IQue - Our Twist on the Web

At a developer conference this week, Microsoft announced it would be releasing a cloud computing service alongside its forthcoming operating system, Windows 7. Cloud computing is a broad term that describes software and services made available on the Internet instead of on local computers and servers.

Examples of current cloud applications are the various Google Apps like Google Docs, where word processor and spreadsheet applications are not installed on a local computer, but rather exist as a service accessed online. One of the benefits of cloud applications is that, because they exist online as opposed to on a single computer or network, they can be accessed from any computer. Also, because the services exist across a number of servers, there is great reliability, as well as the capability to handle spikes in online traffic.

The Windows announcement is a clear response to companies like Google and Amazon.com, an early pioneer in commercial cloud services. While Microsoft certainly has the resources to commit data centers to these services, it remains to be seen how they will fare in this newest stage of computing.

I recently heard a story about a business owner that I thought was worth sharing.

One day this business owner realized that he was not receiving any emails. After a lot of digging to find out the problem he realized that he had let the registration expire on his domain (www.mydomain.com), which in turn disabled his email and website. He contacted the registrar of his domain who informed him that the domain had expired and that they had made numerous attempts via email to contact him to renew it. Turns out all those emails ended up in his junk email folder and were never opened. As a result, someone bought his domain out from under him and advised him that they would be happy to sell it back to him for $150,000!

These days, domain brokering is becoming becoming quite a business in itself. These individuals keep an eye out with domain registrars for expiring domains and snap them up for a nominal fee—sometimes as low as $10.00 a year. Then they turn around and try to sell them for an exorbitant amount of money that the average business owner cannot afford.

Don’t let this happen to you!

• Be aware of where and who is the registrar of your domain
• If possible host your domain with a company that will handle the renewals for you like Twistique!
• You can often set up an auto-renewal with registrars
• Mark the renewal date on your calendar. Set up a reminder for a month before
• Consider renewing your domain name for 3 years or more years at a time, so you don’t have to worry about it for while.

In our ever-changing economy everyone is trying to make money and keep their businesses competitive. Don’t let these domain brokers take advantage of you. Once you have an established business and domain, losing it can cause serious setbacks to your business. Your website goes down, no one can email you and all of your business collateral is no longer valid—a pretty expensive misstep.

If you are not already aware of who the registrar of your domain is, find out and keep track of it or ask Twistique how to find out this information. If you already have all of this information, consider yourself a step ahead of everyone else!

Once your point person is in place, initial planning for a website begins with inventorying and mapping out the content that will go into its population. Organize your content into 4 primary sections.

It’s always a good starting point to gather and evaluate all of your companies current marketing material. This gives you many areas to build upon and will usually let you know who was responsible for what. You will also be forced to revisit topics such as vision statements, demographic studies, focus group tests (for products) and any other areas of marketing that may need updating.

Once you’ve taken inventory and established your sites initial focus, you need to think about what your main sections are going to be and branch out from there. Your main sections are your main topics to write about. Even if you start with a paragraph per section, that’s better than nothing and a great foundation to build on. It will undoubtedly spark other ideas and needs. Also, having a grasp on content per section/page, will help make decisions on development technologies needed along with specific pieces of functionality to present it.

Now, let’s start to put our initial flow chart together. Notice I said initial, as it will evolve and always be considered a work  in progress. You can use programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, Word, Visio or OminGraffle to set your charts up. I usually like to sketch things down on graph paper first and then fill in the details with Photoshop or Illustrator. But, that’s just me.

Always, always, always start with your Home page! After all, this is usually where your domain is initially going to go. Think of it as your reception area that is going to be guiding potential customers wherever they need to be. This must be aesthetically pleasing, easy to evaluate, strategic and straight to the point.

As you’re creating your flow chart, compile lists of topics for each page. These will usually help determine your overall  navigation structure and play an integral role in developing your sites usability. This is also when you would start to tentatively assign individual or group tasks as well. It’s important to know who is going to be responsible in helping you gather the sites’ information and whether or not you need to hire more staff.

At this point, you just need to continue with the process until you have the initial phase of your content map (flow chart) layed out, tons of topic ideas/content blocks written and most of your navigation planned out. And, be sure to always keep your sites’ focus in mind. Meaning, don’t do sections/pages just to do them. Keep things simple and try to get a potential customer to your end result goal as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Keep going through this process over and over again until you feel like an effective content map, with documentation, has been written and ready to be evaluated by a web developer(s).