Focus your marketing resources on website strategies that produce value for you and your clients. Subscribe to my Contrails newsletter and receive insight on website design, strategy, positioning and management from a 30,000′ perspective. Always free. Unsubscribe at any time.
Space is an important aspect of strategy. A central Soviet strategy in World War II was to trade space for time against the advancing and superior German forces. The Soviet Union needed more time to ramp up military production, gather
Operating in, occupying, and controlling physical space is a foundational strategy concept applied to everything from warfighting to business marketing to sports. Dominating the “high ground” — the most elevated terrain or plane — provides distinct advantages like vision, defensibly,
This is the first installment in a short series on the concept of space in strategy and how it applies to website strategy. Much of what I share I learned as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and student of military strategy.
In 1983, I bought my first computer (an original IBM PC) with the money I saved in junior high. I could see computer proficiency would give me a significant academic advantage in school over my peers, who were saving their
In the not so distant past, professional service organization’s thought of their public facing website as the be-all and end-all of their digital presence. As social media grew in general popularity, most organizations have sent digital “shoots” out to explore
Would you pay your digital agency $200 to swap out a PDF on your organization’s website? You might have to if your website is tied into their proprietary Content Management System (CMS). That’s the situation one leader I talked with
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War The relationship between website strategy and the tactics used to implement that strategy can be cloudy.
Your organization’s website is an island in a vast digital sea. Its job is to connect you to the outside world. Is your website a bridge or a pier? I’ve been writing about website strategy using the metaphor of building
If you don’t have a website strategy in place, then there is a good chance you are building a bridge to nowhere like this one in my wife’s hometown of Ketchikan, Alaska. And you would be hard pressed to build
Smarmy, inspirational business clichés are not my thing, and anything having to do with “bridges” likely falls into this category: https://bit.ly/2Z39f8z However… Josh Earl in his excellent email marketing newsletter mentioned “building bridges” to a list of potential dream clients
You can tell how serious a client is about a website project when they have a deadline. I once designed an entire pitch presentation and website mock-up in four days for an online vitamin startup seed funding round. They were
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. —Tim O’Brien, in The Things They Carried In O’Brien’s widely acclaimed book on the Vietnam War, he tells the
[This is Part 2 of Lessons You Wish Had Learned from the Pandemic About Your Organization’s Website. Read Part 1 here. Ask my 12-year-old son what can happen when you don’t have a flight plan. He recently lost his $100 drone on day two of
The recent presidential executive order to ban TikTok in 45 days and a lesser-known decision by WordPress to suspend the download of its most popular (over 1 million users) commercial theme Astra, should highlight why you need a robust digital
An organization’s website strategy (if they even have one) is often scoped in terms of months or years. Almost no one except the largest and most forward-leaning corporations will plan website strategy in terms of decades. What if you thought
I didn’t stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. I’m not a lawyer and this email doesn’t constitute legal advice. This is all about website strategy, baby. At the lowest strategic level, website compliance is about covering you or
I want to discuss a topic that I’ve not been comfortable talking about up to this point because: I have not implemented solutions for my own sites. I am generally lazy in these areas. I tend to choose the past
My 12-year-old son has a hard time understanding what he does today and how he does it will not only impact his current opportunity and environment, but also his future ones. Not surprising for a 12-year-old. He recently purchased a mini remote-controlled drone to learn to fly. It’s pretty amazing.
Over the last decade, I can think of no other single design that has had a more tangible, pervasive, divisive place in the visual and ideological landscape of the American public than Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” red hats. I wrote about
Congratulations! Your company has just spent a couple of months and a decent chunk of change with a hipster web designer/team creating a fantastic website that is getting you traction with your clients. You’ve raked your web design team over
I help decision-makers in service-based organizations understand and create better website strategies to drive growth and engagement.