Download ABT Featured Heroes  Download from WordPress

As taken from the readme file:

Description

Provides a new content type “Heroes” to manage your featured slides. You can then add a slideshow to any page using the shortcode abt_slider_hero. The slideshow is automatically configured using jQuery Cycle and the options you specify in the shortcode.

One of the options postType allows you to use other content than the provided “Heroes”, effectively allowing a slideshow of almost anything in WordPress.

Installation

1. Unzip, upload plugin folder to your plugins directory (/wp-content/plugins/)
2. Activate plugin
3. Add slideshow shortcode anywhere you need it.
4. If you want to put the widget (shortcode) in a Widget, you’ll need to allow shortcodes in widgets
5. You can call the slideshow in code using abt_featured_heroes::embed( array $atts )

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the shortcode?

Use the following format (defaults indicated here):

[abt_slider_hero fx="fade" width="100%" height="400px" order="asc" orderby="menu_order" speed="600" timeout="7000" classes="" postType="heroes" style="photo"] 

where

• fx = the cycle transition effect (fade, scrollUp, shuffle, etc) – see jQuery Cycle homepage for more information
• width = width of the slide
• height = height of the slide
• order = sorting order (asc/desc) for the fetched items
• orderby = how to sort the fetched items
• speed = transition speed from one slide to the next
• timeout = delay between slide changes
• classes = optional classes to apply to the slideshow
• postType = you can retrieve other content types than “heroes” if desired
• style = normally the thumbnail navigation just reuses the full-size image, but if you want to “control” the quality of the shrunken thumb specify an alternate image size (like “thumbnail”)

Pretty much all of the attributes are optional, so all you need is:

[abt_slider_hero] 

How do I put a slideshow in code?

You can call the slideshow in code using abt_featured_heroes::embed( array $atts ), where $atts is an array matching the shortcode attribute list.

Can I change the defaults?

Only one simple hook available:

• add_filter('abt_featured_heroes_localize', YOURFN);change the base javascript variables used by the flipwall init script:
  • stylesheet: replace the default stylesheet with your own to change the default appearance of slides
  • speed: change the transition speed (from 600 ms)
  • timeout: change the slide delay (from 7000 ms)
  • fx: change the slide transition (from ‘fade’)
  • style: optionally use actual thumbnail photos for navigation, instead of reusing full-size images (default ‘photo’, alt ‘thumbnail’)
  • width: default width (from 100%)
  • height: default height (from 400px)

How to put shortcode in widget?

Use a filter to apply shortcode processing to widgets.

Filter: <?php add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode'); ?>

There was a problem. HTML structured the page but didn’t fill it with copy or images. Each time I learned one skill two more that needed learning popped up. Web development challenge in these early days centered on finding people willing to help for a reasonable amount of money or learning how to DIY (do it yourself). We’ve come a way since 1999, but some things don’t change. Anyone can have a website only a few will understand how to make money online.

You Get What You Pay For And Web Development Costs Are Going Up
In 1999 presence was the challenge. In 2012 presence is assumed. Once everyone has an Internet marketing presence competition moves from presence and engineering to the battle for hearts, minds and advocacy.

Fighting for hearts, minds and advocacy requires different skills. Internet marketing may be the most engineering-like marketing thanks to a sea of behavior and heuristic information, but cutting clutter to make strangers love your company, brand or product is as much business therapy as business.

As web development business therapist we see common mistakes such as:

• Search For Silver Bullets
• Know Thyself To Know Others
• Barking Dog Marketing
• Cathedral vs. Bazaar

Stop Silver Bullet Search
We believe in the quick fix even when life teaches otherwise. The search for silver bullets is distracting and bleeds our most valuable asset – TIME. Reject quick fixes and instant millions. People do win the lottery, but their winning never improves your odds. “Win the lottery” isn’t an effective Internet marketing plan. Anyone who tries to sell you a silver bullet or lottery ticket should be avoided. Creating greatness is HARD and requires sweat, tears and treasure.

Know Thyself To Know Others
Thinking Like An Internet Marketer values the web for what it can and can not accomplish. No web site makes a company’s communication more organized or clear. The web is a huge guassian blur making pointed and sharp ideas, potentially dull and confusing. How would you rate your knowledge of your company’s character on a ten point scale? If you answer anything below a 8 then you have introspective work to do. If your company, brand or product is blowing from pillar to post then, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, “There is no there, there.” Know yourself BEFORE you create any site, blog, social media or email campaign. Compare each effort in some meaningful and measurable way to your company’s core values.

Barking Dog Marketing
Do you walk toward or run away from a barking dog? Barking at visitors has the same impact. Greatness, transparency and honesty are more sustainable and profitable than any short term bark. Barking may improve sales or conversions for a short time, but damage to brand, positioning and long term profits and advocacy may be significant and long lasting. Every day and action matters in the battle for hearts, minds and advocacy. Read Dov Seidman’s great book HOW: Why we do anything means everything. Seidman explains why values and processes are the only things any business truly own.

Cathedrals vs. Bazaars
Internet marketers build sand castles. Whatever we create will be gone soon. Building sand castles requires different attributes than constructing Renaissance cathedrals meant to last a hundred years. Thinking like an Internet marketer means organizing work around:

• Speed
• Data
• Creative Use Of Convention (don’t recreate what visitors expect)
• Team
•  The Magic 11% (see 1:10:89 Rule)
• Listening and Leading

Speed, passion and wrecking what needs ruination means errors, bumps and mistakes happen. If mistakes drive you crazy don’t become an Internet marketer. Mistakes are a part of the cost of being relevant in a constantly shifting space such as Internet marketing. Perfection isn’t a sustainable Internet marketing strategy. Speed, being data-centric and listening more than you talk work better. Understanding the difference between creating sand castles and accepting input from the bazaar instead of laying stones to live for a hundred years is why “Thinking Like An Internet Marketer” requires a paradigm shift. Perfectionism is too expensive for sand castle builders working in the world’s largest bazaar dodging silver bullets and barking dogs.

Wait, what are breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs are these things:

Homepage > Section > Sub-Section

This is a breadcrumb on Solid Rock International (solidrockinternational.org)

Over the years, breadcrumbs have evolved from a suggested improvement into one of the main parts of a web page along with the page name, search box, navigation, content area, and footer. The breadcrumb is intended to help orient the user to the site’s organization and structure.

What does the research say about breadcrumbs?

In a 2007 Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen stated “breadcrumbs are not important enough for a dedicated study”. Personally, I think they are.

The best research to-date on breadcrumbs is a 2003 article in UsabilityNews (from Wichita State’s Software Usability Research Laboratory). Rogers and Chaparro built a gardening website and studied how users  interacted with the breadcrumbs in a usability test. The researchers found that breadcrumbs were used 6% of the time when participants navigated the website. In other words, 94% of the time participants used other ways to navigate the website (e.g. the main navigation or back button).

It has been over 8 years since Rogers and Chaparro’s research, but the 6% statistic is hard to ignore. It seems likely that as the web has evolved, more people have become accustomed to seeing and using breadcrumbs. Nielsen claimed in 2007 that his group was seeing more and more people use breadcrumbs in their usability studies. I would estimate that breadcrumbs are now used about 10-15% of the time to navigate a website.

Are breadcrumbs important?

Yes.

Users expect to see breadcrumbs, especially on sites with deep information architectures. Even if users are only using breadcrumbs 10-15% of the time to navigate, they are still relying upon them when necessary. Make sure to follow the breadcrumb guidelines provided by Nielsen. I’d make a list of guidelines here, but it is important to understand some of the issues and reasoning that Nielsen provides. So, go read it.

If a website is missing breadcrumbs, it is generally perceived as difficult to use. In most cases, the website actually is difficult to use. But, it is usually not because breadcrumbs are missing. Sites without breadcrumbs are generally lacking attention to detail. Breadcrumbs are usually included with a well-designed website.

I do think that the importance of breadcrumbs is greatly exaggerated when it comes to web usability. There are much bigger things to worry about, such as understanding your site’s users, writing effective web content, developing an intuitive navigation, and meeting all user goals.

The lazy method we got away with before:

function abtcore_shortcode_button( $atts, $content = null ) {
	extract( shortcode_atts( array(
		'color' => 'blue'
	), $atts ) );
	return '<p>' . $content . '</p>';
}

add_shortcode( 'button', 'abtcore_shortcode_button' );

The better way that is now required by WordPress 3.3:

function abtcore_shortcode_button( $atts, $content = null ) {
	extract( shortcode_atts( array(
		'color' => 'blue'
	), $atts ) );
	return '<p>' . $content . '</p>';
}
add_action('init', 'abtcore_register_my_shortcodes', 100);
function abtcore_register_my_shortcodes() {
	add_shortcode( 'button', 'abtcore_shortcode_button' );
}

Notice the add_action() call on the ‘init’ on line 7. This will properly register your shortcode function when WordPress initiates.

I hope this helps.

Check it out: http://www.slideshare.net/MarkRiggan/mobile-first-responsive-web-design

Marshall Brain (@brainstuffHSW) from HowStuffWorks.com took the stage to kick off day 2 of the Internet Summit in Raleigh and threw down a great argument for why we should care less about design and more about function.  Now design matters of course and I would be thrown to the lions if I said that if it didn’t. (Working for a firm that cares a great deal about design that we should take design and shove it is crazy talk)

My goal here is do give an overview of what he talked about, why some of it is valid and what I think the true balance is. (Full disclosure – I am a developer and my User Interfaces look like crap without our design team).

His examples though were quite compelling: Google Search Results, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit.  The content is what is truly driving customers back to these sites over and over again.  Now I would argue that the experience is what matters and how quickly one can access content, FOR these examples is what makes them hugely successful.

Now for us in the industry we can all be fairly certain that a great collaboration occurred to create Google’s new search results:

User Experience Improvements in Google Search Results

My point is that these are elements of design!  Now what they really could be is a great collaboration between UX and designer. Check out the Search menu is in red and it knows my location.  Savy? Also it is subtle, but changing the top search button blue is a great choice that draws attention to it.  But I argue that was indeed a design choice.

Now Marshall’s real point was that in start-up mode don’t really waste your time pushing pixels around and making things perfect.  If you create great content your followers will come and they will use your product.

He said, “I shop at Walmart.  Fonts and colors go over my head and I don’t even see them.”

His point was here that most of the regular everyday people out there that don’t care about design and if you are trying to get investors they don’t either, they want to know how much traffic you are getting and whether or not you are “converting”.

Now it is tough to argue with this point, but again, I go back to the fact design, form, and function are all required.  So I nuance his point slightly and say perhaps spend a little more that he is abdicating for so you can make your site accessible for all, usable for all, and create an experience with content that tells a story brings you back for more.

His other great point was that great content tells a story and if you tell a great story it will resonate with people (and I add then share it with all your friends @darylhemeon ha!).   Marshall also outlined his major issues with sinking too much design time up front:

1. It is expensive
2. time consuming
3. It is never done – fashion is always changing
4. browser compatibility issues
5. distraction from what is important

Marshall’s points are well taken. All I am saying is that is our jobs in this industry to find the right balance for every customer.  What he did say rang true though about the top three most important features are the Content (Content is King #ISUM11), Navigation is simple and functional and SPEED.  If your site is a dog, no one will run with it.

I do understand that what he was trying to do was stir people up on the morning and I started this conversation first thing at my office and people started to wig out!  Which personally I think is great because what it does is make us think about what matters for our customers and that is what is truly important.

Marshall Brain, thanks for a great talk, thanks for stirring the pot and thanks for recommending WordPress…by the way, this blog uses that too.

@drewdiskin Drew Diskin, M.S. Digital Engagement Strategist, Inertia

Commentary:

I think Drew had a powerful story to tell, using this story of John Hopkins and showing more specific examples of HOW they turned around their results, HOW he got C-Level buy in would have made this a much more powerful story.  All in all a good presentation.

Notes:

How do you translate real world experiences into a digital one? Drew worked at Hopkins Hospital & Health System.  There was a culture that was beyond anything you could describe in some ways about how amazing they performed.  But they had severe digital woes.  They had a 62% bounce rate, 75,000 pages, 350+ websites.  The reality was that their brand sucked on-line.

The took on a smaller subset of pages and put them out in a few months and put it out there fast so they could figure out how they were doing.  Their CMS was an old Cold Fusion product that was inhibited fast turnaround.  How do you speak to people not at them when all the patient cares about is that their cough has been persistent for two years because they worked in coal mines?

Be present where your customers are at in their lifestyle and how to change to make it more relevant to them.

Obvious UX – Analytics can be used to get a baseline, UX Testing and Prototyping, Focus Groups, Online Surveys, Informal Conversations with Internal and External Customers are a MUST now, they are necessary to do business.  The challenge is convincing the C-Level executives that this is worth spending money on.

Not Obvious – Are people returning?  Are they sharing? Are they converting? Are they completing the tasks that you have? Can you access the site via mobile? Are you trending? Do you have a Facebook presence? Where else were your users before and after they were at your site?

Measure, Recource, Prototype, and Measure again – was part of the Hopkins rescue mission for UX.  Drew helped create a Digital Engagement Strategy that creates and experience for users not just a website.

Traffic findings were a success: Find a Doctor was up 187%, Apply to the School of Medicine was up 200%.

How to mitigate the performance risk of 3rd party web components

@compuware Dennis Gullotti, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Commentary:

The chief takeaway for me was as we add more and more service calls to our sites, make sure you monitor and load test all your 3rd party calls.  If you increase your load time by 2 seconds you will increase your abandonment rate by 8%. When testing capture your hard data so you can show you business people the impact of adding social media hook-ins to your sites.

Notes:

3rd part components can help you drive traffic like Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, RSS all of this should be to drive traffic to your site and increase your conversions.  CDN’s can also be used to increase performance like EC2 storage, but outside of North America and Europe the performance isn’t great so add a CDN on top and it will scream.

Your performance because of 3rd party presents other challenges in getting speed because of size and customer satisfaction.  Anything above 8 seconds is not good.  Excellent load times need to be 2 seconds.  All of that testing should be done from user desktops because that is real.

Set your business and performance goals: Is my audience using it? Does the vendor guarantee performance? How much revenue is it generating?  Do some due diligence on the component provider?  How does it impact mobile?

Forrester research claims that in 2009 that a page should load in 2 seconds so think about how you are going to impact that load time when adding a 3rd party component.

Facebook publishes performance statistics for their APIs.

71% of mobile phone uses expect a site to load just as fast on their phone.  The takeaway here is to make sure you are limiting 3rd party content calls, limit the number of requests, keep sizes smalls and use a Content Delivery Network.

Make sure that you LOAD Test, especially if you have 3rd party calls.  When doing this type of testing try to do it from the end users point of view: mobile, outside the firewall, etc.

Half-Hearted User Adoption

@navigationarts Don Bruns – Director of Application Design, Navigation Arts

Commentary:

Don moved really fast through a lot of his notes.  He had some great content, the chief takeaway was to make sure you are creating experiences that accomplish their 10 most common tasks.  Overall this was a high level speed overview of how adoption is the only metric that matters.

Notes:

User adoption is not binary, it is the core success metric of your application.  Halfhearted adoption can kill your ROI.

Causes of this: No benefit to the end users, lack of business case, system doesn’t reflect how users behave, poor system performance, failure to manage change.

Change management is overcoming the points of resistance for your users, not “because I said so.”

What are the symptoms of half-hearted user adoption?  Do you find yourself bribing your employees to use the system or share information on-line? Are you penalizing non-use or even inventing reasons for use? Are you creating a scavenger hunt?  What you should be doing is creating a killer app that transforms the way that you work.

Get developers to take the User-Centered Design approach with everything you create to make sure you are creating applications that users really want to use.

Designing for Touch: Are We Ready?

@scottgunterux Scott Gunter Vice President of User Experience, Usability Sciences

Summary/Commentary:

Not everyone is ready for touch screen devices, but if you are going to roll one out make sure you do meaningful testing.

Notes:

The iPhone and the iPad have changed the whole dynamic of how we create applications.  Are we ready for it because it has changed our behaviors?  Are consumers ready for more touch screen devices?

Good example of touch screen devices in our lives:  There are over 400,000 ATMs in the US – source Wired Magazine 2009.  This device was not accepted early, but over time has become a standard.  There are now 28,000 kiosk locations nationwide for Redbox – this simple design is a recipe for success.

More choices create more decisions and that typically is bad for a User Experience.  (author note, thinking of Windows Vista here)

Distracted driving accounts for 16% of all care fatalities in 2009, most of these experiences were because of in-car entertainment systems?

Many grocery stores are getting rid of self service checkout. Big Y Foods due to their research decided to bag self service checkout.

“The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they about their users.” – Jared Spool

One of the best ways you can do this is buy doing a field study of observing your users.  What do you want to learn?  What do you plan to do with the results?  List out your assumptions and validate them.  This will allow you rollup your data in a meaningful way.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in research is rushing to conclusions before you complete your research.  Try to observe users in their natural environment.

Before you do your testing, conduct a pilot session, arrive early, then stay out of the way of your uses, don’t be afraid to adjust your plans on the fly, and capture all the data you can.

When you analyze your data make sure you test out your assumptions, go back to your objectives and leverage visuals, but above all let your data drive your analysis.

I entered the grand ballroom and my first thought was, “is this Vegas?”  Fortunately for me it wasn’t Vegas and I found a comfortable spot to take notes on the first session. (note to all speakers:  I did my best to regurgitate your notes, don’t hold it against me)

Christian Sullivan (@differentwalk) “Creating a World Class Social Media Campaign”.

Here are the highlights:

• Gap’s use of Groupon sold 400,000 coupons worth 11 million
• Moutain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” campaign gained 800,000 Facebook fans
• Sam-e’s Good Mood Gig campaign used contents to generate buzz
• Ford’s new car reveal actually connected fans by driving customers to their site throughout the day of the reveal
• Levi’s created a “Like” store which placed the Facebook “Like” button on all their products, it created more referrals to their site than any other source.  It also created trust amongst their consumers because their friends recommended their products.

One of her overall messages was to remember that the consumer is in control, so let them have control because the consumers want to participate in their experience.

Todd Moy @toddmoy : “The Secret World of Usability”

Todd gave a great talk about how usability permeates all function in life and not just applications.  He discussed some really key concepts which I will spit out in note format and give some good examples.

The Shaping of Perceptions

• When people are given a gift they immediately think the products they were were working with are more usable.
• As consumers we are strongly encouraged by feedback as you move through the product – we want to take an action and then see what the reward is taking that action.  Good example of this turntable.fm – your virtual friends’ avatar’s will head-bob when they dig your tunes.
• “We when we feel good we overlook design faults.” – Norman – This can also apply to how we interact with our significant others!
• The timing of the reward is important, when it is given.  Try to make the reward not long after the interaction.  I immediately thought of RunKeeper and how they send me an email when I reach a goal or logged my 100th activity.
• Amazon found out that they significantly increased revenue by offering free shipping at $75.  People were given an incentive to spend more.

Matthew Munoz @matthewmunoz : Web Design as a Strategic Tool

Matthew gave a great presentation with trying to answer to the question, “How do we make the designer a catalyst?”  In this crazy world of scarce attention, how to we dedicate the time an energy to show abstract concepts?  The challenges that he put out there were ones we face everyday in this industry. How do you design a visual argument?  How do you design a story that breaks down complexity?

Great example here of Dan Roam’s Napkin Design for Health Care reform. The point here was how do you take a 2000 page bill and come up with a way to show visually what is it all about?  How do you tell a visual story that breaks down the complexity?  How do we create meaning or a process for creating options?

Matthew’s manifesto is as follows – his prescription for solving those confounding problems.  Some of my notes are mixed in here as well:

1. Use Metaphors
2. When you use scenarios things feel less risky
3. –missed this one Dr. Gonzo was sabotaging lunch–
4. tell stories – Tom’s One for One
5. Ask Why 5 times – continue to ask this question until you get to the root meaning of what you are doing
6. inspire action with openness, create an architecture of participation, contribution and participation (I thought of crowd sourcing and social media)
7. every project is chance to find common ground – he positioned his team as Sherpa.
8. break your project into sprints and workshops and have your clients participate
9. imperfection breeds participation – get people to be involved even if you work isn’t done
10. release early and release often
11. design with, and for
12. design the system
13. everyone is a designer – great point here about how everyone can give you feedback, they just might not be able to move elements on a page, but they can tell you WHY they like or dislike
14. build your reputation as a problem solver and opportunity finder and doors will open for you, and yes like Sally Field, people will like you, they really will.

That is all for now, I have to run because Dr. Gonzo is trying to make his way to take over the podium for the key note, heaven help us all.  I just hope I can find my turkey sandwich.

It’s no secret, I love beer. When I’m not talking about web design, I’m talking about beer and my homebrewing hobby. So naturally, this is where my “water cooler discussions” usually end up. What I’ve found from these conversations is that I have a lot of co-workers that love beer too. If you weren’t aware, we have 3 homebrewers, 1 ex-commercial-brewer, and about 25 or more avid beer fans in our office.

Fanboys aside, designing a beer and the process of brewing is similar to the planning and developing of a website. Both industries have a handful of key ingredients and important factors:

1. The concept or idea
2. The purpose and end-goals
3. The foundation
4. The experience
5. The consumers and keeping them coming back

When these factors come together in harmony, we’re left with a product that makes both the brewer (or web designer and client) and the consumer equally happy. And, on the other end, if these factors don’t jive, we’re left with a sad product that doesn’t sell.

Photo by e_walk on Flickr

The Concept or Idea

In order to craft a great beer, you first need a solid idea. What kind of beer are people drinking? How saturated is the market? What kind of beer do I want to make? These are just some of the questions any product design phase. They’re necessary because they help you focus on your concept. Going too broad too soon could result in failure. So, we focus on what will work for now. Once we build up a following, then we can begin to introduce all those other ideas or recipes floating around in our head.

So, I’ve done my research and I’ve found that most people in Raleigh seem to like pale ales. There’s already a few local breweries that make this style. But, there’s room for competition since the demand is so high. Now that we have a style chosen for our flagship, it’s time to plan and test the recipe. We find some friends, invite them over, and have them taste our latest batch of beer. We might even submit our idea to a panel of experts looking for feedback. In the homebrew world, this panel of experts are judges at a local competition. Regardless, every person along the way helps us formalize our concept–making it stronger.

Then, we need a catchy name. The name needs to say it all. And, most of the time, it needs to not have been used before. We’ll call our pale ale “Crabtree Pale Ale.” This name not only suggests the hoppy and dry finish we’re going for, but it means something to my local market too. I can already picture the label.

The Planning and End-Goals

Fully understanding the purpose of your concept can help you derive your end-goals. And, properly planning this execution is vital to success. This would be like understanding and formulating your recipe to suit a particular beer category. What flavor, aroma, and texture components are necessary to the style? What ingredients are used to achieve this complexity? And, most importantly, what can we do to keep this product on or under budget without sacrificing quality?

We’re making a pale ale, so we need a final beer that is relatively clean, moderately hoppy or bitter, and maybe a touch citrusy. The final product should also be pale and clear. There’s a few malts that we can choose from to create the flavors we want, as well as, a whole-host of American hops that will fit the profile.

It’s no coincidence that planning and end-goals are so closely related to the concept. What you’ll find is that there’s a lot of reliance on, or blending of, each of these steps. This is necessary to achieve the best product possible. This is also why it’s important to have all the moving parts under one roof.

The Foundation

Arguably, the most important ingredient in beer is water. In fact, beer is comprised mostly of water. Therefore, water quality naturally plays the biggest part. Many brewers treat their water to achieve the profile appropriate for the beer style. Whether we want hard or soft water, it is much like choosing the right code base, e.g., .Net or PHP. Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. Water can accentuate hop flavor or malt flavors. It can affect the efficiency of our mash (similar to making tea with grain). And, if you’re like me, this complicated chemistry gives you a headache, much like the programming languages and networking/hosting required for making a website.

The quality and balance of your code and HTML is much like water in brewing. Bad code can really ruin a website, and chlorine can ruin a beer. Gross.

The Experience

The overall experience, or taste of the beer, is crafted in part by the water quality, as well as, the ingredients and techniques used during the brewing process. In web design, this crafting is done by our User Experience (UX) Designers. They’re major players throughout the entire life-cycle of the project. Everything that is done passes through their UX filter. Their chief concern is always how the end-user will experience and use the website. For beer, if a flavor component is off, the consumer will reject it because it doesn’t taste right or it is too hard to drink.

This “experience layer” in brewing has many moving parts. There’s the malt, the hops, the pH balance of the water, and the temperature control (at each step). And, if the style requests, a spice or adjunct may be in the mix.

Malt brings sweetness and potential alcohol. Hops brings bitterness or balance (it also preserves the beer). Chemicals in the water accentuate each of these flavors as well as improve the efficiency of the process. But, temperature control can easily become the biggest player in the result of the final product. I can add the right amount of hops, but if I mash too cool, then I won’t have enough residual sweetness to balance the beer. I’ll be left with a harsh, thin, liquid. Been there before.

This is much like adding lots of eye-candy, frills, and information to your site, only to find that you didn’t pay attention to what the users (not you) are looking for from your website. If the frills don’t help the experience, then don’t add them. And, like-wise, if all the moving parts parts (designers, developers, marketing, and UX) don’t come together in perfect harmony, something might break.

The experience is a double-edged sword. It’s all about balancing the frills and ingredients to achieve the perfect experience.

The Consumer and Keeping Them Coming Back

You may have noticed that I left one key ingredient out of my beer analogy so far. That is yeast. Yeast is our consumer. And, so is the actual consumer. But, to be fair, yeast is the first organism consuming our beer.

During the entire process, you’re attempting to make a sugary water extract, called wort, that will be like a Candy Land for these tiny single-celled creatures. Unfortunately, though, it’s not as simple as that. If you mash the malt too high, you’ll be left with an un-fermentable extract. Essentially, you’ve made a beer with too much sweetness. Or, a website with too many frills and not enough digestible substance. This could be too much content or, conversely, too much JavaScript fanciness hiding the lack of precision. We want those yeast cells to consume and multiply. We want them to have families that consume the beer too.

Another potential problem is not adding the right amount of yeast. This would be comparable to hitting the market without proper marketing. What happens? The fermentation happens too slow resulting in off-flavors. And, possibly, you end up with a stuck fermentation. In the product world, this is slow growing and painful return on investment. Or worse, no growth at all.

There’s lots of ways to keep the fermentation going, or entice the consumer. We could control the temperature, making sure it’s appropriate for growth. We could use the appropriate yeast and pitch the perfect amount of it. This is similar to choosing the right target audience and controlling the amount of marketing. During the products life, how much marketing are you investing into your product?

Or, if the style allows, stick the beer in the corner and allow it to open ferment at what ever temperature it gets in the room during the day. This would be like viral marketing–letting the consumer run with it! But, then again, it all comes back to the initial concept: what style or what am I selling? And, how do you market the product appropriately?

Final Product

Once the yeast has done it’s thing, you’ve got a tasty beverage waiting for you in the icebox. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the product you’ve created. And, if you venture beyond the hobby, maybe it’ll make you lots of money one day. Cheers!

By the way, what’s your favorite beer?

Martin's First Web Site circa 1999

I was in love. I’d spent a year creating my first web site (FoundObjects.com now in the WayBackMachine and on ScentTrail Marketing). Those vertical Mondrian lines are a month of my life I will never get back. I wasn’t the nicest human during the long incubation either. I HATE not being able to figure something out. Learning to use 1999 HTML to accomplish FoundObjects.com’s art / portal look took time and more left brain than is naturally resident.

There was no choice. We had no money, or money we didn’t need for food, keeping a roof over our head and keeping our fledgling specialty gift distribution company alive. There was good news. We were selling our generation’s “Pet Rock”, a gift so viral its run rate was already in the millions. Ever play with magnetic words on a friend’s refrigerator? Thanks . Sales of Magnetic Poetry Kit kept FoundObjects.com afloat long enough to teach important lessons in web development and Internet marketing.

FoundObjects.com was a “specialty gift distributor”. Our model turned on creating the next Magnetic Poetry Kit. Aspiring gift entrepreneurs pitched us ideas. We created strategy, shared our manufacturing network, put products into our warehouse, developed marketing materials and plans and sold to our list of cool niche gift shops in America and around the world at International gift shows in New York and San Francisco. Found Objects was raw Quirky. Quirky without the TV show and cool web community.

I’d convinced my now ex-wife to share our cool stores customer list online. Reaching my highest level of programming incompetence attempting to read and write to databases (a task much to left brained for me then), I created 50 flat HTML1 (vs. HTML5 now) tables by state. “Our competition will use our list too,” was the President of FoundObject.com’s concern. She was right and she was wrong. Our competitors did use our list AND they helped maintain it providing my first lesson in community quid pro quo. People want to help.

Keeping 50 state tables up to date was a pain. It is the kind of work I hate – detailed, tedious and necessary. Google loved those tables. Typing “cool stores in LA” in 2000 and FoundObjects.com was on top of a SEO clueless specialty gift crowd. We were lucky not smart. Google’s spider liked those tables more than the nasty dynamic code of the day. Then I made a mistake.

I hired a talented UNC computer programmer (Adam if you are reading this call me), to create a database to eliminate painful, time consuming table maintenance. I won the battle and lost the SEO war. My 50 tables were easy before Google’s spider to read. Back before Google floated the index, making your result set and mine different based on cache, friends and login, knowing when something was SEO wrong didn’t take long.

One day FoundObjects.com was on page one and in the first organic listing for Cool Stores in X (where x was any American city or state). The next day, not long after my labor saving change, FoundObjects.com was NOT on page one, two or even page 55. Ouch.

I’d violated the first rule of Google. I’d removed something spider-friendly from the FoundObjects.com tapestry in favor of something not spider-friendly. Adam and I didn’t know to create a flat table and feed Google’s voracious spider the way it was used to being fed. We didn’t understand the rules of the SEM game. Suddenly without warning we found ourselves in the middle of a mysterious new game with hidden coda, strange rules and painful penalties for being stupid, badly informed or both and we’d just been both. Ouch!

More than ten years later I understand. The real value of FoundObjects.com was its Etsy.com-like mashup. Google’s hidden bear traps requiring careful consideration, planning and calling smart friends are clear to me now. Every Internet marketing day is a game played with live ammunition, invading armies, courage and honor (mostly).

How does this story relate to Atlantic BT’s new How To Buy Internet Marketing and Web Development in Raleigh North Carolina series? Almost every Atlantic BT customer already has a web site. When they visit the Atlantic BT Center right outside of Macy’s at Crabtree Valley Mall they want more than a web site, they want to win. Many customers are confused. One Raleigh Web Development company recommends this change, another company suggests three others so maddening confusion ensues.

Discussing web redesigns without understanding business objectives is crazy and dangerous. Google knows your site. You’ve been modeled as a site with 300 pages (for example), 2,000 unique visitors a month, average page views of 3.5, a bounce rate of 62% (say) and a little under four minutes average visit time. Your site has PageRank, a number between one and ten Google assigns to create the most important bell curve in Internet marketing, and you have 200 inbound links from a variety of sites. The PageRank of sites linking to you helps define where your existing site stacks up in search. Are you the lead sled dog? Is your site the most trusted source on topics important to your business? Or are you pulling the sled from inside an aggressive pack of huskies? Middle of the pack means you don’t get pushed off the team, but the view is always the same.

Managing a $2 million dollar ecommerce site in 2003 I had an interesting conversation with my boss. “What,” I asked not expecting the answer I got, “is my Pay Per Click marketing budget?” “You don’t have a budget, you have a return on investment (ROI) goal of $3 to $1,” my direct marketing boss gave me the right answer to my question for the very first time in my career. My online marketing budget was infinite as long as we made money. It would grow to over $1 million consistently delivering $3 to $1 or better.

Writing this Atlantic BT post almost nine years later I remember sitting in here office. I’d looked out the window sure some momentous natural thing was about to happen. Lightening would strike, aliens land, dogs and cats live together.

I’d run a Profit and Loss (P&L) statement for my friend and now great customer researcher Mary Kay O’Connor at Monsanto / Nutrasweet. Mary Kay asked me to justify $100K in travel (this was before GoTo meeting) and two million in advertising on our high margin food ingredient sales to the company’s $20+ million dairy business (sugar free frozen novelties were about to become all the rage thanks to a talented team of R&D, marketing, PR and sales people).

My last corporate job as Director of Dairy sales controlled about five million more gross dollars than my new company’s total annual revenue. My new web team controlled about 12% of my new company’s topline in 2003. At Nutrasweet I had paper power. Thanks to my boss’s singular, perfectly suited Internet marketing idea of infinite budget my power was much greater despite my new company’s smaller size. Internet marketing and web development in Raleigh or anywhere else is NOT about spending as little or as much as possible. Internet marketing and web development is about creating positive return on invested capital (ROC). ROC means you stay and play. No return and someone plays with your toys.

You see the Internet marketing game yet? You see how web metrics and analysis becomes lifeblood for Internet marketing? Your PPC budget is infinite as long as Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is positive. Positive enough to either make money outright or drive conversions to more profitable channels (email marketing, organic search, social network marketing). You can’t play this new Internet marketing and web development game in Raleigh or anywhere else unless you quantify stimulus and response, action and reaction, traffic and conversion.

I’ve shared my web marketing revelation story several times with clients, clients who’ve talked to every Raleigh web development company and are so confused and angry they could spit. Sharing how lost, lucky and then stupid I was more than ten years ago helps lighten things up. I explain outright failure is often how the most important Internet marketing lessons are learned. How should Raleigh web development be purchased? A: carefully. Your web site isn’t an island. Web sites ONLY represent YOU. Web sites can’t and will never be a thing in and of themselves.

Web development as extension of branding and business goals can be hard to grasp. Many customers want to work backwards. Create a cool site and our business will be special. Yes and no. Any cool web development is immediately dependent on the life support system created by or for the new web copy, images and code floating in infinite and ever expanding Google space. If your are trying to buy a website redesign it is like you are adopting a child, a child with existing behaviors.

Atlantic BT’s first job is to observe your newly adopted child. How does he or she play with others? How does the most powerful hall monitor ever created (Google) feel about him or her? This analysis provides some insight into how competitive your child is and can be long term (online 3 years is long term). If we know your newly adopted child’s unique traffic, trends (up or down and for how long), PageRank for Home page, Twitter, Facebook and other important pages we can tell how much tutoring will be required to get a PhD (if that is the goal).

If you’ve been an Internet marketers long enough you develop a large amount of reasonable benchmarks. Are there outliers and exceptions? Do black swans exist? Sure but black swan exceptions and outliers prove not disprove rules, guidelines and benchmarks. Internet marketing in Raleigh or anywhere is, at its core, a mathematical progression. Five data points and we can model your competitive space. We never stop with five points. After we observe how your adopted child / web site is being treated on the playground we want to understand the playground, all remotely similar playgrounds and anticipate future playgrounds.

The hunt for future playground, or what I call “Blue Oceans” stolen from Blue Ocean Strategy book, is, not surprisingly, also a mathematical progression. We hunt data anomalies. Yesterday seeing a PageRank 6 site with less than 700 pages in Google alarms went off. See the ART in web analytics? You might look at a PR6 with so few pages and think, “Good show.” I look at the math and say it doesn’t add up. Anything beyond a standard deviation of 5% requires diving into Omniture, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, Argyle Social and possibly five other datasets to understand the WHY of it, the reason for such anomalies. Knowing when to dive and when diving doesn’t matter is the art of web analytics. BTW, the over and under on earning a PR6 with so few pages is off the charts.

Atlantic BT Logo

The world is awash in data. There is more data than you can massage, pivot, report or understand. Data doesn’t matter, understanding does. Understanding separates good from great in web development in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Austin, Boston and Silicon Valley. Great internet marketers, and I know several, can share process, provide steps and some experience based benchmarks to set expectations. Art is a higher calling, a strange mix of experience, analysis, science, intuition and gut. People with last names like Brogen, Godin or Beal (right here in RDU) are magicians.

Come to the Atlantic BT Center needing only a new web site and you are an outlier. Most customers need brand clarity, blue ocean analysis (where aren’t your competitors and how do you get and stay on the beach), Internet marketing strategy and yes probably new web code and better user experience (UX design).

Internet marketers move from business problems out to web site creation. Most customers think from web sites in. Meeting in the middle, discussing the unique characteristics of Raleigh web development (can you say geotargeting and local search) and Internet marketing’s current truths and cool campaigns emerge. Since non-action is the largest Internet marketing sin followed closely by taking Google’s teddy bears away we work together to create action plans. We do stuff even if it is the wrong stuff initially (something we will know immediately from metrics so don’t worry).

We don’t create “Invade Russia In The Winter” inflexible plans. We don’t extend the plan for more than a month. A month of PPC provides enough feedback to change ideas ten times, to alter creative and find winning offers (FREE SHIPPING if you are an ecommerce and FREE TRIAL if you are B2B). We watch Google Analytics like hawks sitting attentively on wires watching a grassy field for dinner. Any movement, defined as standard deviation of +/- 5%, means wings start flapping.

Internet marketing and web design and development hinge on the OTHER stuff you do. A few days ago, looking at a beautiful and very expensive site, we had to say “you can’t get there from here”. The site, for all its extraordinary beauty was an Internet marketing zombie. Already dead we had to declare it so, a necessary but never FUN conversation. Next we looked hard at the space, at the business model. Could we move in some new direction? Who controlled the high ground? How well armed were a possibly new set of competitors? Sorry about all the war metaphors, but Internet marketing is not smores by the fire. We found a sideways move that is worth some testing.

Google’s reputation based economy means you can buy web development from Atlantic BT in Raleigh or any of my five other friends running similar companies across America secure in the knowledge your investment is protected. Darwin protects your web dev project. Intelligent business strategists thrive.  Web development snake oil becomes extinct. When we meet at the Atlantic BT Center right outside Macy’s you may think we are aliens speaking in tongues. Arthur C. Clark explained this feeling:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We feel dislocation moving from what is known toward the margins of Internet marketing, out toward the edge of the known web development universe. Mobile is here and dislocating. Truth is contradictory, strange and stress creating in mobile marketing now. Ever attend a junior high dance? Boys on one side girls on the other right?

Mobile marketing is having that dance now. Some brave dancers are heading out to the middle of the basketball court. They may be richly rewarded. Applying our standard deviation model to mobile marketing isn’t a good idea. Mobile marketing doesn’t appear to create an investment return. Based on a strong “been here before, don’t want to miss another one” gut check we are off the wire, flapping our mobile marketing wings and investing NOW.

What does any of these strange stories have to do with buying a web site redesign? Come to Atlantic BT. We will tell you a story, a story of heroes, villains, trolls, monsters and enough gold to take your breath away. Gold at the end of a quantifiable rainbow sitting atop an Agincourt of victory is the norm. Internet marketing and web development in Raleigh, North Carolina or anywhere else is noisy, crowded and aggressive.

Change your thinking about purchasing web design support. Move from “costs” to “return”. Trust we lucky few Raleigh web developers have more to lose. We will share everything we know, have ever learned and are thinking even if you use the other guys. There are GOOD other guys too (lol). No one has a corner on Raleigh web development, Durham Internet marketing or Chapel Hill web marketing.

If you’ve been burned by snake oil as I have try not to let past experience influence your NOW. I’ve been burned 3 times but have made at least 50 Internet marketing purchases (vendors and friends like Adam from my opening example). Three burns out of fifty isn’t bad. Those three scorching bad experiences are outliers. The norm is Internet marketing and web development ideas, people and software purchased performed well and some incredibly so creating outliers on the other end of the bell curve from snake oil.

We see the tension, expectation and worry in many buyers. They believe they’ve been sold snake oil, but it is rare they have actually been so taken. Mostly they have something that feels wrong and buyer’s remorse is raging. Here are a few web development rules to live by:

• If someone says they can make you #1 on a keyword in Google without knowing anything about where you stand, your competitive set or your budget for things like content marketing, social network marketing and PPC campaigns RUN.

• If you think your current site is horrible and you paid too much ASK US. We look at web sites differently. If your site isn’t crazy stupid, and there are about 100 ways it can be, then you did good and probably got what you paid for. You are in the game. Congratulations.

• Approach Atlantic BT or any other Raleigh web dev with trust created from knowing we have more on the table than you. Your site can always get better. We bet our company on making you enough ROI to tell five friends (and that is at least $5 to $1 in my experience).

• “But we are risking our 401k,” you may be thinking. Been there, done that and have the t-shirt and we won’t take that gig. I see the irony of saying if young Martin asked Atlantic BT for help old Martin would say no, but the game is different, an order of magnitude different, now. Old Martin would never turn young Martin away. I would set young Martin up with three friends who know how to get young Martin’s idea packaged, introduced online and learn to fly enough that Atlantic BT and the many big guns we have may never be needed. Cost of poker and we promise to write about your (and my friend’s) winged victory and cry into our beers a little over being so goofystupid.

We are in love.

I could write about how to buy email marketing, Internet marketing (PPC), search engine optimization, content marketing and social media marketing for hours and hours and thousands and thousands of words. This is the business I, most of my friends and Atlantic BT have chosen. We love this strange Internet marketing journey.

Visit Macy’s, buy some shoes, a dress or perfume and then run across the street and let Atlantic BT share a story or two.

Get Started…Find blue oceans and ALWAYS LEAD!

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director of Marketing
Martin(dot)Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com

Start Today, Start Now, Here is How…

Contact Atlantic BT:
Yes, I want you to share a story and here some more of yous .

Sounds interesting, but I want to learn more
Atlantic BT Blog
Atlantic BT Customer Video Testimonials
Atlantic BT Twitter

I want to come by and see your operation but don’t want to buy anything or talk to some sales guy.

Join our Internet Marketing Meetup and come by to hear Lisa Sorg, Editor of the Independent, speak about how a niche publication looks almost as large as the N&O online (very cool)

I’m a competitor and am so much better than you

Cool, come visit, share your story and we bet you lunch we can work together.

No really, I’m a Raleigh web development and Internet marketing company and am going to crush you like a bug

Love your passion and will bet you the cost of lunch for your company we can partner on five things helping each other serve clients better. We don’t find 5 things to work on together we buy you company lunch (up to 20 people).

I’ve heard great things and want to be the 54 employee at Atlantic BT.

Cool, we are always looking great people, check our openings.

Don’t see anything that interests you? Come in share your story anyway and we bet you lunch we can help.

I’m a startup and want Atlantic BT to help create, market, share, publicize and promote my widget catcher.

Very cool, Martin writes about Triangle startups for Technorati (Hope, Heroes and Startups). We will feature a startup of the week soon on our site. So let us know what cool stuff you and your startup team are creating in Raleigh, Durham or Chapel Hill.

I’m a vendor and want to sell you some cool web dev tools?

Love to talk. Start with Martin and if you are way too left brain for the marketing department (not hard to be by the way) he will bring you over to the West Side of the building (where the cool kids play).

I think Atlantic BT is cool and just want to help?

The answer to your question is always YES and THANK YOU and start with the right brainers (Martin and the marketing department) and they will respond in kind.