So it surprised me when the client stopped paying to support and improve upon the site. Still, it’s their money, and their business… But what really got me was seeing the client completely trash the great design work we did, junking it up with amateurish third rate “improvements” that were very poorly thought out and which made the site harder to use as well as ugly.

I asked our old client contact at the company about it, and he told me that his boss had decided that we cost too much and that nobody cared about great design in a recession, so he was making changes to the website himself. Our contact noted that their traffic had indeed dipped since we were on the account, and that sales had dropped as well.

I shook my head and hung up the phone. But then, a few weeks later I ran into the company president, and asked him about things. He told me he truly didn’t think people cared about good design, and he was convinced that his heroic efforts to ’save’ the website were working. I pointed out that i knew sales had dipped after he took over, and I offered to help at a reduced rate, but he wouldn’t hear it.

It’s now 6 weeks later, and that company is no more. They have folded. Kaput. Gone. I heard from their advertising agency that the president, in his last throes, had tried to take over their ad campaigns, too, trashing months and months of work.

I’m not happy that this company floundered and failed. But I talked about this client and their failure today for a reason- a great website or tv commercial or social media campaign cannot save a sinking ship, but a crappy, poorly thought out effort can certainly hasten your demise. Your digital marketing is your company’s face to the world. It represents you. Yes, even in a recession, good design matters.

Maybe the economy is coming back, maybe businesses are realizing what a great deal digital marketing is, or maybe people are just figuring out what a great deal we are. Whatever the reason, we’ve been fortunate to grow the business. As we’ve grown, I’m still involved in most aspects of the company, but I’ve decided that it’s time for me to set some standards for the clients and projects we take on.

You know what that means- manifesto time! Hey, guiding principles are a good thing, and I expect everyone at PatrickOrtman, Inc. to follow these principles when an opportunity to grow our client list comes to us.

Of course, I’m a big believer in transparency so I’m sharing my little manifesto with the world. Maybe it’ll help your digital agency- or whatever type of business you run- to set up and codify your own set of guiding principles? After all, you can’t have a revolution without a manifesto! Without further ado:

1) Every project and client we take on will get our best efforts, and the personal attention and resources necessary to knock it out of the park. At the same time, we expect that any client we work with will do their part in providing us the resources so that we can knock their project out of the park. The best client relationships go both ways.

2) When we choose to work with a client, we will be honest and truthful in all our dealings with them. We are not ‘Yes Men’, and when we disagree with a client we will, as tactfully as possible, tell them where we stand. After all, a client hires us for our expertise. Similarly, we expect our clients to be honest and truthful with us, too.

3) We will not work with a client who does not meet our standards of being an ethically run organization. We hate liars, spammers, users, and shady people. Dealing with those types of clients makes us feel so icky that bathing in champagne and $50 bills doesn’t remove the stink. No, thanks!

4) We will not compete on price. We’re certainly not the most expensive digital agency out there, but we’re also not the cheapest and we don’t want to be. We love creating great work, and great work deserves to be well and fairly paid.

5) Every project we do has to be interesting, in some way. Sure, this sounds a bit high-falutin’ at first, but think about it: we’re creative people. To do our best work we need to be engaged. For us to be engaged, there has to be something about the gig that’s interesting to us. We’re not clock-punchers, we’re not assembly line workers. There’s other, lesser digital agencies that fill that role. We’re artists and craftsmen.

6) Similarly, we understand that part of what makes us special is we’re constantly learning new things and finding ways to apply our knowledge to our clients to help them improve their businesses. Too many companies only care about this quarter’s bottom line, and have cut down or eliminated the ‘R” in R&D. Not us. Therefore, from this day forward I am implementing a program where everyone at PatrickOrtman, Inc. is to spend at least one full day a month working on something they want to work on that is not client-related. This could be as simple as adding a feature to a website CMS, figuring out a more efficient video production pipeline, shooting an experimental short film, learning a new technology that could be used with website design, or playing with some new features in Photoshop. The idea is, I want to encourage everyone here to do something creative and not directly client-related for at least one full day a month.

Of course, everyone- myself included- has to present our findings/film/photos, or whatever at a company meeting the next week. The idea is to stretch, to grow. And to share that knowledge.

So, for now that’s my manifesto. I’m interested in any ways to grow this document and make it better, so if you have an idea- share!

There are many times when it’s important to focus, and I haven’t yet met a web designer or digital production person who was incapable of Yoda-like concentration and focus, when the situation demands.

But sometimes, it’s a bit easy to be so focused on the minutia that one can miss the bigger picture, and if you’re a boutique digital agency like we are, that can really hurt you. There are times when one needs a larger perspective, and this is particularly important when choosing a new client.

I know, I’m used to some static from web guys everywhere- “what do you mean, choosing a client? That’s a luxury most of us mortals don’t have! We take what we can get!” I hear you, I do. But every time I’ve believed that- that we needed to take what we can get- it’s bitten us in the butt. You’d think I’d have learned by now, but I’ll admit that even I sometimes forget that it’s important to be picky when you decide who to work with. Everyone needs a reminder, once in a while, I guess.

Here’s a few questions I like to ask myself and my team before we take on a new client. I’m not saying we always follow this advice, but I will admit that when we don’t we always regret it:

Does the client have the money to make this project happen?
This is pretty important. If a client has no money, you’re unable to do much at all. Always get the budget range right up front.

Does the client have the vision, experience, and trust to accept your guidance?
The client is hiring you for your expertise. They need to be able to clearly communicate their vision to you, and have the experience and trust necessary to let you do your best work. Otherwise, it turns into a punch-the-clock situation. That’s no good for anyone.

Does this client have growth potential?
To me, I’m not so interested in one-off clients. I want us to find and work with clients who want to keep us around for a decade or more. I want a client who knows their business, and wants to grow. These are satisfying relationships.

Is this client someone you’d be happy to work with even if you had twenty million dollars in the bank today?
This is the big perspective-helper for me. Look, at the end of the day money’s just a number. To me, the most satisfying feeling is working with a client who we actually like. Believe it or not, last week I fired a new client when I found out she wasn’t the kind of person I want us to do business with. Personality counts, because again I want to work with clients for the longterm.

I’m not saying that these questions will guarantee you’ll always make the best decisions. But a little perspective can really help when it comes time to choose the most important members of your team outside your agency. Your clients influence everything about your agency, so it’s vital that you choose them wisely.

This is the companion piece to our recent Superhero Series post, in which Patrick pontificates upon the secret to everlasting joy and big bank account balances, if you’re a website design company. Enjoy!

OK, show of hands- how many of you think of your company as a “website design company”? This article is for those of you who raised your hands. You need to evolve. It won’t be easy, it’ll cost time and money and mean you’ll have to start looking at your business completely differently. But if you don’t evolve, you’ll die.

Here’s the thing: website design is a commodity. That means you’ll find yourself chasing smaller and smaller projects for clients who often rightfully see your company as an easily replaced cog in their marketing machine. Sure, you can point to how your websites look better than the competition, and defend your business to the ends of the earth, but it won’t do you any good. Nobody cares.

Depressed? Don’t be. I’m here to help you evolve how you look at your website design business. Here’s a few tips that will help your web design business evolve into a successful modern enterprise:

1) The web is going mobile, get on the web standards train
Do you know how to build websites that work on mobile devices? What’s your website look like on an iPhone or iPad? Does it have a big ugly gray box where your Flash components should be? Shameful. Embrace web standards in your design work, and make a point to show your clients how having a website that works on mobile platforms is a great thing that massively increases their return on their web design investment. Take the time to educate your clients about how your work actually functions correctly on an iPhone. The web is now everywhere, and now your clients should be, too.

2) Learn video
The web is also going video. YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. A company that can offer solid, professional digital video services to their clients along with excellent, standards-based website design has a leg up on the competition. Now, to make this work you really need to commit to learning video production. Maybe it’s best to partner up with a firm that really gets video. We decided to do this ourselves, and it involved classes at UCLA’s film school, years of short film and web video experiments, and now we’re including video on almost every website design project we’re involved with for clients. The fact that we took the time to learn how to tell a story in video has paid off handsomely in all aspects of our work.

3) Learn everything you can about social media, and how to use it effectively
A website design company that really grasps social media and can learn how to leverage it to their clients benefit is golden. There’s a lot of poseurs and fools out there, so by really making it a priority to be an expert in social media you’ll stand out like a shining beacon.  You could be seen as a superhero, even.

There’s a common theme in these three tips: you need to grow your services and learn how to seamlessly incorporate new skills into your repertoire to stay on top of this business. The truth is, to succeed today you cannot just be a website design company. You need to evolve. Most importantly: you need to become a problem-solver, not just a service provider.

When the web was new, we were always learning new things and constantly figuring out how to use what we’ve learned to help our clients solve their marketing problems. It was normal to constantly innovate and incorporate new skills into projects. This is how we got to be a part of a whole lot of “firsts” including producing the first rock concert on the web, the web’s first live newscast, our virtual reality work for the Olympics, and so forth. The takeaway is when you put out commodity work it’s only natural that your clients see you as a commodity. So don’t do that! It’s kind of funny, having been involved with this industry since its start, but the way to succeed is the same as it was back in 1993: constantly learn, constantly find ways to set your clients apart online. Yes, this costs money. Money that smart clients are almost always willing to pay for expertise beyond that of the great unwashed masses of website design companies that are more like assembly lines than anything else.

A long time ago, I made the decision that we’re not simply selling website design services. We’re selling integrated digital marketing solutions to client problems. There’s a huge difference, and it’s not just in wording- this change took time and lots of money. It took vision and guts. But it’s been a great success for us. You can do the same for your business.

Once you’ve made the commitment to be more than a traditional website design company, the question becomes how to categorize your business as you evolve. You’re now on your way towards providing integrated digital marketing services to your clients, and you need a box that fits your new mindset. My favorite term is Digital Agency, and Interactive Agency works well, too.

Whichever term you choose for your new enterprise, good for you for evolving, and welcome to the new web game. You’ll find there’s a lot fewer bottom-feeders up here, and the work is much more fun and rewarding.

Here’s Episode 3 of our vlog, a discussion about MODx with Ryan Thrash and Jeff Whitfield in Dallas, Texas. MODx is a Content Management Platform, and we use it as the CMS (Content Management System) for most of our client’s websites. Sure, this episode’s a bit more geeky than usual, but we love how MODx makes our website design work sing, and our clients love how easy it is for them to update and maintain their own websites. Yay MODx!

As usual, this episode was shot, edited, and posted on an iPhone 3Gs. ‘Cause we can.

The best source of new clients for your digital/interactive agency, or any business, is positive word of mouth from your current clients. One sure way to make sure you don’t get good word of mouth from those clients is to approach your project budgeting and estimates without care.

Too many web design and digital marketing firms don’t take the time to really estimate their costs and the scope of the project, so they consistently underbid on jobs. Sure, this might get you the initial nod from a client, if they’re only purchasing services based on price, but it always- every time!- leads to serious problems down the line.

It’s a very dangerous game, you’re playing, when you underestimate things.You see, clients don’t like finding out that they’ll be liable for massive price overages as the project progresses, or that you didn’t include important items in your budget such as content development, project management, and so forth. Yes, at times overages are not avoidable- scope and feature creep need to be accounted for, after all. But when you don’t do your best to create an initial, firm estimate, shocking overages become inevitable.

“Why should I make a precise bid on a job?” you may be thinking. “After all, sometimes you will indeed lose a client unless you play the game- everyone knows things cost more than the estimate.”

Wake up, man. The title of this series means you’re interested in becoming a Superhero to your clients. It’s no surprise that up to 90% of all projects in the interactive/web design space fail. It’s also no shocker that by adhering to our Superhero code that you’ll be in the other 10%, stand out like a shining beacon, and attract the best clients and jobs.

The bottom line is, nobody likes expensive surprises. They’re a huge turn-off! That’s why people hate going to the auto shop or the dentist- you’re never exactly sure what’ll be found and need to be fixed. You, however, have the tools and experience to do better. Don’t you?

Do your part to make the world a better place, and nail down your actual expected costs when you make a bid. You’ll find that your clients sing your praises to the heavens, opening the door to tons of great new clients and future business, because you’ll be doing something very few creative services companies care enough to do.

Be precise!

We’re happy to announce we’ve launched the newly redesigned Go Body website. This is the phase one launch of our new nutritional beverage client’s website, and it includes the bones to let us grow the site for them over time, as Go Body comes to a store near you.

The website follows web standards, of course, and it’s meant as a slightly tongue-in-cheek introduction to the drink, as well as a nutritional information source. The website features a JQuery driven Who Drinks Go Body section that will grow to include slideshows and video of Go Body users, and right now we’re featuring Boston Marathoner Mark Kramer and a North Carolina college student named Kelsey. We’ll be adding a kickboxer from Austin and more Go Body users soon!

Last week we got a call from a small local company. They’d hired a web designer who took their money, started the job, and then blew them off. This put the company in a real bind- they needed to have their website live and running before a major show. It’s kind of funny/strange to me that one of the biggest no-brainers around needs to be stated sometimes, but here it is: if you take on a job, be reliable.

It’s probably fair to say that about a third of the web design projects we get come from clients who are frustrated at a previous website design agency’s unreliability. Now, sure, a few of those situations are probably really the client’s fault. But a lot of the time, especially with freelancers, things get busy and clients fall between the cracks, causing a bad taste in a client’s mouth that lasts for a long time. This isn’t good for the designer, it’s terrible for the client, and it even kind of sucks for the guys who come in to clean up the mess (us).

We work really hard to develop and protect our reputation as a design firm, and you should, too. Here’s a few idea on how to make sure your company never comes off as a flaky, unreliable loser:

1) Don’t overbook. Sure, this is tough to do since it’s often feast or famine in this business. But you really need to consider every client you take on. We don’t bring on a new client unless we see the relationship as more of a long term thing. This helps keep us focused on building a strong client base that we can rely on and create strong partnerships that last years, rather than chasing “easy money” jobs.

2) Communicate, communicate, communicate. We budget at least 15% of each project to basic project management tasks. If you don’t budget for project management, you’ll resent the time you spend talking to your clients. They’ll sense this hostility, and what’s more, you’ll start forgetting things and not planning appropriately. So don’t forget project management! Smart clients don’t mind paying a little for this very vital function.

3) Hold yourself and your employees to the highest standards. I’ve talked about this before, but your company’s reputation is only as strong as the weakest link in your organization. Make it clear to your employees that you will only accept the highest standards from their work and their communication with the project leader and client.

In the end, we kicked butt for our new client and have their website ready to launch the day they go on the road for their show. Crisis averted, and by being reliable we’re the superheroes of this story. Don’t you want to be a superhero, too?