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“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I help decision-makers in service-based organizations understand and create better website strategies to drive growth and engagement.