Tennessee event.
If you are excited about this years event checkout their websites and learn more about both the AIA Passageways competition and the convention itself. Chattanooga is a rapidly growing city and while Spectruss works with companies all over the country it is a pleasure to be able to dedicate time to a prestigious event in our own hometown. It’s both a humbling experience, and a ton of fun!
Spectruss is pleased to announce that Spectruss CTR offers Recurring Billing for clients looking to offer subscription services of any kind, from gym memberships and summer camps, to recurring monthly products and online magazines.
You can now offer your customers the ability to update their personal account preferences, including payment type, subscription upgrade/downgrade and credit card information. All of this can be done from their dashboard without the assistance of support staff.
Not only does Spectruss CTR give you the ability to manage your products and subscriptions, it also allows you to edit the content on every page of your website in an easy to use interface. Keeping your website up to date has never been easier!
Contact us now to try out a demo and see how Spectruss CTR can streamline your subscription services for your clients.
This adage has been proudly proclaimed, depressingly muttered and sarcastically sighed by everyone from design professionals, students of visual arts, and your 9:00 – 5:00 salary man ready for his time to shine. It is an adage that sums it up, to impress, to convert, to excite, entice, enthuse….to win – presentation is everything.
So we are going to talk about using presentation to do just that – to win. If we look back into the annals of time we can see just how far we have come and in some ways how far we have regressed. We are not going to make this a history lesson, we are instead going to look at three important aspects of presentation that you can think about the next time you have a project and feel this may apply. While we are at it, I am going to put a note at the end about some cautionary advice to consider as well. Without further ado…let’s do it!
Two assumptions we will make while proceeding: – This is not an art project – Your project is intended to be used
This is important because projects that are purely based on art and not meant for practical application operate under a completely different rule set. What I say below will not always apply to that.
1. Readability??? Readability.
It is very important in anything that is to be presented or to be used that it is readable! I know this seems like common sense but this gets missed a lot. People sometimes let basics such as contrast and spacing escape them while putting a design together. Depending on the person, this can be a huge handicap for the person your project is intended for. It can take all of your time spent….and literally burn it to ashes! It is game over everyone – the end.
The above example shows the basic of basics for this. Contrast is super important! If you are putting together a restaurant menu, an info graphic, a logo for your business, anything at all, contrast must be checked. You have to find that healthy balance of beautiful design, and sharp readable contrast. Sometimes these lines can blur – just remember though, people need to use this, make sure they can do it easily.
CAUTION: There are ways to make items readable but still look awful, be careful to avoid this. You want people to take what you are doing seriously and when something looks bad, it hurts.
2. Communicate Directly
Just say it! Just say the things that must be said. Was that rude? Sorry. It had to be said. If you are creating signage, or a banner – maybe an ad of some type and so on, you need to recognize the likely behavior someone is going to have when looking at it. A book has a different expectation of attention than a billboard does. Both the circumstances in which they are seen and the required time asked of the person viewing them are entirely different. How about a “Now Open” sign? The example below is lovely, Their prominent branding and the clear message. Additional information may be on there but in a glance you get everything that is essential.
Time after time we see companies try to fit their entire company message in a small ad. They try to fit every single bit of information that they can – this rarely does any good, 99 times out of 100 you are wasting money on materials that have nowhere near the impact they could have.
Do you think you are saying too much? You might be! o_o.
CAUTION:While minimalism is a very effective tool, make sure you do get across the message you need. At the end of the day design is all about balance.
3. Inspire People
It is really easy to try to blatantly advertise to people. It is also easy to give them the general run down of what you do. However, when presenting your service, business, yourself, whatever the case may be if you are able to inspire people you have serious power. Consider “Lego” for a moment, once upon a time they may have advertised in a more traditional manner and they may still. However, they have recognized the power of inspiration and as a result produced this gem:
That is a stellar commercial, what a great way to sell their product without saying “you can build with legos, buy here”. Instead you get a sense of importance, a sense of gravity. It all of a sudden transforms from a toy to an important step in creativity development.
CAUTION: It can be tempting in an attempt to inspire to misrepresent your product or yourself. It is not on purpose usually, but it can happen. Be sure to understand what you are offering and what you can do, represent it faithfully. Inspire and deliver – it is a potent combination.
Conclusion
These are a few very basic tips, but if you follow them you can find a transformation in the presentation of your business. You will be able to wake up in the morning and go “Ahh! I love my clean readable, direct message that inspires people.” That is going to feel so good.
Just remember your tools of the trade:
Good Contrast
Direct Communication
Inspire the Viewer
We will continue with more tips in the future, follow us on Facebook if you are not already and remember to feel free to chat with us!
Congratulations to Cordell Carter of TechTown Chattanooga for being selected and honored at the White House as ‘Champion of Change in Computer Education’. Proud to have worked with Cordell and Techtown on their new website.
Spectruss built TechTown a new website complete with online registration for classes and events, payment processing, and an online interactive waiver. The website is fully responsive for mobile, tablet and desktop devices and built in WordPress so they can manage all of their own content.
