As the Web world continues to evolve every day, Astek moves right along with it. While we offer a wealth of services related to newer Web strategies and tools such as social media, good old fashioned websites are still alive and strong.

Sometimes it can be hard to know where to begin if you’ve been given the task of redesigning your company’s website. Having been through this process numerous times, I’ve shared some of my own thoughts and good articles I’ve read recently that can help you through the earliest stages of redesigning your website.

Write your Website Redesign RFP (Request for Proposal)

Like most shopping expeditions, you will find the best product or service for you if you know what you’re looking for ahead of time. This starts by drafting a document of your requirements, which are unique to you. This will help you define your objectives and come to the table with a clear roadmap.

I’ve sometimes found myself in the position of helping prospective clients write their RFPs, whether or not we get the work in the end. I’ve been on both sides of this, and find that working through the RFP with someone who has been through it before can help you immensely.

The most important thing your RFP should do is clearly outline all the parameters of the project to structure it for your vendors so that you can align the format of the proposals you receive. The more specific your requirements, the easier it will be for you to compare quotes. Comparing apples to apples will help ensure you’re picking the right vendor for the right reasons.

RFPs take on numerous forms, but the basics should include project overview, goals, services requested, key roles, expected formats, special requirements, technical requirements, existing integration points, submission details and timelines. For extra credit, you can also create a site map, which is a bullet list or flow chart of the expected pages on your website.

Read more about creating a Web RFP from MarketingProfs. (Free account required for full article)

Read Seven Tips for Improving Your Website from Entrepreneur.com’s Daily Dose.

Illustration by Matthias Pfluegner

Choose the Right Partner for You

Not all Web vendors are the same. They range from individuals to large agencies. With so many options, it’s less a distinction of good and bad and more a matter of alignment with your culture, goals, work style, capabilities, and budget. Some Web professionals focus purely on design. Others do design and development and perhaps hosting. As agencies grow larger they tend to offer more services such as strategic marketing and ongoing campaign development. Full-service boutique agencies like Astek are rarer.

Your RFP will help align the formats of the proposals you receive, which will make them easier to compare. If you didn’t get very far with your RFP, never fear. A good Web consulting firm will be able to guide you through the process. It just might take a little longer to get there. Most websites don’t tend to do a whole lot on their own, so you should consider how this will fold into your overall marketing strategy.

Like anything, you’re better off with a firm that is really good at a couple things than okay at a lot of things. Many Web firms have their own content management systems (CMS), like Webany, so you should specify if you want a proprietary or open source CMS. Mobile is becoming essential for websites, along with SEO and social media, where it can be difficult to determine the true level of experience being sold. Ideally you will find all these disciplines under one roof to reduce the amount of time you’ll spend managing multiple vendors.

Always be sure to ask for references with whom you can speak and examples of past work.

Read tips from Scott Robinson about choosing the right web developer.

Read about tips for keeping up with the digital revolution and getting unstuck.

If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. Good luck!

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Andy Swindler Categories: How To, Marketing, Web

Back in August Google first started piloting “Author information in search results” (Matt Cutts YouTube Videos 1 & 2) giving authors more prominence in SERPs

Here’s the how-to link – the original post by Google: Google Commandment #1,785,234,002

One of the final steps requires you to add the pubs you write for via the “Contributor to” link. The “Contributor to” link is not so easy to find so I embedded a screen grab of it here. Click the image for a larger version.

This should not take more than 15 minutes start to finish to set up.

It looks like Google is now also giving more favorable rankings to the Google+ profile accounts over other profile platforms in SERPs. More on that, a Techworld article expounding on a Danny Sullivan article.

To summarize all that – You need to get your profile up on Google+ ASAP!

After it’s set up with you’ve got your pic, pub links up, and your articles have your email address in them, (how that happens – see dev team) and Google waves their magic wand, your picture will pop up along side the search result, along with links to other articles you published, your Google+ profile, and social/sharing platforms, among other things.

Not only will you will be the coolest (and one of the most prominent) results in Google, but all your competing editors and authors will be very jealous. Do it for the bragging rights of increased traffic AND enhanced celebrity exposure.

You are going to have to get your email in your profile and that email address must appear in the post.  More spam – maybe. More web traffic – for sure.

There are other ways to comply but this might be the easiest for most companies. Either way you will need to involve your dev team.

And – You’ll need to get the dev teams on this soon so you are not the last one to the party.

How to Pitch Upper Management:
Push this deliverable hard with upper management as a high-value low-impact way to increase page views for existing and future website content. “Page views = sales boss!”

Get a meeting with the dev team, have them watch the Matt Cutts videos and read the full post on Google before.

How to Pitch the Dev Team:
You can tell the dev guys to think of Google as job security, if they don’t already realize this. “And our CMS should do this automatically so we are not bugging you every day to update our posts,” you’ll say to reinforce the benefit to prioritizing this project. Set a near-term deadline and make it happen.

Yes it’s just another thing that Google is making you do, but it is a must do – soon.

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Tom Lynch Categories: google, How To, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web

The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.

If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.

Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:

Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.

And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.

If you want to help and have about 10 seconds, this SOPA/PIPA petition from Avaaz.org is a good place to start.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Web

Wikipedia Blackout Page

While browsing the Web today you’re probably seeing the response to the Stop Online Piracy Act that has been introduced into the U.S. Congress.  Many major web companies feel that this legislation will have a negative effect on the way the Internet/Web works and some of them (including Google, YouTube and Wikipedia) are taking down, altering, or limiting their websites to raise awareness of the bill.

Most of Wikipedia is down entirely today but you can still read the description of the legislation here.

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Tom Hickey Categories: Technology, Web

I was honored to be asked to write an article for our favorite Chicago-family-focused website (and Astek client) Families in the Loop. Find out my top tech picks for parents in 2012:

Viva La Tech! Revolutionary Gadgets for the New Year
by Katie Hawkey, Geek Whisperer, Astek Web

Bob Dylan was righter than he knew when he warbled that the times, they are a-changin’ — and this was before the iPad. Nothing changes faster than technology, and as this new year dawns I can’t tell you how excited I am to see what the world comes up with next. Every year seems to bring… [read more]

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Gadget, Technology

As we entered the new year, one thing that most of us face is the overwhelming amount of information we dissect every day. As a community manager for several different clients, the amount is amplified.  While trying to find a way to continue to provide relative and useful information for our clients and their communities, I finally decided to check out Yahoo Pipes. I’ve heard people talk about Yahoo Pipes, even used programs and services that stated they used Yahoo Pipes, but I had never know exactly what they were.

According to Yahoo, “Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” In plain language, you fetch information, add filters and produce specific content you desire. What is so nice about Pipes is it has drag and drop modules that requires no programming background. In addition to creating your own Pipes, you can also view Pipes that others have made. How about using Pipes as an eBay price watch for certain items?

So far, I’ve only created a simple RSS feed for search Twitter for Tweets using the #cmgr hashtag, but making sure it includes common keywords. This is then sent to my Google Reader as an RSS.

Have you used Yahoo Pipes? What ways are you finding to use them? Just hearing about Yahoo Pipes? How do you see them being useful?

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Tim McDonald Categories: General, How To, yahoo!

I got a text message from a friend on New Years Eve, to myself and another friend.  And then I got the other recipient’s reply.  I didn’t think much of it until I got the above text message yesterday (from a friend with an Android phone) and went to reply that I couldn’t make the birthday festivities.  Before iOS 5 such group texts didn’t show all the other recipients, which is another matter of concern perhaps.  The sender of such a message might assume and want the same behavior as BCC’ing on an email.  When I saw the difference in this text, I wondered if it would reply-all, and if so if there was a way to specifically reply only to the sender.  Not seeing a way, I went ahead and replied.

No one else replied “Hey who is this?”, but researching my suspicion confirmed that all the other recipients would have received my text.  The only way I can see to send a reply directly to the sender would be to draft an entirely new text.  There is also a way to safeguard against this behavior entirely, but it’s annoying because it means that you have to disable MMS entirely.  And I would rather not do that because I want to be able to send photos to people who don’t have iOS devices (iMessage lets you send photos to other iOS users without MMS).  But if you want to do it yourself, you need to turn off both Group Messaging and MMS in your Messages settings (note here that I have left both on):

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Gadget, Technology

Dear Astek readers, clients and awesome individuals. I am very excited to announce that I have trekked across sidewalks, airport terminals, taxi cab lines, and up four flights of stairs (with three over-the-weight-limit bags in tow) to set up shop in New York City! That’s right Astek has officially taken Manhattan. I personally have traveled to New York City very regular since I was 17, and have wanted to move there since that time. So now I can finally say that I have done just that!

Don’t worry, I shall be coming to Chicago quite frequently. I adore the Windy City, and will never fully leave. I however am very excited for the challenge ahead and to see how Astek grows out here on the East Coast!

Until then, I give you my view from my taxi cab. Cheers!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun