Happy Friday, everyone. The thinks cafe is serving more Friday link juice. This week’s flavor: Reasons for redesigning your website. Drink hearty.

• Clearly, I’m a big fan of Zappos. CNet looks at how Zappos is planning their redesign around introducing new product categories. But instead of launching the new categories and the new site in one big push, the company is testing “…a soft launch of the new, cleaner look to around 1,000 customers before deciding on a formal rollout plan.” Very smart.
• Another reason for redesigning your site is to improve your search engine rankings through search engine optimization. Over on Search Engine Land there’s a strong argument showing why SEO is not free. Building those efforts into a redesign often allows you to kill the proverbial two birds.
• Oftentimes, you’ll redesign and move your site to a new domain at the same time. SEO Roundtable highlights Google’s recent announcement of best practices for moving your site. Long overdue and well worth bookmarking.
• Finally, redesigning never makes sense if it doesn’t give customers what they want. The always link-worthy Linda Bustos lists common things customers really want from your site.

Catch you all right back here on Monday. Cheers!

Business owners, managers and writers often invoke sports metaphors to illustrate business situations. Just as often, those metaphors fall flat, either because the audience has little connection to the sport or the metaphor has little connection to reality. So a business book that builds its case around the actions of a low-budget sports franchise risks alienating sports fans and business managers alike. Yet, traveling these well-worn basepaths, Michael Lewis has written one of the classic business books of its era in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”.

The book, ostensibly about the Oakland A’s and their demanding general manager Billy Beane, provides a catalog of techniques - and more important - attitudes necessary to compete with the big boys. Its fundamental question, “how does a low-budget operation manage to win consistently against the best-funded teams in sports,” illustrates how a small business owner or manager can develop a winning game plan by focusing on the right information and exploiting market inefficiencies the big guys overlook. Plus it reads as an engaging David vs. Goliath story, introducing colorful characters and situations familiar to sports fans and business veterans alike.

Among the business wisdom sprinkled throughout its pages, “Moneyball” states “the goal of the Oakland front office was simply to minimize the risk. Their solution wasn’t perfect, it was just better than the hoary alternative, rendering decisions by gut feeling.” It also quotes the wonderfully-named amateur (later pro) statistician Voros McCracken, “It didn’t make any sense to me that the way to approach the problem was to give up.” You don’t have to be a fan of baseball - or any sport - to see how that applies to every business.

Oakland general manager Beane, according to Lewis, is fond of Warren Buffett’s statement, “The hardest thing to find is a good investment.” Buy this book. That’s at least one good investment you can take to bank.

Robert Gorrell at GrokDotCom listed blogs he appreciates as part of Darren Rowse’s Blogger Appreciation Day. I was thrilled that Robert included me in his list. I was also struck by the overlap between his list and the blogs I read regularly. So, with all due credit, I’m republishing Robert’s list here with 2 additions, GrokDotCom itself and Robbin Steif’s LunaMetrics.

Enjoy!

• GrokDotCom
• Linda Bustos & Jason Billingsley
• Mary Schmidt
• Matt McGee
• Andy Beal
• Brian Clark
• Baratunde
• Matt Pace + crew
  
• B.L. Ochman
• Aaron Chronister
• Dave Young
• Rand Fishkin
• Roger Dooley
• Marshall Sponder
• Linas Simonis
• Avinash Kaushik
• Fred Reichheld
• Paul Williams
• Gord Hotchkiss
• Adele Revella
• Jim Novo
• Edward Tufte
• Amanda Watlington
• Mal Watlington
• Garr Reynolds
• Tom Limongello
• Olivier Favre
• David Armano
• Richard, Marshall, Sarah, Josh & Alex
• Bob Walsh + comrades
• Julien Hervouet & Florent Gosselin
• Peter Kim
• Andy Sernovitz
• Tim Huijbers
• Chuck McKay
• Steve Clark
• Kim Krause Berg
• Josh Bernoff & Charlene Li
• John Jantsch
• John Moore
• MarsOcean
• Don Dodge
• Michele Miller
• Jason, Matt, Sarah + crew
• Mitch Joel
• Roberta Rosenberg
• David Meerman Scott
• Juan Guillermo Tornoe
• Olaf Molenaar
• Stéphane Hamel
• Christ Coolen
• Wayne Hulbert
• Mike Drew
• David Berkowitz
• Augie Ray
• Bob Souer
• Tim Peter
• Steve Hall
• Angela Natividad
• James Paden
• Yvonne DiVita
• Bridget Z
• Chris Baggott
• Steve Woda
• Tom Fishburne
• Mattias Kindell
• Sam Decker
• Lars Johansson
• James C. Zolman
• Carolyn Gardner
• Robbin Steif
• and Seth Godin

How you connect with customers matters.

• Seth Godin points out why it feels like Forbes is spamming him. He says, “The end result of spam…is that it eats away at your brand.”
• Meanwhile, David Armano points out how Zappo’s and Southwest use Twitter, noting, “it’s never about the tools. It’s about how people use them.”

Connecting with customers needs to serve your customers’ needs, not yours. When you only use it to serve yours, it’s spam.

Even though all of these companies are using the Internet to connect with customers, which one would you rather be?

Happy Friday, big thinkers. This week’s list is short on ecommerce and long on brand. But, while brand may only play a small in role in customers’ purchase decisions, it plays a huge role in where they might choose to shop.

• First up, we’ve got Ben McConnell interviewing NYU marketing instructor David Vinjamuri about his new book Accidental Branding. My favorite quote, “Customers take cues off of incredibly small things when they make judgments about you.” The ecommerce experience on your site says lots about your brand, too. (Like how I worked in ecommerce somewhere along the way?)
• Many companies are shifting away from traditional brand advertising towards more measurable media, such as paid search. Fred Wilson points out how online media may affect more than just online purchases. So maybe we ought to re-think the definition of “brand advertising,” eh?
• Many readers of thinks don’t have the budgets for traditional brand advertising. Which is OK. In addition to Fred’s tale above, Search Engine Land interviews guitar teacher John Tuggle, a great small business success story. Good read. Good advice.
• If you want to gain new customers using techniques like search, you’d do well to avoid these 6 organic search mistakes. Search Engine Land claims they’re common among B2B marketers, but consumer-facing folks need to watch out for them, too.
• Finally, if your customers aren’t here in the States, Distilled in the UK points out SEO tips for local markets worldwide. It’s a fascinating read regardless of where your customers are.

See everyone next week. Have a great weekend.

Who should build your website?

Building a website is easy. Painfully easy. Anyone can do it. That’s a fact. Tools like Jimdo, WordPress, Weebly, SiteKreator and Synthasite provide everything you need to ensure your business has a professional web presence.

Building a website that’s easy to maintain and helps your business meet its long-term goals, though? That can be a completely different animal. It’s not to suggest that these tools won’t work for you. They will, at least for simple sites. But what separates the men from the boys regardless of the development tool is a professional approach focused on you, your customers and how to benefit both.

So what should you look for in someone to build your site? Here are the things that matter most:

Your business needs

• Does the person you’re looking at understand your business needs? Have they worked with your type of business before? While it’s not critical that they’ve built sites in your industry before (and sometimes it’s preferable to get a fresh approach), what is important is they have a process for learning about your business needs. It can be called discovery, business analysis or - my personal favorite - “uncovery.” But the process matters.
• Does the person or team you’re working with understand user behavior? Worry about folks who say, “all customers act exactly the same way.” While it’s true that there are common types of behaviors and common types of purchase funnels, without detailed knowledge of your customers, of your business, they could be heading down the wrong path. I have seen many similarities in the behaviors of customers on such diverse sites as web-based training, financial services, hotel reservations (economy through luxury), retail, news, blogs and restaurants. Don’t be surprised if your customers act just like those in a completely different industry. But sometimes subtle differences have huge business impact. The discovery process should take into account the needs of your customers as much as the needs of your business. (And if you think your business needs outweigh your customer needs, you might want to rethink your business).
• Does the person or team have the time, resources and knowledge to accomplish your project? Getting off to a strong start is important, sure. But finishing is better. Make sure you - and your vendor - leave enough time for (regardless of what they call it) project definition, design, development, testing and deployment. For a simple site, this can take as little as a few weeks. For a larger one, you might be looking at months. But the process takes time to do it right. Give yourself that time and you’ll reap the rewards.

Your technical needs

• Does the vendor understand meaningful analytics for your business? Obviously, your vendor needs to know web analytics. But do they know how to apply those to your business?
• Does the person or team you’re working with understand search engine optimization (SEO) practices? Search engines often represent significant sources of new traffic for business - if your site is set up correctly to capture that traffic. Creating an appropriate site structure, finding the right terms, and writing quality content and page titles all represent the types of activities necessary for ensuring your site shows up in the right searches. Does your vendor know how to do this? (Don’t just ask them if they do, get them to show examples of work that ranks well. And run away if they “guarantee the first position.” They’re lying).
• Does the vendor use web standards? Have they even heard of them? Following web standards - whether industry standards like building valid HTML and CSS, or legal standards like Section 508 compliance - help ensure that your site will work for the longer term and make it easier for you to switch vendors later if you’re unhappy with their performance.

Your financial needs

• Does the vendor charge a reasonable amount relative to the return you’ll receive? A (very) rough rule of thumb is that a well designed site should cost anywhere between 0.5% to 2% of the revenues it generates. The cost of your site depends on several factors:
  • How much content needs developing
  • How many customers the site needs to support at one time
  • How many back end systems the site needs to integrate with
  • How much research you put into the discovery process
  • How much custom work your developer does vs. how much “off-the-shelf” is available

  Make sure you understand what you’re paying for in each step of the process. If the person claims “it’s too complicated” or “you wouldn’t understand,” send them packing.

Your human needs

• Do you like the people? While you can definitely get good results from people you don’t like - unfortunately, the reverse is also true - why accept the heartburn of working with people you just don’t like? Ideally, the developer of your site is as invested in its success as you are. If they don’t care, if they don’t accept that responsibility, if they rub you the wrong way, keep looking. Life is too short to waste with people you don’t like. And your business is too important to trust to those folks.
• What support do they provide you when things go wrong? It’s a sad fact. Sometimes things don’t work out the way we’d like them too. What levels of support is the developer willing to provide you? Make sure you each have a clear understanding of what is - and is not - included. Nothing contributes to changing “I like these guys” to “I hate these guys” more than misunderstandings around how to handle the unexpected. So answer that question right up front.

Your brand/aesthetic needs

I saved this one for last. It’s very easy to get “wow-ed” by a pretty design. But a pretty design doesn’t always work as a website if the designer can’t meet the standards above. Definitely look for people who get your brand, who reflect your vision of the site. But save that as the final test. Then you’ll be sure you get a brand-focused and attractive site that also works for your business.

I realize this is a long list, with lots of detail. But your business is worth it. In fact, is there anything missing from the list above? Are there things that have worked for you? Please tell us about it in the comments.

Note: Really large, high-volume sites requiring significant overhaul could take a year or more to redesign. Do yourself a favor. Chunk that development into components or “phases” that can roll out every 3-6 months. Release early. Release often. Drawn out development processes don’t work. So don’t do that.