For your designer: The more detailed and prepared you are, the more your designer can see your vision with you.

Goals: You don’t need to know the technicalities here. Just lay out what you want your website to do for you. Increase sales? Promote brand awareness? What is the goal you expect to achieve by investing in a new site?
Market: Who is your target? Who do you expect to visit your site, and who do you want to visit it more often?
Functionality: How you want your website to work. Describe how a client would come onto the site and find what they needed, navigation and details on your vision for the site.
Visual: What do you want your site to look like? Colors? Design? Do you have a logo or photos you want prominently displayed?

For you:

 These are prepared by you and are separate from web design services, but you must have them ready before your designer can start. You must buy your house before you can have someone remodel or work on the interior design. If you need help with anything or are unsure of how to go about getting these together, feel free to contact Pi Digital Media, they will go the extra step to make sure you are prepared in order bring about the best site-building experience.
Domain name: This means choosing a name for your website. It will the the online address where your business can be found. Make sure it is not already taken and registered by someone else and purchase it online.
Hosting: This is essentially where you pay rent online to have a space on the Internet. Once you have your domain, you can find a web host and purchase space to set up your site there.
Budget: Make sure you have a budget for the site you’re looking for. If you have questions about price ranges, ask your designer to lay out prices for you once you’ve told them everything you want and how you want your site to work.
Web designer: Make sure you have someone with the right capabilities to give you what you want. Make sure your designer feels confident about being able to listen to your needs and deliver. Choose someone you can trust and that won’t leave you disappointed with price, service, and the outcome of the site.

With that I am pleased to announce our sponsorship of NYU CrowdPitch, an upcoming event hosted by Lendio (formerly FundingUniverse) and the Entrepreneurs Exchange Club (EEX) at the NYU Stern School of Business. CrowdPitch is an event where 5-6 companies are selected to present their ideas to an audience of entrepreneurs and a panel of experts. At the conclusion of the pitches, the audience and panel give their “Fun Money” to the company that impressed them most.

I was first introduced to the CrowdPitch events at Lendio’s inaugural New York event in October of 2010. I had such a great time learning and networking that I offered to volunteer to ensure another New York CrowdPitch in 2011. I was able to put Lendio in contact with a few of the EEX students at NYU Stern and since then we have all worked together to plan what is sure to be an valuable event to everyone in attendance.

If someone you know is interested in pitching their business idea to some of the top venture capitalists in New York I strongly encourage you to register for this event. If you’re in the area and want to participate as an audience member in this free event then sign up as well.

Click here to register: http://nycmar2011.eventbrite.com/

I look forward to seeing you there!

We’ve been planning on covering this topic for a while but, like all great things on the internet, somebody else got to it first. Here’s a great article from Six Revisions about the Anatomy of an Effective Product Page Design.

As always, in order to have an effective website, you must have a solid understanding the goals of the website. Without clear goals, your business will not have any real purpose in developing a new site. Goals can vary from selling more products for e-commerce site, increasing traffic for an ad based site, or increasing the number of volunteers for a non-profit. A clear goal will set the tone and direction for how you expect visitors to use your site. One great way to organize your site is to start off with a wireframe. This provides an outline for what information goes where in order to accomplish the goals of the site.

Homepage
The landing page of your site should be a window into all of the important parts of your site. If you are a non-profit looking to increase membership and donations the landing page should have, at minimum, two distinct sections that address how to get involved and how/why people should donate. The homepage should be a compelling ‘sneak preview’ to everything your site has to offer.

Images vs Text
It is important to find an effective balance between the amount of text and the number of images on a page, especially the home page. Images convey emotion and the feel of your brand in many ways that text can not. Even a good writer may not be able to tell the story as well as an image because there is an emphasis on brevity in web copy. Text however does provide the specifics of your business that the users need to know.

Titles
The titles of each menu option should be clearly labeled. Resist the urge to create clever titles that are meaningless to the average user. Menus are to make navigation of the site easier, not more complicated. On the other hand, titles of a blog post can be as creative as you want, but you should use keywords in the titles so they are more likely to come up during search results.

All of the development for this is still in it’s infancy, but it’s important to keep your wheels spinning on how you will be able to leverage technologies like this in the future.

Take a look at this concept window display. This engages the passerby with motion detection and will almost instantly grab someone’s attention.

If last year was about forward thinking, this year is definitely about forward moving.

This company has been around for just over a year and has already funded hundreds of projects across film, technology, fashion, design, and several other creative areas. The unique quality  is that projects get funded through a concept called ‘crowdfunding’ rather than just from one source such as a bank, angel, or VC. Thousands of people donate amounts to your project (some as little as $1), and in return they are offered rewards related to the project. For example, a product designer wanted to raise $15,000 for the production of a multi-touch watch out of  an ipod nano. By the end of the funding round the designer raised over $941,000 from over 13,000 donors.  Everyone who donated more than $25 was rewarded with the actual product as well as the gratification of knowing it was part of the original development.

But this is not limited to just preselling a product, plenty of successfully funded businesses on KickStarter offer smaller incitenives to donate. Some music projects add donors names to the credits, some people just offer their gratitude. But the key takeaway is their is a large community of people ready to fund your creativity. KickStarter is an excellent place to start.

Here’s an infographic that details the process and gives a bit of history as well:

Consider how you can add the most value to your clients, not just generate more sales. It’s better to consider your social media presence as part of the product instead of part of the sale. If you want to design a specific strategy for your brand just contact us.

As you can see, finding active users and directly addressing their needs is about as personal as you can get. Even if you take a few hours each week to do this you can bring a few quality users to your website which is especially valuable in a low volume, high margin business. You can check out Twitter Advanced Search by clicking here.

Who generates the bulk of the content, me or the users?
If you are writing articles, creating the art, or selling your product and that is the focus of your site then, like most sites, you have a good ol’ fashioned professional website. However, if your users are generating most of the content on the site (think facebook, twitter, craigslist) then you are building a platform, which means you’re only responsible for making sure the content creator and content consumer can interact. Be sure to understand there will often be overlap of user generated content (UGC) and professional content. The difference usually lies in who’s initiating the conversation.

How should I categorize each type of content?
Begin by sorting content into groups that are specific enough to have the user understand what they are going to get from it, but still general enough to contain several items in each group. Develop groups based on commonalities amongst the way you intend for users to view the site. Groups can be sorted by things such as purpose, function, or user interest.

How frequently will I update each content type?
The key here is to be realistic with your estimate. For example, if you incorporate a blog into your site but have never managed a blog before it can be a daunting task to commit to writing a new post every day. Also if you have a prominently displayed section of your site that hasn’t been updated for six months, it makes the site appear as if it has been abandoned.

What is the sites hierarchy?
Take the time to prioritizing the prominence of the pages of your site. Many times it helps to create a simple bullet point outline to sort out your ideas. You will often find that the main categories in your completed outline serve as great starting points for a main menu for the site, while the subpoints can be dropdown menu options.

Once you have addressed these questions you will have a more clear understanding of how to present the information to your users. The design of your website should be an extension of that understanding. Talk to us if you need help with content organization.