Putting Clients in Control

A decade ago we noticed a trend that business marketers wanted the freedom to do this, but most other web design firms charged hourly for simple content changes. In 2001, there were few affordable packaged solutions we could afford to offer our clients, and open-source options were not, in our opinion, user-friendly. They were great for “webmasters,” but they were too complicated for amateur website administrators.

SiteBot

So, I decided to develop Orbit’s own content management system.

The system had to be easy for clients to use to minimize support calls.

• It had to be simple.
• It had to be secure.
• It had to be flexible so custom features did not require custom back-end development.

The first version of our content management system, called SiteBot, was released in 2003. We included SiteBot in all our proposals and priced our website services no higher than the average Chicago firm. This strategy provided us with a big advantage over our competitors, and business started to grow.

The Orbit Baby is Born: Mighty-Site

By 2005, WordPress, Drupal and several other open-source CMS’s had gained attention, but they were still meant for developers and webmasters – not marketers. As websites with a CMS were a standard requirement, we wanted to offer something noticeably better packaged and more powerful to make an impression on prospective clients.

Orbit released the second major version of its content management system and branded it “Mighty-Site”. Brand and usability were the primary motivators for the upgrade. This build was a team effort involving Orbit’s new design team and new PHP programmers. Inspired by a 1940’s ad, I illustrated my second daughter – who just learned to stand – swapped a rattle for a barbell, and the Mighty-Site baby was born!

Ecommerce

By 2006 we had more opportunities to design and develop ecommerce websites and needed an out-of-the box codebase to offer. Ecommerce platforms were highly competitive and offered many features, but we believed we could design and build something better. Utilizing Mighty-Site’s flexibility, it was relatively easy to expand its capabilities for product catalogs, coupons, shipping rules, sales tax, and everything else that makes ecommerce complicated.

Usability => Money

At this point, developing the website was the greater challenge, but we focused on the aspects that made clients money – Design and Usability. Ecommerce sales conversion was a hot topic, and we believed we could deliver a more user-friendly process than off-the-shelf software. For example: to reduce confusion, website users placed items into their cart without needing to leave the product screen, and to prevent cart abandonment, we designed the one-page checkout form and never required a customer to create an account.

Affordable Customization

Most ecommerce projects needed something customized for their customers. Because the developers of our websites were also the developers of Mighty-Site, we had a cost advantage over random developers enhancing random open-source codebases. Thus, our clients were able to invest in custom built ecommerce sites without absorbing expenses for enhancements to the content management system.

Custom Applications

Experience gained from ecommerce development created opportunities for us to offer more complicated and custom front-end website applications. New clients were taking advantage of our services to create websites highly integrated with their normal business operations:

• Membership Directories
• Event Calendars
• Ecommerce for Event Registration
• Location Searches with Google maps
• Custom products for publishers and travel agents
• Customer Relationship Management

Mighty-Site never needed customizations to handle the administration of the custom data. However, there was an unforeseen consequence to the complicated data architecture: Mighty-Site was reaching usability and technical limitations on the amount of data it could effectively serve per screen. We also needed the ability to quickly expand its feature set with custom management applications and various reports.

Mighty-Site 2.0

In 2008, Orbit went to the drawing board with a new design and development team to plan the third major release of the content management system – Mighty-Site 2.0. The motivators for improvement were Speed, Organization, Expandability and, of course, Usability. Mighty-Site 2.0 was released in 2009 and is still in use today.

We have launched at least 150 websites with this system. What is more remarkable is that many clients from the early years have upgraded their sites to the new version of Mighty-Site, usually with a website redesign. The results are even better! As time advances, so does technology, and Orbit, for the sake of our clients, is right there with it.

By Barrett Lombardo

Here are some of the top fears of website owners that can slow down your web marketing:

• Fear of launching a website before things are “final”
• Fear of sharing your secrets
• Fear of being in a web video

Let’s look at each of these and consider how emotions can get in the way of results.

Fear of Launching a Website Before Things Are “Final”

“I don’t want to go live until everything on the site is completely finalized.”

It’s common for people to hesitate or delay before launching a new site. They’re reading the copy, looking at the pictures and they’re finding things that could be just a little…bit…better…

Why not take an extra week and wordsmith that last paragraph? Because the extra time isn’t worth delaying the value you’ll get from the new website. You’ll get better results sooner if you launch it now and tweak that paragraph next week.

By the way, there is no such thing as a finished website! A good site is designed to change. Hopefully, you’ll be updating and changing things regularly for years. That means the best time to go live with a new site is the first day it’s better than the old site.

Digital ink is never dry.

Fear of Sharing Your Secrets

“I don’t want to write about that topic. My competitors might steal my ideas.”

It’s natural to be afraid to say too much. Some of us have had information taken and used by competitors. (I once saw a proposal from a competitor that looked awfully familiar. As it turned out, most of it was language I had written a year before for a different proposal. Where did they get that?)

But it’s probably a mistake to not write something useful because you’re afraid it might be used by others. It goes against the premise of the Internet. When you share something you become more widely known and more relevant. I would rather be plagiarized than be irrelevant.

If you’re interested in SEO and link popularity, you may actually want other website owners to take your content. When you share your content with other bloggers (guest blogging), you’re actually hoping people will take your writing and put it on their sites, because when they do, they’ll add a link back to your website.

You get what you give.

Fear of Being in a Web Video

“I don’t want to be on camera. I won’t look good in video.”

We’ve all felt this before. It’s common. It may be more shyness than fear. But since video is such a compelling upgrade to a website, getting over this shyness can make a big difference. People want to know who they are working with or buying products from. It’s called trust and video helps you build it.

If you had a potential client or customer to your office, would you want them to see your face and hear you talk? So if you have a visitor to your website, why don’t you want them to see and hear you? Think about it: it’s not that you don’t want to be seen and heard by others, you just don’t want to see and hear yourself. Silly, isn’t it?

So give it a try. The 3 minutes you spend talking about your business may be seen hundreds of times. This might be the most effective use of marketing time you’ll ever spend.

Say it once, say it well, say it to many.

Other examples of how fear can inhibit web marketing…

• “I’m afraid to ask for reviews from my customers.” – Positive reviews are becoming more important than ever. Muster up the courage to ask your biggest fans to write a review; you’ll be glad you did.

• “We don’t want to show too much information about who works here. We’re afraid our competitors will try to steal our people.” – This is understandable, but leaving out team bios makes your site less personal and makes visitors less likely to feel a connection to your business. If you think including bios of your team will affect employee retention, you may have bigger problems. [This is a good point that would also make sense in the section about video. Especially because the video section doesn’t specify WHY video is compelling (humanization, face-to-a-company, etc etc)].

• “I’m afraid of what people might say about us if we try social media.” – People talk. They’ll talk about you whether you use social media or not. The real question is, do you want to be part of that conversation? Skip social media and you have one less way to listen to and learn from others.

 Here are some tips to help get you going…

• Trust yourself: Think of your past successes and how good you are at what you do. Imagine yourself getting it done, one step at a time. Think of what the next success will feel like.

• Get out of your comfort zone: We grow the most, professionally and personally, when faced with challenges. When you’re vulnerable, you’ve got opportunity to improve.

• Start Small: The first step may be hard, but take a small step. You don’t have to do it all at once, but you can start now. If you don’t do anything, nothing will happen. In marketing, that’s a bad thing.

• Read “Getting Naked”: This book makes an excellent case for putting yourself out there, focusing on helping others and always being honest, even when it’s hard.

Being concerned about getting things right is good. But worrying too much can cause problems, especially online, where the best results are seized by those who embrace taking action, sharing information and putting themselves out there. Remember, accomplishments are proportional to attempts!

“Audentis fortuna iuvat.”
Fortune favors the bold.
The Aeneid, Vergil

by Andy Crestodina

1. WordPress
2. Drupal
3. Mighty-Site^®

WordPress

WordPress can be considered an “entry-level” content management system for websites and blogging. However, besides the blog software, WordPress provides few standard features. Thankfully, the variety of plug-ins can be useful tools for the savvy web-marketer with a do-it-yourself attitude.

There are a few great things about WordPress

• Simplicity: WordPress is easy to learn and easy to maintain.
• Tons of Help: There is a huge community of designers and developers that provide themes and plug-in enhancements.
• Low Cost of Entry: Most plug-ins are free, and there are thousands of low-cost design themes to install.

For these same reasons, a common assumption is that a website built with WordPress would cost less than using other platforms.

Any business should consider these points

• Good for Business? Unless significant customizations are made, a WordPress site can make a less-than-professional impression.
• Customizations Take Time: All customizations require extra time to build the administration modules within WordPress.
• Frequent Maintenance: With open-source comes security issues, so upgrades are released to the core system and plug-ins frequently.
• You Get What you Pay for: We believe that a website will cost as much as the effort put in to make it impressive regardless of the platform that drives it. Orbit’s service, high-end design and custom development can make a WordPress site appear professional, unique and should produce great results.

Drupal

Some clients are looking for a highly robust content management system option that does not tie them to Orbit. They may want the option to use their own development team for maintenance or insist on hosting on their own servers. Orbit has adapted to this need by offering Drupal.

Why?

• Great Out-of-the-box: Base features are fantastic.
• Well Structured: Drupal is extremely powerful, well organized, and easy to administer.
• Expansive: The module library for common features and enhancements is professional and reliable.

But Drupal has disadvantages too

• Customizations are expensive: All custom front-end development requires careful planning and extra time to build so it can be administered within Drupal. This can result in 10-15% more time needed to build a custom feature.
• It runs hot: Drupal’s a massive system requiring more server memory and resources to run than Mighty-Site or WordPress. Hosting costs may be higher than anticipated.
• Designed for Pros: Because Drupal has so much to offer, there is a lot more to learn. Drupal is a viable solution for a business with a professional web development or IT team. Thus, the administration resources for Drupal can be more expensive than other systems.
• Ecommerce is just OK: Drupal also offers e-commerce and blog modules, but they are challenging to modify to meet Orbit usability and design standards.

Although Drupal projects tend to be more expensive than Mighty-Site and WordPress, we are always confident the website will meet the business needs of our clients. Expect great results for its users and administrators!

Mighty-Site^®

Mighty-Site is a proprietary content management system created and maintained by us. Designed specifically for the use of our clients – who tend to be marketing managers and amateur website administrators, we believe our CMS is simple, fast and easy to learn and use.

The great advantages to using Mighty-Site are

• Expertise: All of the Orbiteers know its capabilities – project managers, developers, designers, strategists, support, everyone.
• ROI: The budgets for custom features are almost 100% applied to the design and development of the front-end experience for your website users. Usually no customizations are required to Mighty-Site^® for specific client features.
• Security: Only Orbit developers have access to the codebase. Open-Source systems are constantly probed for security flaws to conduct attacks en masse.
• Website Enhancements: Orbit can efficiently implement enhancements to your website. If you have seen the feature before, odds are we have designed and implemented it on a client website. This abundance of experience allows us to improve our process, lower the cost, and deliver the best results for our clients.
• Ecommerce: Although Orbit’s ecommerce websites are an extension of our standard website codebase, the design and usability of the website is highly custom. Our ecommerce web designs proven to provide the highest results in terms of user appreciation, ease of use and sales conversions. This is an important differentiator between WordPress and Drupal where ecommerce is an add-on module.
• Support: Because Orbit has no control over the upgrades to a WordPress or Drupal website, and thousands of developers are contributing to the open-source modules and new versions, supporting an open-source system can be very expensive due to its unpredictability. Support for Mighty-Site is included in your hosting and license cost. If there is a bug, we fix it. If you are having trouble formatting some content, we can help. Forgot how to change something? Our support team is ready.
• Upgrades: Although Orbit has learned a lot of tricks by getting under the hood of WordPress and Drupal, we only continue to enhance Mighty-Site when necessary or based on direct customer feedback and requests. We want to keep Mighty-Site simple and powerful. The Mighty-Site features we have added over the years are solutions to specific and consistently requested website administration problems. If you’re a client of ours and want to discuss a Mighty-Site upgrade, give us a shout!

Mighty-Site and WordPress

The Perfect Pair?

Orbit has been using WordPress since 2010 as an extension to our standard codebase for clients wanting to blog on their website. We developed our own theme code so WordPress can reside alongside Mighty-Site. This is a low-cost, high-value solution. Clients need to log into two systems, but these systems take advantage of what they do best: Mighty-Site serves custom-designed marketing websites and applications; WordPress serves the industry-standard blog. And website users don’t even notice the site has two systems.

Expect the Best

Regardless of the platform, Orbit’s website development process, service and quality focus on results. The websites we build will:

• be search engine optimized to be easily found.
• have a custom design to extend your brand.
• have features designed and built to convert users into customers.

We build great websites because we value our clients and our clients’ clients. You can check out our latest work in our portfolio.

By Barrett Lombardo

We know that restaurant websites can be accessible, user-friendly, and beautiful given the right functionality and design. When Straits Restaurant Group, a collection of trendy dining establishments with locations along the West Coast and Southern U.S., came to us in need of new website, we gladly jumped aboard to make it happen.

Here are the goals we set for this exciting project:

Goal 1: Design a site that people will want to use

Goal 2: Showcase Ambiance + Passion without compromise to user experience

Goal 3: Build an effective mobile site

Goal 4: Manage all sites, desktop and mobile through one CMS

Read the full restaurant web design case study >

Real Technology

Web nerds hate to admit this, but most people are nowhere near the cutting edge. Every site is different, of course, but your analytics will show a significant amount of people visiting your site with very old browsers.

StatCounter has Internet Explorer 7 as the fourth most popular browser in the U.S. over the last three months—and Internet Explorer 7, released in 2006, is three versions old (Internet Explorer 8 is by far the most popular U.S. browser over the same period; Internet Explorer 9 is still just a blip). Furthermore, mobile users likely account for only a fraction of your site’s total visitors (over the last three months, mobile users accounted for under 10% of the traffic to orbitmedia.com). And according to a recent Nielsen study, only 4.8% of consumers own a tablet.

At Orbit, it’s very important for us to keep up with the latest technology, especially because a lot of it can be implemented without requiring users to upgrade. But we have to be realistic about adoption rates, and we have to anchor every decision in real-world data about what (non-web-nerd) people are actually using.

Real People

Technology is important, but your visitors are people, not devices. Which means it’s even more crucial to be realistic about the human behind the browser.

Over the years, we’ve watched a lot of real people use real websites. We’ve supplemented this data with research from other groups doing the same thing. We’ve spent a lot of time discussing detailed recommendations and making specific decisions. Ultimately, however, what we’ve learned can be reduced to a single sentence: Real people don’t give a damn about your website. If this sounds insane coming form a web design company, please, keep reading…

Visitors come to your site looking to do something specific. They move really fast. They’re not going to read all of your beautiful marketing copy, and they’re not going to stop to admire that stunning rollover effect in your navigation. If your visitors aren’t able to accomplish their goals, they’ve got no problem going somewhere else.

Here’s where it gets tricky: not giving a damn doesn’t mean people will use any site. It just means they don’t want to think about it. If the design is unprofessional, people will assume the product or service is too. If it’s difficult to place an order, people will go to a different site where it’s not. Being successful means working hard to provide a pleasant and easy experience that meets the specific needs of your visitors. You need great design to inspire confidence and convey your brand without getting in the way. You need great writing to communicate in mere seconds. And if you do a great job, people still won’t give a damn about your site. But they will come back.

Where’s my flying car?

We were supposed to have personal helicopters and robot servants by now. We were supposed to be walking on Mars. And we were definitely supposed to be done with Internet Explorer 7. But the only people who will ever visit your site are the ones who are real. So embrace them. Talk to them. Learn about them. You may find you like real people more than some ridiculous flying car.*

—

* Also, we have the Internet. Popular Science didn’t see that one coming.

Usually, I recommend against it. Having another website means more work: more time spent managing and promoting. Think of it this way: should I live in two houses? Sounds nice to have two places, but it’s going to take more effort to make each feel like a home.

Making a new section on your website may take only a few hours, and as long as you have a content management system, it might cost nothing. But there are times when it makes sense to have a separate website.

If you’ve ever asked this question, first consider the downsides to promoting and managing a separate site:

• Web Development Costs: Yes, I’d love to have Orbit build a new website for every domain name owned by every client, but I can’t recommend this in good conscience. Building great sites takes a real investment of time and money!

• Management Time: Hopefully, both sites are easy to update. But another site will need more content, which means more writing time and content development costs.

• Search Engine Ranking: The number and quality of incoming links is probably the most important factor in search engine rankings. It’s better to have one site with 100 links than two sites with 50 each. In other words, it’s better to have one site rank on page one in Google, than have two sites on page two.

Keeping these factors in mind, the pros had better outweigh the cons.

So when does a separate site make sense?

Of course, there are cases when you really should have another site. Here are my guidelines:

Ask yourself these two questions:

1. Would the new site have a different audience?

2. Would the new site have different goals?

If the answer to only one of these questions was yes, I don’t recommend a new site. It’s probably best just to have a separate section on your existing site. Only consider building a separate site if you answered yes to both of these questions.

Examples:

• Widget Co. sells widgets to businesses.  Now they’re thinking of selling widgets directly to consumers.  In other words, same goal (sell widgets), different audience (consumers).
  Yes + No = Separate Section

• Tony’s Unicorns (remember Tony?) is expanding, and now they’re going to start servicing griffins.  It’s a different goal (service griffins) but for the same audience (owners of mythical creatures).
  No + Yes = Separate Section

• Glenda does event photography for corporations.  But people keep asking her to plan weddings and she’s going to promote these services online.  It’s a different goal (promote planning services) and a different audience (happy couples).
  Yes + Yes = Separate Website

What about all these domains I have?

If you really want to take advantage of those domains, you can always redirect them to your main site. This doesn’t have a search engine benefit (it’s actually not a new incoming link), but it might make you feel better for having spent the money! Besides, there are other reasons to own domains, such as defense against competition, speculative investment and conversation at the bar on Thursdays.

Bottom Line

Next time you think about website design, pause and ask yourself those two questions. You might reconsider. Deciding not to make another site may save you thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. But you may also find that a separate site is a great idea!

By Andy Crestodina. You can also find Andy on Google+ and Twitter.

All of us who own or work for Internet-based businesses are blessed to be living in groovy times. This is especially true if you’re in Chicago.

While Groupon – with its multi-billion dollar valuation and ascent as “the fastest growing company ever” – deservedly gets all the headlines, the pioneering daily site is not the only story in town. Chicago is emerging as a viable and distinct alternative to Silicon Valley, Boston and other tech industry epicenters for entrepreneurs starting web and mobile media companies.

Venture capitalists are finally starting to pay attention to Chicago. In recent weeks, online restaurant delivery service grubHub.com and social media software developer Sprout Social have raised tens of millions of dollars from world class investors. Online brokerage OptionsXpress, founded a decade ago, recently sold to Charles Schwab for a billion dollars.

There is no ceiling to what is possible.

So what can you do about it? Here are three things to consider when starting an Internet-based company in Chicago.

1) Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today

For too long in Chicago, entrepreneurs looking to start a web company waited until investment money or a lucrative customer to emerge before launching a website. Buzzed by the ludicrous success of dot-com high-fliers, people devoted more time to business plans and what their vision could ultimately become than they did to getting a site up and running.

When the bubble burst, those who were left standing operated serious websites with real customers. In the intervening years, costs to develop, maintain and market (especially through social media channels) a site have decreased exponentially. So you can afford to get your site up and running right away, gauge feedback from your constituents, and innovate from there.

2) Community membership has its privileges

Just as you are building a website, you are also creating a business. You’re not alone. There are several outstanding organizations for business networking and education in Chicago that can help you land a customer and share best practices with others in the space. The Illinois Technology Association, The Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, and TECHcocktail are all great resources.

If you are looking for more of an entrepreneurial boot camp, Excelerate Labs is a great place to learn from those who have done it before and to pitch your idea to investors. While applications for the 2011 year are closed, Excelerate still offers multiple public events throughout the year that are worth attending. For more specific matters like learning about search engine marketing or meeting mobile application developers, you can find dozens of regularly scheduled Meetups in the Chicago area.

If online social networking is more of your thing, become a member of Built in Chicago. With a mission of “promoting digital innovation in the world’s greatest city”, Built in Chicago has thousands of member profiles, aggregated news and forums, and more than 50 targeted interest groups. For original technology news, Technori and (shameless plug) the Chicago Sun-Times “Tech Matters” column are also valuable resources.

3) Technological innovation moves at lightning speed

A wise man once told me that continual and perpetual education is the key to success. This is especially true for anyone involved in a web-based operation. The business landscape can change at a moment’s notice and seemingly each day we are introduced to new tools and marketing platforms that can help us run our sites more efficiently and profitably.

Five years ago, Facebook was restricted to those who had a dot-edu email address. It now has more than 600 million active users. In 2008, mobile applications were far from mainstream. Today, there are more than 500,000 apps available for the iPhone, iPad and Android-based devices. Less than two years ago, Groupon was just starting to get some traction marketing deals to its Chicago-based email list. Today, the company is at the epicenter of the multi-billion dollar “deal of the day” industry.

While your business may not become the next Facebook, Apple or Groupon, you can draw more than inspiration from those and lesser-known companies. There are a lot of great tools you can use to plug into your business right away. You can create a Facebook Group, develop and iPhone or Android app, or become a Groupon affiliate to expand your business.

Now is the time to press go. What are you waiting for?

Brad Spirrison is the Managing Editor of Appolicious.com and AndroidApps.com, the leading discovery platform for mobile applications.

This is Brad. We love Brad. We think you should too.

There are many many aspects to web marketing, from web design to email marketing, from online sweepstakes to search engine optimization. For some areas of web marketing, we do some aspects but not others. Here are a few venn diagrams that will help explain the things we do, the things we don’t, and why…

Content Development

Content is critical. Without it, a website would be an empty shell. People don’t typically go to a site to look at the design. They go to see, read, hear, and watch information. So it’s the content – the text, images, audio, video, and venn diagrams – that visitors are looking for.

Yes, we develop content. The kind of content we create moves. We do video production and motion graphics. We do it for websites, TV, and trade shows.

But we don’t have writers on staff, so we don’t do copy writing. For the websites we build, the text on the pages either comes directly from the client, or from professional writers.  We partner with some excellent writers and we’re happy to make a recommendation.*

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are a lot of factors that contribute to how high a website ranks in a search engine.  Most of these can be grouped into two categories:

• On-Site SEO – making the pages themselves appear relevant to search engines
• Link Building – how many other sites are linking to the site

We build sites that are search friendly. They indicate to search engines that they are relevant for certain phrases. We start by researching and recommending target key phrases. Then we create the site map, the design, and the programming accordingly. We even recommend changes to the text and formatting, keeping in mind key phrase frequency and prominence.

But many experts believe that link building is even more important. Search engines (rightly) assume that if a lot of other high-quality sites are linking to a site, it’s more likely to be relevant.  Promoting a site through link building – mostly by submitting it to other sites – is effective. But it isn’t something we do.  But we partner with some of the best, and we’d be happy to make a recommendation.*

Mobile Marketing

A year ago, we were talking to clients about mobile marketing once a month or so. Now it’s weekly. A year from now, it will be part of daily conversations. But since it’s still so new, it’s important to make the distinction between mobile websites and mobile apps.  Especially since we build one but not the other.

We build mobile websites. A mobile site is a separate, smaller version of a website that is designed to work on a mobile browser (on a phone or tablet). They should load fast, be easy to use, and be easy to update. It’s like a faster little brother for your website.

On the other hand (or in your other hand), a mobile app is a program that you download and install on your phone or tablet. You find them in the Apple App Store or Android Market and sometimes you have to pay for them. They’re not websites and the strategy, design, and programming behind them is not the same. It’s a whole-nother ball game, with different skills, costs, and marketing plans.

We don’t build mobile apps, but we know some very smart people who do, and we’d be happy to make a recommendation.*

Why Doesn’t Orbit Do Those Things?

Since the beginning, we’ve been motivated by multi-disciplinary challenges – the ones that make us use both halves of our brains. At different times, we’ve tried to do other things, but we’ve always come back to those projects that motivate us most – those projects that combine strategy, design, and development.

This is why everything we do combines creativity with technology.

Writing copy isn’t technical. Link building isn’t creative. We absolutely appreciate the value of these things. But there will always be others who do them better that we would.

*You may have noticed, Orbit doesn’t outsource anything.  We simply refer our favorite partners and invite our clients to consider working with them directly.

Because of this mess, there’s a lot of extra work for website owners to ensure everyone can see their videos. On a recent project, for instance, Orbit was forced to upload three versions of the same video to make it compatible with all major browsers and mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad, etc.) – and there’s still no guarantee that we won’t need to add more in the future.

Now for the good part: video hosting services like YouTube and Viddler have armies of developers who do nothing but work through these issues. So while we can’t predict where web video standards are heading, we do know that uploading your video to a reputable hosting service – and then embedding the video to play on your site – should always work. The service will format your video as many times as necessary, and they’ll also keep up with the latest changes in standards. (For the near future, anyway; certainty beyond that is just not attainable in this world, I’m afraid.)

So upload your video to a hosting service and let them worry about the formatting. You’ll never have to think about the H.264 video codec ever again.

And isn’t that what we all want?

Yet how well a website works can be measured in part by the costs associated with it. The direct cost is the total price for the initial project. The indirect costs consist of secondary expenses related to ongoing marketing and support during the lifetime of the website.

At Orbit we have two development processes. Both are designed to reduce costs and improve quality. The first is an internal process that starts before the client ever arrives. The second process begins at the first client meeting as we discover the project’s specific requirements.

Internal Development

First, what do we mean by develop? Development usually refers to the programming of the website, whereas design refers to the look and feel.

With development, we need to consider a few basic questions. What features are required to make an ecommerce website work, for example?   Regardless of the item being sold or the company selling the item, the basic logic can be described in a few steps:

1. A customer selects an item to purchase
2. The selected item is placed into a shopping cart
3. The customer decides to checkout, continue shopping or abandon their cart
4. To checkout, the customer initiates the process of purchasing what is in their cart
5. The store presents a total bill for the item(s) desired by the customer
6. The customer presents a method of payment
7. The payment is verified and the transaction is completed

To be sure, this purchasing feature isn’t complete and plenty of questions can remain. However, this generalized logic provides a starting point.

This is where web development at Orbit begins, identifying basic features of a potential website.

Developer Day

Roughly once a month, all of Orbit’s developers spend the day working on such questions, analyzing and programing with various sandboxes.

A sandbox is simply a generic website in which the development team can create, test and improve  different features and find the best approach for virtually any type of website.  It’s a play area for programmers.

The focus is on breaking down the feature into workable steps and rapidly building them. In doing so we consider what has worked for clients in the past along with growing trends such as social media integration.

Each Developer Day represents the repeating of a cycle of planning, analyzing, coding and acceptance testing in order to get the feature built right.

But, as we mentioned, plenty of questions can remain. Not all features will work perfectly “out of the box” for all clients.

Developing with the Client

This brings us to the second process of web development at Orbit: developing with the client. Now the concern is on completion of a particular website. Thus the focus for the developer changes from generalized concepts to specific implementation.

But before a developer can customize the code for a client, a new process of discovery and planning must begin. The phases of this process break down into the following, with direct client involvement at each step:

1. A Kick-Off Meeting where initial questions about goals and scope are answered
2. Discovery of the layout and flow for the proposed website
3. Designing the look of the website and expressing the client’s brand
4. Development, implementing and testing
5. Deploing the website for public use

In this sequential development process each step follows from the last. There is a specific beginning and ending. One step cannot be started until the previous step is completed and approved.

The Big Payoff

Understanding the development process for a custom website is important. How many hours a developer works on a client’s website and the dependability of the underlying code affects its ultimate cost.

Both direct and indirect costs impact the client’s ability to market their website and can limit the overall return of the website.

Rather than starting from scratch, Orbit takes the pieces we have built and improved earlier and applies them to the client’s project, customizing the features to the needs of the website. In doing so we execute different development processes in order to keep our client’s costs manageable while adding value to their business.