My Twitter use has a very high value to me and if fact it even has a number.  I’ve posted in the past on the benefits Twitter showed me right form the start, how it can drive blog traffic and a big attempt to amount 100 reasons for a business to Twitter (still short, add one!).

My Twitter ROI as of today is:  $13.50 per Tweet

As of the tweet I’ll put out to announce this blog post, I’ll have closed just over $25,200 in business only and directly because of Twitter and my 1,870 updates. That is just plain cool.  Even better is I have many more projects being quoted, referrals being given and connections being made.  Strictly from Twitter.

I’ve received this business from Twitter in a few routes:

• Industry peers. Thanks to Twitter I have connected with numerous other talented web designers and developers that have passed me leads.  Twitter allowed us to connect, view links to work we’ve put out and made them think of Five when there was a project or lead that didn’t fit them.  This has been both humbling and exciting as a some very talented people themselves think enough of our services to recommend us.
• Marketing proffesionals. I’ve connected with internal marketing talent from various companies locally and nationally that have put me on to RFPs, projects and other needs that I would have never known about without a connection via Twitter.
• Twitter friends. It might be baseball related, small business related, music related or another interest I have put out there, but I have connections that are non-web design related.  The replies and conversation might be about about the Minnesota Twins offense, but then a direct message comes out of nowhere with a contact person at a company that needs web help.

Do you have a Twitter ROI or a Value Per Tweet (VPT)?  Share it if you can.  I’m constantly amazed at the value I get from Twitter in news, connections, knowledge, ideas and yes … even sales.  I’m looking to add to my Twitter ROI.

An Improved Website Across The Board
Rosen Properties had been using a real estate website solution for some time that lacked in many areas.  While it did provide Rosen a presence online it didn’t have enough value to bring in new customers.  Five’s web design and Internet marketing skills went to work on:

• Web redesign to improve consumer trust and 1st impression
• Improve navigation and usability
• Improve search engine optimization and ongoing SEO
• Easy to update website powered by the SMC
• Added a blog to improve SEO and communication
• Stronger tools to market homes for sale, rent and rent to own
• Web analytics and goal tracking

The end result is a well rounded web design and web platform that Rosen can continue to build upon.  In this market where people need foreclosure assistance, credit re-building, rent to own options and a faster way to sell a home, Rosen Properties brings a ton of options.

Make sure you check out the new website:  www.RosenProp.com

If you are considering launching an e-commerce website or about to redesign your website, keep these e-commerce web design tips handy.

1.  Keep It Simple
You have a simple goal and that’s to sell.  Make sure your navigation is easy to use and make multiple paths to your “add to cart” pages.  Simple and redundant navigation is the best thing any website can do.  We try to create as many, easy to use funnels to get to product info and purchase.  These navigation items should be your main navigation bar, internal links in content, bread crumb navigation, a product search and site map at minimum. Yes, all of those are basics to a good site.

2. Seeing Is Believing
Most e-commerce purchases are visual.  If you are selling any product that a user needs to have visual trust in, do what you can to have the best photos or graphics of that product.  Many sites loose customers because of poor photos of their product for sale. Some of the things you can do to stand out and ear trust are have photos with enlarge options, alternate shots of different angles and zoomed in photos of product detail elements.  Don’t let your photos kill the sale, let them win it.

3. Answer The Details
Organizing  and displaying the details of your product are a must.  Having “answers” on your product detail pages that clarify measurements, specifications, materials, uses, options and more will get you more sales.  When users can’t find that one last detail to make a purchase, they’ll jump to find another site that answers their need.

These 3 e-commerce web design tips are just the start to a succesful website selling online.  If you can be the best resource by having an easy to use website, with better product photos and endless details … you’ll find yourself with the sales you desire.

A shift is taking place on the web for small business.  Websites and web content are moving to reality, far away from marketing hype.  If a company can change their approach and find ways to bring valuable content to users, then they can improve traffic and ultimately leads.

A Clear View, Show What You Can Do
A buzz word in the web design world is transparency.  To me, this simply applies to the ability to show potential customers and current clients just what you can do for them.  Instead of pitching them that you are “the best, the leader, number one” why not drill into exactly how you can help them?

Example 1: A CPA Firm could use their content to outline their menu of accounting services … and their content might read the very same as 10,000 other CPA websites in their industry.  If they shift their approach, they could provide a summary of how they helped a small business find financial efficiency, position it for growth and help it succeed.

They could show their target market exactly what they ARE doing and make it easy for that user to understand the type of benefits they bring with their service.  Their services mix to create success for a client, instead of a users trying to guess what they need off the standard services list.

Example 2: A Restaurant can show their menu items and a burger is a burger is a burger in print version.  But if you take a short video clip of making your gourmet or special burger, post a series of photos and customer comments on it … you have something to bring hungry stomachs in.

In taking the approach to show the reality of your ingredients, the process and the visual WOW factor, you have created a distinct difference from your competitors websites.

Those are just two quick examples of how taking a better approach to web content and involving ideas, media and real web content can have an impact.  EVERY business out there can find these valuable ways to better illustrate how they can benefit, help and serve their clients and customers.

Build you website visitor a clearer picture on your offering, expertise and process and you will become a clear choice as the one to buy from.

Bringing Social Interaction To The Duck Blind
The guys behind The Hunting Authority came to us with the goal of being the best website an avid hunter and outdoors person could find.  Great design, great content, great features and most of all, a voice for the hunter.

We jumped at the challenge to build user profiles so that visitors to the site could create their own profile and interact with each other.

Here are some of the social features we built into the website:

• Account creation with screen name
• Ability to add/edit a bio
• Ability to designate hunting interests, areas and the ability to search other members with similar interests
• Status area to announce what you’re up to
• Bulletin board to leave comments on other members profiles
• Photo gallery to add your own hunting photos
• Ability to embed YouTube or other 3rd party video players
• Ability to write your own blog articles and comment/respond
• Ability to rate and review guides, outfitters and gear
• Ability to show your favorite web links

We packed a ton of great interaction and community tools into the initial launch of the website and already have more features slated as the website takes off.  We built out all of these features on our content management platform.

Hunting Blog
The site features a hunting blog that already is packed with great hunting info, wild game recipes, dog training tips and more.

Setting up a custom blog design isn’t a big deal for us, but the fact we integrated the profile account creation and log-in with the blog was pretty great.  This made the user profile creation just a single log-in for the site and simplified their ability to comment on blog articles.  It’s nice to have your CMS and WordPress play together so nicely, for everyone’s benefits.

Guides & Gear: Give Your Review
Once registered, the website users have the ability to add, rate and review outfitters, hunting guides and the hunting gear they use to hunt with. Users can search for hunting guides and outfitters by searching states or Canadian provinces and then view detailed information.

Working Footer
Lately we have voiced our thoughts on website footers being important.  On this website we put both first, second and even some deeper levels of links and pages into the footer.  You’ll see more of this as we feel its a great usability feature.

Success In The Crosshairs
As you can see, this web design project was no small creation.  The website has many more features than what we touched on here.  If you are a hunter, we encourage you to check out TheHuntingAuthority.com and create a profile. We enjoyed the challenge of the project and look forward to continuing to build out more great features.

We can vouch that these guys are dedicated to having the best hunting website on the Interweb.  Great content, great features and giving those with the passion and knowledge a voice; that’s what The Hunting Authority is about.

The line-up of speakers featured some great Internet minds.  Kicking off Friday morning was Jason Fried of 37signals.

Jason stressed getting away from failure (it’s not cool), the value in eliminating interruption, focusing on the  day at hand and not a 2 year or 5 year plan, putting the most effort into the things that don’t change in your business (service, process), and the value of your by-product.  I had a ton of interest in finding the by-product of your business, not just the specific service you offer, but the knowledge in the process of it.  This can translate into books, speaking events and more.

Another speaker I really enjoyed was Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless Tees.  His time on stage focuses on transparency and accessibility.  He outlined how these things contribute to success of his company.  Jeffrey hit upon the message of spending time with your community of customers/users and listening to them, reacting to them and acting on the right moves.

Gary Vaynerchuk closed out the presentations with his “loud” presentation (loud in a good way).  His passion for getting people to hustle, work hard, build a brand and deliver your expertise in any way possible is a great message.  Gary definitely let his feelings be known on how the Internet will squash everything … newspapers, TV and possibly high education. Gary also did some great Q & A with the crowd as well.

Other attendees recapped the conference as well, so check out Shane Adam’s blog, Read Write Web and Silicon Florist.  Check out Managing The Edge, it has a decent video segment of interviews from the conference as well.

It was a well put together conference, crazy successful for a first time conference.  I was encouraged by the fact I hold some of the same value in transparency and making things happen.  I also picked up some great ideas on other theories and ideas to strengthen the Five brand and business of web design.

In such an evolving industry it’s great to listen to great Internet minds and also interact with others fighting the good fight daily.  Overall, I give Big Omaha an A- and look forward to next year.

You are missing out if you’re not in Omaha. I made the voyage down from Minneapolis to check it all out. I’m a big fan of people taking ideas and working them to reality like Jeff and Dusty did.  That’s real inspiration to me.

Local web talent What Cheer and marketing mix Secret Penguin hosted an open house that got the evening started.  Things shifted around the corner at 7:30pm to Slowdown, where Gary Vaynerchuk got things up another level by doing his Wine Library TV episode LIVE to a packed house.  Gary will be presenting Friday at Big Omaha as well.

Here are a few photos and video to give you a taste of the night.

Gary Vaynerchuk doing his Wine Library show LIVE at Big Omaha

Big Omaha Conference Kick-off With Gary Vaynerchuk from Five Technology on Vimeo.

Big Omaha co-creator Jeff Slobotski at the kick-off event with me

Badges?  You better believe Big Omaha has some stinkin’ badges!

It was a great night to catch up with some great web design and marketing minds I have connected with in person and online. Drinks and dialogue with Eric Downs, Steve Gordon Jr., Jeff Slobotski,  Robert Murphy, Michael Kelley, Brad Wisler, Chris Burns, Nathan T. Wright and a slew of others.

Things get even better tomorrow with a line-up of great speakers.  I’m pretty excited to hear from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.

If you’re not here in Omaha, you can tune it to the chatter  http://twitter.bigomaha.com.  Holler at me tomorrow if you are here and I’ll be recapping Friday and the whole weekend next week.

During the last decade, millions of websites were released year after year.  In a great trend for all involved, user experience became the dominant focus. Social media is now skyrocketing in nearly every sector for every audience. Websites are now being used on mobile phones and devices. Desktop applications are interacting with websites. Businesses are integrating a large amount of their operations into web-based platforms.

The trend in web design during the last decade resembles that of the 1960s and 70s in the advertising industry, often referred to as “The Golden Age of Advertising”. A time when great, original ideas were continuously rolling off the tables at agencies, and new technologies had enabled conceptual wizards to push the envelope with out-of-the-box ideas. Like then, we have had agencies and individuals all over the world pushing the envelope for the last decade to make the internet the best it can be.

Has anyone considered we may be in the golden age of web design? Some observations I have on this are below:

• Larger companies are re-investing in great design and technology regularly to retain and attract users. Smaller companies are biting off as much website as they can chew when facing overhauls and brand updates. Most companies are representing a growing interest in SEO, analytics, social media, marketing strategies and usability.
• Advancement of web application technologies – Web 2.0 methodology and technologies have swept the premium web marketplace and is here to stay.
• A threshold in interactive web design. While interactive & animation technologies continue heavy development, the majority of websites stay relatively limited with those features – particularly utilizing Adobe Flash, embedded video and JavaScript frameworks lightly.
• There has been an unprecedented drop in the releases of base website languages. From 1995 to 2001 there were 6 official version releases of HTML in 5 1/2 years. From 1996 to 1998 two versions of CSS were released. Now we stand around 10 years later with the next generations of each still pending – which are XHTML 2.0,  CSS 3, and XHTML/HTML 5.0.

Summing it all up:
Utilizing the tools we have today, web designers and developers have not required major advancements in technology to pump out robust, user-oriented, interactive websites. As much as anything, the ideas and approach has evolved.

The marketplace has also shifted to deliver stronger websites to smaller businesses at lower costs. In addition many businesses are going green and utilizing web technologies as cost-efficient marketing channels. Wikipedia is now the local library for many average citizens; Facebook, the schoolyard; Google, the everything.

We know it will continue to get better from here, but what I’m getting at is where we may be on the web technology curve.

Sounds like the golden age of web design to me.

But you, you’re not big.   You’re a small business and while you’re interested in tools and strategies to grow your business, you don’t know how to evaluate the Twitter buzz.  It looks like a time waster, meaningless chatter and something that falls to #524 of what you have to accomplish in your day.

You might want to reconsider. I could list out my 100 reasons a small business should get involved with Twitter, but I think having 100 different voices (comments) would be better.

So I’m putting it out to the Twitter community in the attempt to gather a total of 100 reasons or more to be on Twitter as a small business. Give me yours, leave your Twitter ID too (I’ll link it for you), and lets help those on the fence decide and all of us learn a new thing or two on the benefits of Twitter.

OutWest had been on the Site Management Console web platform for over 5 years, but the growth of their business and interest in new web features brought them to explore a web redesign.  In meeting with OutWest’s owners and staff, we learned the new additions of horses for sale to their offering and their desire to further interact and push event information to their audience.

With the new web design we pushed more of the romantic western feel.  Earth tones, torn edges and leather textures were used to create a warm, inviting and western feel for the interface.

The website project entailed:

• Full interface web redesign
• New features for events, horses for sale
• OutWest Blog & RSS Feed
  
• Email marketing integration
• Enhanced on-page SEO

The client has already let us know their excitement with the site launch.  We think it’s always great to see our long term clients become even longer term.  No matter the need for a new design, new features or additions, the SMC can scale and adapt with them.

We’re looking forward to the great things OutWest will do with the new website.  Check it out at OutwestArena.com and give it a big “Yee-Haw!” for yourself.