Your company website needs a purpose both for you and your clients to truly be effective. Most companies need a website that does three simple things:

1. Grow your business by attracting new customers
2. Give existing customers tools that will keep them as your customers
3. Attract new talent to your company

The question needs to be asked, is your website working for you? Most answers aren’t cut and dry as they relate back to these three core principles. Including website initiatives should be part of your internal review of procedures and products annually. But what is a website initiative? It should be any planned enhancement to your site, whether that be a new page, color scheme, form or an entirely new site all together. How do you determine if you need to spruce up your existing site or start over? Take this website inventory.

1. Do you feel the colors and design are attractive? Yes / No
2. Is the menu and page system easy to navigate? Yes / No
3. Does each page have its own URL? (Meaning is xyzdomain.com/pagename unique.) Yes / No
4. Does your website work, as intended, on each of the modern browsers (Firefox 3-6, Internet Explorer 7-9 and Safari)? Yes / No
5. Your photos: Are they in focus? Do you see a finger? Can you see your images load on the page? Yes / No
6. Is there background music? Yes / No
7. Do you have a website visitor counter in the public areas of the site? Yes / No
8. Is the copyright date in the footer show this year’s date? Yes / No
9. Do you have an unused or underused blog? Has there been less than 1 post a month in the last 3 months? Yes / No

Answers (1.yes, 2.yes, 3.yes, 4.yes, 5.no, no, no, 6.no, 7.no, 8.yes, 9.no)

If you answered no to questions 1-4 it might be easier to start over with a website design. If you answered Yes to only a few of Questions 5-7 and 9, or No to Question 8 then you probably can do with a decent amount of web-sprucing. Congratulations if you answered the questions according to the key. Congrats, your website is modern and easy to use!

There are other things to consider when talking about rework and redesigning your website. Everyone touts social media (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) integration, but that doesn’t make sense for every situation. Think about your organization and your potential customers and act accordingly.

How do you update or plan to update your website? Adding a content editor is the easiest way to ensure you (or virtually anyone with computer skills) can keep website content up to date. When adding a content editor, like WordPress, scheduling a redesign to correspond is most cost effective effective in the long run. Plan for content updates quarterly, at the very least. Inaccurate or old content will alienate potential customers.

The most important rule is to always keep your website up to date. Your website is a reflection of your company. How do you want to be portrayed?

Deciding to overhaul your company’s website is no small decision. Beyond setting aside a moderate budget for the project, there are important decisions to be made: what should it look like? Who should you hire to handle the coding and design? What does it even need to do, that it doesn’t do now?

Given these tough questions, and the expense of a quality website, it’s no wonder so many business owners and marketing managers decide to put off upgrading their sites. Deciding to hesitate, however, is usually false economy: it ends up costing you more than you’d save, when you consider lost online sales, lowered impressions of your company, and so on. For most businesses, an outdated website is like having a salesman with a polyester suit and bell-bottom pants—it’s telling people that you aren’t with the times.

To keep you fashionably profitable, here are five tips for taking the website redesign plunge:

1. Ask questions. A critical part of the web design process happens before a single pixel is placed. Some of the things you’ll want to know before you begin your new site are what it’s going to look like, how long it’s going to take, what the costs will be, which features will be added, and so on. Don’t be afraid to ask about things you aren’t familiar with, either. A good web design partner can help steer you towards the features and platforms you need, rather than just the ones you’re most comfortable with.

2. Think of all the numbers involved. What you end up paying for your website isn’t nearly as important as what it ends up paying you back. Most business owners understand this point on a certain level, but find it’s easy to forget once they’re looking at different bids. Make sure to compare apples to apples and remember that six months from now, it’s what your site is earning that will matter most.

3. Consider design, functionality and marketing. Lots of clients never get past the first mockup picture; they become so mesmerized by the new look of their website that they get into a rush to put it online without much further thought. Most profits, however, come from what your site can do… not just what it looks like, so give as much time to the functions and programming as you do to the artistic vision.

4. Test out a new design using a landing page. Not sure about redesigning your entire site? Start with a baby step. A landing page is a good way to try out a new look, logo or message. Make sure there is a clear call-to-action and use analytics tools like CrazyEgg to conduct A-B testing. Check out the landing page we did for Donnay Homes.

5. Find a design partner you can trust. Redesigning a website is a longer and harder process than most people think; there are layouts, meetings, changes, more meetings, and a whole lot of tests and opinions. For that reason, it’s important you choose a design partner you trust to lead you through the process. Otherwise, you could find yourself several weeks – and several checks – into the process feeling more confused than when you began.

Think your website could use an overhaul? Contact ArcStone Technologies today to find out about our web design services and get a free website evaluation. It probably costs less than you think, and we’ll keep your site looking better than ever – both online and on the bottom line.

Picture this: It is just another day at ArcStone. We grab our morning coffee, chat about this and that, and check our email. Then it is time to get to work. Time to delve into the world of never-been-done-before.

That’s our world.

We Love A Good Challenge

Our latest project coincided with the kick-off of Minnesota hockey season. Atomic School came to us with a unique challenge: They needed an e-commerce website that would allow the parents of Minnetonka, MN hockey players to easily order clothing and accessories. But there was a catch.

There were over 730 youth hockey players in Minnetonka. Each player’s team needed to have its own “store,” meaning its own personalized URL, as well as a simple checkout that ensured their orders were sent to the right places. Timing was tight. Hockey season was only weeks out.

But Minnetonka loves its hockey and we will always love working on web apps, so it was the perfect storm.

Unique Problem? No Problem.

Using Magento, a popular open-source e-commerce platform, we did some intensive customization to to allow the Atomic School staff to setup multiple “stores” with the click of a button.

We were able to improve upon the base Magento functionality, in this case to speed up the setup process. A member of the Atomic School staff uploads the entire inventory to Magento exactly once. They then enter the URLs and shipping details for each team.

Now it takes a customer less than three minutes from start to finish to order a Bauer Team Jacket. That’s the magic touch.

What’s Your Idea?

We love new and fresh ideas and Magento is just one of the many tools that we have at our disposal. And yes, we still offer one of the best guppy consulting services in the Western Hemisphere. What’s your idea? It would be great to hear from you.

It’s a familiar situation for most nine-to-fivers: you have a huge file, multiple people need it, none of which are in the same location, the companies shared server is impossible to navigate and large email attachments get blocked by the firewall.

Welcome To The Big File Dilemma
In today’s world of data-overload, it’s easy to accumulate a collection of impossibly large files. Databases, video, image and audio files can be hundreds of megabytes. Working with large files locally poses no challenge as hard drives have gotten larger and cheaper. The issues of file size rears it’s ugly head once those files need to leave your computer.

A Connected Solution For A Connected World
Traditionally, large files were shuttled from worker to worked VIA removable media. While this is convenient for short trips and temporary storage, shipping media across the world becomes expensive, and the storage media itself is prone to failures. Most people have suffered through the tragedy of a cracked CD or unreadable thumb drive.

If only there was a way to easily, securely, and cheaply share large files over the Internet (foreshadowing).

Wonderfile To The Rescue
With Wonderfile sharing large files is a snap. Wonderfile’s advanced uploader allows you to select several files of any type and size, set permissions, and see the uploaded progress for each file.

The best part about Wonderfile is you can start using it for free with no credit card or contract needed. Sign up today and see how easy it is to share large files with Wonderfile.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our latest makeover!

Southview Design came to us several years ago (through our friend Kristin Kowler at Genius to Go) in search of a clean, professional site that reflected the caliber of work which they were producing in landscapes. The new site not only improved their image, but made their team proud to share it. That was the site design “version 1″

Just yesterday we launched the all new Southview Design, while the previous site was plenty good they sought a more interactive and engaging user experience – and to continue to their already strong search engine presence. The new site features a striking new look, continually updated project slideshow on the home page, and intuitive navigation scheme. The project gallery allows visitors to explore by image – or quickly filter the list of landscaping projects by Service or by Price.

With this new site Kristin has again provided powerful and effective search engine friendly content, which will continue to build upon the already strong search engine presence Southview Design enjoys. Coupled with the ultra-clean site code and site optimization techniques employed in this go-around we wish them much happiness and success with the new site.

And just in time for Spring!

The hardest part of staying in shape is often staying motivated. Your significant other might drop a comment here or there, or maybe a winter trip to Mexico might do it, but I discovered that my computer (and a couple of accessories) actually does a far better job.

I read about it a while ago, but just recently made the purchase. The Nike+iPod Sport Kit.

For around $30 your runs can be monitored (pace, distance, calories burned) and you can turn on a voice to chime in each mile, provide motivational comments or simply announce your pace and milage with the push of a button. This of course is overlayed upon the killer mix you have created or downloaded as your ipod playlist.

After the run, simply plug in your ipod and it uploads your run data to a very slick nike web application – a beautifully designed web site application. Here you get graphs of your run and a plethora of other very cool options like:

Download ipod playlists of others’ workout mixes (Sport Imixes)
Find running routes that others in your area have mapped, and add your own
Create running groups or teams (and compete!)
Create a training schedule
Create goals and competitions (for yourself or you and others)
Get interactive coaching/workouts

And much more. I am only 2 weeks into it but I have never been so motivated to stay on track with my workout, and to continue to improve my pace with every run. Tonight, Lance Armstrong even chimed in at the end of my run to congratulate me on setting my personal best pace per mile.

In all, I see it as the perfect blend of human and computer interaction. The design of the hardware, the user experience, graphical interface and feature set, the personal and community aspects are all exceptional.

Best of all my wife can’t give me a hard time for sitting down at the computer after getting the kids to bed. Just uploading my workout hon’!