A good example on how you can use analytics is when planning a redesign for your website. Right now, Tridea is closely monitoring our stats to see the what the average screen resolution is on the monitors of our visitors.

From that data, we will be able to decide on what the width of our new website will be, based on the what the average is. That is just one of the many examples that you can get from watching over your site analytics.

One of the plus sides of having analytics on your website, is that there are many cheap, if not free, services available to add to your site with ease. We are currently using Clicky, however, other good ones include Google Analytics (free), Mint ($30/license), and Stat Counter (free version available), just to name a few.

So if you aren’t currently using any analytics on your website, I would highly recommend doing so. The information that you gain from learning how visitors use your site is invaluable. It also helps that they are dead simple to setup as well.

While the general consensus is now very conciliatory toward Jobs’ privacy, the knee-jerk reaction from many was, “What about my stocks/next-gen toys/updated version of Mac OS?” A bit selfish, to be sure, but with Jobs’ position and highly-lauded innovation talents, I can understand this. However, this sentiment didn’t decline with time, along with the level of interest in what was happening to Jobs. As Jobs himself says,

“Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well…In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”

Fact is, guys, a solid and successful company does not rely on one person. This holds true whether the company is made up of 35,000 or three. For those of you who are part of a small team, you’re probably used to wearing a lot of different hats. A broad set of skills is a must for finding success in the small business market–but when one member falls out of the picture for whatever reason, what then?

Take the time to seriously consider this, from your perspective and the rest of the team: if you suddenly found yourself stranded on an island with no method of communication, what would be the impact to current projects, future endeavors, and internal processes? Your answers will help show you the areas lacking team talent overlap. For areas that wouldn’t be affected much by your absence, this is a sign that you need to focus on getting a handle on them–for what if it wasn’t you who were stranded, but the teammate most skilled in that area? Conversely, if you find that the company would be seriously set back on a project because you’re the only one the client has spoken with since day one, this should be a prime indicator that your company’s internal communications needs some work.

Key aspects to think about:

• What methods would your teammates have to access project-relevant files?
• Could communications with a client be picked up by another teammate fairly easily?
• Does your network consist of people who share the specializations you have (graphic design, coding, etc) who teammates could tap into during the interim?
• How would your responsibilities be shared or distributed among the other teammates?

Most important of all, does everyone on your team know the answers to these questions?

While Steve Jobs is Apple’s genius, he is most certainly not the only brick in the foundation that keeps the company steady. For small companies, we must strive to make our foundations solid as well, by strengthening the load we can carry.

The lady who I spoke with on the live chat tried searching their inventory for my size, but they were all out. I asked if she knew where else I could get them, which she could have easily said no, but she searched the web and and linked me to another site that had them. They were the exact ones I was looking for. This made me very pleased.

Before I signed off the live chat, she sent me a link to another pair of shoes that were very similar to the exact ones I was looking for. I liked them a lot, but not as much as the others ones (from a different website). I ended up buying the shoes on Zappos, instead of the exact match from the other site. But why would I do that after a long search for the exact ones I wanted?

Customer service goes a long way, and finding companies that are willing to, almost, jump through hoops and provide top notch service is hard to find. The rep at Zappos was willing to send me to another company to buy shoes, as long as it meant that I was happy, and that speaks volumes. The shoes were also shipped to my door the next day for free!

Amazing customer service like that doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you never forget it. Great customer service is also what keeps people coming back. This certainly won’t be the last time I shop at Zappos. So, kudos to the Zappos team for putting the customer first.

What companies have you had great experiences with for customer service?

This year for the holidays, we’ve sent some of our recent clients a small package with a season’s greeting as a reminder that we’re always happy to continue working with them! We feel it’s a small gesture that can go a long way in keeping Tridea in the forefront of our clients’ minds while they catch up with their families and friends, and mention the progress they’ve made in their endeavors and the exciting process of coupling a new website and design with their projects.

Water Bottle and Card

From the Tridea team to all of you who we have worked with in the past and are working with presently, enjoy your holiday with your nearest and dearest, and have a happy new year!

One thing that I’ve always noticed about great leaders, is that they are very motivating. They keep their team pumped with confidence. The team trusts their leader to keep them inspired to do great things. It doesn’t stop in business. The best example of this might be in sports. You can’t look at a championship team without assessing how the coach (the team motivator) got them there. Coaches have tons of different motivation tactics to get their team excited about going out to compete.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” - Jim Rohn

It’s an excellent cycle that works wonders. When you can motivate your team, they become inspired. When they’re inspired, they become excited about doing great work. I believe that any leader of a team needs to know how to motivate their team. If you are unsure how to do that, at least Google it to get started. You’d be surprised on how enthusiastic your team can be with the right motivation.

The one way that we don’t like being approached is someone (or company) just sending in an RFP. There is nothing personable about it. We don’t like starting off communication by reading a document. We like starting off by either in-person meetings or a phone call. We like to get to know who we’re going to be working with, and that can’t happen when we’re spending hours mulling over a huge document.

Our job is to help you solve business problems through great design. For that to happen, we need to work together on identifying those business problems that need solving. Without those discovery meetings, and us falling back to a document, that makes our job a little harder, and we get the feeling we’re being talked to, instead of being talked with.

So if you’re ever interested in working with us, we just ask that you approach us like a human being and talk to us. We’re friendly and love meeting new people. It’d be starting off on a bad foot if we receive a document first. We want to talk first!

Back in May we had the Bear Sterns bankruptcy sell-off to JP Morgan. This past week it broke that Lehman Brothers was filing for bankruptcy which caused a miserable few days for financial markets. In a move that many feel should have come sooner, the government stepped up and offered a bailout plan for Wall Street with the hefty figure of 700 billion. Yes, billion with a “b”.

In a tough economic time, dollars companies spend on advertising are sure to go down. Where, in times like this, where is it best to put ones money? In your website!

We’re in the midst of a Web 2.0 shift, one in which online communities and connections with users are being formed as opposed to old static sites and pushing content one-way onto the users. Social networks are growing and social media opportunities offer low-cost (and often free) ways to interact with your user-base. Companies now utilize fan pages on Facebook as well as creating Facebook Apps that can integrate into the site itself.

And let’s not forget the mobile web. With the Apple upgrading the iPhone’s data speeds to 3G and opening up the Apps store, there’s a been a flood of mobile web application development. Before the end of the year Google’s Android cellphone operating system will debut and there will be yet another major reason to focus energies on mobile-based websites.

So instead of shelling money out for advertising, focus on your site. Create rich content. Explore social media opportunities. Work on making a iPhone/mobile optimized version of your site. While the economy may be going through some rough times, web based business presence continues to grow and you can flourish if you focus on it.

If you haven’t seen Mad Men, I’d suggest watching it. It’s quite good:

Set in 1960s New York, the sexy, stylized and provocative AMC drama Mad Men follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising, an ego-driven world where key players make an art of the sell. via

Clearly, in a show that deals with advertising, you’d expect they’d be creative in their marketing efforts. That’s what it seemed like when the show’s main character, Don Draper, showed up on Twitter posting updates as if he was a real person. Subsequently, other characters began popping up on the service. And then in a knee-jerk act of foolishness, AMC’s lawyers sent a DMCA takedown notice to Twitter and it appeared the jig was up.

Luckily, turns out AMC’s web marketing company, Deep Focus, talked some sense into their client and got them to realize that FREE PROMOTION is not actually a bad thing. Thankfully, their twitter accounts were restored and allowed to continue and fans interact with them daily.

So the moral of the story: instead of being afraid of social media, businesses should embrace it and work on creative ways of interacting with their customer base. Oh hey, did I mention Tridea is on Twitter?

In their article, “U.S. at risk of cyberattacks, experts say,” it describes how a highly-organized effort by Russian hackers preceeded the land invasion with a crippling cyber-attack (though the Russian government denies involvement). The move defaced the Georgian president’s website with images of Adolf Hitler, but other targets were much more damaging.

Hackers mounted coordinated assaults on Georgian government, media, banking and transportation sites in the weeks before Russian troops invaded. Known as distributed denial of service, the attacks employ multiple computers to flood networks with millions of simultaneous requests, overwhelming servers and crippling Web sites.

U.S. experts are saying that due to our particular reliance on the internet, we are at risk and are vulnerable to even more wide-spread effects than what Georgia has gone through. For all of us developers and designers, a shutdown of networks and server communication could be devastating. Even the downtime of a single day can wind up setting projects back several more, not to mention the potential for considerable data loss. While (hopefully) we all keep our backup servers and hard drives updated consistently, the setbacks of the loss of a week’s worth of mockups, wireframes, coding and other electronic documents and materials can be considerable.

The article mentions that this may be the first recorded instance of a cyber-attack coordinated with a land invasion. In this era of remote accessibility and dependency on the internet, I sincerely doubt it will be the last. For those of us whose careers are tied to the web, we now have a demonstrative example of why we need to be more aware of our workfiles and workflows, and how such an attack could grind our industry to a halt.

We always come across people, sometimes potential clients, that want to dive right into a project saying “I want it to look this way and that way.” It’s rare that we get a client that wants to just dive right in and map out a strategy for the content. Well, that should be what happens first. As designers, we need to know what we’re designing for, otherwise, we’re just making a page look pretty and not solving business problems. It can end up being a waste of our time, and your money.

If you’re thinking about a site (re)design, think about your content first. Think about what you want to say to your customers/users before you think about how you want it to look. Not sure how to do that? Shauna Nicholson has some good tips on the subject. Once you have great content, then follows great design, and a successful website. It takes some work, but content should never be an afterthought.