1. Make the most of your pins

1. Pinterest is a visual site. Make sure you pin visually interesting things. High quality designs and high resolution images go a long way. Keep in mind that others may pin your products and posts even if you don’t, so always choose good images for your products and blog.
   
2. Be mindful of URLs. Try to link to the original source of an image whenever possible. Link to the specific page where people can find the content, not just the website homepage.
3. Adding the price to a pin’s description will automatically add a handy ribbon onto the pin and add the pin to the “Gifts” category.
4. Tag pins appropriately. You can tag pins in their description by putting the # symbol in front of the word. They’re called hashtags and they work on Pinterest just like they do on Twitter.
5. Tag other users. You can tag other users on Pinterest in the description of a pin and in the comments just like you do on Facebook using the @ symbol.
6. Share videos too! Most of Pinterest is images, but there’s an entire videos section. Upload a couple of those, too.  Pinterest just inked a partnership with Vimeo that will surely grow this content stream as well.

2. Breathe new life (and traffic) into old content

Here’s an example:  Back in November, Andi spoke at the Future of Web Design in NYC. She put together a thorough and visually interesting slide deck, flew to New York and spoke, and then wrote a blog post about it. Where it’s been sitting getting very little traffic for the last several months.

In five minutes, I scrolled through the slides, found a couple compelling visuals, took a screen shot, uploaded it, added a description, a couple tags, a link to Andi, and a link back to the blog post she wrote. Ta da! Anyone who clicks on my pin will be taken to the Big Sea site.

If you have a lot of followers on Pinterest (which happens by pinning interesting and useful things surrounding interesting and useful topics), your followers will eagerly click your links to find those blog posts.

Promote your Pinterest presence

• Tweet, post on your Facebook fan page, maybe even write a blog post about joining Pinterest or when you have something interesting to share. Always (tastefully) use your networks to cross-promote one another.
• When you pin, periodically post your pin to Twitter and/or Facebook. Only sometimes, though. Don’t annoy your followers!
• Add a Pinterest “Follow” and/or “Pin It” button to your website or blog. We can help you do this, just ask!
• Want to know what’s already on Pinterest from your website? Replace YOURURL with your company’s website like this: http://pinterest.com/source/YOURURL
  For Big Sea, that’s: http://pinterest.com/source/bigseadesign.com

Collaboration, crowdsourcing and contests, oh my!

You can add collaborators to any of your boards. Play around with the idea of inviting your staff, strategic partners, celebrities or even a couple select clients to collaborate on a board with you. Social Media Examiner even suggests using Pinterest to collaborate with your team on office shopping lists.

Just like running a contest on Twitter, you can have people tag you or a hashtag around just about any theme. Depending on your product, one of the most effective might be asking fans to pin pictures of themselves with their favorite product of yours and tag you.

Want to do something with all that fantastic new content? You can repin all of it to a new board, and then maybe even embed the whole board into a blog post.

The concept of contests on Pinterest is still really new, but Lauren Drell recently made special mention of Lands’ End Canvas‘s “Pin It To Win It” campaign. Lands’ End asked users to create a Pin It To Win It pinboard, categorize it as Women’s Apparel or Men’s Apparel, and pin or repin 10 to 20 images from the Lands’ End site or Pinterest page. To enter to win a $250 gift card, all users had to do was email Lands’ End the URL of their pinboard. Some quick searching (and math) tells us that around 200 boards X ~15 images each means some 3,000 Land’s End product images were injected into the streams of thousands of people. Pretty cool!

 What’d we miss? Got any hot tips?

You can follow us on Pinterest: Andi / Charlene / Jessica

If you’re marketing to women, especially women 25 – 45, you should be on Pinterest.

• People are spending an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes on Pinterest, as compared to Twitter at 36 minutes or LinkedIn at just 17 minutes.
• Pinterest is growing at an astounding rate and shows no signs of slowing.  Users have increased over 145% since the beginning of 2012 alone.
• Pinterest primes people for sharing and shopping for the products they love.
• Pinterest generates more referral traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ – it’s second only to Facebook at this point.

Source: Internet Marketing Inc. (Click image for full Infographic.)

You may already be using Pinterest in your personal life, but it can also do amazing things to spread brand awareness and grab new website visitors.  It’s time to bring Pinterest to your business.

Setting up your small business on Pinterest

1. Get an invite. Tweet at me if you need one.
2. Sign up with your brand’s Twitter account. Note: You can only sign up with a Facebook profile, not a Facebook fan page. There’s currently no distinction on Pinterest between people (like Facebook Profiles) and brands (like Facebook Pages) on Pinterest. If you are the face of your brand, you might want to sign up as yourself.
3. Choose your username. This is also your Pinterest URL. This should be the same one you’re using on your Facebook fan page and Twitter account.
4. Enter your email. Use the email you use for your business. People can search for your email so choose wisely.
5. Choose your password. Pick a safe one that you can share with anyone in your organization you’d want to pin with you as your brand. (Like Twitter, there’s no way to allow multiple people to sign in except shared passwords.)
6. Choose some topics and Pinterest will follow a few accounts for you.
7. Create some boards. Set up boards that relate to categories of inspiration on your website or for your industry.  For instance, a financial blog might have boards that are “Financial Literacy” or “Monetary Motivation” or “Worthy Splurges!”.  A retailer has it easy – set up boards for moods, seasons, trends, styles – basically, any of the ways you’d categorize your inventory.  This is a topic for a longer post to follow, but just dive in for now, and start pinning a few items.
8. Add the Pinterest button to your bookmarks bar and start using.  Pin things from our own site and blog; pin things you find that are helpful for your clients or customers; just pin things!

But wait! Listen first.

The best way to get started on any new social network is to sit back for a little while and listen.  After you spend the time setting up your account, take some time to explore other boards and users.

1. Find your friends. If you’re using Gmail or Google Apps for your company email, authenticate and follow they people in your address book. (Don’t invite everyone, though. That’d be spammy.) You can repeat this as many times as you want for different email accounts. If I was creating a Big Sea Design account, I could find people on jessica @ bigseadesign.com, andi@, info@, etc.
   

   Be sure to click along the top to see not only the pins, but also the boards and people for each term.

2. Follow more people. Do some searches for:
   • Yourself and your website.
   • Your competitors, colleagues and industry leaders.
   • Relevant keywords and phrases.
   • Your Facebook and Twitter friends.
3. As you find relevant boards and people, follow them. 

Get pinning!

You’ve set up your profile and you’ve listened, now you’re ready to go. As you find relevant pins, start with repinning.  Use the simple ‘Repin’ button at the top of another pinned element to add that pin to your boards.

Then, start looking for new, fresh content to pin.  From your blog, your website, relevant industry publications – anywhere! If you’re using the Pinterest browser extension, this is ridiculously easy.  If not, be sure to paste in the URL that you want to link folks to when they click your pin (see how this works?).

In the description area, make sure to note what you’re pinning and why.  ”Great tips on saving for college!” or “Amazing recipe for natural body butter!” – get people to click without giving them too much information.

Pinterest etiquette:

• Remember, Pinterest is a social network. That means you have to be social. Get a lay of the land by seeing what the people you follow are pinning. Like their pins and comment on them liberally. Don’t blatantly self-promote. Only pin content that’s worthy and repin plenty of stuff from other people, too.
• Pinterest is visual - so make sure you have great photos that are worthy of repinning when you pin content.  A great photo, paired with an intriguing comment will help inspire the click-through that you’re looking for.
• Read up on Pinterest’s own etiquette guidelines, and follow them.

Are you using Pinterest for your brand or business already?  Post a link here so we can follow you, and follow us (Andi, Jessica, Charlene).

It’s a way for farmers to manage hand-picked crop harvesting and payroll by counting buckets using their iPhones, then generating reports from the web app.

Nothing else exists like it right now, so farmers have been using any number of archaic means to get buckets tallied for the day – from poker chips to hand-tallies to Excel spreadsheets.  Whether inefficient or inaccurate, the counts have always been contentious and the pickers have always had reason to distrust the system.

Until now.

I spent the day in the blueberry fields of Polk County today, watching our app in action as the farmer with whom we’re building the app started his spring harvest.

These berries are not quite ready to pick – obviously.

But these are almost ripe and ready.

When the farmer has enough berries on the bushes to pick – even if it’s not all of them – he starts hiring pickers to pull them off.

It all starts with entering the pickers into the system.  This usually happens at the beginning of the season, and today was their big sign-up day.

We added pickers straight from the iOS app today.  The truck is the mobile “office” that moves around the field with the pickers as they harvest.

When the farmer adds pickers, they assign an ID number that coordinates with a QR code on their ID badge.

After they’re added to the system, they start picking berries.

When they fill up a bucket or two – or three – they bring them to the truck and dump them into the lugs.  One bucket on each side.

Here’s where our app comes in:  the pickers get paid per bucket - so we needed a way to quickly add buckets (“picks”) to a picker’s daily total and get them back into the field.  During heavy picking weeks, there can be 20 or 40 pickers standing in line to dump their berries and get back out there.

Speed is essential.  Language is an issue.  Remedy?  QR codes and a touch-screen bucket add screen.

We scan the code, which pulls up the picker’s name and ID, then type in the number of buckets.

Save, and scan the next badge.

It was a beautiful field to be working in – and truly the most authentic user experience I could’ve hoped for in which to test our app’s performance.

We ran into a few bugs which we quickly fixed and I was able to determine where our bottlenecks in process and flow are.  Instead of watching server logs and data, I was able to watch the farmers when the scanner wouldn’t read, find out if the QR was too small or see if the pickers were wearing their badges appropriately.  I saw how they worked around or with the features and functions we’d built into the app, and found out what they want to be able to do with it next year.

The experiential data gathered today – through observation and interviews – was invaluable. The field conditions are indeed a different user experience than anything we’ve encountered before, and seeing it first hand is the only way I think we could’ve really understood and optimized the app before we launch.

Oh – and did I mention we were picking blueberries?  Fresh, juicy and literally just off the bush?  Cows and horses wandering in the yards on either side of us.  Bugs buzzing and biplanes cruising above us.  The crack of a shotgun as a farmer tries to scare birds out of the field.  Our office pales in comparison.

Clients want:  an awesome website, with cutting edge design, breathtaking interface, goal-oriented content strategy and oh – it has to work. You want your input to be considered. It also has to be cheap and done tomorrow.

We want: a portfolio piece, time to try new techniques and methods (responsive design or HTML5, for instance), cutting edge design, to be trusted for our expertise, to be compensated according to the value of our talents, breathtaking interface, goal-oriented content strategy, and enough time to do our best work.

While there are certainly a lot of common goals, you can see there are some conflicts.

I’m working hard on finding a way to resolve these conflicts, but I don’t think there’s a perfect solution.

My colleagues in this industry all tend to work differently: either by project basis, by the hour, or on retainer. And they all complain about why what they’re doing isn’t working or what’s making the relationships tenuous.  Some of them ditch client work all together and head to app development.

At Big Sea, we love – and thrive – on client relationships.  We love collaborative building processes – seeing the fruits of your domain knowledge with our design and development expertise coming to being.  It’s at once thoroughly fulfilling and unbelievably frustrating. It’s rewarding, annoying, pushing-and-pulling, testing and trying.  It’s so much fun.

Every project – and yes, I mean every, single, project – has very different needs. Sure, some overlap with regard to design or development, but the relationship – the number of emails, the phone calls, the level of input from us or trust from the client – that’s all different every. single. time.

Everyone asks for the same thing:  easy to use, elegant, simple.  Yet, every single website looks very, very different.  Every web app has varying levels of complexity; every blog needs different levels of customization.   Some of you are perfectly happy with Thesis out-of-the-box and just want some great fonts and a header;  some of you want to look totally different than anyone else and demand a completely customized layout.

It changes.  Constantly.  That’s the nature of the process and in my opinion, it’s what makes good websites awesome.  

The ability to adjust on-the-fly to improve a project or rethink our initial approach is vital to the creative process, and it’s severely limited when we bill on a project basis and simply want to get the work done so we can invoice.  We very rarely work on a project basis.

We choose to work on an hourly basis (and provide estimates as accurately as possible) because it allows the fluid process of building a website to remain fluid.  We tell our clients that we bill “hourly and honestly.”  We track our time using Toggl and literally charge per minute (we don’t round up) because that’s what feels right.

If we estimated your site would take 35 hours but you decide to add some neat functionality or want to rework the header three times, we don’t feel slighted by doing additional work.  If we estimated your site would take 35 hours and you fall in love with our first-crack mockup and green light every decision we make together, you don’t feel slighted by paying for the worst-case-scenario.

But hourly isn’t always the best choice for emergencies – and they will pop up – or for engaging us to improve and grow your site or app.  A third-party plugin will go down, a server will misbehave, or an upgrade will be necessary.  You’ll find usability snags or want to increase speed inside the app.   In these cases, we usually engage in retainers or prebilled hours at a reduced hourly rate.

When we work hourly, we are happy to work on your project as long as it fits into our schedule. When we’re on retainer, we can be emergency designers.  We’re committed to the growth and optimization of your web presence. When we work on retainer, we’re happy to make sure that time is a part of our schedule when you need it because we know it’s coming.

Our clients tend to enjoy retainers because they can be guaranteed that we’ll be spending a set amount of hours each month on their projects without any surprises – and they enjoy a reduced hourly rate.  We can make staffing and project commitments without hesitation. And we can both work together throughout the month to build a better website, design incredible brand pieces, build a stronger social media platform, create a stellar email campaign, improve search engine rankings and of course, optimize everything for killer site performance.   Retainers rock – for everyone involved.

That said, I don’t think that retainers are the perfect solution for every client and project.  I think we’ll always have a mix of hourly and retainer-based clients, and there will always be a level of unpredictability in workload and project planning.  Keeps me on my toes, if nothing else.

I know I’m not the first one to contemplate the client-agency relationship.  Our industry is still young (10ish years?) and still pushing boundaries and establishing best practices.  We’ve been operating on a traditional advertising agency model, but I think there’s got to be a better way.

Now it’s your turn:  if you’re a client, what do you honestly think of the hourly billing model?  What do you think of retainers?  What do you suggest as a fair and reasonable approach to billing for our time/work and being available to meet your needs in emergency situations?

The list was long.  Too long for one 40-minute presentation.  So we put together this blog post as an appendix of sorts to give you more detail and better explanations of the more complex command-line approaches (fastest and easiest) to moving your databases and sites from a development environment to a production site.

Our New Project Checklist

To save ourselves hours – no, days of time when we’re ready to launch, we send all of our new clients this simple checklist to solicit all of the credentials and information we might need as we build their website.

Here you go.  Feel free to copy/paste and redesign to your needs.  You’re welcome .

Moving Your Database

Transferring a database can be a nightmare without the right tools. Did WP’s export function cover everything? What happens if you’re using a plugin that doesn’t play nice with that? The easiest way to move your database live is, of course, to actually be developing on the live DB in the first place, but for large sites that will have ongoing work, that’s not an option. You’ve got to have a quick and easy way of copying your database.

So, there are two options:

phpMyAdmin. First, your host probably has an installation of phpMyAdmin that will allow you to access, export, and import your databases. This is your best bet if you aren’t comfortable working in a shell account via SSH (Secure Shell).

When you log into phpMyAdmin and select your database, there’s an EXPORT tab near the upper right. Navigate to that, select everything, and export it as a gz-compressed file. Create your new live database (likely via your host’s control panel), then open that in phpMyAdmin as well, and do the reverse: Go to IMPORT, and upload the DB dump you just downloaded.

Option 2? SSH. This one’s easy: Create the destination db first, then do the following:

mysqldump -u [dev username] -p [dev database name] > dump.sql
mysql -u [live username] -p -D [live database name] < dump.sql


You may need to supply the -h [hostname] or -P [port] parameters, but that’s the gist of it. How you move the dump file between servers is up to you, but using scp (try man scp) is much better than the old download/upload. You just copied the db. One last thing for security: rm dump.sql

Fixing WordPress Options and Entries

You’ve cloned your database. If you were working on a subdomain, you now have a problem: Your WordPress installation will be pointing at the wrong place. There are two entries in the wp_options table that determine where links point, “siteurl” and “home.” One points to the root of your site, one to the root of your WP installation (these are often, but not always, the same thing).

If you’re using phpMyAdmin, navigate to the wp_options table and edit those two settings to match the new site.

If you’re using SSH, enter mysql -u [live user] -p -D [live db], then enter the following SQL:

UPDATE `wp_options`
  SET `option_value` = 'http://your.live.site/'
  WHERE `option_name` IN ('siteurl','home');

If your site root and wp install differ, enter that twice and substitute WHERE `option_name` = ‘siteurl’ or WHERE `option_name` = ‘home’.

Another issue you may encounter if you’ve added a bunch of posts that link to one another: The links in your posts are probably pointing to the development site. That’s cool, we’ve got a SQL formula for that, too. If you’re using phpMyAdmin, you’ll want to bring up the SQL tab for this one:

UPDATE `wp_posts`
  SET `post_content` = REPLACE(`post_content`,'http://old_url/','http://new_url/')
  WHERE INSTR(`post_content`, 'http://old_url/');

You’re all set. Close phpMyAdmin or type exit if you’re using the command line tools.

Let’s move the site itself.

Moving Your Files

This part’s for SSH; If you don’t have SSH access, sorry, you’re stuck doing it via FTP. This’ll make moving files painless. There are two situations:

Same server: cp -R ./dev_dir ./live_dir (substitute directories appropriate to your server)
Different servers: use rsync or scp to copy your blog files.

We like to move files directly from server to server to save time. Depending on your connection, moving a large WP install can take over an hour via FTP. This method will most likely take less than a minute, given the speed between two servers and not having to transfer it all twice. You can do this via a mobile tether and not have to worry about your bandwidth being throttled.

In fact, if you’ve got an iOS device, check out Prompt from Panic, Inc.

Once your files are moved, update the database credentials in wp-config.php, and you’re good to go.

Using Beanstalk for Deployments & More

We’re big fans of Beanstalk (www.beanstalkapp.com) for version control and deployments. If you’re going to be maintaining the site you’ve just launched for any amount of time, it’s probably a great idea to look into using Beanstalk.

Why? Deployments. Deployments are awesome. Once you’ve used them, FTP will become a miserable experience by comparison (not that FTP needs any help there).

Here’s why it’s so awesome: You can set up automatic and manual deployments to multiple locations from your SVN or Git repository. It works over FTP or SFTP (recommended) for SVN. If you’re using Git, you may prefer deploying via capistrano.

When using SVN, we like to automatically deploy to the development site from /trunk. If you like branches and merging, you can set up a deployment from /branches/live to the live server, but Versions (a popular Mac SVN client) can’t merge. If you’re not down with doing merges, you can deploy from /trunk just fine, just be sure you’ve got it set to manual deployment – it’s safer for the live site if pushing code is always 100% intentional.

That applies to git as well, except you’d be deploying from tags (master, live, etc) instead of SVN paths.

Chris Coyier of css-tricks.com recently published a pretty cool screencast that walks through getting deployments set up. Aside from MySQL acting up, it’s a smooth process.

Mac users will likely want Magic Bean for deployment notifications and not having to log into the website to manually deploy.

Odds & Ends

WP plug-ins we find ourselves using a lot:

• Redirection by John Godley: Easy to manage redirections from the client’s old site.
• WP-Help by Mark Jaquith: Write documentation that lives in the WP admin area.

You might also check out any of a number of security-related plug-ins.

Need an SSH client? It’s built in to mac and unix/linux environments (just open a terminal), but if you’re working in Windows, we recommend Putty.

For reference, here’s the presentation:

1. Tell me about yourself, where are you from, what’s your background?

Originally from Delaware, caught the programming and art bugs early on. Went to college at first at Virginia Tech for Computer Science, but ended up leaving; Not enough Comp Sci in my Comp Sci. Ended up moving to FL and getting a Graphic Design degree instead, with much smaller class sizes and more focused classes. The intent was to get a Web Design degree after that, but it became increasingly obvious to me that I could teach those courses: I’d been building websites for longer than most of the professors.

I’m part Comp Sci, part Graphics Guy. Also, I’m sorry for that sentence.

2. How you ended up at Big Sea:

After college, I took a job as an in-house jack-of-all-trades designer. Print, web, conventions, you name it. Cool job, until you get tired of the subject matter. Then you’re increasingly compelled to try something more interesting. In my case, I resigned and went to work for myself, building and launching Listy.us. I learned a metric ton about building web apps, had a blast, but ultimately the project flopped. Got a job at a local charity doing web development for a bit, but it wasn’t quite right for me.

When Jessica tweeted that Big Sea was looking for a developer, I jumped at the chance.  Some Twitter messages, emails, and a Skype conversation later—best interview process ever, by the way—and I was working at Big Sea. It’s an awesome environment with great people.

3. What do you like about working in web design/development?

It’s a creative problem solving job, basically. I think the easiest way to explain it is the idea of Flow, i.e. it’s an almost perfect mixture of challenges and successes. There are some rough bumps here and there (“Why won’t you work? Whyyyyy?“), but in general it’s really rewarding.

That, and the people are pretty awesome. Probably the best community of any industry.

4. What types of projects DO you like working on best?

Ones with documentation… (glaring at OpenCart)

In all seriousness, I love a project where I have input on every stage of it and get to work from the ground up. There’s a great feeling of accomplishment when you can say “I helped build that!” as opposed to “I helped modify / fix / redesign that.”

Opportunities to learn and implement new technology are great, too.

5. New technologies or skills you’re eager to learn?

A lot of the new JavaScript based tech that’s been evolving in the past few years have been catching my interest. Coffeescript + Backbone is my latest playground, but I’ve got my eyes on RaphaelJS, among others.

Sass is pretty awesome as well, we need more opportunities to use that in projects.

PHP 5.3 and 5.4 have nice features. I’m looking forward to those, but I figure they won’t be something you can rely on having in all environments until the heat death of the universe.

6. What is your favorite place to be?

Outside, in shade, 74 degrees and breezy, with a beer and a laptop. Extra points for sound of leaves or water. Negative points for wind chimes; screw wind chimes.

7. If you had $1,000,000, what would you do with it?

Spend my days building web apps to try and have a positive impact on the world. I’ve got a bit of an altruistic streak that manifests when I don’t have to worry about paying bills, and no shortage of interesting ideas.

Follow James on Twitter (@tkstudios) and connect with him on Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter’s your best bet, really.

And it hit me: we are not emergency designers.  We never have been.  We ask tough questions and spend time in discovery and research.  We dig and dig before we ever start designing.  We make recommendations.  We’re not “yes” people; we’re “why” people.  When you tell us your website needs a feature, we don’t just agree; we ask why. Then we push you (and ourselves) to dig up a better answer or provide a foundation to back up your request.

And yet, we end up “hurrying up” more often then I’d like.  We tend to take on emergency projects even though they don’t fit our general mold of process and project management.

It’s not that we can’t build a site quickly; we certainly can.  It’s more along the lines of our initial approach to a project.  Once we get to the design and development stage, we’ve already done our due diligence and the process can fly. But we like to know we got there with good reason and research.  We like to know the stakeholders are all on board with what we’re about to produce, and we like to know that every conversation that needs to be had has been had.

We’ve had a virtual onslaught of new project inquiries in the past few weeks.  And that’s a great thing, of course. We’ve been working hard on great projects and launched this gorgeously redesigned site and have been out writing, speaking and getting to know folks. Our clients give us fantastic referrals to everyone and anyone. We’re busy and loving it.

Of the new inquiries, a handful are really great, qualified, well-fitting projects for our team. Clients who want us to spend the time digging and learning and researching before we build; who want us to labor over the details and create really polished, beautiful web and mobile apps.  Who want us to thoroughly test the products before they launch.

And another handful are looking for “emergency” designers to take over a project that went south or start on something immediately that was supposed to be done last week (I need this 200 hour project launched by mid-February!).

Next time you have an emergency, open this box.

To these emergency clients, how fast we can get them a proposal reflects on how fast we can turn the project around – when in fact, the two are not at all related.  We need time to spend doing our research before creating a proposal. We need time to determine the best platform and approach and our own resource assignments.  It’s a complex matrix and it all takes time to do it well.

That said, we’ve taken on quite a few projects that weren’t going well and turned them around – but those clients recognized that the process would take both time and hard work.  They brought us realistic expectations and we turned out some awesome work.

It’s amazing when expectations meet reality, isn’t it?

I’m feeling liberated in this realization.  It’s yet another “red flag” for my arsenal of client selection tools that help us determine fit for new projects, and a step forward in solidifying our approach to design and development.

Do you find yourself providing emergency design services?  How to you react and how do those relationships turn out?

They’re going to look for a “Log In” link in the upper right corner.

They’re going to try to get in touch using a “Contact” page.

Sticking to expected navigational and architectural structures on your website – especially when you’ve got a lot of content or a complex hierarchy – helps establish trust with your visitors.

Rules, boundaries, roadmaps, breadcrumbs, met expectations - all serve to help your visitors feel comfortable to explore even farther, to dig deeper and keep clicking.   Just like fences encourage kids to explore the full expanse of playground, visitors want to know that your site meets their predetermined website schema so they can feel comfortable pushing the boundaries.

The breadcrumbs, the visual cues that fit expectations, the comfort in navigation serve as reminder that they are safe from harm (“the unknown”). As long as they remain in that secure environment, they can confidently and freely enjoy themselves.

One errant click that lands them somewhere they didn’t expect – or worse, leaves them without a clear path back to from where they came – and you’ve lost their trust.

Straight from the research on website schema’s by Bellman & Rositer, “ease of navigating the website strongly influences attitude toward the site, which in turn increases the strength of beliefs about the new brand’s attributes and also, fairly independently, overall attitude toward the brand.”

Can you think of a time when you visited a website that didn’t meet your expectations and how that made you feel about the company, brand or product?

Starting a new year is a great time to start working on new limits, new approaches and new systems for your business and your life.  So, our intentions are as follows:

For the business:

1. Move to a more client-centric design approach by building partnership agreements rather than one-off build contracts.
2. Make it all responsive. Or at least adaptive. There is no excuse for fixed-width any more.
3. Learn more, and more and more. Every Friday afternoon is designated self-improvement day. That means learning through tutorials or videos, reading or working on personal projects.

Andi‘s intentions

1. More personal communication; less email. Talk it out. Touch base and catch up. Plan regularly scheduled phone calls with all ongoing development projects.  Travel if necessary for kickoff and important milestone meetings. Go the extra mile.
2. Give back to the community. Speak more; attend more meet-ups; finish the book I’ve started writing three different times.  Share my knowledge more.
3. Plan better. Stick to an organized, well-structured project planning approach and spend more time on thorough contracts with detailed SOW agreements.

Charlene’s intentions

1. Go responsive. Just dig in and make it responsive. It’s not exactly a brand new concept. Just do it already.
2. Get Sass(y). CSS is awesome and SASS just adds MORE awesomeness. We all need something new and fresh in our lives sometimes–this is it.

Jessica’s intentions

1. Better time management. Follow the schedules and to-do lists I make, but don’t use nearly enough. Say “no” more, prioritize better and spend less time browsing the wonders of the internets.
2. Write more. I’d be happy if I wrote about just about anything at this point as long as it’s more significant than emails, texts and Facebook updates.
3. Move quicker. Send the stupid email, don’t stare at it in Drafts for an hour. Get things out of “planning” and into “production” faster.

James’s intentions

1. Give back more. Finish the next version of one open source project, start another one, and help others with theirs. Use GitHub to interact, not just for versioning things.
2. Play and learn more. Tinker with new technology on a weekly basis. Watch more screencasts. Read more books. Always have a podcast handy.
3. Take over the world. Muahahahaahaaaa!

Keith‘s intentions

1. Find a balance between efficiency and properly documented code/projects.  We work in a client driven business – budgets and timeframes conspire to sacrifice the proper documentation of code and projects for on time delivery. this year i want to find more of a balance – a few extra hours documenting code will make future updates easier and save time in the long run
2. Take more pictures! My hobbies shift from year to year and I’ve been ignoring this one for too long. I want to shoot more panorama shots of the downtown St. Pete area. Here’s one that i took in Charleston.
3. Work on pace.  Ever hear the old saying “start out like you can hold out”?  I’m going to work on applying that this year. Too often, I procrastinate; looking for motivation to tackle a big project and then code in a burst. I’ve found that if I work steadily, but more slowly, I can get more accomplished because I end up turning out more code.

Now you’ve seen ours and you can hold us accountable (seriously – hold us accountable!).  What are your professional intentions for the year?

Does Using a 3Rd Party Api to Publish to Facebook Decrease Engagement? Update!  Maybe Not.

Facebook claims they fixed the bug causing updates posted by 3rd party applications (like Hootsuite, Twitter, TweetDeck, etc.) to have 80% lower engagement than those posted directly on Facebook. Despite EdgeRank Checker tentatively agreeing (sort of), I’m skeptical.

We hypothesized that there were four possible reasons why this was happening:

1. Facebook penalizes 3rd party API’s EdgeRank – FIXED
2. Facebook collapses 3rd Party API updates
3. High chance of being scheduled or automated
4. Content is not optimized for Facebook

First of all, as they mention, they’re comparing apples to oranges. Impressions are a measure of who sees the content. Engagement is a measure of who interacts with the content. In addition, the actual algorithm penalizing apps is only part of the problem.

Given that:

1. to my knowledge, Facebook is still collapsing 3rd party updates,
2. the actual quality of the posts is often worse, and
3. people have the ability to hide all updates by certain apps from their feed,

I still believe 3rd party posted content will receive fewer impressions and (especially) engagement than content posted directly through Facebook and formatted accordingly.

Link to the study by EdgeRank Checker.

Facebook’s Hybrid News Feed Has Smaller Pages Swimming Upstream

Facebook released the hybrid news feed in September 2011. A subsequent month-long study found that “most Pages experienced a decrease in impressions, while larger Pages (especially those with 100k+ fans) tended to experience an increase in engagement.”

Link to the study by EdgeRank Checker.

Keep in Mind What Fans Are Expecting When They Like Your Page

• 33% of consumers say “When I want to communicate with a brand, I post on the brand’s Facebook Page.”

Source: CMO Council

• 47% of consumers say “When I connect with a brand online for a customer service or support issue, I expect answers within 24 hours.”
• 67% of consumers say “When I Like a brand on Facebook, I expect to be eligible for exclusive offers.”
• When it comes to “why I Like a brand” (what consumers said), vs. “why we think people Like brands” (what marketers said), marketers and consumers are on very different “pages” (pun intended).

Link to the study by CMO Council (PDF).

Why Fans Are Unfollowing Your Brand on Facebook & How to Stop Them

• 46% – The information was not interesting.
• 46% – The information was published too often.
• 39% – The brand is no longer of interest to me.
• 23% – The brand published information I did not appreciate.
• 14% – Information was not published often enough.

“Engagement in Facebook brands’ walls is down 22%,” said Syncapse CEO Michael Scissons. “But declining engagement has less to do with brand fatigue in general than with marketers doing a bad job and shoving boring [content] at consumers.”

“At DDB, Bernbach taught us to behave with respect for the consumer, recognizing that brands are in the hands of consumers, not marketers. Facebook is making it more relevant than ever today. Brands got blinded by the technology, forgetting about the basics of relationships in the way they interacted with consumers,” said Sebastian Genty, DDB’s planning director. “They need to learn to behave like any human being, with respect and transparency. Rhythm is key, as in any new relationship.”

Link to the Study by DDB & Oppinionway.

So What Have We Learned?

• Increase your Affinity score by consciously working to get fans engaged on an ongoing basis.
  • There’s nothing worse than being boring! Be interesting and controversial. Start a debate. Ask questions. Have people fill in the blank. Create a poll. Post trivia and quizzes.
  • Respond to Likes on posts with questions and always respond to comments to keep the conversation going.
  • Give things away and offer discounts. When you do, use the words  ”coupon” and ”$ off” (not % off). Here are 26 ideas and an app to help you out.
  • Promote your Page offline, on your website and use the Open Graph to make it easy for your fans to participate outside of Facebook.
• Improve Edge Weight by posting photos, videos and links which generally have the highest Edge Weight. This doesn’t have to be hard.
• Don’t overwhelm people.
• Keep posts at 40-80 characters or less.
• Post one to four times per week and never more twice per day.
• Optimize updates for Facebook.
  • Although using 3rd party tools can make it easier, avoid them when possible.
  • Tag other Pages and Events. When possible, use your personal profile to tag other people.
  • When posting links, choose a good picture.
  • Avoid hashtags, shortlinks and other evidence of cross-posting.

We’ll be posting a Part 3 all about the timing of posts soon. Stay tuned!

If you haven’t already looked at Facebook’s new Page Insights, look them over today. Do these studies back up what you’re seeing with your brand? Do they contradict? Let us know and be sure to Like the Big Sea Facebook Page!