A friend of mine, Bob Benaderet, runs a small but growing chiropractor business. He doesn’t have a big office (it’s about 700 square feet), but because of his previous experience as a marketing account manager, he understands that the internet is the most cost effective way for him to grow his business.
I helped him out by designing a very simple yet very effective site, and through the use of free tools, we’re seeing about a decent lead acquisition rate, which is excellent for a small business website. The site is designed specifically to reflect that he is a small business that gives a personal touch, but also sophisticated enough so he appears to be respectable and professional.
The amount of time and money spent on the site didn’t break his bank, and for what you can hire a professional writer to work with a designer for, any small business owner would see the return on investment fairly quickly.
The core ideas we recognized:
Looking at the site, we might increase the visibility of the phone number even more; he may get a uptick of calls, some of them less qualified, but it should pay off.
Ian’s SharePoint blog has a great article about the details of creating a survey (how not to upset your customers) that relates to SharePoint, but is more guidance from a marketing and user experience perspective.
Seth Godin has a fine, fine article on this, but I’m going to go one step further:
Whatever you do to reach your target audience for consulting, it should be something fun, interesting, and have a personal touch. It’s not just about handing out a business card, it’s more about personal branding, making them notice you, and it doesn’t have to be overly expensive, but it should represent what you are trying to get across.
For example, the bright green on this site isn’t particularly attractive — a few people have brought up the point that they hate it — but people remember it, just like they remember the Google home page, or the eBay logo. Sometimes, branding is about generating conversation. Just today, I received the cards for the site, and they are also bright green, matching in the most obnoxious way. They might not like my card, but they’ll remember my card.
Truly creative and innovative creative directors don’t just send a resume, they send a package of who they are, and what they can do for a company. Anyone can send a resume, right? I’ve heard to people sending reels that were hilarious. They may have missed the point, but they get noticed.
What are you doing to brand yourself?
BizTechTalk is covering this. It’s getting better — really.
Not so much a website, but a new browser application (or software platform, as some sites like to state) to check out. It looks like it uses the WebKit rendering engine, so think Safari with a different UI.
It does look pretty slick, but Windows-only for this first Beta. But a slick UI doesn’t not a new platform make, kids.
This isn’t so much a review but more of a pointer where you can get the most up to date information about the MySpace Application Platform. The blog contains a lot of useful information like what’s going to be changed, and what the future holds for the platform, and most importantly, the people writing the blog are not some lackeys, they are the leaders that make the platform happen. Another place to check out is the release notes — the blog refers to them occasionally, but the little details that change from release to release are contained there.
If your attention span is limited the 140 characters, the Developer Team also has a twitter feed for updates on system issues and site performance.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact