Thoughts - Website Strategy for Decision-Makers

Build Bridges Not Piers

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

Building a bridge to nowhere

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

Mind the gap please

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

The truth about deadlines

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

What are your carrying on your website

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

A lesson from the future you about the current pandemic

[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

TikTok, TikToK. The clock is running.

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

Unconventional Website Strategies: 100 Years

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

Website compliance strategies in the midst of a pandemic, social justice movement and economic recession

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

That website topic we don’t want to talk about but really should

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

What you wish you had learned about your organization’s online presence for the next pandemic

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.

Design reflections on the BLACK LIVES MATTER street mural in Washington, D.C.

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

How to ruin your company’s well designed website and spend a lot of money doing it

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

Stop critiquing the design. Focus on strategy and results.

Do you, as a client, give feedback to your designer during a design review on the design itself? If so, you are largely wasting your time and theirs. Your design observations, feedback and possibly directives are likely misguided and ill

You are really bad at evaluating design, and we’re to blame

I sometimes hear this phrase when clients evaluate design options: “I’ll know it when I see it.” Actually, no, you won’t. Sure, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, but if you do not clearly define

Value Pricing & Positioning Podcast Insight

I’ve been working on a better understanding of value pricing for almost a year. It’s a pretty popular pricing concept currently for independent professionals wanting to break out of the hourly billing trap. Jonathan Stark is the lead authority on

The Roots of Value Based Pricing

Jonathan Stark recently shared an interesting life story about how we determine value. His enewsletter made me curious about the definition of value and how it has been explained by economists. Value based pricing is a hot topic among independent professionals, but few

Getting done whatever you get done, and learning to be happy about it

This article is not about improving personal productivity, efficiency, prioritization or organization so that you can get more done in the day. It’s about shifting the way you think about what you do each day so that you are less frustrated, more peaceful and

On why it’s important for senior executives to be directly accessible to your customers.

My mother-in-law, who has onset dementia, forgot to hang up when calling her relatives in the Philippines and wracked-up a 239-minute, $723 call as a result. No, the call won’t automatically disconnect on international cell calls even if one party

How to give creative feedback…and live to tell about it.

I’ll admit it. Most creatives don’t have very thick skin when it comes to critiquing their work. And that includes me. Over the years I’ve sat on both the client side and the creative side of projects. There is an