I’ll start by saying that I’m not an expert in this area (yet), so everything you read hear is a combination of my broad range of experience and knowledge, combined with my enthusiasm for online success. I’m currently filtering these ideas into my work, and evolving my skills to help better myself, my company and most importantly, my customers.

There’s more to driving your site to succeed online than just adding a blog and content syndication to your site. You need to market it, and in turn your brand (often yourself). With the birth of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, it has become common practice to think that a site will succeed purely by bolting on a blog, and sticking up some photos and regularly updating the content.

At to that the social phenomenon, people started adding send to a friend links and social network tags, such as Digg and Facebook. Those are great tools, as long as your users click on them and share your message. You could do it yourself, or ask your friends to do it, but it starts to look a little bit obvious and also reduces your rating on those sites if you continually push your own content in. You need to come up with ways to connect with them and make them want to do it. If you’re really good, and connect well, you don’t even need these tools - look at how well Apple does if you need proof.

This is where the advertising industry has one up on web development companies, and where they should learn from each other. Part of their mission is to connect with the customer - in this case, your site’s user - and make them feel you know them and that they’re special. Rather than relying on you to try and work out what to do and write, they aim to deliver elements that appeal to a broad audience, and bring them in by going a few steps further.

1. Know the brand’s customers. OK, for a new brand, this is where the brand and marketing guys come in, and it’s a little more tricky to get right first time, but what I’m going to say in this blog covers that (think competitors). But what does knowing the customer mean? It means start by looking at who your loyal customers are. The ones that have been with you a while, and will stay with you. I’ll say for example to be generic, that might be the 30-50 age group who grew up with your brand and stayed with it. Then look at the ones around that. How can you market to them without alienating the ones you already do so well with? Read what they read. Watch what they watch. It’s tricky, and something that takes a lot to get just right - I’m about to start doing this for one of my clients and I’m can’t wait to start!

2. Get to know the brand’s rivals. This is a bit of a no-brainer if you think about it. We all know it makes perfect sense, but we also know it’s an easy thing to forget or skim over. What are they doing? When are they doing? And most importantly, what do we do better than them that could boost our market share? Then ask if there’s anything they do better that we need to steer clear of - that’s not to that if they really do do it better, you can’t use it, but make sure it won’t come back to have a detrimental effect on what you’re trying to achieve.

3. Know the brand’s products. Does this sound like an extension of the last points in a way? It shouldn’t! If you don’t know everything about the products you’re trying to sell, how can you do a better job of selling them to people who know nothing about it? Know the strengths. Know the weaknesses (but don’t tell the client). Live and breath their products if you can - or find someone that does.

4. Stay in touch with your users. In the day and age of database this, and database that, it’s easy to slap a ‘Stay in touch’ box on a website. But ask yourself what that actually means? Does it mean a monthly, or bi-annual newsletter perhaps? Perhaps it never gets used. I don’t know. All I know is that when I see that box, and I see it not used to it’s best effect, I get upset. That box means that someone has looked at your site, and thinks that you have something that others don’t, and they want to make sure you tell them what you’re doing. If you don’t talk to them, you’re missing a real opportunity and at the same time letting them down! But then, why not go one step further if the product permits. Why not encourage your users to turn that email address into a user account on your site? One that lets them enter competitions periodically? One that actively encourages them to come back, and also gives you the chance to make their experience that little bit more personal? Make them realise that you really connect with them, and want to ensure they get even more from you than they already have.

5. Get to know them better. When users register for a site, you general collect the basic information. Collecting more than that is difficult, but why not ask them anyway? If you can find out that a large chunk of your sites users actually fall into a category that you want to target in point 1, then you know you’re on the right track or have succeeded. Why not ask them how old they are, what they do, how they found you, would they recommend you, and what they think of you. That’s all information you can potentially use later on to do an email or other promotion to them to help make them feel special and that the brand connects with them. OK, so some of those questions are a little sensitive, and they don’t need to be mandatory, but you could give them an incentive to tell you - and that might encourage them to tell their friends too… Suddenly for that one person, you might have 10-20 more customers just for asking more questions to sell to them.

6. Now work out how to deliver. This is a huge topic, and something that I couldn’t possibly cover here. What sites to advertise on. What sites to contribute to. What will appeal to the online community? Should you be thinking about a viral campaign or a competition? Would a Facebook application or Facebook group work well for you? Perhaps a blog would be enough… Ultimately, it boils down to your client’s budget, but you also need to make them aware of what can be done to give them the best return on their investment.

So that’s 6 points. There’s a lot more than that I could write, but that’s a brief take on what I see as a basic strategy to beginning to succeed online. There’s more to come that feeds off that, like viral marketing, banners, offline to online. The list goes on, but you can see where my head is. I’m in the position of moving from being the Technical Director in charge of delivering sites, to being someone more strategic who comes up with the ideas.

I see the web as a world of opportunity. And damn I’m excited by the direction I’m moving in! Please let me know if I’ve said anything you disagree or perhaps really like. And if you want to give me some words of encouragement that I’m going in exactly the right direction, I always welcome and encourage any feedback.

OK, so a slightly long winded title, but I have to express a concern of mine. Recently I’ve been trying to hire web developers for my team to build web site, but I’m hitting a continual brick wall… Most of them actually don’t know how to build a web site!

These people know .NET, which is obviously a good thing, but they don’t seem to have any awareness of the other elements of the website. If it’s not in .NET code, and if it’s not a built in .NET control, then why should they need to know it? That’s the way it comes across to me.

When I started learning web development, I tool the approach of learning HTML mark-up first, then moving to server-side code in the form of Coldfusion. It seemed logical to do it that way, as ultimately what the end user sees is HTML. When CSS came along, I jumped on that bandwagon, and loved it. It helped me breath new life into my code. Then I changed from Coldfusion to Classic ASP and Microsoft SQL. All this enabled me to take a Photoshop file and deliver a complete website with a database driven back-end - incidentally built using the CMS systems I have developed over the years.

Recently, I started learning .NET and I’ve realised what a lazy language it is. Everything about it is geared to not really needing to think about anything! Everything is done for you, to the extent where you just need to start typing and Intellisense kicks in and tells you what you probably meant - and most of the time it’s right. I think that should be a good thing as it gives you more time to focus on the HTML, CSS and JavaScript side of things, delivering a great looking, functional website which validates if possible.

This also gives you more time to ensure the other elements of the site are more polished and included, perhaps affording you time to improve your RSS feed to include the most up to date information. Looking at a new technique such as integrating the Open Search for people’s toolbar or including microformats. Carrying out those last checks such as ensuring the Google Analytics and sitemap code is included and working.

However, that’s not how it works now. Apparently, people that know .NET are exempt from knowing anything outside of .NET when it comes to building a website, which to my mind makes them an Application Developer, not a web developer. Recently, we had an intern in who said he was good at html and CSS, but when you say that’s good and can he turn this PSD into a site, he says know, that’s someone else’s job as if he’s more important than that because he knows .NET.

Why has this happened? It’s a single language, so why do these people place so much value on this one skill over the other, in my opinion more important, elements of the site? I think it’s the banks. Think about it. Banks have recently built massive systems and brought everything online over a period, paying people lots of money for that period and then letting them all go once that task was completed, flooding the market with people who thought they understood the web. It’s a shame, but it affects smaller companies the most ultimately.

Add to that that they don’t seem to understand the idea of a good user experience, and are happy if what they build works. They don’t care if it works well, and don’t even seem to notice if something doesn’t work as well as it could. If a page is slow, doesn’t matter, it loads. If a page is hard to use, doesn’t matter as it works doesn’t it? I find that a strange attitude.

We’ve been talking internally, and are hopeful that a change is afoot and that the days of the true web developer will return again. The developers I place highest value on can be given a PSD and produce an entire website, optimised and including all the elements that make a website great! And I really hope that hope comes true.

I’ve been a big fan of feedreader on Windows, but I’ve yet to find something comparable on the mac. Obviously there’s the on-line tools, and there’s been a few shareware ones around which were OK.

But, feedreader has a beautiful simplicity. It’s on of those programs that does exactly what you need, and could want and doesn’t try to do anything else. The mac ones I’ve seen either did too little, or fell into that trap of trying to be everything. The elegance and simplicity that using Mac OS X is known for just wasn’t there.

Thankfully, whilst hunting around, I came first across Vienna. A project on Sourceforge that does almost exactly the same thing as feedreader with it’s simple 3 pane layout. You can create groups of feeds, when you click on a feed or group, you get a list of all the blogs in that group in the top right pane. Click on a blog, and you get the summary of that blog in the pane below. Double click on the blog’s title and it opens the full URL in you browser. Everything’s nice a quick, and always accessible. You can change the layout to be horizontal if you prefer. Whenever feeds update, you get a message on your desktop - which you can turn off if you like (amazing how many programs forget to give you that option!).

Then, as if a blessing, along comes another program. Newsgator has just released their NetNewsWire program for free. Working much the same way as Vienna, it has 2 other tricks up it’s sleeve. First off, when you double click the feed, it open a new ‘tab’ in the application showing the full page - you’d be amazed how much difference this little trick makes. And, and this is the kicker, you can connect it to your Newsgator account, synchronising the feeds you add here with those on line, and vice versa. This means all your feeds are available anywhere, any time.

Vienna, great, but NetNewsWire is one step better… Give them a try, you won’t regret it!

Has anyone noticed that their friends aren’t using Facebook as much now? I don’t know if it’s just me, but the number of messages with update I get from friends has dropped dramatically. When you log in and check, the updates they’ve been making has dropped dramatically too.

It’s a strange phenomena. The theory behind Facebook is superb. Let you and your friends share everything. Put photos up, let them and their friends know they’re in it. Set up events and groups that they might be interested in. Bring them all together in one place. Send your friends messages and videos from sources such as YouTube.

And the way the user interface has been built is a true demonstration of form and function giving you the best user experience of almost any site. The User interface is so polished and simple. It does what it needs to do, and it does it well. There’s no excessive Ajax calls. You see what you need, when you need it, and it’s quick and clean. The essence of Web 2.0.

You can find groups about just about anything. People that walk slowly, how cute cats are, my favourite drink, bring back Firefly. All valid groups and all things we might be interested in. We should be subscribing to them and sharing our opinions.

Then there’s a the Facebook Applications. A brilliant idea! Open up your service to keen people, let them share their ideas and their passion. Bring the people who love similar things together. Let them take quizzes and see which character from the Simpsons or Family Guy you are. All great fun.

I know there was a time when I was very active on Facebook, joining groups left right and centre. Installing applications for fun. But then, recently, I suddenly decided to remove all those applications. Un-subscribe from those groups. But why? I couldn’t figure it out initially.

Then I started looking and talking to other people, and they’ve done the same. Then I started thinking about why. Why did I feel the need to remove all those Applications that once interested me? Because, to be honest, they were fun once, and the fact that every time one of my friends uses the Application, I get told - repeatedly.

I haven’t removed all of the Applications though. Some are still there, like the places I’ve been one, and Wiliam’s RSS feed reader. They seem genuinely useful to me, and something my friends can use to find out useful things about me and keep in touch with me.

So what am I trying to say? Facebook, please, please, please, don’t ruin the brilliant idea you’ve built! Focus on what it did so well originally! Connecting friends and people with similar interests, and not watering down the experience.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s gone wrong, but if it’s not fixed soon, one of the best websites of recent years will lose the people that it most appealed to originally and end up like MySpace.