June 2006
By Ann Siegle, Tria Partner

Meet our newest partner, Barbara Mohler
Barb was featured in the Business Weekly section of the Lansing State Journal on June 5. The article highlights many interesting things about the newest Tria partner that you might not know! Click here to view the article at the Lansing State Journal's web site.

Tria goes on tour
On behalf of the Artist Success Kit (www.artistsuccesskit.com), Ann Siegle and Linda Brennan have been speaking to fine artist groups in Mid-Michigan about how important is is to set up a business and recordkeeping system, and how to do it.

Many fine artists often resist organizing, feeling it will dampen their creativity. But the Artist Success Kit is designed by and for fine artists — built around the way they often like to work — creating organization that actually frees up time for their creativity.

Also, the Artist Success Kit has recently been expanded to include additional marketing content for fine artists. In addition, Ann is a contributor to the Michigan Art Guild Newsletter, with a three-part series that began in March, on the Marketing Toolkit for Fine Artists.

Ann also worked with students at Davenport University in April in a two-hour class workshop on Creating Your Own Personal Marketing Plan.

Web site evaluation worksheet

Tria has developed a worksheet based on a process we use in-house to evaluate a client’s web site. In this issue, here’s a primer on using the worksheet, and a link to get it. If you’re wondering if your firm’s web site needs an overhaul, this process will help you decide.

The evaluation process is done in four stages:
1) Overall impression
2) Evaluation of essential ingredients for a successful site
3) User-centered design principles
4) Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and a competitive review

Overall impression
The first question we ask is “is this site consistent with the company’s brand?” This is probably the most important question of all — and it’s one that you’d be surprised to know is the most commonly overlooked. Why? Many companies shortchange themselves when it comes to web development. Programmers, as talented as they are at making magic happen, are not marketers. And very often programmers develop sites that are pleasing in a technical or functional way, but not in a customer-centric way. Combine that with marketing expertise, and you have a powerful combination (this is our process at Tria).

Essential ingredients
Does the site have all of the six essential ingredients for success? From speed to support, there are six essential factors. We rank how effective the site is from 1-5, and create an overall rank for the essential ingredients list. Lower scores indicate a more urgent need for an overhaul. Higher scores with low scores in particular areas mean that the site might only need an update.

User-centered design principles
Most sites by-and-large, are organized by how the organization is viewed by their staff. About the Company is generally first. History, Mission, etc. come next. But the customer doesn’t see your organization with the same priorities as you do internally. An external organization of the site is one of the first things we evaluate.

And unlike many other web developers, we actually survey customers. An independent voice asking questions often yields some surprising information that can be essential in reorganizing a client’s web site.

And finally, we categorize ALL of our rankings into the following areas:
Strengths, weaknesses and opportunities; plus we perform a competitive review (how does your site stack up against competitors in your field?).

At the end of the review, you’ll have a clear idea (and a plan) for whether or not overhauling your web site is important. If you’re using a Content Management Solution to manage your site (see our Archives for a detailed review of CMS solutions), your new web overhaul can be completed without touching the content — organization, look and feel and menus can all be reworked within a template change in the CMS easily and quickly.

Request a web site evaluation worksheet by clicking here.

Click Fraud and other Pitfalls of Online Marketing
Up to 20% of your ad click-throughs could be fake

Several of our clients place ads on Google, Yahoo and independent web sites. Most pay an average of from 45 cents up to several dollars per click.
Click fraud, a particularly difficult problem to solve, comes in two basic forms, click-throughs and affiliates. Click-through fraudulent clicks are generally perpetrated by a competitor, or a bot. Most advertising is paid for by the click. You, as the advertiser, agree to pay a certain amount per click-through to your site. So, to run up a competitor’s advertising bill, all one would have to do is click repeatedly on his/her ad.

There is no way to prevent this from happening. You can search server logs and find out who the person is and contact them, or retaliate by doing the same thing. One of our clients was the victim of this method of click fraud, perpetrated by a smaller competitor. This resulted in a huge bill for our client.

The second method of click fraud is perpetrated when fraudulent sites are set up for the purpose of housing links (and garnering a percentage of the per-click-affiliate advertising). You’ve seen legitimate versions of this — affiliate ads placed by Google on sites you may frequent. But sites set up for the specific purpose of housing ads also garner their share of the per-click profit from Google. These rogue sites pay people in low-cost third-world countries to click on the ads to run up the click-through rate — and subsequently increase the advertising revenue from Google.

There is not much you can do about either problem, though a few tactics exist for the first type of click-through fraud. We can tell you how our client discovered and solved his problem if you believe your site is experiencing the same issue. Contact us for details.

For more information on this topic, you can click here.

Marketing article of the month:
Time for Some Buzz-Kill
Brand and marketing gurus need to lose the jargon and get back to first principles in order to really connect with the public
Click Here, then try the exercise at the end….it’s fun!

Thinking of design & marketing night & day,
Your friends at Tria,

Linda, Ann, Tina and Barb

If you want more information on these articles or anything else related to design or marketing, please e-mail us at contact@triadesignfirm.com