TAG, We’re It

As a collaborative group of hungry creative agencies pushing to get Vancouver, WA (a small town in the big shadow of Portland, OR) on the creative map, we need to have a certain amount of drive. Most of what we do is taken with a shotgun approach in order to move with a certain amount of flexibility and dynamism so we don’t get weighed down in the details of our initiatives.

TAG, at its most basic, is a partnership between local creative agencies and studios. Each member of the group has access to the collective’s knowledge base, sharing information freely back and forth. We are also able to leverage one another’s workforces, pulling in members with specific skill sets to help us run successful client projects. It’s this elucidating quality that lets each agency operate from a space larger than their individual size and skill depth.

Doing What We Do

We were starting to plan the first Rise Up conference, a one day virtual (Zoom-based) event geared to help businesses cope with periods of great disruption. The pandemic of 2020 has wreaked havoc on businesses worldwide—many of them not knowing how to navigate these muddy waters. Our goal was to help.

Most of what we do is taken with a shotgun approach in order to move with a certain amount of flexibility and dynamism so we don’t get weighed down in the details of our initiatives.

The topic of the overall conference was heady and layered-making the three week time period seem even more unrealistic, but we marched on undeterred. What we achieved was, in my opinion, truly impressive.

In the span of those few short weeks we managed to plan, organize, and execute a full scale conference featuring three speakers and three panel discussions (totaling 24 speakers) and raising nearly $10,000 for local charities. We additionally, and most importantly, imparted information & advice on how to approach disruptions in our work lives, develop realistic expectations for change, and we explored ways to locate new opportunities and put a plan of action in place around them.

The Warm Fuzzies

The takeaways on a personal level, and for the studio, were numerous and eye opening—too many to list here. But here are a few of the most notable bits that Brian and I ended up walking away with:

• The power of camaraderie: A collaborative group is essentially about working together towards a united goal. We experience this every time we take on a TAG project. Seeing this in action for a purely altruistic cause drove home the importance of working collaboratively with others.
• The benefits of resource sharing: The creative professions are very tight lipped about things like processes, clients, and money. TAG has broken down those walls, and with good reason. We want to further the practice of other members. You can’t do that when you won’t have honest conversations.
• Design for good: I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of organizations doing work as a philanthropic work. I’ve never worked so seamlessly with a group doing it, however. Rise Up saw every one of these creative forces set aside their egos, take direction, take the lead, step up, and get it done. It was a joy to watch this unfold.
• Presence of mind: When you’re pulling an event together with so many diverse voices you never quite know how it will all come together. We were quite surprised at the unity and tone of voice that permeated the event. While we all come from different backgrounds and our experiences over the last few months have varied, we were nearly synonymous in our viewpoints and discussions.
• Affinity for action: 27 strong voices can lead to an awful lot of confusion and circuitous, confusing, or even wishy washy ideas. Yet, over the course of the three panels it became very clear that we were not there to bemoan the state of affairs. We were there to learn, share our thoughts with one another, discuss our methods of dealing with disruption and get stuff done.

The Rosey in Full Effect

I know I’m painting a rather creative, utopian picture. And you’d be right to call me out on it. Did the event run perfect? Not by a long shot.

At the end of the day, there were things that could have been improved or simply been done better at the event (a process we are working through as a group right now as we look at doing the event again in the months to come). Yet, given the crazy self-imposed deadline that we thrust upon ourselves; we put our heads down, acted as a united resource and pulled off a complex event that provided real value to an entire community. In the end, this is what I became a designer for.

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It can be tempting to think that once your website is up and running that it will largely take care of itself. Yet, like most investments (car, office, employee), there are certain things that need to be done to keep that investment working for you. Regular maintenance on a website keeps it up and running the way it should be, as well as protecting your site against those who would seek to do it harm.

What is Your Time Worth?

The question of time value is a valid question and relates directly to the idea of why website maintenance is so important. We’ve worked with dozens of clients that didn’t take the time to update or backup their websites only to have them go down or be exploited (read hacked) which forced them to take time away from areas they needed to focus on so they could research how to fix their website. Many times these situations could have been avoided by simply spending a little time updating their website.

What is the Value of Your Online Investment?

How much money have you dropped into getting your website to where it is today? Even if you didn’t hire a design studio and you took the time to do all the work yourself, what is the dollar value associated with that time? $5k? $10k? More? Generally, it’s not a small number. So, having to cope with website issues that most likely could be bypassed with a bit of prevention seems like a small price to pay. You’ve already made the investment (in dollars and time), maintaining the site doesn’t take all that much more effort. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

An Ounce of Prevention

You know that old adage that your granny used to say to you? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Well, here are a few reasons why website maintenance is necessary and important as a preventative strategy:

The Value of Regular Website Updates

When you had your website initially built, your web designer may have told you of all the benefits you would receive from using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, etc. A CMS really is a great way for companies to easily create/manage pages, make changes, and/or edits to a site on an ongoing basis after it’s launched. A CMS does this by taking something that is a very complex system (the website itself) and wrapping it in a user interface that is as simple to use as Microsoft Word. That ease of use comes with a price, though.

A CMS is a complex piece of software, and as a result, it needs updates from time to time to keep it running the way it should. When these updates are skipped, it can cause problems.

A CMS is a complex piece of software, and as a result, it needs updates from time to time to keep it running the way it should. When these updates are skipped, it can cause problems. For instance, the site might seem glitchy or not act right until an update is installed. When your website and its CMS is not updated, that old software can cause problems in how the site operates and it might even provide an access point for hackers who are looking for a way to exploit a site.

The Protection that Comes From Whole Site Backups

Accidents happen, it’s true. Regardless of how much preparation goes into your site, problems can arise from time to time. A web server issue can damage files on your site or your site could be hacked and problem causing malicious code injected into your pages. There are a lot of things that can go wrong that are out of our control. That’s where regular backups come in handy. By doing, at the very least, a monthly (or weekly or daily) backup of the entire site you guarantee that you have a copy you can revert to should there be an issue.

In most cases, if your website is using CMS you might need a plug-in to help manage your backups. That is because aside from the files that make up your site, you also need to make a copy of the database that your site uses to store your page copy and images. A web designer can help you get that setup and teach you how to run it yourself or you can get that service as part of a monthly service package.

A Pound of Cure

That’s the prevention. Now, where’s the cure?

Regular Website Maintenance is Necessary

As you can see, regular website maintenance is something that every website owner should be working on—a necessary pursuit when safeguarding your investment.

Now we’re realists, and as such we understand that taking the time to learn how to do monthly maintenance and then diligently following a monthly schedule can be tough. It takes you away from working on your business, which many times means you’re losing money.

We asked the question, “What is your time worth?” earlier in this article. That question is essential to this topic for one very clear reason—your time IS valuable. We know this. Every minute you’re not focused on developing relationships or doing the work means things aren’t moving forward. Unfortunately, though, if you don’t work on maintaining your website, no one else is going to do it for you… or will they?

Getting Help

Many of the companies we work with on a monthly basis realize that their time is better spent on bringing clients in the door rather than navigating the learning curve of handling their own website maintenance. The cost in time when compared to what they might be paying for monthly website maintenance doesn’t balance. So, we offer an array of services designed to help businesses keep their sites working and problem free so these entrepreneurs can get back to what they do best.

Whether you engage an agency to help with site maintenance or you do it yourself, there are some basics that need to regularly happen in order to keep your site in proper working order. Updating software and regular backups will go a long way to protecting your investment.

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Why Website Maintenance Matters

Let’s face it. There are less than reputable people out there who would love nothing more than to gain access to a website and cause issues. Many times it’s just to say they did it, but there are others that use the opportunity to cause serious, permanent damage to a website. At the very least, they can leave malicious code on your web server designed to re-route unsuspecting clients and customers to locations other than your website.

Because websites many times rely on software from different vendors for certain functionality, they require periodic updates to stay current.

Most of these attacks of opportunity are possibile due to out of date software used to run and manage your site. Perhaps your web design studio showed you the value of having your website built on a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or another framework. Because these CMS’ many times rely on software from different vendors for certain functionality, they require periodic updates to stay current. A lot of the time, CMS updates happen because a software vendor learns of a new way that hackers can exploit a website using their plug-in / software and the vendor releases an update to remove the vulnerability. That’s a good thing.

Moving away from the most obvious concern of exploitation, website maintenance can also provide protection through regular, whole site backups, uptime monitoring, and a variety of other small services that provide stability to your website.

What Type of Maintenance Services Are Available?

There are a variety of maintenance services that can be offered. Here are a few of the core services you can expect from a website maintenance program:

• Regular website updates
• Daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly website backups
• Uptime monitoring
• Website security scanning
• Regular website audits

Other services that can be provided but may not be part of a standard maintenance package (or are more infrequent package services) are:

• SSL setup / maintenance
• Audit and fix of broken links on site
• Page speed assessment and optimization
• Audit and fix broken images on site
• Meta data and schema data audits and fixes

How Much do Website Maintenance Services Cost?

That depends on the level of support services you’re looking to use on your website. Most companies will offer a series of services bundled in a few monthly packages that you can subscribe to. You pick the package that fits your budget and move forward accordingly.

Most companies will offer a series of services bundled in a few monthly packages that you can subscribe to.

Many studios and agencies have also started to include additional hours of service work that can be applied to helping in other areas beyond just the maintenance program. This is perfect for small businesses who need monthly changes to their website content. That can take the form of new website pages that need to be created, content edits, or other small monthly tasks. That is the type of monthly website maintenance / retainer package that we offer here at Shop. We’ve found that most companies have a variety of little tasks that they need help with in addition to monthly maintenance. By bundling a few hours or work time in with the maintenance duties, we are able to better serve our client’s website needs and the client feels like they are not receiving a bunch of hourly bills for a few monthly changes across their site.

Is the Money Worth What You Get?

As mentioned earlier, your website most likely represents one of your more dollar intensive business investments. If you think about it, you’re website is your frontline sales resource. It’s out there working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What would you normally spend for an employee who could do that same level of service for you on a monthly basis?

Taking good care of your website through a regular series of maintenance services helps to keep your site up to date, operating smoothly, and selling your services. And if there is an issue, regular website maintenance puts in place the tools to quickly identify issues and get them resolved in a timely manner.

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What is HTTP?

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It’s a nice way of telling your browser how to handle the URL/site you are requesting. Your browser can handle quite a few different protocols, including, but not limited to; “HTTP”, “HTTPS”, “FTP”, and more.

What’s so special about a letter?

What is amazing, is the power that one letter has over how the world will view your website. The difference between “http://” and “https://” is that the “s” stands for secure. By secure we mean that any information that is passed between the browser and that website is encrypted, ensuring others cannot intercept that data as it’s being transmitted. This is great because if you are collecting any information from a user on your website, providing a layer of security makes them feel more secure about sending that information out through a form and out over the web. Without the “s”, your users are sending their information out into the world without any sort of protection or encryption. This all begs the question, “Who’s looking at your user’s info”?

Adding to Your Vocabulary

Getting the “s” requires purchasing what is called an “SSL” certificate, which stands for Secure Socket Layer. This certificate allows your browser and the server you are connected to to create a secure encrypted connection, allowing data to safely and securely pass back and forth. You may be asking how one gets one of those fancy “SSL” certificates. The answer, as with much on the web, is multi-faceted. There are a few web hosting providers out there that have been given the authority to “vouch” on your site’s behalf and say that your site is safe to create a secure connection with. So, getting an SSL certificate with them is just a matter of having monthly hosting services with that provider. Once installed, it will allow browsers to make that secure connection, and off you go, feeling more secure about everything web-related. If your hosting company does not provide the service then you have to go to a company that can issue the certificates and have a web designer or someone who understands the process setup the SSL certificate.

So, at this point you may be thinking, “I don’t collect any sensitive information, so I shouldn’t need one of those certificates, right?”. Well, in the past; yes, that would be true; however with the new changes that Google is implementing, the internet giant has started “shaming” non-secure sites by placing a “not secure” message next to the site address in the URL bar.

Then, in the future—Google is not saying exactly when yet—Chrome will flag all sites that don’t use TLS encryption as “Not secure” and also display a red triangle indicator, which Chrome already uses when users go to a dangerous website.

What Google is essentially saying is this: “Even though you aren’t collecting any information, your site should be secure, and if it isn’t secure we’re going to let everybody know that”. As if telling the world that your website isn’t secure wasn’t enough, Google is taking things one step further and listing HTTPS as a ranking factor for organic SEO.

Getting Your “S”

So, you’re starting to understand what SSL means and have decided that you need the power of the “s” for yourself. First off, good choice. Second now you have to figure out, “How do I get an S”?

There are a few ways to achieve this. The easiest is usually to contact your web host and have one created for you and installed on your site (beware as there is varying cost associated). Some providers even work with Let’s Encrypt, an SSL service which allows you to get a free certificate for your personal use. That tend to be the easy part.

Once you have an SSL Certificate, do you go to your site using the “HTTPS” and see the green lock? No, unfortunately just having the certificate is not enough to make a site secure. Some of the steps still required after getting your Certificate installed will be:

• Updating all links on your site to point to the “https://” version of each page ( your site isn’t secure unless all assets, images, files and scripts it uses are also utilizing the “HTTPS”. )
• Changing your site to force the “https://” protocol to load so it doesn’t still go to the “http://” version of the site
• Add any necessary redirects to go to the new secure URLs
• Update your domain in Google’s search console and resubmit your sitemap ( this will help greatly with SEO and maintaining your current traffic )

As you can see, there is quite a bit to do to update to the power of an “S”. However, it’s a process that should only need to be done once and then you are secure in the knowledge that your visitors are safe and will (metaphorically) thank you for having their security in mind.

The post The Power of an “S” — Exploring HTTPS and SSL appeared first on shop.

Two Camps: the Redesign vs. the Realign

Out With the Old: Design It and Don’t Touch It

It used to be that we would welcome the idea of the complete website redesign. It was a chance to start over from scratch—an opportunity to explore visual possibilities without restrictions. We would design from the ground up, hand the final site over to the client and let that site, and its content, largely sit static until it was time to redesign once again from the ground up a few years later.

In With the New: Create It, Refine It, and Grow It

In time we began to understand that we could do things a bit differently. The idea of developing an evolving content strategy, in which site content (pages and words) could grow and change over time, became increasingly popular. The additional ability to visually realign a site through a series of incremental changes meant that a client could greatly add to the value of their brand by shifting the visual message to meet the demands of his changing products and services. It all added up to less cost, less time, and more versatility. Yet, there are still times when a complete redesign becomes a preferable solution. But when?

Recognizing the Need for a Redesign

There are a few areas that we discuss with potential clients when deciding on whether a redesign is a necessity or whether we can make shifts through a process of realignment. Here are a few considerations:

Your Site’s Not Mobile Friendly

As you are well aware we live in a digitally diverse space these days. Mobile internet use has far exceeded standard pc usage over the last few years, making it essential to be able to share a website on a variety of mobile devices. That has put the onus on businesses to face a redesign in order to keep their site viewable and usable to their customers and clients. Modern design principles allow us to create a site using responsive technologies that re-conform a website for presentation on all major digital devices.

When to redesign your website remains one of the top questions we field from potential clients. Here are a few of the areas we cover on that subject.

You Can’t Remember the Last Time You Updated

Chances are that if you can’t remember the last time you redesigned the company site it’s probably long overdue. Technologies change, and they change fast. If you are sitting on a site that has not had any major updates in the last decade then it’s really time to consider a revamp. Chances are that a fresh new site will greatly increase the usability and user experience you are providing your customers and clients.

You Went the DIY Way

Many of the business owners we talk to decided to go their own way and build a website on their own. The desire, which is understandable, is to save some money by doing the heavy lifting. Design is an investment, and a website can represent a significant monetary investment. What most people find, however, is that there is a reason why businesses engage a design professional—design is hard. Getting the various facets—visual and useable just right takes some training and the DIY method leaves you with something that can be visually disappointing and a hinderance to your brand.

Your Brand, Services, or Product Have Grown, but Your Website Has Not

A brand is an evolving thing. Your company is not static. It moves, expands, contracts, and changes direction. Your web presence should follow suit. It is one of your most important brand assets. As such it deserves just as much attention as you would give to your business cards, letterhead or that dated print brochure.

Your Traffic is Dwindling

One of the by-products of having not updated a website in awhile is that traffic numbers can begin to stagnate. There are several reasons why something like this could happen, but chances are the reasons won’t be apparent without a little help. Over the past few years much has changed in how Google and the other search engines interpret sites that are not built using modern techniques. One of the big ones is having a site that’s not mobile friendly. As we continue our migration to mobile devices, search engines will give less authority to sites that are not viewable on mobile devices—viewing them as increasingly irrelevant.

What is Your Gut Feeling?

This one fits soundly into the “fuzzy” or “gray” category. You might have just reached a point where you feel it is time to mix things up. This is a strong indication that it’s time to talk to a design firm.

Time to Talk Turkey?

So, there you have it. A few (of the many) reasons you might consider it time to redesign your company’s website. Whatever your decision is it’s worth taking the time to engage a design firm to talk about options. Most will be wiling to discuss the options with you during a short meeting.

The thing to remember is that your website is (or should be) one of the most valuable members of your company. It’s out there 24 hours a day performing a thankless job none of us would really want to take on. As a member of your team have you given it the tools it really needs to do its job?

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