I have always had the belief that design was a utopian endeavor to be undertaken by the smartest people in the world to solve problems. That designers were by nature helping the world evolve toward better, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more useful artifacts and services. I believe in my soul that this is true, but I also know it’s not enough.

What also needs to happen is this: business leaders need to see how designers can be innovators for them. Designers can make businesses more efficient, make products more usable, help speed communications, minimize damage to the environment, foresee the need for innovation, and be the catalyst for it.

When you think about companies such as Apple you can’t help but see the contribution that design has made to their market value. The problem is that many companies can’t see how design will affect them. I’m not sure if this is because they fear innovation or just misunderstand what design is.

Design is not:

1. Only a noun. It’s also a verb. It’s a process and a way of thinking. It’s the act of recognizing a problem, researching to find the causes, conceptualizing solutions, communicating to create awareness of these solutions, and directing their implementation.

2. Just pretty pictures or fancy words or shiny materials. In short, it’s not the end product, it is the means to get to the end. (Design can lead to end products as varied as the companies they are made for. They could be pretty pictures or shiny new materials but they could just as easily be a new business plan, a product launch strategy, a client communication tool, or an information display.)

3. Necessarily the answer to all your problems. Many companies hire designers to help innovate but then fall short on manufacturing, shipping, delivery, customer service, and a host of other requirements of a successful business. They look at design as a way to best the competition but then forget about the most important factors in the process: consumer desire, consumer need, and consumer satisfaction.

Design is:

1. A strategic imperative. As more and more businesses see the value of a design-centered approach to problem solving and innovation, they will realize they need to do the same to stay competitive. Design can’t be an afterthought; it needs to be an integral part of the company.

2. A way to create true innovation. The research and development inherent in the design process are really the only ways to mitigate risk in the search for the new. There have been examples of success by accident, but these are rare and often short-lived. Success, in other words, is also something that can be designed.

3. A process to create greater efficiency in an organization. Sometimes making your products or services better is not the issue. The challenge lies in making them with greater profit baked into the process. Designers can look at an organization’s processes and design them to be more efficient, thus reducing overall costs.

4. A method for communicating. Like language, design is a way to communicate. Designers have the ability to streamline communications so that the impact of the messages is clear and concise.

Just before the holiday we received my oldest son’s current school progress report. (Thankfully he is a good student and always does well.) This reminded me of a useful tool I’ve found to help measure websites with regard to best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) and web marketing. The tool is the Website Grader.

This tool essentially scans your site for common HTML related to best SEO practices. It combines that data with other data from around the web, such as the web ranking in Google, the number of inbound links on your site, and where your site stands in relation to social media. It then generates an overall grade and a summary report.

Using a tool like this can help you gauge your site’s current rank and determine where you can most effectively put additional resources and time to improve the SEO of your site, and also to get more inbound traffic and converted leads.

Here are some screen shots of what you can expect if you use the tool to generate a report.

After entering your URL, you get a summary grade for your site:

The grader tracks on-page SEO:

It also tracks off-page SEO:

It determines whether you have a blog, and if you do, grades it:

It analyzes what’s happening on your site with regard to social media:

It helps you track information about your competitors’ sites:

Finally, the grader looks at the forms on your site that help convert visitors to leads:

When I was a creative director at HomePC magazine back in the early ’90s, there were lots of articles making predictions about the convergence of PCs, TV, and telecom. Along came WebTV in ’96, a big box with a wired keyboard that made your TV into a monitor for accessing the Internet. Microsoft bought WebTV, but it never took off; it was very clumsy, with a bad browser among other shortcomings (not surprising). Now here we are in 2010, and you can plug your ethernet cable or wi-fi into your TV. Presto, you’re on the Web—sort of.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the television/Internet space, but I can assure you that something’s very wrong with this picture. I’ve been doing a little research and I’ve looked closely at Web-enabled Sony, LG, and Panasonic TVs. These sets do not offer the big, open Internet we know and love; instead, they provide widgets and content channels chosen for us based on licensing deals between TV manufacturers and content providers such as Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Time Warner.

This may seem to be a huge improvement for consumers. We can get movies instantly from Netflix and YouTube and great content from some of the best media companies in the world. In return, the media companies expand their audience, which will help them weather the recession and diminish their advertising woes. This is great for Sony and Google. But it’s bad for us. As Dan Frommer from Business Insider puts it, “We want a TV with a real Web browser that offers full access to the entire Web via wi-fi/broadband—not some crippled gimmick.”

As a marketer and consumer I have serious concerns with the direction the new Web-enabled TV movement is taking. I’m reminded of the AOL days, with closed proprietary systems where content was pushed and interactivity was limited. The only true convergence happening here is the merging of services provided by ISPs, telecoms, and TV manufacturers.

My exploration into the world of Web-enabled TVs has renewed my appreciation for the current Web—the Web that is free, open, and innovative. We need to remind ourselves that we have a wonderful and fragile resource that needs to be fought for and defended. I hope we haven’t lost the battle when it comes to Web TV, and that it will evolve based on user demand and not on corporate enrichment. Content providers, telecoms, and manufacturers need to realize that with an open Web they’ll have their biggest audiences and happiest sponsors.

If you’re interested in the fight for the open Web and Internet neutrality, please visit these sites:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

http://www.freepress.net/

http://www.wearetheweb.org/

http://www.openinternetcoalition.com/

http://stopbigmedia.com/

Earlier this month I attended the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) conference in New York. The mission of SoDA is to advance the profession of digital marketing through education, discussions of best practices, and advocacy. The conference was billed as an “un”conference, which made the event conversational, collaborative—and at times a little too “un”structured. Still, it was a good experience.

We broke up into groups to discuss hot topics: Challenges of the Modern Agency, Metrics for Success, Engaging Social Media. I had hoped to gain insight into how large companies and agencies are managing their brands within their social-media initiatives. It’s clear that social media should be part of a brand’s marketing strategy, but how are companies controlling their brands’ voices? To my surprise, other attendees from top agencies and brands had similar questions—but few answers.

Some sound ideas popped up, such as the development of branding guidelines for social media, and the hiring of brand editors who can provide a checkpoint before tweets, blogs, and comments are published. These two methods can work fine for blogs themselves, but they can kill the spontaneity and immediacy of a tweet or a comment on a blog. Moreover, what do you do if your entire company is enthusiastic about speaking out and joining in on all the conversations?

If it’s your company’s policy to allow many social-media voices, it’s imperative to set up rules and guidelines and hold your employees accountable. Amber Naslund of the blog Altitude provides great examples of blogging policies from large corporations that can be used as an excellent starting point for developing your company’s guidelines.

If your social-media voice is monitored by a specifically designated department or by an outside agency, it’s easier to stay in control and keep your brand’s message inline. Your social-media captains should plan how they will uphold your brand’s promise in their conversations with customers, employees, and partners. They should meet weekly or monthly with the marketing or brand teams to ensure that all efforts are aligned with your brand’s strategy and corporate culture.

For a Twitter campaign for one of our clients, we create a monthly bag of “evergreen” tweets that are mixed in with spontaneous ones. That client is accustomed to having its copy and creative approved by its legal department and brand managers, which is not an ideal situation for quick tweets about what’s going on at the moment. To overcome this we develop 20 tweets that can be preapproved, and then mix those in with 10 spontaneous tweets that follow our defined social-media strategy. With this method and ongoing monitoring we’re able to lower the risks of tainting the brand, while still appearing spontaneous and continuing to build one-to-one relationships with the company’s customers.

This is new territory, and the best tactics have yet to be determined.  We encourage you to share your experiences and thoughts on how you manage brand continuity in social media for your company and your clients.

In a previous post, I talked about trimming the fat from content. But let’s face it: trimming the fat assumes you had good meat to start with. In a world where people have precious little time, if you’re thinking site redesign, content strategy has to be a main priority.

I’ve been working with a client recently on a large site redesign. Like many of my other site-redesign projects, this one was long overdue. Much of the content was outdated. It had been managed by a host of individuals, all from different countries, who each had their own way of doing things. The jargon was so product- and business-specific (filled with acronyms and marketing brand names) that it was hard for anyone outside the company to understand. Images (yes, images are content too) were old and poorly optimized, and they incorporated a myriad of photo styles, none of which went together. The client was going to implement a new content management system, which is very robust but needs a lot of management on the development side to institute roles and define content types. What was needed was a true content strategist.

A content strategist works with a client to understand what content will end up on a site, how that content will be organized, what processes will be in place to manage content of different types, and how various types of content relate to one another. Content strategists are part information architects and part copywriters, with a dash of user advocate thrown in. They create rules-based approaches for refining existing content, enhance search optimization of content through metatags and keywords, and develop new content.

While working with an information architect (IA) is necessary in nearly all web and application design projects, for large brochure and information-rich sites a content strategist on the team is also invaluable.

The benefits of working with a content strategist:

• Content strategists are more focused on the specific content of the site and not just the organization of that content as it relates to the overall architecture, as an IA would be.
• A content strategist can develop a matrix that defines content types and sets up relevance relationships to shape how content is linked throughout the site.
• Content strategists can set up keyword, data tag, and metatag information for content elements and pages.
• Content strategists can set up rules for content, such as whether a page title also becomes the menu title to navigate to that page, or whether images should have captions. These details are often too granular for an IA to be involved with.
• A content strategist can define data elements for individual page templates and help the IA structure the priority for those elements. This can be a way to organize existing content, or to help understand what important content elements might be missing.
• Content strategists can help define roles for those who edit content. In complex companies, multiple levels of access and workflow processes might be needed. This “behind the scenes” look into content creation is something information architects don’t often perform.

I recently gave a lecture to the advanced web design class at Farmingdale College. When I met up with professor Jack Harris, he informed me that the kids, mostly juniors and seniors,  saw Loewy Design’s page in the Flash/Dreamweaver Genius Guide, and they were looking forward to meeting with me. A bit embarrassed and very flattered, I asked Jack what book was he talking about and where could I get one.

I later found out that the book is published by Imagine Publishing and promises to be the essential guide to dynamic design and development. We were recognized for our website’s approach to animation and design using purely CSS and Javascript, a technological accomplishment but not exactly what I wanted to talk about in my little seminar. My talk was about the real world lessons that you can’t get from a textbook. I wanted to focus on the process of solving business and branding problems with the online medium.

I tried to push their tech questions aside but they kept coming. I eventually got my point across that the technology we’re using today will be completely different when the students immerse themselves in the job market. They’ll need to educate themselves on the latest versions of Flash and Dreamweaver and keep up with always evolving programming languages throughout their careers.

The most valuable information I could share with them was to describe our thought processes, not only about making a website look great but about creating one that will actually help your clients solve their business challenges. I gave them our secret sauce on how we deliver positive results to our clients and improve their bottom lines.  As a take-away, I provided them, and now you, with a list of reference tools organized by each phase of our process.

By no means is this the complete list, since it too is always evolving, but it could serve as a nice resource and good starting point for students, clients and peers.

The history of branding goes back nearly 4,000 years; it was originally conceived to promote ownership. Branding today represents something far more complicated and even elusive for many companies. Today the concept of branding has much more to do with engagement than with ownership. And the act of branding has less to do with a product or service and more to do with the way a company engages an audience with that product or service.

Take a positive experience you’ve had with a brand. What about the experience made it enjoyable? Everything about that experience was an example of branding, from purchasing it to opening up the package (assuming it was a product) to using it for the first time and every time since. If you love that product then the company is doing a good job of branding.

Now think about how this translates online. Take, for example, large media sites like Google or Yahoo. For many people these destination sites have become their default homepage. It is because they are engaging with their users over and over again. In some cases a site you like may have only been a temporary stop for you, or as in the case of Google one you return to often. The point is that if you remember them and go back they are also doing a good job of branding.

If you’re looking for ways your company can do a better job of branding online, here are some suggestions:

1. Interact with your own site often.
It doesn’t matter if you have a social media, product brochure, news, or any other kind of site. You should know it backwards and forwards and should be able to tell what’s good about it and what’s not. You should consider this from both your and the typical user’s perspective. Think about where your site is presenting compelling information, where it’s asking users if they want to connect, and how those connections are nurtured and maintained. Make a list of things you’re doing well. Note where things can improve and what should get tossed altogether.

2. Make sure that the design and usability of your site match the intended position you want your brand to have.
Do you have a fashion product, a toy, a set of corporate services you’re selling? How is the design of your site reflecting that? Who are the audiences that come to your site? Are they the audiences you are trying to cultivate? Are you engaging with them in ways that are most comfortable for them? A brand audit can help you identify how users are connecting with your brand, and what their perceptions are.

3. Offer ways for your users to connect with you.
These can be in the form of a user’s forum, or a Twitter or Facebook page. The point of these is to be engaged. Talk to your customers and allow them to talk to each other. For many businesses this sounds like a dangerous proposition but more often than not, repeat business and referrals are the best ways to build brand loyalty. What’s also good about this is you can help frame the conversation and if something negative does come out of this interaction you can react to it before it snowballs out of control.

4. Talk to a professional.
Branding is complicated. In many cases it requires nuances that only a professional who’s been doing it for a while can provide. Understanding where your brand is today, how it got there, and where it’s headed is often very difficult for someone on the inside and too close to that brand. It often takes an outside perspective to get a full understanding and a new brand strategy.

Recently a client asked us for our opinion on a Digimag (or whatever-you-call-it) service called Ceros. I’ve seen this technology grow in popularity over the years, and I have to admit Ceros has taken it to a higher plane. Their product and experience is rich with video, animation and interactivity – but so what.

I can see how print publishers would really love for this page-flipping technology to take off. Their print advertising windows are closing quickly, yet their online advertising windows are not opening fast enough. With Digimags, they are offering an online add-on, attempting to close the deal with the advertiser on that expensive print inside cover or center spread.  In my opinion, this is just another way of putting off the inevitable transition from print to true online publishing – publishing that is centered around knowledge exchange, content that takes place on a variety of platforms and advertising programs based on audience relevance and brand engagement.

Furthermore, is there really a mass audience for Digimags? Nxtbook Media, another digital magazine service, has an interesting real-time map illustrating how often Digimags are read across the globe.  While this is a cool use of Google’s API, showing a reader or two per second – this map is an insult to a publisher’s intelligence.  According to their site, 1.3 million people read a Digimag per month.  That sounds like a lot – but it pales in comparison to the number of people who read online magazines every day.

Digimags are not the panacea for publishers’ woes.  They sacrifice the standards and best practices of web publishing. The content has poor search visibility; there is no room for user-generated content; you need to click and enlarge to read; and you have to drag your electronic paper around to navigate.  Perhaps their future is better suited to a different device, such as the Kindle, as stated in this article.

Finally, producing an issue of a Digimag can cost as much as $100 per page.  Why not put that towards building a sustainable online magazine for your audience and your advertisers?

Everyone knows the economy is bad. I was talking to a friend in the home construction business the other day. His business has dropped nearly 60 percent, and he’s doing better than most in his field. He thinks that a tide of rising inflation over the next six to twelve months will make the economic situation even worse. We’ve all been told that we have to weather the storm. I see it a little differently. I’m a surfer. When a storm comes, I don’t just weather it, I relish it.

This past weekend we saw one of the biggest swells to hit the Northeast in at least half a decade. Hurricane Bill produced waves that averaged 15 feet or more. Everyone was told to stay away from the beaches. But the surfers, those who were brave enough, flocked to them. They saw opportunity and challenge when others saw only adversity. I see the economic storm in the same way. These challenging times require that we work harder, not hide under cover and wait for the storm to pass.

This is exactly the time to be thinking about your online strategy. Connecting with your customers online allows you to be more targeted and ROI-centric, and to do more with less. Email campaigns, building networks though social media, and targeted online ad campaigns are all relatively inexpensive ways to stay connected to your customers. What’s especially good about these media is that they can readily be altered to adjust to changing times. Print campaigns can’t do that, and they’re not as targeted.

And the only thing worse than losing customers when times get tough is losing them for good because someone else took advantage of an opportunity while you sat on your bum.

If you’re running a small business, at some point you probably thought: “there’s got to be a better way.”  As small businesses become larger ones, systems and processes tend to get more complex.  Yet sometimes the best solutions have fewer bells and whistles but fit better with the culture and operation of the company.

Case in point:

Years ago, as an independent contractor in a home office, things were relatively simple. I did it my way, flying by the seat of my pants with my own systems and processes, which mostly meant a good memory and lots of post-its. Thankfully, the business has grown and I’m now managing seven people, freelancers, a full office, accounting systems, networks, and an upcoming office expansion. With growth comes complexity, so my staff and I are constantly evaluating tools to make our lives easier and our work better.

What we’ve found is that the newest and most elaborate products are not always the best for us.  Our company and culture is unique, so this year’s “Top 10 Solutions” may not necessarily work for us.   The tools and technologies that we use to run our business have to match our group’s abilities and their willingness to embrace them.

Our time-keeping software, for example, is a simple application that has become our most important tool.  While my staff finds it a pain to account for every minute of their time, they appreciate that the system helps us estimate costs and profitability (right guys ).  Without these metrics, we would be unable to measure our success.

We use a system called TimeFox.  As a group we went through demos, free trials and testing before we committed to it. We listed our needs and sought a system that was easy to use and quick to put in place, bypassing software that included more features but was more cumbersome to use.

Another tool that needs careful evaluation is our project management software because it is used by clients who have different levels of expertise. Basecamp is a tool we often use if clients are web savvy and detailed oriented. For clients who need a simpler solution we’ll use Backpack, which is an easy to use intranet storing and sharing information with a virtual team.

Now that we are moving to a larger office, we are researching phone systems.  I think we’re close but I’ll let you know (any good ideas out there?). One thing is already clear: we’ll be guided by our experiences and won’t feel compelled to acquire a system with a lot of extraneous features that aren’t right for us.