I never really started following Apple and it’s leader until the first iPhone started making its initial buzz throughout the industry, but since that time I’ve keep a keen eye on them. One of the things that strikes me most impressive about Steve is that the more I follow him and the more I go back a read his old articles or interview, the more I like him and come to understand what a true genius he is.

Think about that for a minute. How many heroes in your life, whether they be politicians, sports stars, celebrities or CEOs, do you actually like more throughout the passage of time and when going deeper into their life and beliefs? So often we uncover areas where we disagree or they do something that tarnishes our opinion of them. Not so with Steve. The more there is to read about him and how he influenced others lives, the more I come to respect the man.

One of the more profound things he said that I try to keep in my daily life was about how he chooses to spend his time. He mentioned that each morning he will look in the mirror and ask himself if he is doing today exactly what he wants to be doing. If he goes few days in a row without being able to answer yes to that question, he stops what he was doing and starts again on what he wants to do. Although Steve Jobs’ time on earth was much too short, there is no denying that with that philosophy he accomplished more in 56 years than most would with 200.

Consumers lost their biggest advocate yesterday. And while he was still such a visionary that his touch on emerging technologies will still be felt for a few years, I’m very sad to see what a Steve Jobless world is going to be like a decade from now. How does the world find a replacement for someone who is one is six billion?

If you’ve never taken the time to look back on Steve Jobs life, there is no better time then to take the time a do so now.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the fourth post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

Identifying Target Users for My Site

Now just think about the various types of people who should land on your website. Since my website is about Gwinnett County here is what I came up with:

My Target Users basically fell into one of two main groups, those who live in Gwinnett and those that don’t live within Gwinnett. Then I broke down the types of people from both of the groups that would visit.

After that quick bout of note taking I then expanded it a bit under each user type and did a brief profile of them:

Thoughts About Identifying Target Users

To identify your websites target users, you should look at what you have envisioned so far and ask two questions, “Who does this appeal to as it is right now?” and “Who do I want to visit my site?”. Hopefully both questions have most of the same people in it. If not, you might need to go back a few steps and start to change a few things. Be sure to bounce your questions off your monetization strategies as well. If you plan to have local business buy advertising you not only need to make sure you are attracting the same people that are likely to click on ads to local businesses, but also you have to attract local business owners to go to your site and convince them to purchase an ad spot.

Something I did when I was in this stage was to simply look at the people around me and profile them. Is the Mom carting around four kids going do find something they like on my site? Do I even care if she does or doesn’t? Is the business man in the three-piece suit going to find anything of interest on my site? Do I need people like him visiting to make my site a success?

For my county guide website, upon reflecting on these notes I realize a couple of groups I should have included so that I could better target them – the social network leaders and local politicians. I need to find some way to make my site more appealing to those in my county who have the most twitter and facebook followers to make it more likely that they will spread my site content out to their networks. Similar the benefit gained from the socially connected types ability to spread my site’s content virtually, local politicians or board seat members can spread my site via their physical networks I’ll make them down as being identified here and go on into profiling them further in my next post about Profiling Target Users for Building a Website.

Brainstorming isn’t restricted to a hard ending point like some of the other steps in the website design process is. Take a few days to write down ideas, then move onto the next step, but don’t stop brainstorming. As you advance close to a finished product new ideas will enter your head. Never stop brainstorming, but learn where to draw the line when it comes to building. Not every good idea needs to make the initial release. For my personally type, this is where I struggle the most. I want to put it all in and not show it to anyone until it is completely finished and perfect. To quote one of my new favorite quotes that I read in the Huffington Complete Post Guide to Blogging,

Perfect is the enemy of done.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the third post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

Brainstorming for My Site

Here are a few things I brainstormed:

• Big Content Items
• Balancing the content to appeal to multiple visitor types
• Community – Obviously important for a local website, but how and where do I want my community to grow.

And here are some of the solutions I came up with from my brainstorming:

Big Content Items

This is just a quick list of content that I want on the site. Most of the stuff are main navigation tab type things like, Info, News, Events, etc. but some are more subdomain type things like a job board and a forum. The content of the site gets further vetted in the Information Architecture and Content Strategy phase of website development, but it is important to get them down now to get the creative juices flowing in the right direction.

One big decision I made concerning my site content was that I didn’t want to be considered a news website. Trying to keep up with all the news that happens even on just the county level would have been more than I would have been able to manage and still have time to grow the site in other areas. Being considered as a news website might also have detracted from the deeper content that I want people to know my site for as well. The most important reason why I didn’t want to have so much news was that news isn’t something I personally wanted to write about. Why would I build something in my spare time that required me to something I didn’t want to do? So I came to the conclusion that I was only going to publish news stories if it were something that might be useful for more than two weeks. So things like ‘crash on I-85′ and ‘Schools closed today due to weather’ wouldn’t be published on the site, but things like ‘New County Commissioner’ would be.

Balancing Site for Visitors

I thought about the word ‘balance’ and how I didn’t want my site to sway too heavily towards a certain visitor type. While a local community website will obvious mainly appeal to people living in the local area, I also wanted to be sure to provide content for people who weren’t local residents. For people living within the community, I wanted to balance the content between the casual browsing types and local business owners types. As I get around to the wireframing stage you’ll see this concept take more effect and *spoiler alert* I focused too much on this and had to make some corrective action to design something that made more sense.

Community

Another thing I really put some thought into was the ‘community’ aspect I wanted to build. Community is going to be a large part of this site’s success, but I had to play around with different ideas of how I wanted to build my community and where I wanted my community to reside on the web. Did I want people contributing to my site via comments, reviews or article uploading? Do I want people coming to my domain to chat or do I leverage existing social networks?

I decided that I wanted to keep all of the community side of my website on the social networks like Twitter and Facebook for a few reasons. As I mentioned in the Personal Goals article, I believe it’s important that even if your website isn’t a success financially you should still be able to feel like you accomplished something because you’ve learned something new. I wanted to really learn how to use Twitter and Facebook to craft a community. I’ve been using both networks for years, but they were just for abstract thoughts and ideas. Never have I had any real focus or desires to build up my networks and attract people to follow me.

I also decided that I didn’t want to have any user contributed content on my site such as comments or reviews. I decided this because I wanted to keep my focus on community relegated to the social networks and because I wanted my site to be a living portfolio of my work. I like knowing that I personally wrote, or supervised the writing, for all the content on my site. Plus, the blogosphere commenting scheme has really lost its savor. This personal blog has a comment ratio of 1:10 of comments from real people vs. a robot trying to get a link with some generic ‘I think the article content you writed(sic) is really great’ comment. I’m better off leveraging the tools designed to build communities.

Takeaway Thoughts about Brainstorming a Website

Keep your notebook handy and come up with new ideas everywhere you go. Inspiration can come from anywhere and there is no bad idea at this stage. Write it down and continue to mull it over for the next few days. You don’t need a ‘top 10 best ways to brainstorm’ post to show you how to get started, just start asking yourself questions about your website project and write down the question. When you’ve felt that you’ve asked enough questioned and determined enough answers, you should begin to see your website in your mind’s eye. It might not have a color scheme or the copy typography, but you can still see it coming together.

Now you’re ready to move on to identifying you target audience.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the third post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

Personal Goals for my Site

My goals fall into three broad categories.

One, I want to learn and to improve as a WordPress developer and designer. I want to get more comfortable editing template files and going past just using WordPress for blogging purposes. That means adding and using custom post types and custom taxonomies to make it more of a generic CMS. As a designer I want be able to use this site as a living portfolio. I want to take the time to keep iterating on a design to make it continually better and better. Also, I wanted to work more on a formalized design process, which is what this series of post is all about.

Second, I wanted to learn how to ‘maintain’ as site. It’s all good and well to sell a design as being SEO friendly, but it’s another thing when your bottom line and true success comes from being able to produce top SERP rankings. SEO is such a broad field that often gets a bad rap from being so full of shysters. Monetization is also a vital part of maintaining a website. Testing and tracking and learning how to make a profit is what keeps the website going. Another aspect of maintaining a site is marketing, in my case social media marketing. This kind of ties into my third personal goal as well.

Third, I wanted to get more comfortable with a community. I’m not exactly and introvert, but definitely not an extrovert either. This is one area where I’m really going to have to push myself to get better at. I just want to learn how to better talk with strangers. To meet people from the community, tell them what I’m working on and see if I can help. For example, I know a good article for my site would be to feature a vendor at one of our several Farmer’s Market each week, but it is something I keep putting off. There are other reasons for wanting to build a community other than just to become less introverted. Being able to prove that you’ve fostered an online community is a great way to prove to someone who I’m trying to do social media consulting for that I know what I’m talking about. A community will also be very beneficial to monetizing the website.

Take Away Thoughts about Setting Personal Goals

Like the site goals, personal goals also should be written and reviewed on occasion. They should do things that ‘stretch‘ you beyond what you are comfortable with.

Don’t be afraid to list money-making as a personal goal. While it might not seem as noble to say you want to make money from your site, for a majority of us that is exactly why we are doing it. Sure there are other reasons why you are building ‘this’ particular site, and money might not (and really shouldn’t) be your main reason for building the site. But being able to generate money is a really good indicator of success. Would you rather have a site getting 10,000 unique visitors a month with $0 in monthly revenue or 100 uniques with $10,000 revenue? What site is more successful? What site is likely to stick around longer?

Your goals should make you a better coder/designer/marketer and all-around a better human. Should the site be a failure of epic proportions, you should walk away being just a little better than when you started.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the second post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

Site Goals for My Website

Most of my goals are more content related or not really quantifiable. I’m not sure if this is really a bad or not. I didn’t set any goals for things like monthly unique visitors or such because I really had no idea what a good goal for that would be. There weren’t any real competitors in my space to try to set traffic goals like that. My goals really are more like ambitions; things I’m striving for; the general direction I want my site to go.

Upon going over these again, and since the site has been live for over a month now, I really should add some more quantifiable goals to obtain. I need to add goals for things that I can control like having a page for every park in the county on my site and for things that I can’t necessarily control like having the major of a city tweet about an article on my site.

Take Away Thoughts about Setting Site Goals

Setting goals can be a tricky thing. You don’t want to set the bar to low so that achieving it is effortless, but you also don’t want to set the bar so high that it cannot feasible be achieved. I think an important attribute to add to your goals is to set a time. Have some goals that you want to achieve this month, have some that you want to achieve in 6 months and have some that are on your all-time list.

Another thing about goals is to write them down and review them. Reaffirm these goals frequently and when big decisions have to be made, reference your site goals.

After you have determined what you would like for your site to accomplish, it’s to move forward and figure out what you personally would like to accomplish with your new website by setting some personal goals.

Maybe I’m the odd one out, but I know for my website project that just wasn’t the case. The inspiration for it was slow and curated over months until it got to a point where it felt like a successful idea and was something I was passionate to start.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is also the first post in explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

The Inspiration Behind My Website

The idea behind my website Capture Gwinnett, which is a local county guide, information and news website, started when my county started to build a baseball stadium near my house which would be the home of the Atlanta Braves minor league baseball team that was previously in Richmond, VA. I got to see the land for the stadium being cleared and watch the progress of the stadium being built on my drive into work each morning. One day it occurred to me that I bet others who live in my county might also like to see the progress of the stadium being built, but don’t drive by that way normally. So then I thought it would be cool if someone had a website that posted pictures each day of the progress of the stadium.

That idea came and left without anymore thought put to it. It was just something that would be cool, but hardly something I had the time to do myself.

Another idea came to me when one of my favorite local coffeeshops closed. This was a cool little café that had large oil paintings on the wall and nice cozy vibe to the place. It was located in a decent spot near a Wal-mart and had some decent exposure, so I was a bit perplexed as to why it failed. As they were closing and liquidating the inventory I found myself wishing there were some local website that could help promote these small independent businesses. My county is full of large franchises and has very few local independent restaurants to help give it more of a city vibe. The few that do open, rarely stay open for long.

This concept of giving promotion and helping these small businesses hung around with me and my thoughts about building my local county guide website began to coalesce.

After those incidents mentioned above, I starting looking around my county for other things I could write about that would help validate my idea. My county has had a large resurgence of restoring the historic city districts, some that have been around for over 150 years, plus some of the cities have been building large community centers that hold concerts, farmer’s markets and other community events throughout the year. These things encouraged me to know that there is a effort being made to build stronger communities and so a website to help organize and build a virtual community was possible.

I had been collected ideas here and there and been thinking more and more about making this site for a few months later. The real tipping point came when I read Seth Godin’s Linchpin. That book and his focus on his blog at the time dealt with how important it is to quite being afraid of failure and to just ship something. It’s easy to be ‘working’ or ‘thinking’ about a project but the real test comes when you actually ship it. It was the motivation I needed to really start pursing this project.

Take Away Thoughts about Finding Inspiration

I believe inspiration is something that has to cultivated.

You might just have an inkling of an idea, but the only way to grow it is to grab a pad, and pen and some coffee and sit still for 30 minutes and just write down ideas about it. Talk about the idea to someone even when the entire concept can be relayed in three sentences. Put yourself in situations that force you to actively think about it. Think about it so much that you get to a point when you feel ashamed to be talking to someone yet again about your idea but not have anything to show for it.

Then when that happens, commit to making the idea into a reality and move on to the next phase of Building a Website: Set Site Goals.

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration

That quote is often used to show that hard work is needed for anything to be successful, but sometimes see the other truth in the quote. Sure perspiration might take up a majority of what is needed to be a genius, but without inspiration, nothing meaningful can occur. What if that 1% was a bad idea then the 99% was wasted. Both are needed, and both need to be good for success to occur.

Site strategy is where you develop that 1% and fully realize the concept before diving in and making something.

Here is what we will be going over in the Site Strategy Phase of building a websites:

• Inspiration
• Site Goals
• Personal Goals
• Brainstorming
• Identify Target Users
• Profile Target Users

Be sure to subscribe to get notified when this series gets updated.

I plan to change that and would like to take you through my journey of over the past year of me creating a website from its inspirational origin all the way through seeing it being designed in my moleskine, polished in Photoshop, developed into HTML and then into WordPress and finally into what I am doing to run the website since I launched it a couple weeks ago.

Upcoming Series Outline

This is roughly chronological view of  how I, a one-person shop, did this site. This order will be different when working with more than one person because things like design and content can be done in tandem.

Site Strategy

Where the idea begins and steps take place to formalize the idea into a concrete project

• Inspiration
• Site Goals
• Personal Goals
• Brainstorming
• Identify Target Users
• Profile Target Users

Content Strategy

Discovering and organizing the site’s content

• Listing Potential Content
• Categorizing and Organizing Content
• Content Sitemap

Abstract Design

Take the site from sketches to polished mocks

• Design Inspiration
• Moodboard
• Wireframes
• Mocks
• Beginning Logo Design

Technology Strategy

List the various applications and services needed to setup and maintain the website

• Foundational Technology – Stuff required to setup the site i.e. host, CMS, email, etc
• On-site Technology – Stuff used to on the live site i.e flickr for photos, twitter, etc
• Off-site Technology – Stuff used to maintain the website or provide metrics i.e. email marketing manager, site analytics, etc

Concrete Design

Turn the photoshop mocks into an HTML website

• From PSD to HTML
• Javascript Libraries
• Finalizing Logo Design

Technology Implementation

Setup a working website

• Install CMS
• Convert HTML to CMS templates
• Add On-site Technology
• Add Off-site Technology

Content Development

Replace dummy content with real content

• Write site articles
• Take pictures needed
• Add articles in CMS
• Cross-link articles

Launch

It’s go time, baby

Maintaining the Website

Growing and marketing the website.

• Site Analytics and Diagnostics
• Content Goals
• Develop a Content Posting Calendar
• Social Media
• Marketing

Growing the Website

Learning how to adjust and make intelligent site iterations

About the Website

Now that I’ve properly teased you with all that I plan to show, I guess I better tell you about the site we are going to be following throughout its journey.

Capture Gwinnett is a county guide website where residents of Gwinnett County, GA can find information about things within the county such as parks, restaurants or other locations. It also provides the residents with news and events to keep abreast of what is going on within their county. The site has in-depth guides to help residents do things like finding good restaurants in Gwinnett and non-residents find stuff to do with the Guide to Gwinnett.

It will be a long ride to follow the journey of this website, but it should be a good one full of lots of advice to help you to get comfortable with doing something similar and to hopefully avoid some of the mistakes I made. I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed or to follow me on Twitter to stay best informed. My goal is to write one post a week in this series, but I am trying to maintain the other site as well, so no promises.

The Story

I was catching up on the latest season of Smallville the other day and was watching the season finale. One of the characters was in a maze of a building’s air ventilation system and as he was getting navigation directions from another character on the phone he said, “You are my personal MapQuest”. That statement really got me thinking about how often I still hear people use MapQuest as a common vocabulary word, yet I personally haven’t used the service in over 8 years.

The History

MapQuest was one of the first companies in the online map game and for a while they were the only service people were using. Then Google completely changed the game when they decided to get serious about online maps with AJAX maps. After that most people switched to the superior Google Maps while the other players starting playing catch up. Now I personally use Yahoo Maps because I think they do things even better than Google does. I’ve been so satisfied with those two that I have never considered going back to MapQuest.

The Thought

When I hear someone discuss needing online directions it often references MapQuest, such as, “Just MapQuest it” or “I printed the MapQuest to your house”. Are people still actually using MapQuest.com or is that just the verb for “getting online maps” or noun for “directions”?

Whenever I hear MapQuest used by someone I always think of it as the synonym. Which makes for an interesting thought experiment.

The MapQuest brand is so good that it is synonymous with directions. MapQuest = Directions. That is huge for a brand to actually replace people’s common vocabulary words with your service or company. Yet how completely useless is that if no one is actually using their service to get maps. What value would Google get when someone says, “Just google it”, then that person goes to Bing to do their search. Xerox is another good example.

Perhaps I’m wrong in my assumptions about how the general population gets online maps.

The Questions

So here are my questions to those of you haven’t cleaned up their RSS feeds in the past year and so I’m still around.

• Do you primarily use MapQuest for your online mapping needs?
• Do you commonly hear people use “MapQuest” in sentences?
• If you hear, “Just MapQuest it”, do you think the person saying it literally means, “Get your maps from mapquest.com”?
• What can MapQuest do to start cashing in on the successful brand?

The End

Thanks, ba bye.

This is the first guest post I’ve ever written and although it is more of a basic concepts post, it feels good to be accomplishing my main New Year’s resolution of producing. I hope to have more guest posts appearing around the interweb in the next few months. When I do have others published I will just mention them on Twitter instead of making a big deal of it like this post. So if you aren’t following me, then do so.

If you happen to be visiting from said guest post, then welcome. I don’t write often but when I do it is usually design or tech focused, with an occasional rant. Feel free to look around to archives to find something of interest. If you like what you see then feel free to subscribe via RSS. You have no fear of me spamming your reader.

Currently, I am working on a pet project website of mine. While doing so I’m documenting it’s progress while using this design process. I am almost finished with step 6, and hope to have all the HTML and final polish finished right before WordPress 3.0 comes out. If there is a gap between those two then I will be writing posts describing steps 1-6. I planned to do more posts while I was working on it, but when I get a spare 2 hours I find myself wanting to spend that time working on the project instead of recapping it.

So there you have my past, present and future all summed up in under 300 words. Have a great day.