The problem with many professional service firms’ website is that they lack an effective content development strategy. Pretty graphics to a website can’t do anything unless there is power packed content behind it.

The lack of a content development strategy results in a few negative consequences such as;

• Customer is overwhelmed with too much information.
• Customer doesn’t have enough information to make a decision.
• Customer can’t connect nor relate to the business
• Customer doesn’t trust what the business has to say.

After awhile, I just got tired of seeing one professional service provider after another skip out on the most obvious content strategies and lose money that is waiting to be taken.

To cure this disease, I just released my free website content guide, “Talk To Me-A Guide To Helping Professional Service Firms Develop Killer Conversational Content For Their Website”.

It is about developing web content that help you “talk with” your customers rather than talk at them. In doing so, your online presence will appear as more genuine, relevant, and position you as the provider of choice for your client needs. Ka-ching.

Download the 13 page guide here.

While anyone can benefit from the guide, I found the following professions and vertical markets to be most relevant to the guide’s content.

• Lawyers and law firms,
• Real estate professionals,
• Business consultants,
• Coaches,
• Agencies,
• Marketing professionals,
• Virtual assistants,
• Human resource firms,
• Accounting and accounting firms,
• Financial services firms,
• Information technology,
• Management consulting,
• Information technology,
• Independent professionals

I welcome feedback. This is version 1.0. In future releases, I would like to include more about how blogs and other forms of social media can add more conversational content to your online presence.

What to do with this guide?

You can print this out and read it at night before smacking yourself on the forehead wondering how much money you may have lost with your own website.

You can forward it to other friends and colleagues who run their own professional service firm and let this be a hint that they need to start having a conversation with their customers as well.

Download it, email it, or just blog about it.

[This case study can also be found in a printable pdf format as well.]

One of the first clients that I attracted for Sachi was Carol Williams. Carol is a 20-year veteran of real estate. She serves the Wenatchee, Washington State real estate market. Wenatchee was ranked as the 2nd fastest growing real estate market in the U.S in a recent CNN Money Magazine survey.

Website: http://www.CarolsWenatchee.com

Background: Carol wanted a second real estate website that would compliment her existing template driven website (www.TopPropertiesWenatchee.com). She heard about the great benefits of having a real estate blog and how it could help with attracting new clients. She wanted our expertise in blog consulting, search engine optimization, and web design.

After listening to Carol’s goals, we offered the following services to Carol;

1. Web design,
2. SEO web copywriting,
3. SEO analysis and ongoing consulting,
4. Blog content development and consulting.

Through our consulting, we developed a strategy that would help the client be found from prospective home buyers who were using the internet to find their agent of choice for this designated real estate market.

Before devising an attack plan, I already knew quite a few things about the real estate blogging market that I could leverage to our advantage. First, the real estate industry is one of the biggest industries to have accepted blogging as a viable online marketing tool. Second, we are still in the early adopter stage of real estate agents using blogs as a form of online marketing. Hence, I knew that there were a lot of mistakes that many agents were making from their blogging initiative and we wanted Carol to avoid those mistakes. Third, many prospective home buyers flock to the Internet to find their local real estate agent. I knew that a well-developed blog could help the agent stand apart from the other cookie cutter real estate websites that they frequent.

Equipped with this knowledge, I knew that Carol could benefit greatly from our services.
The Result: Within a year of the initial design and consulting, the client doubled her yearly sales production because of the new site design and was on the way to earning triple digit income.

There have been numerous smaller homebuyers who found Carol on the web because of our design and SEO. We should also note that the design and optimization of her new site helped boost the search rankings of her older website which was previously was not even on the radar of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This also helped in gaining new clients.

Her biggest client was a real estate investment group that was looking to buy and invest into 3-7 homes on a monthly basis in the Wenatchee area. They had gone through numerous searches on the web for the right realtor. Because of the high rankings that she achieved for her keyword phrases, the REI group found Carol’s website and interviewed her as a candidate. Of all the agents they interviewed, they chose Carol. When Carol asked why they chose her out of all the other agents, the group responded by saying that they felt she portrayed a lot of credibility through her weekly blogging. She was able to show that she was continuously up-to-date on all the latest news surrounding the Wenatchee, Washington real estate market. I’m sure that there are many other agents who knew just as much as Carol, but Carol knew how to convey that competence through an online presence.

Carol is a 20 year veteran of real estate and has told us that of all the marketing strategies she has implemented in the past, our marketing services was one of the best she has used so far. Let’s also remember that Carol was solo for the most of this time. And for the first time, in twenty years, Carol had to hire two new real estate agents to assist her with the amount of business that have come in for her. I would not be surprised if Carol is now on track to early retirement.

How did we do it? We attribute our success to developing a methodology for this client. It can be summarized as follows;

1. Research and prioritize which real estate keywords we want to rank for. I have discovered some keyword phrases, which are not so obvious to the average real estate agent but are still profitable to focus on. We then optimized the site for keywords that are not as competitive but still lucrative.
2. Develop a website that is both easy to navigate and filled with great information for prospective real estate buyers.
3. Coach the realtor to develop a proper content strategy that would interests people who are looking for the most recent information on their local real estate market. Simultaneously, I knew this information was useless unless our site architecture was search engine friendly. Therefore, I developed a site for that was intended for two audiences;
   1. Search engines,
   2. Human readers.
4. Educate the client and make them realize that this is not an overnight solution. Patience and persistency is needed in a long-term online marketing campaign. The problem with most real estate agents is that they lack a long-term focus with real estate blogging. They think that you can make money within two months and this is simply not the case. I never made any guarantees to Carol that she would make a boatload of money. The best that I could do was to educate her on our methodologies and assure her that we did have a marketing plan. We were also adamant that this was a partnership. As much as we were willing to work with Carol, she had to be willing to work with us. She was one of the more coachable clients that I have had. I credit her own creativity and determination as much as credit my own skillsets to help her attain results. She is a natural writer and was willing to do what it takes to develop a success online presence. You can’t ask for more than that out of a client.
5. Rinse, wash, and repeat. I monitored the metrics on the backend of the website to see what type of content that readers had an interest in. I was also measuring the type of keywords that were being used to land on Carol’s site. I continuously kept the client up-to-date on the latest metrics. We measured and benchmarked our results and kept fine tuning the site.

And the rest as they say is history.

If you would like to know how my web design and online marketing consultancy help you attract new clients, get in touch via email or phone and we’ll chat.

Every now and then, I always run into an online discussion where someone wants to know which is the best blogging platform. There always seems to be a vibrant discussion that ensues with no consensus. Some love Blogger by Google for it’s ease of use and it supposedly gets indexed quicker because Google owns it. Others love Movable Type because it caters to the enterprise market. And yet others love WordPress because it’s open source and has hundreds if not thousands of plugins to choose from to enhance your blog.

I thought it would be a solid idea to try and gather some of the top reviews that have been made in the past about these blogging platforms and post it here. These reviews are given by people I respect and I hope it will give you a better sense of what to look for. At the end of the day, you have to define your goals and expectations first. Once that is achieved, it becomes easier to pick the right blogging platform. Please comment below if you feel there are other reviews of major blogging platforms that I have missed and I will update them as needed.

Andy Wibbels has cheatsheets to helping people understand the structure to WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, and Typepad. You also want to check out his entry that compares the anatomy of all four of these popular blogging platforms. There are some related entries to this as well at the bottom of the post.

Mike Rundle of BusinessLogs gives a great review by pitting Movable Type vs WordPress .

Charline Li of Forrester, uses 54 different criteria of what makes for a good blogging platform. Note that you need to dish out nearly a $1000 dollars for the comprehensive report!

After using both for a year, Emily Robbins gives an indepth comparison of how WordPress and Typepad compare to each other. And I do mean indepth!

Darren Rowse doesn’t give a review but he does help you define your blogging goals before selecting a blogging platform. There is alot to think about when you read through it.

Sussanah Garder gives another comparison of blogging platforms. Make sure you check bookmark the comparison chart as well. It gives a good visual of six major platforms.

And finally, Sitepoint does the blog software smackdown by comparing three major blog software- Movable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern. It was written in 2005 so it’s a bit outdated considering blogging software changes frequently.

I hope this helps.

And by the way, WordPress is my favorite. Handsdown.

Get your own WordPress blog installed and customized onto your domain. Learn more here.

(Please note that this guide can also be found in a 3 page pdf format as well. Download it here. Let us know if this guide was helpful by responding in the comments section.)

This is reading that every small to mid size business should have on hand when approaching a web designer or design company. Many clients lose money with their websites because they failed to do the necessary due diligence of hiring a designer. At Sachi Studio, we believe that an informed client is the best client to have. After finishing this brief guide, you will be able to;

1. Identify the goals for your website,
2. Know what questions to ask of a web designer,
3. Understand the various costs associated with developing a website,

If you approach 10 web designers about their prices, you will get 10 different answers. When a prospect uses price as the sole criteria of hiring, they will usually focus on the lower end designers. This is exactly when trouble begins and horror stories occur. Instead, you should be approaching designers with the goal of who is most qualified in terms of skillsets instead of prices. By hiring designers who add the most value, you will receive a website that will prove to more valuable to your business.

So how then, do you find a designer who can add value to your bottom line? The answer lies in the goals that you want out of your site. Below are five questions to ask yourself to help clarify your goals. Once you determine the website goals, you will then use them as a guide to help you find the right designer for your business. Remember; not all web designers are created equal. These questions are meant to help you filter out the unqualified web designers.

1. Do I want my website to be ranked well within the search engines for certain keywords that customers could be using to search for my business? If so, then you want to find a designer who has skillsets in Search Engine Optimization Strategies.
2. Do I want the option to update the website on my own rather than rely on a web designer? If you want to update the site on your own, then you should find a designer who is familiar with various Content Management Systems and how to design for the CMS Software.
3. Am I planning to sell products online? If you do, then you should find a designer who has skills in database programming and ecommerce functionality.
4. Will I be writing the web copy for the website or should I find someone who can? If you write it, your webcopy should be finished by the time the designer is done on their end, otherwise this delays the project further. If you want your web designer to do this, then you should make sure that she knows how to write webcopy. Most people know how to write, but few know how to write effectively on the web and to get visitors to buy from you.
5. Do I want the site to play a marketing role in my business? If so, then you want to find a designer who understands various types of online marketing strategies and how those techniques can be integrated into your website to bring in more customers.

In summary, these are what you should look for in a web designer. We recommend that you ask the questions below of your designer. The designer should also be able to show previous work with respect to these requirements.

1. Does the web designer have knowledge of search engine optimization strategies? If so, does he have a portfolio of work to show his competency in SEO? What kind of techniques will he be employing and does he have a methodology to developing a well-ranked site? How is the research performed?
2. Does the web designer have experience in designing for ecommerce websites? What type of software will he be using?
3. Does the web designer have experience with designing for content management systems? Will he be training you on how to use the software so that you are not reliant on him for future maintenance? Is it proprietary or open source software?
4. Does the web designer know how to write effective web copy? How are the rates structured?
5. Does the web designer have an understanding of various online marketing strategies that can help the customer make more money from the website? What type of marketing strategies does the designer provide? Brand creation? Email marketing? Business blogging consulting? SEO? Article writing?

What affects the cost of a site?

The cost for a website, even for basic brochureware, can vary quite a bit. One designer can charge $700 for a 5-page site. And yet I know another who charges $1300 and yet I know another company that charges $2000. And all three clients will be happy with what they receive and paid for the site. Most people only see the end result of a design, but below are some of the elements that occur “under the hood” and are factored into the cost of any website. Beware of the designer who quotes you a concrete price without finding out more about the information below from you.

1. Mockups. How many mockups or drafts do you wish to have? Some clients wish to have three or four iterations of the site before coding commences. The more mockups that a client wishes to have, the more time it takes for the designer to implement thus increasing costs significantly.
2. Technology. Depending on the goals of the site, technology and software can play a critical role in the site design. Some people want the option to update the site on their own without relying on the designer. This means that a CMS, Content Management System, is needed. This will usually increase the cost of the site design since it takes a bit more time to design for a CMS.
3. Creatives. If you want a lot of creative juice to be integrated into the site design, then this will increase the cost. Design elements such as customized icons, buttons, flash, and graphic illustrations are time and labor intensive. Creativity will vary widely from one designer to another. There will be a balance that you need to achieve with the aesthetic look of your site, what your designer can produce, and how much you are willing to pay to achieve that look.
4. Revisions. How many times do you want to revise a site before it is finally launched? The more revisions a client wishes to have, the further this delays a project and the more time a designer has to put into it. Time is money.
5. Services offered. Aside from coding and design, there are other services that some designers can offer. Search engine optimization strategies, online marketing strategies, email marketing, and web copy writing are just a few of the added value that some designers can offer to your business. Building a website is just the first step. Getting visitors to buy from you requires a designer who has a solid understanding of marketing. What you are willing to pay will depend on how much value you place on your online presence.

A couple buying tips;

1. Register your own domain name rather than rely on the web designer. Relying on a web designer to register the domain name for you mean they have ownership of the domain name and not you. Should something go wrong with the relationship between you and designer, you will not be able to get your domain name back. This can cost you a lot of business.
2. Don’t focus on pretty but focus on marketable. A lot of website owners tend to think that a website that is beautiful in graphics, full of flash, and has music, will help them make money from the website. This is simply not true. At the end of the day, website owners don’t want something pretty but want something that will help them make money. Focus on having a site that loads fast and is full of content and resourceful to the visitors.

Are you looking for that Web 2.0ish look to your new technology startup? Of course you do. Designers get asked that all the time. Here is how we achieve those shiny buttons for the site. Just remember- not every site needs to achieve this look.

Ever wondered what others think of your site? You can find out by using the Star It widget that will allow others to rate your site from 1 to 5 stars.

Want to know what real logo and corporate identity looks like? Best of the Best 2006 list is the result of an international contest showing the best logos, trademarks, and corporate identity of 2006.

The moment that all 1.5 million members on openBC have waited for is finally here– the redesign and rebranding to Xing.com. The redesign went live on Saturday as to allow the developers time to fix any bugs that were still occuring. Alot has been said about the new redesign in various forums, especially within the Moderators Forum that I belong to. I want to take some time to write out a decent review of the new design and list the improvements they’ve made as well as some of the design aspects that they’ve taken a step back on. It is with some hope that they are listening to a more objective viewpoint rather than some of the emotional tirades that have been made on the various forums on Xing.
First let me list the improvements they’ve made and why these are beneficial to the user;

• Implementation of drop down menus for various sections. Drop downs are of great benefit to a design because they help make a design cleaner by improving white space and ridding the site of excess features that can overwhelm a user. Anyone who was using the old design knows just how overwhelming it was for a newbie. The old openBC site had very little use of drop down menus. If we take the member’s start page on the redesign, we notice that there are drop down menus for the “customize info boxes” and “search agents” on member’s start page.
• Improved structure and site architecture. There has been a remarkable improvement given to the redesign. One of the biggest angst about the openBC design is that it was not very user friendly. I even know of employees of the company who commented about that. Good usability relies heavily on clean site architecture. One of the improvements with Xing is that they focused on improving breadcrumb navigation with the main horizontal navigation. Users don’t feel as displaced as they may have felt before and they know where on the site they are.

• Color scheme and graphics. The green hues are the perfect color scheme for the new company colors and logo. The forest and lime green are great at clashing and harmonious at the same time. Green typically symbolizes money and prosperity. Xing also has more use of graphical buttons then the old design. This helps contribute to a more aesthetically pleasing design. It’s very Web 2.0.
• Stronger initiative to avoid incomplete member profiles. One of the challenges that many SNS face are incomplete profiles of members. There is no way to eliminate this but there are ways to help avoid high counts of incomplete profiles. openBC had alot of incomplete profiles especially among the new members joining. There were often complaints of how newbies felt that the sign up process was overwhelming. I took a quick look at the sign up process and it seems not much has changed. However, Xing has taken the initiative to give members a subtle nudge that their profiles may be incomplete in the ways of a status bar as shown here.

As you can see, my status bar shows that my profile is 86% complete. I click on the go button and it takes me to this screen.

I am now shown which areas of my profile is incomplete and prompted to fill it out. As it shows in the photo, the bolded areas are what’s causing an incomplete profile. In this case, I am missing a photo and need to fill out my interests. The status bar is a simple but effective way of avoiding the high counts of incomplete profiles that we find on SNS. More complete profiles result in more business productivity within the business community at Xing. Complete win/win.

Here are some other minor tweaks that were made that I commend as well.

• Additional business card view for our confirmed contacts. Aside from the typical list view that we had, the new business card view allows members to quickly glance at our contacts rather than having scroll down to see our contacts. The little graphical buttons beneath the photos has five features we can use. We can email the contact, skype them, introduce them to mutual contact, delete them as a contact, and download their contact info into our Outlook program. This results in allowing membership to use Xing as a more robust contact management system. Sweet move. Please note that I’ve whited out the phone numbers on this screenshot for privacy concerns.

• Increased size of member photos for our profile page and for the forum threads. I remember the old dimensions that openBC had of member’s pics on the forum threads and profile pages– it was too small. The new pics for our homepage is roughly 138 in width and 170 in length. I think the old dimensions were 75×75? The new dimensions are just right. I get to see more of me. As Katie Couric said, “There’s just more of me of me to love now”

Now, having discussed the good, let’s talk about the bad. Here are some elements of the redesign that I think the former openBC took a step back in. The first one that I am listing is the biggest mishap.

• Business details of a person’s profile page of a member is no longer above the fold. With the old openBC design, members visiting another member’s profile page were able to quickly glance at the crucial business details. Roughly 80 percent of the information was above the fold. With the Xing design, I must scroll down to see the rest of a person’s profile such as their company name, industry affiliations, interests, etc…We should have as much of a person’s business details above the fold rather then below. On my 17 inch screen, I can only see up to a person’s wants. Imagine how bad it must be for someone with a 15 inch screen. Pretty bad. This is bad usability. On a business networking site, a person’s profile is their digital identity. It is what most of us use to decide if we want to make contact with another business person. The new layout for the member’s homepage is the antithesis of this very belief for an important and innovative business social networking site like Xing. They are hampering the online networking experience of the membership by not having more information above the fold. I know some people may think this is a minor issue but when you consider the fact that most of us will browse and click around on a few new profiles on a daily basis, then you start to see that people don’t want to keep scrolling down for each new profile they visit. I’d say 80% of the business details is actually below the fold. This is the current look.

This is what I think it should look like. I took the liberty of rearranging some of the sections to make it look like something that is more accessible to all. As you can see, this suggested layout looks very similar to the old openBC layout for a person’s profile. Photo is on the left, with some contact date below the photo, and the crucial business details are on the right. The only difference from the old design are how the developers improved some graphic buttons and fonts. I know that a redesign is meant to offer something fresh and innovative. I applaud the designers for at least trying, but it is a better idea to settle for the older layout for the profile page or a variation of it. I think something like this is also nice.

This is the only real angst that I have of the new layout design. But for the sake of posterity, here are a few other minor elements that the redesign took a step back in.

• The most active and largest groups are at the bottom of the groups page. This decreases visibility for these groups and no longer serve a purpose if displayed down here. It’s a known usabilty and accessibility fact that the farther down an element is, the less likely that people will pay attention to it.
• Move the url of member’s website link back to the business details tab rather than the web tab. I like the idea of creating a new web tab and putting all pertinent “web information” there, but having a link to a business professional’s website should stay on the business details tab. If I want to learn more about the member, then I want immediate access to their company website. Anything that Xing can do to minimize one less click for the membership is preferred and only makes for a more enjoyable experience online.

Interactivty design is huge with online communities. Xing made some great improvements in this area and I hope to see more once the online drama settles within some of the forums. If you haven’t joined yet, here’s an invitation to join
With the impending IPO, rebranding efforts, and attempts to internationlize the platform into European, Asia, and U.S markets, Xing should give any business focused SNS a run for their money. LinkedIN is doing well with having just recently hit 8 million members and they are now turning a profit. Unfortunately, Ecademy is putting their site up for sale. Not too surprising considering they have only achieved 100,000 members in their 7 years of operation. Ryze is still lingering around with 400,000 members but the perception is that it’s been neglected by management for nearly the past two years. You know things have been going downhill when moderators have repeatedly brought up on their own forum as to whether Ryze is fading away on. I recall CEO, Adrian Scott, making a post within the site’s community board that he was starting to hire out his team in January 2006. It’s now November 2006 and he just made another posting to the community board that he is now getting settled with leasing out a building and now they will start building out the team.

I consider these to be the “Big 4″ for business focused SNS. As you can see, the market is wide open and Xing could easily achieve market dominance. They have strong technology, a scalable platform, strong base of 1.5 million members in only 3 years of operation, and a solid business strategy. And on a personal note, their employees are extremely courteous, bright and affable people. There are some who I’ve talked to over the phone a few times [Zhiyi Yu], exchanged a few emails [Justin Jowett] and I’ve at least met one in person [Maria Sipka].
I think this is one of the most most attractive and internationally-minded group of employees of a social networking company that I’ve seen. Or is it just me? You be the judge. See pic below.