Meet our newest team member, Janet Caffray. Along with her project management duties, as the Senior Account Manager, Janet will be helping us manage development at Knowmad. Janet brings a wealth of talent and knowledge that we’re looking forward to integrating into our processes as we grow.

Wanted: Web Developer

Knowmad is looking for an ambitious, detail-oriented Web developer to join our team. If you have knowledge of PHP, Linux, MySQL and Apache as well as the desire to learn, we’d like to talk to you! Learn more at Knowmad Careers ».

However, this analogy starts to break down when you look at the issues facing businesses that are trying to make the decision of whether to move their services and data into a centrally-managed computer network shared by their competitors. Unlike the electric grid, the cloud is a 2-way street where valuable assets are moved outside the control of the business. A few of the issues that must be addressed include business continuity, security, privacy, and compliance. Given the advantages that utility computing brings, businesses are rapidly adopting the Cloud and these issues are receiving attention by researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs.

At Knowmad, the work we do is naturally part of the cloud. For over eight years, we’ve been building and deploying websites for our clients and ourselves. We have worked with clients to move data between their website and the backoffice to facilitate e-commerce or support customers.

In addition to supporting our clients, we also run most of our business over the Internet. We take the proper precautions and do the necessary maintenance to provide us the level of trust we need to enure that we have addressed the issues surrounding Web technologies. As we adopt new solutions for maximizing our time and efforts, we have starting using hosted services such as Basecamp, Liquid Planner and BitBucket.

So, what do we look for when evaluating a potential cloud solution?

1. Trusted vendor – BBB accreditation, well-known company, online reviews, and customer testimonials
2. Open standards – can we get our data back out if we decide to leave? can we get backups of our data from their systems?
3. Security – how does the vendor address security of our data? do they have a good track record? do they use external auditors (e.g., Sas70)
4. Privacy – how is our personal information used by the vendor?

In addition to qualifying our service providers, we also take measures to reduce our risk such as 24×7 service monitoring, off-site backups, alternative stand-by solutions, and limiting our exposure (e.g., we do not place sensitive information that isn’t encrypted into Cloud environments and maintain original copies of files shared through services such as Basecamp).

Like it or not, there’s no doubt that this model of cloud computing will continue to grow. The benefits it brings often outweigh the risks. However, it warrants continued vigilance while the systems, processes, protocols and laws are put into place to fully address the risks. For now, it is necessary to evaluate each piece of your business that you are considering moving to the cloud to think through the ramifications and options for managing risk.

How confident are you in putting your business into the Cloud?

Old Italian Homestead

During my travels in Italy this fall, I witnessed both the beauty of this historic country as well as the impact that neglect has on its ancient structures. Indeed, a common job in the country is in the maintenance and restoration of its architecture, art and books. Likewise, in today’s business world, the heart of a successful Web strategy is regular maintenance of your website.

Nowadays, it is no longer sufficient to build a website and deploy it to the Web as an unmanned beacon for your prospective customers to find you. Savvy visitors expect up-to-date, relevant information or will move on to the next site which is likely your competition. Even search engines have clued into the fact that an inactive site is probably an irrelevant one and downgrade its rank in search results.

Website maintenance involves 3 core components:

1. Content
2. Design
3. Features

Content

On the Web, content is king. This aspect of building a website is so important that we recommend working with a professional writer to develop the initial copy. Keep your site fresh through on-going updates, company news, a corporate blog and/or newsletter, and, as appropriate, building your corporate message through on-line services such as Google Place pages, Manta business listings, LinkedIn Company Profiles, etc.

Design

Good content cannot make up for poor presentation. Companies such as 3M, Apple, Google and GE all know the importance of good product design. This value is no different on your website as Tessa Harmon points out in her blog post “Why Thoughtful Web Design Matters.” A good design can last 3-5 years but must be maintained to support evolving Web technologies and the changing needs of your business. We have all seen websites where the owner has forced new content into an old design. The results are not pretty.

Features

Finally, website visitors are coming to expect features that make it easy for them to find the information they want or to interact with your company. Depending on the goals of your website, features could include conversion points such as contact forms, information request forms, and premium content downloads. Other features include site-wide and customized search (e.g., product or article search), online databases, client login, discussion forums, wikis, blogs, etc.

Many of these features come as part of a content management system, a software package that helps to automate the work involved in managing a website. In some cases, complex or site-specific features must be custom built by a Web developer. Like any computer software, your website software must be maintained to fix bugs, apply security patches, and keep your website up-to-speed with the competitive race of Web technology.

Italian Residence

Conclusions

Building a successful Web presence is like composing a symphony. It takes good content, thoughtful design and useful features to provide an online experience that retains current customers, delivers leads for your sales team and provides a sales tool that helps turn prospects into clients. Whether you do it yourself or hire an experienced agency to help you, don’t neglect your website.

Lessons Learned

Over the course of growing Knowmad Technologies from a freelance programming business into a full-service Web agency, I’ve learned a few things along the way (sometimes by the school of hard knocks). For instance, there was the pivotal learning moment in realizing that we not only needed to be good at designing & building Websites but also good at discovering and capturing business goals & objectives.

This particular engagement was to streamline information from multiple sites as well as to replace an old, custom-built Website with a more reliable, user-friendly content management system. After a protracted development cycle due to more custom programming than we had anticipated (inadequate planning) as well as several change requests resulting from unanticipated features (inadequate planning), we learned upon delivery of the Website that the primary goal of this project was to increase online sales (inadequate planning).

As a result, we had built a solution that met the stated needs of improving the Website design to make finding services and checking out much more user-friendly. However, had we known about the client’s business goals, we could have made strategic suggestions, such as Internet marketing or design elements that support their goals, to further improve the effectiveness of their Website. At the very least, we could have created better rapport by understanding the critical success factors that were driving our client’s need to engage our services.

In looking back on other engagements, we have found that the requirement to build a “new website” is often a presenting problem to a much larger issue. As Gerry McGovern writes in his article “Web manager: Top tasks versus tiny tasks”:

“A classic web redesign is like taking a raving alcoholic and sending them to rehab for a month. They come out looking clean and redesigned.  However, the underlying problems have not been addressed so six months later you’re back in the same mess.”

Whether you are working with internal staff, freelancers or an agency, the more you can share with your Web team, the more effective they can be in making your Web presence into a successful component of your business strategy. This starts with sharing your business goals and objectives. Again, McGovern sums this up nicely in his article “Web teams need constant feedback”:

“The Web is so important today. And yet many of the web teams I deal with are way down the management hierarchy. That needs to change because the reality is that the Web is central to the present and future success of most organizations.”

What are you doing to improve the effectiveness of your Web team?

So, let’s look at what it takes to turn your Website into a tool for your business to prosper rather than a liability to wither on the Web. We’ll look at three key elements of a successful Website project:

• Define your goals
• Create a strategy
• Measure the success

Define your goals

Before starting to build your Web site, make sure that you know what success will look like. Your goals will influence the design, features, implementation & marketing of the site. Here are some common goals for your corporate site:

• Coporate branding – ensures that your online presence accurately portrays the size, depth & capabilities of your business to prospects, partners & employees (both current and potential)
• Sales support – give your sales team tools to provide additional product or service information
• Lead generation – provide your sales team with new warm leads for prospects seeking your product or service
• Customer service – give your clients the ability to self-service their accounts or get more value from your service
• E-commerce – being able to sell products directly online can lead to higher margins and better customer relationships
• Online community – business models that serve a community can use their Web site to enable better communications & provide additional resources for their community

Create a strategy

Once you’ve defined your goal, it’s tempting to want to jump right into development. However, taking the time to create the strategy of how you will accomplish the goal will pay off in an effective Web site that delivers results. Your strategy includes the target audience, sitemap, features, wireframes, business risks, security requirements, user roles and metrics for success.

For instance, if you own a services company looking to increase leads for your sales team, your site will need to have conversion points that will generate leads. These could be product sample or demo requests, premium content downloads, appointment scheduling, contact form, request for a quote and more. The design and site structure should create an enjoyable experience that makes it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for.

Your strategy should also define criteria such as whether you will you capture contact info via a form for file downloads or allow open downloads in order to spread your content widely. If you choose the latter option, you may also want to put call tracking in place so that you can measure how many phone calls the Web site generates.

Measure the success

Finally, once you have completed the design, written the content & launched your Web site, it’s important to measure the success of your efforts. If you took the time to create a strategy, you’ll already know what you need to measure to determine the success. There are many tools that can help though a popular favorite is the freely available Google Analytics.

It is amazing how much raw data a Web site can generate from visitor traffic and user interactions. For the purposes of measuring the success of your project, Analytics allows you to customize the dashboard and setup goals which provide a quick status update to see whether you are meeting your objectives. If you are not, there are many additional reports which can help you to review user behavior and try to understand why your visitors are not taking the actions you would like.

Conclusion

Building an effective Web site involves setting goals, planning & measuring results. If you think of your Web site as a component of your overall business strategy, you’ll be better able to create a tool that drives your success rather than distracts you from your work. Like a business, creating a successful Web site is a process, not a product.

So tell me, why do you have a website?

Sam Palmisano opens up the letter with the usual rigamarole about “superior performance” and “strong EPS growth.” In past years, my inner geek could never get past all that strutting and statistical voodoo. However, on the next page, these letters get far more interesting as he talks about the IT industry, marketplace & future.

In this year’s letter, he writes about the last decade in which IBM promoted the “Smarter Planet” concept as well as refocused it’s business around services & software, shedding many of its commodity hardware businesses. From the review, he looks ahead to the future for our industry. This constitutes growth markets, analytics, cloud & next-generation data center, and smarter planet initiatives. Not much to learn about growth markets other than that IBM works in 170 countries and sees plenty of stimulus money being earmarked for development.

The analytics section is the most interesting. IBM describes analytics as mathematical models that turn information into insight. He cites stats such as IP traffic expected to reach half a zettabyte in three years (that’s a trillion gigabytes). Another interesting stat is that thirty percent of data in the world today consists of medical images. All of this data is being connected. He refers to this enhanced connectivity from computers to phones to cars to appliances to objects as the Internet of Things and says we’re heading toward trillions of connected objects (and Taoism only thought there were 10,000) and hundreds of millions of individuals (thanks to social media tools). Mathematicians and economists will clearly have good opportunities for employment in this decade!

An interesting analogy that he makes in the review of last decade is the application of “advanced engineering and management principles of the sort that prior generations had applied to manufacturing.” This idea is brought up again in the discussion of cloud and next-gen data centers as “the industrialization of IT.” This is utility computing which moves the servers out of the server rooms and data centers and into the services arena. He briefly addresses the pros and cons of this development. It’s clear that IBM will continue to invest billions into this future.

The concept of a smarter planet is no longer an if but a when. IBM plans to work with its customers to address their desire to learn how to create smarter cities, businesses, governments, health care services, etc. Let’s hope some of this knowledge can be applied to the environmental impacts all this globalization and development is going to cause as we put more and more pressure on our planet’s systems.

As you’d expect, the letter closes with the usual optimism and shout-outs to employees. Want to read the letter for yourself? As a public company, IBM makes its report available at http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2009/.