With so much competition for attention, how do you make sure your website rises above to make a great first impression? More than anything else, making strategic decisions for your brand by asking the right questions will ensure that decisions about design or messaging are made with your overall goals in mind. The result being not only the lasting impression you’re looking for, but cohesion between your company values and the website that represents them.

So what are these questions? Here’s a brief list to help get you started:

1. What’s unique about your company?
2. How would you briefly describe what your company does?
3. What’s your vision for your company’s future?
4. Who is your biggest competition?
5. Who is your target audience?
6. What’s the most important decision your customers make when it comes to choosing your company?
7. How do you think your company is perceived today, and what do you like and dislike about that?
8. Why do you want to have a new website, or have your current website redesigned?
9. Why will people visit your company’s website?
10. What do you want people to come away with after visiting your company’s website?

By answering these questions you’ll have lots of information to help inform the decisions you’ll make regarding your website, whether you’re building it yourself or hiring someone to do it for you. As you think about the messaging you’ll include on the site and how it will be designed, refer back to your answers to help guide your plans to make sure you’re serving your company well!

There comes a time in the creation of every website where large files need to be shared among stakeholders. This might be when the website owner is sending content for the website to the web designer, or it might be when the web designer is sending mockups back to their client. Either way, email isn’t always the best way, and you don’t always want your work-in-progress mockups on the internet for all to discover. Plus, email software will often reject emails with huge attachments, and they can be unwieldy for all involved.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, there’s a wonderful service called YouSendIt.com. They allow you to send single files up to 100MB to people, who can then download the file using a link in an email they receive from the service for free. The recipient can download using the link in the email they receive for a handful of days, and then it expires.

It’s a wonderful, easy-to-use service.

If you need to send lots of files to someone, just zip them up and use YouSendIt to send the single zip file. This is a wonderful way to not only compress the size of the transfer, but to make it easy for the recipient to work with lots of files pertaining to one project.

Your operating system may already have an easy way for you to zip up files (Mac comes with one automatically), usually by selecting multiple files in your Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac), then right-clicking and accessing the “Archive” or “Compress” or “ZIP” function. If you don’t have a ZIP program on your PC, 7-ZIP (http://www.7-zip.org/) is a great, free program for the PC.

It’s taken a long time, but the relaunch of Outbox Online is here!

About a year ago, I decided to recreate my website. I wanted to streamline the presentation and I wanted to use WordPress as my CMS. My own site, however, took a back burner to all client projects, so I worked on it in brief spurts. Recently I decided it was time to finally make it happen, so I updated the design slightly and spent nights and weekends putting it together. And here it is!

It’s not entirely finished, but it’s finished enough to launch. I’m hoping the new design will make it easier to understand what I do, how to get in touch with me, and see examples of my recent work.

In coming weeks I’ll be adding featured projects, providing a way to get a quote on a project, and eventually, a way to purchase a packaged semi-custom website. Stay tuned!

Many times those of us starting creative endeavors (starting a new business, writing a book, etc..) can only afford to do them while still at our day jobs. I mean, someone has to pay the bills, right? Plus there’s the cost of getting a new project up-and-running.

And in addition to setting aside time to work on your new project, you need to set aside time to work on the website it needs, the social media marketing it needs, the blogging it needs – and you need to sleep.

So, when people ask me how to juggle this in a limited amount of time, here’s my advice … Click here to read more »

You’ve assembled a great team to build your new website: Congrats – that’s huge! Besides providing content & monitoring their progress, what should you be doing to help the site succeed? Click here to read more »

Social Media! It’s everywhere! It’s on everyone’s mind! Everyone is talking about it!

Some of it is hype & some of it is truth. I often get asked to distinguish the two, and almost everyone wants to know the “magic formula” for social media advertising success. While there are certainly some things you can do to gain success, there is no magic bullet or single prescription. And that’s the beauty of it. Social media is about people and communities, and each one is different.

Here’s an interesting link that describes some effective, recent social media ad campaigns: http://mashable.com/2010/09/14/social-media-campaigns/

When you look through the projects discussed there, it’s easy to think “Well, of course Gap and Starbucks have great social media ad campaigns! But not all of us have the time and/or boku bucks it can take to run a killer social media campaign. What do *we* do?”

My advice: learn from the best & play to your strengths. If a company like Starbucks; a nameless, faceless international corporation, can create content that feels sincere and personal, just imagine what a small business can do! Small business employees are close to their product/service – they’re involved in multiple aspects of the company – the kind of stories and experiences they can bring to a social media campaign are priceless. Also consider how accessible a small business is – if I can login to Facebook and contact the founder of a company with a question and get a quick answer, that’s a level of service and access that leaves me wanting to participate again and again. You don’t need a huge graphics budget & you don’t need expert coding skills. If you need help to get your brand established, or a brief consult with an experienced professional to design a strategy for you, a small investment with a skilled web designer is all it takes to get you up and running.

This post starts a new series: “Clever Internetizens” — it will be a series of interviews with people on the web who have a great web presence. They utilize their websites and social media effectively across a variety of disciplines. Today I’m talking with author & librarian, Sara Ryan (http://sararyan.com). Sara has written two novels, Empress of the World and The Rules for Hearts, and a bunch of comics including the series Flytrap. She’s currently working on a graphic novel for DC Vertigo called Bad Houses.

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Did you have a website before you published your first novel? If so, what made you have one?

I was in grad school at the dawn of graphical web browsing. As soon as I learned how to ftp and change file permissions, I set up what was then known as a Personal Home Page. (Old. School.)

I used it mainly to recommend things I liked.

• How long have you had the website that you have now?

I’ve had sararyan.com since 2001 (here’s a snapshot via the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20010219040125/http://www.sararyan.com/). The design has evolved considerably since then.

• How did you decide what it should look like?

I knew I wanted a sort of collage/bricolage appearance, because I wanted to be able to add images relating to new projects without necessarily changing the whole design. And I think the site’s retro/antique look is paradoxically less likely to feel dated over time.

I also asked my readers; the Flickr and LibraryThing widgets and the prominence of the blog on my frontpage came as a result of their feedback.

And finally, I worked with highly skilled code monkey Space Ninja (spaceninja.com) to develop the details of the look-and-feel and make sure the site worked on different platforms.

• How often do you update it?

It varies wildly — sometimes I post several times a week, sometimes I take a hiatus for as long as a month. Probably the average is about once a week.

• How do you use it to publicize the work that you do?

Like most folks, I announce events and link to interviews. I also make a lot of work available on the site. I have several short comics that you can read online (you can also buy them as chapbooks), and I’ve recorded myself reading my first novel, Empress of the World, in its entirety as a series of podcasts. I’m working my way through my second novel, The Rules for Hearts, too.

• How else do you publicize your work?

I like Twitter.

I’m on Facebook as well, in a low-key way. I respond to comments on my wall, but I’ve never set up fan pages for my books or used it to send event invitations. I can’t quite bring myself to cross that particular self-promotional Rubicon.

And I crosspost my blog entries to LiveJournal. It’s not as popular as it once was, but a fair number of folks still hang out there, especially genre writers, so there’s a certain sense of community.

My overall approach: I don’t force myself to participate in spaces that, for whatever reason, don’t feel right. Lots of writers are on GoodReads; I’m not. Lots of writers have Google alerts set up for their names and book titles; I don’t. And sure, I might miss out on seeing some nice reviews, but I also don’t have the stress of wondering whether a particular mention will turn out to be depressing or delightful.

• How do you balance and prioritize the tasks of writing and self-promotion?

In a sense, the balance is easier for me to maintain than for some of my friends who write full-time on a book-a-year schedule. They always need to simultaneously promote the current book and write the new one.

I have longer stretches between books, so the level of self-promotion ebbs and flows fairly organically. And sometimes I’ll take a hiatus from the blog (as I did in August) to devote more time to writing.

• I love that you’ve posted individual podcasts of you reading your work – what prompted you to do that?

I noticed that my computer had GarageBand!

Seriously, I like reading out loud, and podcasting seemed like it would be easy and fun — which it has been, in part because I, um, don’t worry too much about sophisticated audio production values, e.g. I just record and post.

I started the Empress podcasts as a way to build up to the publication of Rules, and continued because people seemed to enjoy them.

• You regularly blog about other authors and books you recommend – what prompted you to do that?

I read a lot; I like talking about what I read with friends; I like treating blog readers as friends.

• How much do you share about projects you’re working on before they’re published? Does it help your process at all?

I share much less than I once did. I’m less likely to report on word or page count, more likely to discuss process in a broader sense. I wrote a while back on the differences I’ve observed in revising a graphic novel script vs. a prose novel, and I have a post in the works about unexpectedly useful reading.

I think the danger of talking too much about a project-in-progress is that readers may wonder what’s taking you so long (!) and/or get tired of it before it even appears. And publishers often move a book’s release date, so if you’ve said Hey, it’s totally coming out on September 1st!, and then you find out it’ll actually be February 27th of the following year, well, that is no fun for you or your readers.

• What’s your advice to authors when it comes to their online presence?

Have one. At minimum, basic information about your books, a bio, upcoming events. Make it easy to contact you if you want to be contacted. In terms of social media, do what interests you. Don’t blog if it feels like homework, don’t tweet if it feels like a waste of time.

That said, don’t be afraid to try something new, either. It took me a while to get the point of Twitter, now I find it nigh-indispensable.

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Thank you, Sara, for your thoughts and advice to those looking to create or optimize their web presence!