Great facelifts are not just for the Hollywood elite anymore. In these challenging economic times, organizations are discovering the wisdom of reorganizing their existing wesbsite real estate rather than going under the knife for a complete site redesign. Think botox vs. nose job – If you had limited time, resources and a pretty low pain threshold, which would you choose?

All kidding aside, these days a “facelift” or a “site refresh” may be just what the doctor ordered for several reasons:

1. Your organization has rebranded, updated your collateral, or changed your identity in any way that resulted in a lack of overall visual cohesion.
2. Your site was last designed when Front Page was the cool kid on the block, IE 6 was the best browser on the market, and it’s just begun to feel dated.
3. Your whole site is in flash, no search engines can find you, and you cannot edit it easily.
4. Your information architecture and labeling is largely sound, but could use a tweak to update the language based on some user testing results.
5. You don’t have the time or the money for a complete redesign, but feel your organization’s message and mission are suffering because of a less than optimal site design and user experience.

While I’m a big fan of the transformative power of a fresh coat of paint for your website, here’s a few road-tested suggestions to consider before you drink the facelift kool-aid.

1. Assemble a small, nimble and responsive team to do the work. Do not skimp on a great PM who is no pushover but knows which battles are worth fighting.
2. Take the time up front to define the project requirements and keep them narrowly focused. Make scope creep an offense punishable by organization wide ridicule. Seriously.
3. Commit to a launch date and do not change it unless cats and dogs start falling from the sky. Same for major deliverable deadlines. This will be the “Project that never ends” if you don’t.
4. Do not let process bog you down. Be flexible enough to try a simpler way of doing something even if it represents a shift in “how you’ve always done it”.
5. Set reasonable expectations for the project amongst the organization’s stakeholders, and make sure you keep the lines of communication open at all times.

At the end of the day, the mark of a successful website facelift comes down to effectively using your available resources to help your users better engage with your organization.

And by the way, you look FABULOUS. Did you have some work done?

P.S. If you want to learn more about effective design strategies for your website, don’t miss yours truly (and some other cool folks) speaking on Oct 1st at this Google/Ad Council seminar: “Extreme makeover: Taking your website to a new level”

Problem:

The holidays are coming up again, and once again you waited too long to buy your gifts.  You can’t find the items in stores, and when you find them online they won’t ship in time.  They don’t even offer an e-card that nicely displays the gift you purchased.  The best you can do is print out the item’s product page and stick it in a card… only, what you print out has the item’s price tag in a glaringly large font size, along with headers, advertisements and who knows what else.

Solution:

Firebug.

Even some developers who use Firebug on daily basis may not realize some of the powerful capabilities it has for quick and easy DOM manipulation.  Among its other capabilities, Firebug lets you edit and even delete parts of an html page directly in the browser, without the need to save or open the page in an editor.

Starting with the “Inspect” button, you can quickly jump to any part of the page and Firebug highlights the inspected element.  From there, you can right-click and either edit the content or delete the element entirely.

A minute or two of clean-up and you’ve got a respectable rain-check for gifts with a minimum effort, all without ever clicking the “save as…” button on your browser.

Sometimes a client needs a change.  When you’re talking about websites, that change can be the whole enchilada: a new (or first time!) content management system, a comprehensive content audit with audience matrices and  IA work, a big build with tons of new functionality.  Or it might just be a creative design refresh with some minor tweaks and enhancements,  resulting in the appearance of a major revision at a lower cost and quicker implementation — the website facelift.

A website’s search can be similar.  Many clients we talk to are convinced that their site search doesn’t work and needs to be torn out — and sometimes that’s true.   We can gut the whole works, put in a new Google Mini or MS Search Server, spend hours dividing your site into collections, setting up separate searches based on audiences or site sections, but that’s not always necessary.  As a counterpart to the website facelift, the site search facelift seeks the same result: more for less.  How? By applying lessons from your search metrics, particularly what the top search terms of people seeking information at your site are and then making specific corrections to content.

While a site search facelift has several techniques to improve results, one of the easiest steps you can take to improve search results is to review frequent search terms and provide recommended links through your search engine for those terms.  The term used is dependent on the search engine, but is commonly referred to as “best bets” or “suggested results”.

Perhaps your search engine doesn’t make those frequently searched for terms reports available? Don’t have that data in the first place? Don’t be so sure – if you’re using Google analytics, most of the time that information is available to you irrespective of your search engine technology.

The best thing about this method is that it generally follows the 80/20 rule where 80% of your searches are coming from 20% of the search terms people use.  Start with the terms most frequently searched form and you are automatically handling the search results in the order that will gain the most benefit from clear, recommended content suggestions.  And while there’s a lot more to a full search facelift, this is a quick way to get some significant results.

A couple of months ago, I was frustrated with several academic journal websites which did not have the necessities of web 2.0 sharing features which can make their site useful to the new generation of scholars.  The suggestions I gave centered around adding “share this” or “add this” functionality that would allow site visitors to add a link to their delicious bookmarks, share it with their friends on facebook or twitter, or possibly send to a friend via email.

These changes are institutional and my message mostly fell on deaf ears. One did get back to me and asked if I could help them as part of their student volunteer staff. We’ll cover that in another article.

The problem of adding such functionality is that it can be a chore if the content itself is not ready for sharing. For example, PDFs are never good material to link to on facebook, because they won’t create a nice looking story feed item. Pages that don’t have images won’t look nice either. Apart from cosmetic errors which can be a hurdle to success in implementing these simple tools, time and effort are always a problem for busy organizations.

There is an easy solution provided by wibiya. They offer a way for anyone that publishes content to add an interactive web 2.0 toolbar which sits at the bottom of your webpage no matter where a user is on your site. Similar to the “Start” bar in Windows and the “Apple” bar in Mac OS, this utility is very useful.
Although it integrates with Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and any website well, the best feature I believe is in it’s ability to create a Facebook community.

What does Wibiya say about itself?

“Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.”

I hope you have time to evaluate if this is a useful tool for your organization. It could save you more time and money than you expect.

True Web developers are like superheroes with magic powers, at least to someone like me, who has only enough technical skills to make me dangerous.

So when we have an opening for a new superhero, I get very excited. When we have two openings, I get downright overwhelmed.

We’re looking for a couple of fantastic developers to join our team and help provide technical solutions to our clients.

Tech Lead / Consultant - The Technical Lead’s powers are experience and leadership.  He/she uses these powers to provide both objective technical analysis, as well as lead the implementation and integration of possible solutions. He/she also possesses the power to do hands-on programming as part of the project team.

Web Developer/Software Engineer with .NET – The developer’s powers are amazing .NET (C#) programming skills and a deep knowledge of Web technology.  He/she will use these powers to implement websites in various content management systems, create custom applications for the Web, integrate Web sites with other client back-end systems, consult with clients on available technologies and evaluate technology options.

To find out more about these positions, click on the “about us” link and go to “careers”.

So put your cape on and join Beaconfire.  Help our clients use technology to make an even greater impact in the world.

I’ll never get tired of saying this. The envelope please – Beaconfire just won four Web Marketing Association 2009 Web Awards including:

Free The Slaves, Outstanding Website
Share Our Strength, Non Profit Standard of Excellence
Wildlife Conservation Society, Non Profit Standard of Excellence

Huge thanks to all our project teams for the great work, and to our award-winning clients for being such Rockstars!

If you’re not busy on Saturday, why don’t you join one of the waterway clean up projects being organized by Ocean Conservancy?  On Saturday, Sept 19th people around the world will be pitching in, diving in, and helping clean up any body of water we can get our hands on (or near).  Last year teams around the world picked up 6.8 million pounds of trash which means that’s 6.8 million pounds less that’ll end up in our oceans.  Over 400,000 volunteers, 100 countries, and 42 states participated in last year’s worthwhile effort.

A Beaconfire crew will be joining the Ocean Conservancy team to work on the banks of the Anacostia River.  You can learn more about this international event (and sign up!) at www.oceanconservancy.org/icc

There’s no doubt that Google is the search engine for most of the Internet.  Over the past few years, the big G has taken almost all of the growth in the search business (90% according to the linked source). And when vendors speak of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), they are recommending practices that are tantamount to Google Engine Optimization.  And why not? Most website administrators looking at their search referrals can plainly see why that’s where to put your effort in.

With the recent agreement between Yahoo and Microsoft making MS Bing the search platform for all of Yahoo’s sites, there’s now a new wrinkle in the SEO game.  Take the two numbers in your referral logs for Bing and Yahoo, combine them together — big enough to matter now? Especially with MS pushing the technology everywhere it can?  Right now you’ll continue to have traffic from both Bing and Yahoo, but moving forward, most sites will only have to optimize for a single additional search engine in the #2 position — Bing.

If you decide Bing is worth watching, try out these tips on optimization.  Remember – SEO is always a bit of black magic rather than hared science, but the rewards can definitely be worth the effort.

With all the talk about Slacktivism going around lately, both pro and con, I was impressed to see it in fine form yesterday, all over Facebook.

Slacktivism is the fine art of one-click activism, and it’s been panned as a way to feel good but accomplish nothing.  But from the time I woke up yesterday to the time I went to bed, I watched this statement grow and spread through my Facebook network, and it didn’t feel like an empty gesture:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

It’s simple, direct, and easy to join in. It got the attention of the White House, for one. I’d be surprised if plenty of Congresspeople didn’t see it, too. But the striking thing to me is that, in a debate that’s been known for anger and misinformation, this simple, positive message spread so fast and far. Where a few people might have spoken out in favor of health care reform of their own accord, this statement had (probably) thousands of people speaking out with a single voice and showing their support for an issue in desperate need of supporters.

I haven’t heard where this effort started – whether it’s the careful plan of an anonymous cause marketer – but I like to think it was a spontaneous, grassroots statement.

As a marketer contemplating the implications, I’ve got a lot of lingering questions about what this means.  How many people posted it?  How far did it spread?  On a closed network like Facebook, it may be impossible to find out.  There’s no signup to track, or link to click – just a plain-text post to your status.

But we can ask about the impact: Did it change the debate? Probably not too much.  Did it get attention? Most definitely. I don’t know whether it spurred dialog or just made a statement – if you have any anecdotes, please share them in the comments!

I, for one, found this to be a very inspiring example – Slacktivism at its best.

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If you think this is cool, here’s one last bit of shameless self-promotion: today is your last day to vote and comment for our panel Can Double-Clicking Change the World? at SXSW and bring together some of the finest minds in the field (including the recent addition of Clay Shirky!) to continue this discussion in Austin.

Announced last year, Facebook Connect heralded an architectural shift for Facebook developers, away from the thousands of insipidly cute notification apps and toward a sophisticated way of wiring up full-fledged websites with social actions.  Here’s the proposition: your web developer adds a bit of javascript to your website and you can allow users to post your website actions to their walls, or update their status, or many of the other actions they would take directly within Facebook.

The real power of the system becomes evident when you “connect” profile information on your site with Facebook, allowing information to flow through to your site with a button click instead of a lengthy sign-up form.   The barrier-of-entry for all aspects of user profiling is reduced — people that wouldn’t bother to sign up for an account on your site at all can still be served personalized information and tracked demographically, and people who would sign-up get their information pre-populated and connected to their social network of choice (assuming that’s Facebook, of course).  In a way, it’s similar to the effect that Amazon Payments or PayPal has in merchandising and micropayments — people are more likely to actually check-out with their cart if they can use a name they trust and don’t have to type in their name, address and credit card information over and over again.

The benefits to all parties seemed pretty clear: the user experiences simplified profile management, Facebook serves as a defacto “social action” engine and drives traffic back to its site,  and your website gets data it may not have had otherwise.  But things aren’t that simple.  For instance, who owns the information about the profile that Facebook provided to your website? What exactly can you store from Facebook, and at what point is that data part of your site’s profile and not the users’ Facebook profile?

It’s not a trivial point.  It turns out that even major site Digg.com, the example site Facebook shows a screenshot of as a Connect site in it’s Facebook Connect announcement post,  didn’t know where the line was.  As the writers at AllFacebook.com point out, the Facebook TOS are muddy: different rules about what data can be stored and cached under different circumstances; conditions for people removing or disconnecting from your app; frequent changes due to new functionality and occasionally, public outcry.  Compound that with the fact that it’s near impossible for Facebook to police the requirements among the many sites using Connect, and there is a lot of confusion between what a Connected website wants to do, should do, and can get away with doing.

As websites link up with Facebook Connect more and more, the lesson for prospective integrators is to plan for the implications of the TOS on your data collection and make sure you aren’t left in the lurch if it doesn’t match up with Facebook’s rules.  A decent back-up plan includes OpenSocial, Twitter and maybe a little bit of praying.

Microsoft’s mash-up engine Popfly died a quiet and unlamented death last week.  Very few people seemed to even know it existed, but based on its colorful, icon-layered interface , its few visitors probably got the impression that it was some kind of Flash game creator – which it was, if you replace “Flash” with “Silverlight”, just like Microsoft would like you to do.

But the editorial emphasis on cheap “my first game” entries on the site’s homepage belied its underlying strength as a mash-up platform.  Think of it as a system with the fluent routing of Yahoo’s Pipes but with the component architecture of traditional programming languages, all wrapped up in the gloss of  Silverlight technology.  Popfly users had the capability to take up components prebuilt by hard-core programmers as data sources – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – and use them as building blocks in Popfly’s visual editor to create powerful, integrated apps with a modern look.  Except they didn’t – they made Pong clones.

So the world won’t be crying for Popfly, but it’s hard to wonder if the same fate isn’t in store for other mash-up systems – was it Popfly’s candy colored wrapping or the hands-off visual programming mash-up idea itself that doesn’t have legs?