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

We’ve reached the end of a significant phase with eMainstay, a client with whom Astek has spent the last three years building the My25 web-based meal-planning software to improve health and reduce management costs for communities housing people with developmental disabilities.

In order to broaden the market for the software, which has proven highly successful in numerous USDA-funded studies, eMainstay approached Astek to develop a robust new My25 prototype for the software and online community development. We chose video as the form to convey our vision for the future of our software and a truly innovative approach to household-oriented meal planning.

The videos below say it better than words. Bon Appetit!

My25 Business Overview

My25 Online Toolkit Intro

Extra special thanks to Vin Design, Kathleen Ermitage, and Sedgwick Productions for their multiple contributions to the ongoing success of this project.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Technology, Web

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I don’t have much to add to them, but I thought I’d put up some recent finds from around the web that have been really helpful in solving some of the many technical issues I encounter.

• Get WordPress Permalinks Working with Windows, IIS, and ISAPI Rewrite Got WordPress running on a Windows server? Then you should have ISAPI Rewrite and the configuration described in this article to get your blog’s permalinks in a much more search engine (and human) friendly format. We also have ISAPI Rewrite working on our server to get pretty URLs working in Drupal.
• “301” Permanent Redirects Another link in the search engine optimization domain, this guide will show you how to set up these redirects in many different types of server technologies. If you host a site and are making changes to it that make certain URLs obsolete (porting the site to a new CMS, say), then it is really worth your while to set these redirects up for the old pages. Otherwise your search engine ranking could suffer.
• Preparing Your Website for Internet Explorer 8 IE8 came out at the beginning of this year and is gaining some traction. It is way more standards-compliant than previous versions of IE, which is great. However, most sites have IE-specific workarounds (read: hacks) which now pose problems for this new version. This concise guide breaks down everything you need to know about making your sites now work with IE8.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology, Web

As a programmer, this always bugs me.  Not that it’s easy to get it right in many circumstances.  But if you aren’t sure your progress information is accurate, just show an hourglass or something.  </GEEKGRIPE>

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Technology

Another Microsoft headscratcher solved, thanks to another blog. But I only got past my sticking point with the help of a comment about halfway down a slew of comments on the post. So hopefully highlighting that helps someone else. Or if you’re still stuck, pour over the rest of the comments. Problems like these rarely have one neat solution for everybody. Here’s the text of the post reproduced:

Ever seen this error when debugging a web app in the VS.NET IDE:

Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. You do not have permissions to debug. Verify that you are a member of the ‘Debugger Users’ group on the sever.

Well, search the net and you’ll get 100s of hits talking about .NET debugging options, IIS configurations, permissions, admin access, etc…. In my case everything checked out and still no luck. Well here’s another cause of this error: adding http://localhost to your Trusted Sites list…. Yup that’s right. Sounds simple, but that’s what did it in my case….

And the comment which got me debugging again:

Just wanted to share an additional tidbit. After trying everything listed here without success, I tried moving localhost from the IE “trusted sites” zone to the “local intranet” zone – and voila! Not sure what the difference is, but it worked.

Note the remarkable similarity, yet frustratingly subtle difference between the solution to this problem, and the one I posted about here.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

I had the *ahem* pleasure of trying to get a Visual Studio development environment up and running on Vista recently. Most of the installation and configuration seemed generally straightforward. But debugging a web project just WOULD NOT WORK. It wasn’t even straightforward for a Microsoft support engineer to eventually arrive at the quite simple solution.

Here are the details, in hopes some other poor soul in the same boat can find this. Our environment was Visual Studio 2005 on Vista Home Premium (be sure to get the Vista-specific update for VS2005). And when trying to debug a web project the IDE would go into debug mode but then drop right back out of it, with no error message.

The solution was to add localhost as a trusted site thusly (need to have that https box unchecked before adding):
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click for full-size version

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

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We recently took on a Ruby on Rails (RoR) project, which as a technology is most at home in a *nix world. And although that world has come to include Mac OS X, I ended up going with a Linux platform for the project. I know a lot of folk develop RoR in OS X, but it was easier for me to create a standalone development environment in Linux with Parallels. I actually created two different Linux virtual machines as I was getting this going, and it was a breeze. The first was with Ubuntu, a Linux distribution I had been hearing about and wanted to check out. But it turned out to be too hand-holdy in terms of not letting you tweak enough behind the scenes, so I went with OpenSuse in the end. And setting both of them up in Parallels was as simple as downloading the install DVD ISOs and opening them as new virtual machine installs. Pretty cool!

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

I needed to create a service with Visual Studio 2005. I had done this with 03, and apparently there’s some new stuff in 05 that’s not entirely intuitive. I had some significant head scratching and googling until I finally saw my new service show up in the Windows service control view. In my research this blog post turned out to be the most complete and helpful set of instructions on how to actually get a service installed:

http://www.grinn.net/blog/dev/2008/02/windows-services-in-c-part-2-adding.html

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

Here’s one of those posts I hope someone finds a-googling in search of the stupid little solution that has eluded them for hours. If you’re implementing your own signout button in an ASP.NET site (as opposed to using the built-in LoginStatus control), be sure to follow this pattern:

Session.Abandon();
FormsAuthentication.SignOut();
Response.Redirect(…);

You MUST do that redirect immediately after the SignOut() call. I had some other database calls, unrelated to any ASP.NET framework web stuff, between the two and a subsequent call to Request.IsAuthenticated() in my Global.asax was returning true. Taking out those intervening calls made Request.IsAuthenticated() return false. So any other custom operations you need to happen on signout must happen before the above code.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

With more than 13 million iPhones in the world and the most comprehensive developer strategy ever for a mobile device, Apple has enabled many developers to quit their jobs and turn to iPhone app development full-time. In addition to an easy-to-use developer toolkit that makes it easy to make the apps, Apple extended the concept of the iTunes store to distribute the applications wirelessly to iPhone users. Since its so easy to get your app in your pocket, popular apps quickly sell into the millions. Prices for apps vary from free to somewhere around $20, but most are priced around $1 or $2, making even goofy apps a no brainer for users. Its not hard to justify the entertainment value of a fun app that costs less than a cup of coffee.

While some developers look to get funding to take their projects farther, many are content to write and distribute apps on their own. Pangea software has created Mac games for more than two decades. According to founder Brian Greenstone, “It’s crazy. It’s like lottery money. In the last four and a half months we’ve made as much money off the retail sales of iPhone apps as we’ve made with retail sales of all of the apps that we’ve made in the past 21 years — combined.”

There are useful apps and frivolous apps. The point is that Apple has created a mobile device and platform that are limited by little more than a developer’s imagination. Some of my favorites are Ocarina, Evernote, Twittelator, SnapTell, Shazam, BeatMaker, and CTA Tracker.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Technology, Web