In the meantime, I have been busy in several other venues:

• Procurement and Other Issues in Public Housing
  Nick Harris and Bob Eastman, on the Calyptus Consulting blog

• A Conversation with Calyptus Consulting’s George Harris
  Bob Eastman and George Harris, on the Calyptus Consulting

• Olympic Feats: Behind-the-Scenes Engineering at London’s Summer Games
  Jon Marcus on the PTC blog

• Outsourcing IT Lets Small Businesses Focus on the Business
  Heather B. Hayes, on the Biztechmagazine website

• Game Changers: Technology that Drives ROI
  Wylie Wong, on the Biztechmagazine website

• Realities of the SMB Market
  Bob Eastman and Miles Prescott, on the MPSInsights

• Additional work published on the SMB Research website

Have you read enough pieces yet on what makes a great website?

You have probably seen quite a few articles and posts addressing this.  We here at SMB Research know we have seen a lot of material. (SMB Research includes at least one fairly good article on SMB Research’s Top 20 Favorite Reads of 2010.)

Many of these articles seem to take a cookie-cutter approach:  it should go without saying at this point that a website needs to have good navigation, and that a website needs a “Call to Action”.

We think there are a number of other critical website features and best practices that get too little attention.

SMB Research has spent quite a bit of time looking at websites – companies’ websites, as well as just about every other kind of website.   We have spent the better part of a combined 25+ years talking to software and technology vendors, end-users, and service providers – trying to align the capabilities of one with the requirements of the other.  This has required thousands of hours of research, including researching the information available on companies’ websites.

In one specific engagement, a year ago or so, SMB Research even created a framework (Inform, Involve, Navigate, Analyze) for assessing the states’ websites, to assess how, and how well, states were presenting on their websites their use of federal stimulus funds.   We assessed and scored each of the 50 states’ websites, and ranked the results.  We have looked at a lot of websites.

SMB Research sees some critical website features for websites which are getting far too little attention; we will suggest some Best Practices in several areas than can provide a much better user experience:

• Who you are
• How to contact you
• What you do
• Where you are
• Social Media

Who you are

Visitors to your website should also be able to quickly see who your leadership and management team is, as well as the people who are the first points of contact for your visitors, customers and prospects.  Although this is all part of ‘who you are’, almost every company disperses these pieces of the puzzle to different areas on the website.  If the visitor is lucky, this information is easily accessible on the front page, or perhaps one level below the front page.   More often, this information is scattered, and variously included under ‘About us”, or “Company’, or ‘Contact Us” or perhaps included under ‘Corporate governance’ on an investors page (the implication being that you should not be interested in who their leadership is unless you are an investor.)

Best Practice: Your company’s contact information, or link to your contact information, should be at or near the top of your website.  Surprisingly, this link is found, more often than not, at the very bottom of the website.  What message is this sending to your visitors about your company’s desire to hear from them?  Hand a stopwatch to someone, and have them find a contact’s name, phone number and email address on your website.  Can they do this in 15 seconds or less?  Where were they at the 15-second tick mark?  That is probably where someone’s name, phone number and email address need to be.

Best Practice:  Names, titles, and Bios, at least, of your leadership team should be easily accessible.  Could the average person, using a stopwatch, find the names and titles of your management within 15-20 seconds?   Extra credit is awarded if you, like Qualcomm, provide the ability to download a hi-res photo or the Bio.

Best Practice:  Double extra credit is awarded if your company, likeVisibility Corporation, the ETO (engineer-to-order) ERP company, make each leader’s name clickable to open up an email to the person.

Best Practice:  Companies should provide prominent visibility and accessibility to those people that you would like to serve as first points-of-contact for the visiting public.  Oracle gets a fair grade here.  In no more than 3 clicks, you can get to the locations and main phone numbers for regional offices in Massachusetts.  Best Practice would be to provide names, direct phone lines, and direct email addresses.

Not so Good Practice: Providing only a webform to fill out as so many companies do, or providing only an “800″ call center to call into.  Customers, visitors, and prospects expect better than this.  Customers and prospects are probably justified in feeling that if a company cannot personalize the experience in this initial step, then the amount of personal touch in the rest of the company’s systems and processes is suspect.

A research and business intelligence firm started following us on twitter recently.  Interestingly, it is near impossible to find even one person’s name on the entire website – we have yet to find any names on any of the contact pages, and their “corporate” page is a blank white page.   A decidedly antisocial firm wanting to engage the social media does not compute.   We have politely declined, pending some further transparency and forthrightness on their part.

In another recent interaction with an aspiring technology pundit, this person seemed too take particular pleasure in taking the easy potshot, while avoiding direct dialogue. On their website, he and two co-pundits provided no contact information or Bio information whatsoever.  An oversight, or something else?

Best Practice:  If you are going to have a presence on the Internet, and use that position to comment and critique from an analyst perspective, you need to provide full contact information to enable a dialogue.  Failing to take care to provide your contact information (and other appropriate disclosures) may turn what is at first just (?) a glaring lapse in judgment into more serious questions about professionalism.

What you do

Your website needs to spend as much, or more, time telling the visitor about what you do as it does talking about what products you have, how to use your services, what your target market is, or how big your company is.   As obvious as this should be, we are continually surprised by how many companies’ websites seem to use all of the expected words without providing any coherent expression of what the company does.

Can you tell from the company name who Coler and Colantonio, Inc. is or what they do?  No, of course not.  So Coler & Colantonio makes sure that when you visit their website the first thing you see is an exceptionally clear statement of what they are about:  “Coler and Colantonio provides engineering and scientific consulting services to the Energy, Land Development, and Government Market Sectors.”

We do not see many companies do it better than Coler and Colantonio; and the underlying message they are sending you is that they are a company that talks straight and respects your time.  

Best Practice:   Somewhere front and center on your website should be a concise statement of what your company does.   The average person should be able to find this on your website within 5 to 10 seconds.

This statement of what your company provides is best when it is tight and straightforward – but should be in sufficient detail that someone can immediately make a ballpark estimation of whether your company provides what they need.

A process manufacturer looking for an ERP system should be able to tell if your software solution is intended for discrete or process environments.  Someone looking for a consultant should be able to determine whether your company is in fact a consultant or an analyst, and if an analyst, whether a technology analyst or a financial analyst.

Anyone visiting your website should be able to tell within 5-10 seconds whether they are on a website with something to offer to them.  Dan Kraus, of Leading Results, may have something when he says “Please don’t tell me what you do. Your website should tell me what I get.“    Telling us what you do would be at least a big step in the right direction up for too many websites.  Tax Master‘s ‘We Solve Your Tax problems’ may be the gold standard.

Videos:

Clearly, one of the ways – reported to be increasing – to tell your market who you are and what you do is via video.  I cannot speak for Miles, but I find a great number of the videos on technology-related websites to border on being mind-numbingly uninteresting.

So I was very happy to see Beagle Research‘s Denis Pombriant inject some optimism into the future of video in his article, “Social’s Killer App Is Video and Vice Versa“.  He may be able to persuade me that, well, not all videos have to be brainkillers.

Video may be a way for you to show what you do.  When you find it hard to describe this, why not show it?  If you are a company with fairly broad capabilities in die cutting, for example, how can you easily describe this to someone in an engaging way?  Who even knows what die cutting is?  How could you describe your capabilities in a way that engages?

G&L Precision Die Cutting thinks they have an idea, in this video on their website – “Watch us at work“.  Somehow this company has found a way to make a short video about die cutting that is more interesting than many talking heads.  Maybe ‘even’ an industrial company can show us a thing or two about how to make effective use of video.  Have a look, and tell us what you think.

On the other end of a spectrum, Darryl Praill has taken a different innovative approach to using video to tell you about who he is and what he does, which I find no less engaging, albeit in an entirely different way.

Best Practices: Use video only when you feel that you understand the medium and the right reasons for using it well enough.  Don’t rush to video for fear of being left behind.  Video is too tricky, and the internet is littered with poorly done videos that do not improve upon what more tried-and-true technologies.   If and when you are going to do something with video, here’s hoping that you will show some of the imagination that have been suggested by Denis Pombriant, G&L Precision Die Cutting, and Darryl Praill.

Where you are

The more locations you have, the more difficult it is to present this information in some form that is useful to your visitors.  We understand the challenge.  Still, too many companies seem to just use the list of locations to demonstrate their size and breadth, forgetting that visitors will want to use this information to figure out which location is the main headquarters site and how to quickly make contact with any of the remote locations.  One example of a great layout: Arkeia Software.  Here is a company that wants you to know where they are, how to reach them quickly and easily – and provides a photo of each location.  Moen‘s corporate locations page is another nice way to show all of this information in a fairly nice layout with most of the necessary information.   Adtran‘s map is a great example of how to provide a map that is more helpful than the typical Google maps (which in my opinion is overused for this purpose.).  Give me Adtran’s map any day.

Best Practice:   If you are going to provide a full listing of office locations or sites, make very clear first which location is your headquarters or main location.   Ensure that it is possible to copy and paste your contact and locations information from your website – do not encapsulate these in Flash (as so many companies do).  Provide some information about each site:  functions / roles at the site; or at least the main number at the site; perhaps even a name, direct phone number and email address.

Social Media:

SMB Research agrees with those who say that a blog is almost essential these days for most companies.   Twitter is, it can be said, also quickly becoming de rigueur these days for many - not all - companies.  Your customers and prospects, service providers, competitors, and industry influencers are likely to be using these and other social media to have a continual conversation about your company and your market.   If so, your choice is to either participate – or wish you were participating.  Companies who have mastered an appropriate way to use a blog, or twitter, or who have intergated the use of each of these together are way ahead of the game.

Blog Best Practices:  If you are going to have a blog on your website, the blog must be prominent, visible and easily accessible.  The blog should have an owner or owners, and provide their contact information – this information is missing from too many blogs.   Each blog post should have an author’s name and provide the author’s contact information.  One of the quickest ways to lose visitors and followers (and trust!) is to have blog posts authored by departments or companies – with, astonishingly, no apparent human intervention.  (Companies don’t write posts – people do.)

Twitter and Blog Best Practices:  Companies that integrate their blog and their twitter feed get a multiplicative effect from the two channels.  Having the company’s twitter feed on the blog makes the blog continually updating,  and relevant.  Alerting the twittersphere of new blog posts keeps your twitter feed thriving, and brings continual traffic to your blog.   Treat these channels with respect, however.  Companies who are under the delusion (as many companies seem to be) that they can use these channels to aggressively carpetbomb the ethersphere with their company names are likely to be marginalized and left to do some damage control.  These and other social media are engagement channels – opportunities to participate, share, influence, and add value to the conversation, and to profit from the give-and-take.

SMB Research has a lot more ideas and insights to share on how to leverage your website, whether you are a small-to-medium business (SMB) or a large enterprise.  SMB Research can provide you with some very good assistance; we will not hesitate to provide a hand-off to some very good social media experts who can advise on an integrated social media strategy when that is appropriate.

Give us a call and let’s start the conversation.  781 904 0408.

Recommended Reads:

• How Small Businesses Are Missing Huge Web Traffic Opportunities
  by John Paul Titlow, on the ReadWriteWeb
  February 16, 2011

• 6 Must-Haves for Your Small Business Website
  Lisa Barone, on The Small Business Trends website
  February 1, 2011

• Please don’t tell me what you do. Your website should tell me what I get.
  Dan Kraus, on Leading Results
  December 9, 2010

• Dear Restaurant Owner, Please Ditch the All-Flash Web Site
  Joanna Pineda
  April 10, 2010

• Ten Things a Modern Website Should Do
  Sam Wettling
  January 14, 2010

When we at SMB Research started talking a few weeks ago about what we thought were some of the most interesting and valuable articles from 2010, we realized that once again this year there has been a great deal of very good (however you define this) research and writing. If you struggle to find the time to read to read everything that deserves your attention, we share your pain.

To help you out, SMB Research decided to take a look back at some of what has been written and published this past year, and to identify some of our favorite reads.

SMB Research’s Top 20 Favorite Reads, 2010:

(in chronological order)

To compile this list, each of us (Miles and Bob) compiled a long list of SMB- and technology-related pieces that we found to be both well-written and to generally meet the following standards:

• Crisp and clear – providing insight with clarity, precision, and occasionally passion.
• High signal-to-noise ratio – that is, showing exceptional respect for the reader’s time investment.
• Digestible – not too short or too long.
• Vendor-agnostic – Focusing more on ideas rather than on any specific vendor (for the most part.)
• Credible, & Authoritative – Written by, and with, a reputable and credible voice.
• Accessible by you – not requiring a paid fee to access.

We looked through the hundreds of sources and voices that we follow, and looked most closely at perhaps a couple of hundred of the innumerable SMB- and/or technology-related articles, blog posts, and other pieces of writing from 2010.

After identifying some 100 of a long list of articles, blog posts, and other writings, we used a simple scoring method to independently identify the 20 or so pieces that we respectively felt were our ‘favorite of favorites’ for their substance, quality, and crispness. The list above is a reconciliation of our respective favorite reads.

To read more about what SMB Research is researching, writing, and reading, visit SMB Research’s website and The SMB Research Blog.

It was a glorious day in the Bronx – what us spectators like to call an ideal day for running – once Nancy and I straightened out our GPS difficulties (oh, THAT right hand turn).

This was somewhat of a special trip for me, not only because our son John Eastman was running, but also because I yearned for years to run at Van Cortlandt Park.  Alas, in my rather brief running career, under the unforgettable tutelage of my high school coaches Connie Putnam in Cross Country and Nathan Hale in Track at Mohawk Trail Regional High School, I never got to run at Van Cortlandt Park.   So I looked forward to visiting the venue to watch the Hawks run with, the ECAC tells me, some 700 runners with 80 teams from 20 schools.

Team Results:

The St Joseph’s University Hawks placed 12th in the women’s Championship Race, and 18th in the men’s Championship Race.

Individual Results:

Women’s coaches’ Race
2nd place    Beth Lambright      19:25.3
6th place     Erin James            20:16.9
8th place     Laura Faller           20:18.5
10th place   Lyndsey Sample    20:28.9
11th place   Paige O’Neill          20:33.5
34th place   Darcy O’Connor      22:07.1

Men’s Coaches’ Race
24th place   David Evans           28:09.3
26th place   John Eastman        28:13.1
34th place   Drew Cogley          28:27.3
38th place   Sean Staltari         28:38.2
46th place   Greg Etter             29:14.4

Women’s championship Race
41st place     Maureen O’Donnell    18:46.2
43rd place     Hannah Fuller          18:48.4
65th place     Kelsey Rose            19:16.5
73rd place     Jessica Di Cicco       19:26.2
93rd place     Emily Chappell         20:07.7
107th place   Samantha Peters      20:56.5

Men’s Championship Race
68th place       Aaron Leskow         26:19.6
104th place     Mike Rankin            26:47.6
109th place     Kyle Gorczynski      26:55.4
118th place     Vinny Nicastro         27:00.1
132nd place    Dan Roark               27:17.6
136th place     Tom O’Kane            27:22.6
141st place     Kevin Donnelly         27:32.0
145th place     Vince Collins           27:41.0
146th place     Murphy O’Donnell     27:45.0
151st place     Ryan Birchmeier      28:03.7

[St Joseph's University did not have runners in the women's or men's University Race.]

ECAC/IC4A CROSS COUNTRY CHAMPIONSHIP RESULTS:

Women’s Coaches’ Race (5K)

Men’s Coaches’ Race (8K)

Women’s Championship Race (5K)

Men’s Championship Race (8K)

Women’s University Race (5K)

Men’s University Race (8K)

Be sure to visit the St Joseph’s University’s cross country websites (women’s,  men’s websites) for more information.

On an additional note, congratulations go out to St. Joseph’s University junior Kevin McDonnell on his qualification to and running in the 2010 NCAA Division I championships, which unless I am mistaken was THE last Cross Country meet for the season.  See the St Joseph’s University cross-country website for more information on Kevin’s McDonnell and the Nationals.

For the record: Let it be noted that Lloyd’s Carrot Cake, 6087 Broadway, Bronx, New York (Tel. 718 548.9020) right across the street from Van Cortlandt Park is pretty darn good.  Now I need to go for a run.

Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG, www.dciginc.com), and SMB Research are nearing completion on the DCIG Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer’s Guide.

While you will have to wait just awhile longer, we don’t mind giving you a sneak peek at some of the great learnings you can expect to get from the finished product.

We rated the vendors in overall functionality and support from Basic to Excellent.  The top rated vendor is Best in Class.   The major categories of the Buyer’s Guide analyzed include Technology, Management, Backup, Recovery, Support.  We also looked at areas like Deduplication and Media.  Interestingly a number of vendors that offered Basic functionality across the board actually had invested a lot in building key strength in Deduplication.  (A future DCIG report will focus on specific Deduplication offerings.)

End users clearly have different requirements.  So DCIG and SMB Research believe that this guide will help users focus on the most appropriate solution(s) for their situation.  With that said, one cannot under emphasize the importance of a strong support offering.  Does the vendor you are considering offer several layers of support options, including on-site, phone and/or email support?  Do they offer a forum where you can communicate and share ideas with fellow users?  In our research, we found that 20% of the vendors that offered overall Good or Excellent functionality across the board offered relatively basic and sometimes lacking support capability.  This should be a red flag for users.  The good news is that there are some vendors that place more emphasis on Support.

Other vendors that were consistent in many of the categories were found to excel in one specific area. In some cases this was Backup, Restore, or Technology.    One vendor was rated Good in all categories but seemed to pay less attention to the management of server virtualization such as trending, discovering virtual machines, allocating resources when needed, providing a visual dashboard of backup progress, and various optimization techniques.

Some early insights and observations:

• Some 46% of the software vendors participating in this Buyers guide offer their solutions both as stand-alone software products, or bundled in an appliance.
• Over 45% of the vendors we are looking at report that they do not do mirror backups.
• Nearly 80% of the software solutions report being able to do object-level recovery.
• 75% of the vendors in this Buyers Guide report doing do source-based deduplication.
• Fewer than 60% of the vendors that have looked at provide the option of including or excluding backup of VMs that are powered off.
• Nearly 60% of the vendors claim to be able to alert you if your tape libraries are approaching capacity (compared to 85% of vendors for disk libraries.)
• Nearly 70% of the vendors that we have looked at use VMware‘s Change Block Tracking.
• 70% of the vendors that we are looking at provide the capability to auto-discover new Guest VMs.

More than 60% of the vendors in our Guide do not presently what can be considered to be best-in-class features:

• Backup software’s administration function prioritize a server that has gone the longest since its last backup
• Detect servers backing up significantly more data than previously and provide alerting
• Integration with VMware’s Change Block Tracking
• Integration with VMware vCenter Converter
• Ability to multiplex concurrent backups to a single tape drive

These are just a few of the insights that we are working hard to include in the guide.  And we know we are on the right track.  We have already heard that we have come up “a lot of very creative questions that took some great insight and understanding of the environment and problems within the VM backup space. Kudos to the people that put together the questionnaire!”

It won’t be long now before we go to press!

For more information on this upcoming Guide:

• DCIG Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer’s Guide Moves Closer to Reality
• A Buyer’s Guide for Virtual Server Backup is Coming…
• Virtual Server Backup – A Conversation with Lois Paul’s Don Jennings
• Focus of the Next Four 2010 DCIG Buyer’s Guides

For Information on how to get the Backup Software for Virtual Servers Buyer’s Guide:

• DCIG – About our Buyers Guides

Zipcar’s CEO, Scott Griffith, set the tone with his keynote in which he talked about his Pittsburgh, PA, origins, his seven years at the helm of Zipcar, and Zipcar’s goal to be a disruptive force in transportation.

Perhaps most important, Mr. Griffith, spoke about his five lessons for small businesses:

1) Get the Business model right.

2) Keep it simple. – described as one of Zipcar’s core values

3) Sell the steak, not the sizzle.

4) Have a worldview.

5) As you grow and innovate your company, you sometimes have to innovate yourself.

Entrepreneur of the Year Joanne Chang, pastry chef & owner of Flour Bakery & Café, talked about how her growing bakery / café business started out as a dream, and even when, during her first difficult years, she asked her then boyfriend (now husband) and her parents whether she had made a mistake, they urged perseverance.

Ms. Chang’s perseverance has apparently paid off, due in no small part, it seems to me, from afar, to Ms. Chang’s stated focus on not just making really great food and accompanying this with great service, but also (even!) enhancing the life of her employees and customers, and having fun while they are doing this.

You do not hear this often enough from businesses that sound like they mean it.

What came through to me from Ms. Chang’s brief, but poignant remarks, were her passion for her business, how this has sustained her – and seemingly been infused by her longtime employees. There is a lesson here.

The Award for Business Excellence went to Cedar’s Mediterranean Foods, Inc. What struck me about Cedar’s is their emphasis on providing food for a healthy lifestyle, and doing this with what is reported to be the latest manufacturing technology, and a focus on “green”: The company plans to have the facility’s roof entirely covered with solar panels by the end of 2010 to help produce energy used for operation.

The 2010 Business of the Year Award went to Sagamore Plumbing & Heating. CEO Joe Harold, said something very interesting: Sagamore Plumbing did not win this award; our customers won this award for us.

Sagamore Plumbing's Joe Harold

Established some 19 years ago, in 1991, Sagamore has grown to 150 employees, who average 13 years of employment with the company. Most notably for me, Sagamore demonstrates its commitment to its employees (and, by extension, its customers) with its very own Sagamore Academy, offering some 30 courses to ensure that their employees are among the best. Apparently, others have taken notice, as other companies send their employees to Sagamore Academy, too.

Oh, by the way, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce set a benchmark, in my humble opinion, for how to run a tight, compelling event that delivered recognition to some worthy companies and individuals, and ensured that everyone left with some learnings and insights. If you missed this year’s event, be sure to put this on your calendar next year.

Congratulations are due as well to the other notable inductees to Saint Joseph’s University’s 9th Athletics Hall of Fame Celebration:

John Butz ’66, Baseball
Bill Campbell, Sportscaster
Tony Costner ’84, Men’s Basketball
Renee Hykel ’01, Women’s Rowing
Christina Kowalski ’00, Softball
Michael McDermott ’97, Golf
Susan Moran ’02, Women’s Basketball
Tom Pippet ’73, Men’s Soccer

The Wall Street Journal reports that there are currently some 6,909 languages existing today (with many of these dying off every year), making the discovery of a new language all the more exciting. Want to say ‘I saw the Man’ in Koro? Here’s how. If you are reading this, [Kah-play-yeh], the phonetic way of saying thank you in Koro.

No one tells it better than Joseph Ellis in his 2000 book, Founding Brothers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000):

“On the evening of July 3, 1826, [Thomas] Jefferson fell into a coma.  His last discernible words, uttered to the physician and family gathered around the bedside, indicated that he was hoping to time his exit in dramatic fashion: ‘Is it the Fourth?’ It was not, but he lingered in a semiconscious condition until shortly after noon on the magic day.  That same morning, [John] Adams collapsed in his favorite reading chair.  He lapsed into unconsciousness at almost the exact moment Jefferson died.  The end came quickly, at about five-thirty that afternoon.  He wakened for a brief moment, indicated that nothing more should be done to prolong the inevitable, then, with obvious effort, gave a final salute to his old friend with this last words: ‘Thomas Jefferson survives’, or, by another account, ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives.’  Whatever the version, he was wrong for the moment but right for the ages.”

copyright© 2000, by Joseph J. Ellis