Great strategies are just the beginning. Finding success is the reward. We love both. We work with companies develop brands that engage and help businesses who want to leave the place where little bits of marketing don’t do enough. We help start integrating the pieces that are needed not the ones that under-perform. We don’t make you better at what you do. We won’t make a financial planner a better financial planner, or a dairy farmer a better dairy farmer. We just make the shift to effective marketing.
Many of the services we provide are listed below. What can we do for you? Give us a call (517)358-6794 or send us a note. Let’s have a no hassle conversation about where you are and what we can do to help.
Eric is a self-taught web developer and designer who focuses on WordPress development. He’s been with the business since fall of ’15 and has helped with many site-builds and development projects.
When not designing and developing custom websites, Eric can be found tinkering with a variety of hardware and different programming languages. He loves to understand how things work at “the bare metal” so that he can bring them to their full potential or otherwise do something beyond what they were originally meant to do.
Eric sees programming as a series of puzzles that need to be solved, which exhilarates him. The newer and more complicated the challenge the better. Each line of code has its place in the whole—getting them all performing their jobs most efficiently is what makes it the most rewarding for him.
Eric has been working with websites since he was about 14 and loves building with WordPress. Its intuitive interfaces and extensive APIs make it a joy to develop with and it is constantly improving with every new release. The way that it works “under the hood” leads to so many possibilities for creating fantastic websites that can be easily maintained for many years to come.
Lately I’ve had quite a few conversations with fellow web developers looking for guidance on how to win an RFP. We’ve been blessed recently with quite a few successes and I’d like to share a little secret with you, the same secret I’ve shared with them. Winning RFPs simply comes from listening. Understanding your clients needs and demonstrating you can meet them quantitatively.
You don’t win RFPs by betting on qualitative information, hoping for uneducated customers or relying on slick salesmen. You don’t win RFPs by having been in business longer than your competitor, by having more sites or by having a huge staff. You win RFPs by demonstrating good work, by matching the right staff to the project, and by showing the client your capability to exceed their expectations.
We’ve all felt insecurities but they are just that, insecurities. Remember these two things; 1) RFPs are part of a vetting process designed to separate wheat from the chaff and 2) RFPs are often written by committee so simple, clear objectives are hard to come by. This is where the saying, “Fail quickly” comes to mind. It’s OK to be the chaff, but find out quickly by identifying objectives, understanding why the objectives exist, and proving whether you meet the need. Base your decision on facts, not insecurities.
Achieving 100% compliance and traceability shows that you understand the project from the clients point of view
As to whether you’re wheat or chaff for the project you’re looking at right now, find out fast by bringing a Requirements Traceability Matrix, RTM, into your bidding workflow. In programming, this can be an extensive project in itself, but here we are using simplified chart to prove, through small Test Cases, whether you can fulfill each requirement. It’s an easy way to see how requirements relate to services. When you’re done, you’ll know whether to bid with confidence or no-bid.
How do you set up a Requirements and Test Cases for a Traceability Matrix?
Set up a graph and create three columns titled Requirement, RFQ Location and Response Location. list what the client wants, their Requirements, vertically under the first column. Now show the relationship to the RFP by filling in the second column where the request is located. Your ability to fulfill a need is the result of a Test Case, often referred to as a Test Oracle. If you move forward, you’ll have to write out the proposal. What better way to start than with all of the Test Cases and their related Test Oracles in a concise outline.
Proving your capabilities in outline format in a separate document and listing the numbers from your outline in the third column of your chart provides an easy to follow index for your team and for your client. As a side note, you’ll often find that your clients will refer back to the RTM you’ve created as the basis for determining project completion. That in itself is a key differentiator.
What does an RTM look like for ?
The list of requirements can become extensive, but let’s look at what a few examples would look like in chart format:
Requirements Traceability Matrix
Requirement
RFQ Location
Response Location
Name, Title, Address of three references
Section 3
I
Ability to complete the project within the allotted timeline
Section 4
II
Development of 3 Custom Post Types
Section 5
III
——————————————————————————————————
The corresponding Response Location’s outline would look like this:
I. Name, title and address of three references:
A. Name, Title and address of reference 1
B. Name, Title and address of reference 2
C. Name, Title and address of reference 3
II. Ability to complete the project within the allotted timeline:
A. Schedule clear for dates specified in RFQ Section 4. Ability to complete reviewed by KM and JW.
B. Real Big Marketing is able to begin the project upon issue of purchase order per client request and will be completely implemented no later than August XX, XXXX(NOTE: Per client instruction this excludes Section 12 – Content Migration).
III. Development of 3 Custom Post Types and 3 corresponding templates:
A. Per RFP Section 5, client requires three CPTs; 1) Testimonials, 2) Coupons, 3)Staff. Reviewed by SB, KM, JW. No technical barriers. Add .5 hours to meet design spec.
——————————————————————————————————
It’s a simple solution to remove the insecurities and make the bid/no-bid decision. Wheat or chaff, you’re streamlining your RFP response process. When you decide to bid, you’ll find that you’re tightly aligned to the client. You can quickly demonstrate, point-by-point, that you’ll meet and exceed their expectations. No slick salesman required, just build out the outline. You’re more qualified than you think.
Thank you for requesting an analysis of www.michigantheatre.org. We appreciate many of the design and User Experience (UX) choices made to date. Placing the Upcoming Events in the home screen is a smart choice. Well done. But this evaluation goes beyond telling you that you did a good job and need to focus on SEO, or that your favicon is missing.
No, this information dives into some important usability opportunities and enhancement. Such as, where should a user go after seeing the events on the home page. We would like to share these problems, issues and opportunities with you.
Technical analysis was completed with several tools including those available through pingdom.com, yslow.org, builtwith.com and sucuri.net. Interpretation of that data along with a comparison of the current site design to commonly accepted best practices was completed by Steve Bennett, Kyle Maurer and Joel Worsham.
Site Performance
Speed
A fast loading site is extremely important. Site visitors and search engines expect sites to load quickly and to be able to navigate to subsequent pages without unnecessary wait times. It has been proven that visitors to sites will visit more pages, interact with more features and even purchase more products on faster sites. In addition, many search engines including Google tend to rank faster loading sites higher in their search results.
The michigantheatre.org website is not experiencing debilitating load time issues but there is significant room for improvement. After all, a site can’t possibly be too fast.
We tested the site for speed. Your website’s load time was between 4.23 seconds and its performance grade was 88/100. In English, these numbers tell us that your pages load slowly, sometimes very slow, even though your requests are low.
To facilitate better load times, we would recommend reviewing your choice in hosting provider, implementing multiple levels of caching, reducing the number of images and replacing them with sprites and css elements, using a content delivery network or CDN to transmit images, along with minifying and concatenating scripts and stylesheets to compress data transmission across the web.
We reviewed the site for security issues. There were no reports for malware or blacklisting. However there is an important security consideration.
WordPress out of date
The michigantheatre.org website is powered by WordPress but is currently two major releases behind the latest version of WordPress. Keeping the software that powers your website up to date is the number one way to keep your site secure. We recommend you update immediately all of your plugins, your theme and WordPress and also assign a reminder or a responsible person to periodically ensure that all such software is kept up to date.
Though the events are listed on the home screen, using the function, “Buy Tickets” leads the end user to the contact us page. This is unexpected behavior and could be remedied with either a built in ticket sales platform or connection to a third party application. Either of which is completely workable from the WordPress platform. Within the past 6 months, software has been developed which allows for scalable ticket sales, will call, and for end users to print their own tickets. Some theaters have seen ticket sales jump to 80% of total sales because customers could print their own tickets. This type of system can reduce Will Call to at or under 5 minutes.
We could also enhance the experience when dealing with events that do not require a ticket by simply removing the link.
Text embedded in images
Years ago we used tools like Photoshop to present artistically styled, aesthetically appealing text on web pages. It was standard practice to create and present images containing text on a site. Today, advancements in website creation tools and web browsers provide more effective options. Now text can be placed on web pages and then styled to present the same visual end product but without requiring the use of images.
Here are a few reasons why it is NEVER a good idea to embed text inside images:
Text inside images cannot be read by search engines and as a result, no SEO value is added to the page
Images slow down the loading of your site
People with disabilities using devices such as screen readers will not be able to read the text
Visitors on slow connections may be unable to load the images or may simply not see them due to their slower loading times
Text inside images cannot be translated for visitors wishing to view the page in another language
Text inside images cannot be scaled and re-sized appropriately based on a user’s screen size which means many visitors will struggle to read the text
Updating the text in images requires editing the original image file, uploading it to the site and replacing an existing one which is considerably more maintenance work than just changing the text on the page
Users who increase or decrease the zoom on their browser will see a reduction in quality and readability of the text inside images
Maintaining aesthetic continuity across the site is more difficult when using images where the colors and fonts cannot be easily modified or inherit the styling of the rest of the site
Users cannot select, copy and paste text that is embedded in images
On the michigantheatre.org site, text can be found embedded in several images under Get Involved. This is an important issue and should be corrected.
Your site does feature a responsive design. Good job! This means that the site adapts to the screen size it is being viewed on which is ideal and the standard best practice. However, simply making a site responsive is not enough. It is important to ensure that all visitors to your site are presented with content that is readable and usable, regardless of their screen size.
The michigantheater.org website does get a lot of factors right but there are still a number of usability issues present. Here are just a few worth noting:
As mentioned in above, text used inside of images is problematic. Visitors to this site on small screens will see all the images reduced greatly in size so that any text within them becomes very difficult to read. Were this text separated from an actual image, the size could be preserved and remain readable. This issue occurs in numerous places throughout the site, especially in the header and on the home page.
The home page includes great content but on small screens the phone number and directions are hidden down in the footer. The phone number is not actionable. In other words, nothign happens if you touch it on a touch screen. This results in users being unable to call or get directions from you site.
This is an opinion, but if we could review the analytics, we could see if it should be a fact, the Events Hotline should be listed before the office line because that’s the one that makes you money.
The Logo runs over the menu at certain widths and could use a css adjustment.
Because the Theatre is a public facing organization we thought you might be interested to know how your site works for people with disabilities. We ran the site with a screen reader active. The results were intriguing. The reader caught the name of the site and began to work through the header and main navigation, but stopped working effectively in the navigation items with sub pages. It also read incorrect information for title items. In the body copy area on the home page, it skipped the description of the theater and began describing empty image names.
Accessibility has become a hot button and one that deserves attention. We recommend working working with an accessibility consultant to update the site for users with disabilities. Doing so would improve usability for those with impairments. This would be a strong tactical move with strategic results. You would separate the Michigan Theater from it’s competitors including the Potter Center, the Jackson Symphony and the local movie theaters. A strong PR move which would speak volumes about your support of the community.
Here are some supporting articles for further thought:
Your website is rich in content, has a responsive layout, is built on WordPress and is relatively easy to navigate. However, there are numerous opportunities to improve and a few issues that should be addressed in the short term.
We’d love to discuss the way these changes could enhance ticket sales and other topics relating to your site in greater detail. If you would like to have a conversation with us to clarify what we’ve outlined above and elaborate further so that you can take action, please don’t hesitate to call or email us:
Thank you for requesting an analysis of www.thedomesticengineer.org We’ve completed our hands on, thorough review and here are all the problems, issues and opportunities that we found:
1. Performance issues
A fast loading site is extremely important these days. Site visitors and search engines expect sites to load quickly and to be able to navigate to subsequent pages without unnecessary wait times. It has been proven that visitors to sites will; visit more pages, interact with more features and even purchase more products on faster sites. In addition, many search engines, including Google, tend to rank faster loading sites higher in their search results.
The theexponent.com website is experiencing serious load time issues. Our tests showed that the website’s load time is 3.1 seconds and its Pingdom score is 71. These numbers indicate that your site is significantly slower than most other websites to the point where users are being negatively affected. Improving this metric will certainly increase user engagement and positively impact both conversion rates and search engine rankings.
To facilitate better load times, we would recommend; reviewing your choice for a hosting solution, implementing multiple levels of caching, reducing the number of images, utilizing a CDN and minifying, and concatenating scripts and stylesheets. If you have questions about any of these, please let us know.
Users with disabilities view websites differently by using devices such as screen readers. Unfortunately your site is poorly equipped to support such devices and as a result, visitors using several alternative viewing methods will be unable to access and engage with your content. We strongly recommend taking steps to address accessibility. Contact us if you would like to learn more about this.
3. Navigation confusion
Clear, consistent, intuitive navigation is critical for any website. Theexponent.com demonstrated a number of issues relating to navigation and general confusion about where to find relevant information. The screenshot below demonstrates a call to action that confused us and is certainly confusing other visitors. We would recommend an audit of your content and your site’s analytics which would generate a report on the content visitors are actively seeking on your site as well as the ways they are engaging with the content. This information would be used to determine the optimal navigational structure for improving end user experience.
4. Text embedded in images
Years ago we used tools like Photoshop to present artistically styled, aesthetically appealing text on web pages. It was standard practice to create and present images containing text on a site. Today, advancements in website creation tools and web browsers provide more effective options. Now text can be placed on web pages and then styled to present the same visual end product but without requiring the use of images.
Throughout the theexponent.com website, there are numerous instances where text is embedded within an image (for example, the main menu navigation links). Here are a few reasons why it is NEVER a good idea to embed text inside images:
Text inside images cannot be read by search engines and as a result, no SEO value is added to the page
Images slow down the loading of your site
People with disabilities using devices such as screen readers will not be able to read the text
Visitors on slow connections may be unable to load the images or may simply not see them due to their slower loading times
Text inside images cannot be auto-translated for visitors wishing to view the page in another language
Text inside images cannot be scaled and re-sized appropriately based on a user’s screen size which means many visitors will struggle to read the text
Updating the text in images requires editing the original image file, uploading it to the site and replacing an existing one which is considerably more maintenance work than just changing the text on the page
Users who increase or decrease the zoom on their browser will see a reduction in quality and readability of the text inside images
Maintaining aesthetic continuity across the site is more difficult when using images where the colors and fonts cannot be easily modified or inherit the styling of the rest of the site
Users cannot select, copy and paste text that is embedded in images
One area we found intriguing was a minimal effort exerted to make the site useful to End Users on handheld devices. It was intriguing because we see a trend indicating that over 50% of users are on hand held devices.
Making the theexponent.com domain adapt to different screen sizes is referred to as responsive design. Responsive design has become the standard for providing one website on multiple plaftorms or devices instead of using a separate mobile site. Making sizes and shapes adjust to fit a device is powerful, but it’s not enough to simply change the way things look. It’s also prudent to understand what choices, data, and/or information are made available to each type of device. Successfully pairing these two sets of changes will provide the End User with a more valuable interaction.
This is a critical change which should be addressed to improve satisfaction levels for both internal and external customers of the college.
We strongly recommend taking action as soon as possible in order to improve the experience for all visitors on non-desktop interfaces.
Conclusion
While your website does feature some useful and compelling content, there are numerous opportunities to improve and a few issues that should be addressed in the short term.
We’d love to discuss these and other topics relating to your site in greater detail with you. If you would like to have a conversation with us to clarify what we’ve outlined above and elaborate further so that you can take action, please don’t hesitate to call or email us:
Though the events are listed on the home screen, using the function, “Buy Tickets” leads the end user to the contact us page. This is unexpected behavior and could be remedied with either a built in ticket sales platform or connection to a third party application. Either of which is completely workable from the WordPress platform. Within the past 6 months, software has been developed which allows for scalable ticket sales, will call, and for end users to print their own tickets. Some theaters have seen ticket sales jump to 80% of total sales because customers could print their own tickets. This type of system can reduce Will Call to at or under 5 minutes.
