Lighthouse 360 had their website built on the Your Web Department website platform years ago. A fresh look that would better reflect their brand and convey their message was in order, so they asked us to completely redesign their website for them.
Lighthouse 360 had their website built on the Your Web Department website platform years ago. A fresh look that would better reflect their brand and convey their message was in order, so they asked us to completely redesign their website for them.
The nice thing about a system like YWD is that it provides us complete flexibility, without the need to write any code. This allows us to design/redesign a website for our clients at a fraction of what it would normally cost in other systems, even with “free” ones.
And since the client is already familiar with our easy to use CMS (Content Management System) they can easily make any content updates on their own.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Calendars can be very useful for business websites. You can use them to post upcoming events like tradeshows, conferences, new product releases, etc. A website management system like Your Web Department includes a very powerful Events Calendar tool that lets you create events and display them in different formats such as lists and monthly calendars. And you can extensively customize its look and feel. But you can also use Google Calendar for that if you prefer, and then easily insert/embed it into your business website.
Creating and managing a Google Calendar
Google Calendar -- www.google.com/calendar -- is a free tool that lets you build (and in our case here share) your own calendars. If you already have a Google account (if you use GMail for instance) you can sign in to Google Drive directly from there. If you don’t have a Google account click the Sign up button.
The video below (from Anson Alexander) will get you started on how to create an manage your calendar:
Sharing the calendar with the world
You can use Google Calendar as your own (and private) time-management application. But in this case we want to make our calendar available to anyone accessing your business website. So once you have your calendar ready, rollover its name under My calendars and click on the down-arrow next to it, so a popup menu will appear. Select the Share this Calendar option:
Check Share this calendar with others and also Make this calendar public. This will make all the calendar information available to anyone. I’m assuming you're not keeping any personal information of a private nature in this calendar, of course!
Adding the calendar to your business website
Google automatically generates the code you need in order to embed/insert the calendar into your Your Web Department business website. Here’s how you do it:
1. In Google Calendar, click the down-arrow next to the calendar name to display the popup dialog and select Calendar settings. You can use that page to customize your calendar’s look and feel, dimensions and other aspects.
2. At the top of the page you will see a box similar to this one, highlighted here in red. Select and copy all the text inside the box:
3. Now go to your website’s administration interface in Your Web Department and navigate to the page where you’d like to embed/insert the Google Calendar. Click Add content in the YWD toolbar, and then Embed Code. Paste the code you just copied there, and save.
Preview the page and you’ll see the calendar embedded there:
You can always go back to Google Calendar and change its dimensions, colours, etc. then grab their code again.
What’s neat is that as you add more events to your Google Calendar, your website will reflect that automatically.
Want to go even fancier?
Let's say you prefer not to embed the calendar itself on the page, but rather pop it up above it. For instance, a page like this one, with a calendar image and a text link:
When either the calendar or the text link is clicked, you would like your Google Calendar to pop up in a “lightbox” hovering above the page.
To do that:
1. Grab the portion of the code provided by Google Calendar that’s inside the first pair of quotes i.e. the URL (the address) of the calendar:
In Your Web Department, instead of using an Embed Code content block, create a link from your text or image in a regular Word Processor block, and paste the URL you copied above. In the Target tab of the link properties window, select .
That’s it: when the page is displayed, if people click on the link they’ll see your Google Calendar inside this “floating” layer:
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Anyone who watched StuporBowl 2014 might have seen the GoDaddy ad where a real life, actual Gwen, quits her job to start her dream puppet show business. She quit right there, announced it into the camera. I assumed that this was the first her employers had heard of Gwen’s decision. No matter.
And she’s kickstarting her business by way of GoDaddy’s website building services. Not withstanding the fact that anyone would love to kick off their new small business with a SuperBowl ad. Here is the link to her website.
Why am I promoting a competing website building service? I don’t think I am. Our position is that there are a lot of people out there that don’t want a conglomerate to build their website. No matter how friendly a face Gwen puts on GoDaddy, it’s still a call-centre driven, mega-corp experience. And the punchline is that it is bad website.
For all the high-powered help puppetsbygwen.com received from GoDaddy’s Dream Design Team® it’s a really bad website. puppetsbygwen.com does not have to follow website best practices. She’s been launched into the stratosphere, but GoDaddy is promoting their Dream Design Team® to all small businesses out there and if Gwen’s website is any example of what they are offering, it’s another reason to avoid the conglomerate.
Here’s the lowdown:
Really wonderful opening billboard. I’m kinda happy it’s not a slideshow. They are useful but I can get tired of them.
This billboard doesn’t quite tell me what Gwen does with her puppets. I see white kids playing with puppets but is she selling puppets, building them for kids to play with, is she putting on a show?
Then below is the line “Be part of the adventure…” and a button, Book a Show. This kind of implies that she’s going to be doing puppet shows, I assume.
Then there are four callouts below, Meet Me, My Puppets, My Adventures, About The Show. Okay, this is what I call ‘me’ content. It’s all about Gwen. A website, especially the home page, has to be about YOU, the visitor. What problem is Gwen going to solve for YOU! Now, granted parts of this website are totally self-serving to GoDaddy. That aside, the callouts need to be something like: “Find out how to un-boring your kid’s party” “Meet My Puppets” (not the passive My Puppets) etc.
The callouts also commit the crime of using ‘Read More’ as the linked text. Descriptive text needs to be the link. And in this case I can’t click on the heading or the callout copy. Really bush league stuff here.
The callouts are followed by Behind the Curtain, the story of Gwen leaving her job. Let’s leave this for now. We know why it’s here. 4 million dollars worth of why.
From a best-practices perspective the words “PuppetsbyGwen” with or without spaces does not appear anywhere in the general content. Seriously, this is amateur time.
“Be a part of the adventure…” is not a proper headline. It is meaningless to Google. If they had written, “Be a part of Puppets by Gwen’s adventure” that would have told Google that puppets and Gwen are somehow connected.
There needs to be 100 to 200 words of excellent copy on the home page for Google to really figure out what you do, where you do it, why you do it and who you do it to. It’s not here.
The rest of the site does not have any text on what the freakin’ show is about. The video on the home page does a good job of showing Gwen doing puppet shows in people’s homes. But I don’t get to hear much of the act. I can’t tell if it’s any good or not. The voices all sound the same. The kids are laughing but it would be nice to get a sense of the act. That aside, Google wants to see well-written prose about what you are doing, selling, being passionate about.
There is a page of success tips. Whaaaat? Yes, rule one: Get a super large company to promote your business on the SuperBowl. Rule two… gee I guess you don’t need a rule two.
People come to us daily with sites like this that they want FIXED.
THESE are the EXPERTS that are going to build YOUR site?
Have fun.
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he pulls the levers at YourWebDepartment.com.
If you have a small business and update your own website or blog, you may not be familiar with the best practices in terms of text formatting for the web. Here are a few simple principles you can use to make your business website look more professional.
1. Break big chunks into headings and paragraphs
Long stretches of text are hard to read and intimidating for most people, like in the example below.
Text needs some space to “breathe”. Add full carriage returns between paragraphs to separate them and create a visual hierarchy:
It'll be more legible, clearer and less boring. Also, remember that you can use up to 6 levels of headings. Use them consistently and your text will look much better.
2. Don’t underline text
Assuming that you’re using a website management system like Your Web Department, links will already be underlined for you (or not, depending on the design preferences of the website). So you don’t need to underline any of them by hand. And never, never underline things like headings. People will think they’re links.
3. Don’t manually “colourize” individual words
Sorry, but you really shouldn't manually change the colour of individual words. It won’t look good and will only confuse people. Manually colouring either the words themselves or their background should only be used in really rare occasions, if at all. Consistency is key.
4. Don’t capitalize big chunks of text
It’s a common misconception that text in all caps is easier to read. It definitely isn’t. Also, people associate all caps with “shouting”. Only short text -- like headings -- can be capitalized, never long stretches of copy.
5. Don’t center big chunks
We scan text from top to bottom and left to right. By centering several lines of text we actually make it much harder to read, because we need to “find” the first letter each time we move to the next line. It’s much easier to read when text is left-justified. On the other hand, having it also right-justified doesn’t help. Why? Because then all text looks like a single block, and it’s hard to find where you are within the copy.
6. Don’t bold them either!
I know you’d like to draw your audience’s attention as much as possible to your page. But bolding large amounts of text will not only make the page look bad; it’ll be very confusing. And again, harder to read. Use bold text sparingly.
7. Use larger font sizes for mobile
Your Web Department lets you create a mobile-optimized version of any website. You should take advantage of the ability it gives you to customize text specifically for mobile. You can tweak both the font size and the line spacing for regular text as well as each of the 6 levels of headings.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
My wife runs a wool store. We were talking in the car about social media. Of all retail offerings a wool store with its knitting addicts would be a perfect inbound marketing candidate. My wife’s conclusion about social media. “It’s a lazy way of marketing.”
“Say what?” I said. Are you kidding? You have to spend a lot of hours on social media. You have to do a ton of blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking. It’s is a lot of work.
Then she said, “No, work is going to seniors residences and helping them knit. Work is trade shows. Work is coming up with an angle for a photo shoot with a local newspaper. Work is making sure the display in the window is nice. Work is experimenting what should be at the front of the store. Work is arranging the knitting lessons, getting a teacher, promoting them. That’s work. Social media is for people who want it easy.”
I think she has a point. As small business owners we are both hardworking and lazy. We do the things we like doing. Work hard doing those things and we’re lazy at other things like selling or the accounting. We dream of finding that sales person who will understand the business and bring in tons of customers. It rarely happens, of course, and you are stuck doing sales and marketing. And doing it poorly, I might add. You don’t get it and everyone has an opinion and you have no idea what will work and you’re not willing to spend enough money on it anyway to make it work. So you don’t bother.
Of course, the worst is those of us who have actually spent money, often a ton of it with the wrong people and poof, cash gone, no results. It’s really tough and there doesn’t seem to be any easy answers. Social media seemed to fill that void. But we now know pretty well that social media is good for hanging out with your fans but lousy for generating business. The announcement of the death of outbound marketing is premature in much the same way as bricks and mortar stores were going to be supplanted by online back in 2000. Remember that?
Frankly, I think social media is a great business for people selling social media. Not so good for the person who is trying to market their services or wares. I honestly think you can ignore social media and it won’t do a thing for your business one way or another. What I advise our customers is that if it’s fun and you enjoy it, then do it. Make it an extension of your personality. But beware, the more you do it the better chance you have of putting your foot in your mouth, also.
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he pulls the levers at YourWebDepartment.com.
Short post today, just to promote our new promotional video, “There when you need us.”
The reaction has been overwhelming so far. It only took 7 years to get to this point. And I guess that’s my point to all of you reading this post. We are often too concerned with getting it right, which is important so you’re not wasting time and money, that we forget that the most important thing you can do is have a deadline to evaluate if something is in fact working.
If it is working, figure out how to make it better. If it’s not working, kill it. Too many companies are so darned happy to just have the damn marketing plan done and actually executed that they let the thing keep on going without further evaluation until it’s too late.
This campaign came from listening to our customers. They told us we were the ‘just right’ company. Not too small and not too big. We are the Momma Bear of webshops. We’re okay with that. And so we fashioned a video to encompass the image people have of us already. We thought that if that’s what attracted our existing customers to us then maybe the message will resonate out in the great mean world.
We’ll be evaluating the ‘There when you need us’ campaign on an ongoing basis. Thank you Google Analytics.
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he pulls the levers at YourWebDepartment.com.
The NEST was created by the guy who developed the iPod for Apple. From a functionality perspective, it’s just brilliant. I’ll get back to that later.
From a game changing perspective whodda thought about going after the thermostat market? We’re all used to using those ugly beige boxes with the LCD readouts that are sometimes hard to understand and impossible to program properly. Hmmm, beige boxes that are hard to use, remind you of anything?
The NEST is this stunning, round, glowing hockey puck that is cool to use and can be managed by your smartphone or tablet. Sure, there have been home automation-style thermostats that will also monitor the moisture of your potted plants, but again, taking a cue from our friends at Microsoft, they are insanely complicated and overly burdensome to use.
I read an article of someone who visited Bill Gates’ mansion. It was the realization of Gates’ automation dream of lighting and HVAC and home entertainment control, but as the writer wrote, only Bill could operate it.
I have a friend who can’t leave the house because his wife has no idea how to work any of the automated systems he installed. TVs would be on with no audio. She would sleep in the living room because she couldn’t turn off the embedded speakers in their bedroom, which were playing a constant loop of Frank Zappa songs.
Getting back to the NEST, and now its companion product the NEST Protect smoke alarm, it’s great in-the-box thinking. In-the-box? I had heard a person talk about how out-of-the-box thinking is the wrong term. Sorry, I can’t recall the speaker, it was while ago. He said that the box was the problem. We had to fix the box. Thinking outside of it was not the solution.
The NEST fixes the in-the-box problem of the beige programmable thermostat. Using it one immediately thinks, why didn’t someone figure this out earlier? Some of this comes from the notion that this is what we’ve been doing for so long that we don’t know how to do anything else. Some of it comes from engineers thinking they know what people want without asking them. A lot of it is driven by cost.
You can tell the NEST was built around smartphone technology. It draws its power from the 5 volts the furnace generously provides controllers. But our old controller needed batteries. Why did it need batteries? Because you could see the old-style resistors, capacitors and thyristors that looked like they came from a Soviet era submarine jutting from the back of it. No one was thinking, “You know, if we used smartphone tech we could get rid of the batteries.”
Using smartphone tech would have increased the cost of the basic device. That’s bad, right? There is so much cheap crap companies had to compete with. But what if people would happily pay more for the beige box if it wasn’t beige and wasn’t a box and was easy to use, pleasant to look at, wifi enabled and controllable by smart devices?
I’m sure these questions must have been asked by someone at the beige box makers but no one was listening or too afraid to ask.
Is your product a beige box? Have you been selling it for so long that you can’t think of how it might be better even at the risk of increasing its price and losing some sales? This beige box can also be a service.
Often it just requires a change in assumptions. People have expended a lot of ink on how RIM/Blackberry blew it: arrogance, bad management, etc. But I think they blew it because their overriding engineering consideration was battery life. Some of their devices would run for a month before recharging. This caused Blackberry to focus on a small, tight operating system and low powered processors. Apple, in contrast, thought that as long as someone can plugin overnight, who cares? This would have been heresy at RIM. Who would have had the guts to go to management with that idea?
By deciding that one-day of charge was enough, it freed Apple to design a device with more powerful, albeit power-draining, processors along with an operating system that took up hundreds of megabytes of solid-state memory instead of the paltry 35 meg in the Blackberry.
There is no denying the engineering genius of the Blackberry but by deciding that one-day of batter life was good enough, it gave birth to the practical notion of a real computer in your pocket.
What assumptions are you holding onto that probably need updating? The cheese industry was declining until some clever bloke (or blokess) thought of selling it shredded as a condiment. Now cheese consumption has skyrocketed.
I won’t go into the NEST Protect here. Maybe later. It’s 5 times more expensive than the beige smoke detector it replaces, which always goes off when you’re making toast, but it’s really cool.
The only thing that makes me unhappy is that Google has bought NEST. If I don’t join Google+ are they going to turn off my heat?
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he pulls the levers at YourWebDepartment.com.
More font options have been added to all types of navigation – Horizontal, Vertical, Top, Bottom. Those additional fonts are now also available for the banner text, which can be used on very simple websites where a banner image, typically the company logo, isn't available.
More font options have been added to all types of navigation – Horizontal, Vertical, Top, Bottom. Those additional fonts are now also available for the banner text, which can be used on very simple websites where a banner image, typically the company logo, isn't available.
In the example above, the regular font used in the content area is Callibri, whereas the main navigation is set to Bodoni.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
I don't know of another company that's like Your Web Department. Over the years I've learned that we're quite unique in several ways. What follows is a rambling dissertation about what we are and are not based on the kinds of individuals and companies we compete against. I hope this all makes sense.
We've built Your Web Department to be the obvious choice for a wide range of website needs. I think we are the 'Momma Bear' of web shops; not too small and not too large. We're just right.
We're bigger than the one person web programmer who who can get quickly overwhelmed with work.
We're there when many other one-person-shops fold, disappear or move on to other things.
We are completely dedicated to the building and launching of websites. We are not a design shop that does print and a bit of web because one person knows how to program a bit, or worse, a shop with no programmers subbing out to programmers who they have no idea what they are really doing. This is not to disparage designers. Most have no idea who to hook up with for websites. (May I suggest ourselves?)
We are developers with a design aesthetic. And we are also designers who can code.
We are developers who have decided on limits as to what we are willing to do. Many programmers will say yes to every request. We say no when it does not fit our business model. We know our limits. Offering great surface at a great price fits many business requirements.
We won't take on the huge jobs because we would not be able to service our customers.
Service is our product.
We will tell customers when social media makes no sense.
We have our own proprietary platform that we have been building since 2007. We also offer WordPress now. We have an insane amount of experience in the area of website best practices.
We have been the one source of continuity for many small to medium companies as their marketing people come and go. We are always there to train the new employee. Paul Chato President, YWD Inc.
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he pulls the levers at YourWebDepartment.com.
With the rollout of the iPhone 5s it seems that there are some excellent small businesses learnings embedded in it. While most small businesses have barely a few stamps left over for marketing, mega companies like Apple still can offer some useful lessons for us small fries. Case in point, what is it that your business does, or can do, that is really useful for your customers?
Okay, I can hear you yelling at me already, "My product/service/manufacturing process/book/videos/massage technique IS what is useful or I wouldn't be doing it."
Stop, I can hear you. I get it. The core thing you do is why you got into business in the first place, but are you innovating? Are you offering different ways of approaching or understanding the value of your offering? Are you using reductionism to find the one simple truth that will let people in on the truth of your business without a long-winded explanation?
There are a million unique things about Your Web Department that makes us different from everyone else, but frankly, no one cares. We build websites. At the beginning it was enough to promote that you could manage the website yourself. Everyone can do that now. It doesn't matter if we might do it better. Not good enough.
The smartphone war between Samsung and Apple has become nasty, but in a fun way. The Samsung ad of a couple of years ago making fun of people lined up to buy an iPhone when Samsung already had 'the next big thing' in stores was a fantastic bit of marketing. You had to give Sammy a tip of the hat for turning the tables on Apple's, I'm a PC campaign.
A lot of pundits have weighed in since the iPhone 5s was released. "Screen not big enough." "Finger print recognition, a gimmick." "No one needs a 64 bit processor in a phone." "Gold phone is silly."
Well, sales figures are in and the iPhone 5s is the hottest phone around. (Please, no Android is taking over screeds. Not the point of this post.) In Japan it's crushing the competition. It's even doing well in Korea, Sammy's home.
So let's survey the marketing terrain. Samsung established its Next Big Thing slogan. It's a great slogan as long as you can keep living up to it. Apple has the same problem with it's 'innovator' brand promise. Samsung has also managed the neat trick of pitching themselves as the underdog in this fight even though Apple does not also build oil tankers and weapons for killing people. Is Samsung going to work that into their Galaxy S4 ads? I don't think so.
Getting back to the discussion at hand, what are the differentiators that we are left with between the two products. Screen size, of course, is a valid one. A point for Sammy. Android versus iOS? Let's call that a draw. Then there's the phone bumping thing in the ad for sharing files. Sure looked cool. No one is using it. It turns out that it wasn't much of a game changer. This feature was in a couple of ads, so Sammy definitely thought it was essential.
The iPhone 5s has the much ridiculed (by some major pundits) finger print sensor. No more passwords. Touch the button and you're in. Well, it turns out that people LOVE it. They love the convenience of getting rid of an inconvenience; namely typing in a password over and over again.
And how about that 64 bit processor? Sure, no one understands the benefits of it, but it's twice as big as 32 bit, which is what all other phones use. A phone-bump is just a bump but faster is good for everything, right?
Stupid gold phone. How irrelevant. Apple can't make them fast enough, especially for the Asian markets.
All three were ridiculed by the press. Yet these are the three things driving iPhone 5s sales. Don't forget the original iPhone got a rough ride and the iPad was mercilessly mocked. Clearly Apple knows something we don't.
So there you have it. Is your big innovation just a phone-bump, or is it a finger print sensor? Be honest with yourself.
At Your Web Department we experimented with the notion of "It's free until you go live."
Didn't work.
Then we tried: "We'll build your website for free."
That worked.
The first had little value to the end user. The second had HUGE value. The end product of building a website is a website. The building part is not the product. That was the mistake we made with the first campaign. And maybe we were also a bit afraid of giving away too much. But then we crunched the numbers and figured out a way to build a website for free and make it work for both our customers and our business.
Is Samsung still touting the phone-bump as a defining capability? No. Because it was useless. Looked cool in ads, but useless. And while the initial industry reaction was to poo poo Apple's 64 bit system-on-a-chip processor I can bet you dollars to donuts that Samsung and every other chip manufacturer have nailed the shoes of their chip scientists to the floor and told them they won't be leaving the shop until they can get their own 64 bit chip out tomorrow.
Everyone will have a 64 bit phone out next year. Apple still hasn't bothered to incorporate the phone-bump (There is a 3rd party software Bump, which does that.). Apple did create something better, AirDrop, but you're not seeing Apple advertise it because its perceived value is limited. In other words few people get it. Gold phone, yum.
The lesson here is that whatever innovation you come up with, your customers really have to understand it easily, quickly and love it.
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he pulls the levers at YourWebDepartment.com.
My wife runs a wool store. We were talking in the car about social media. Of all retail offerings a wool store with its knitting addicts would be a perfect inbound marketing candidate. My wife’s conclusion about social media. “It’s a lazy way of marketing.” 
The NEST was created by the guy who developed the iPod for Apple. From a functionality perspective, it’s just brilliant. I’ll get back to that later.
