Best Practices and Standards
Why are you here?
Obviously, you are here because we brought you here. Perhaps you are also here because you know that something is wrong. You cannot quite explain it, but you feel it. You’ve felt it for a while—that something is not quite right. You don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter driving you mad. What are we talking about?
Your business website doesn’t quite measure up to modern standards and best practices. We know…that sounds insulting, but only if we weren’t prepared to help you fix it, right?
What do we mean?
Simply this, almost all fields, businesses, and industries have best practices and standards. This is also true for websites and online marketing. There are commonly known and widely accepted website best practices and standards.
Best practices are methods or techniques that consistently show superior results and are often used as a benchmark.
Standards are specifications, often established by authorities or by general consent. They serve as a measure of acceptability and a basis for comparison.
What are website best practices and standards?
Here are a few of the most common best practices and standards.
How else might you know that our site isn’t measuring up?
- The easiest way is just look around the web. Examine the sites of industry leaders. See how you compare visually to them. Leading sites that look good and perform well typically follow best practices and standards.
- Customers and partners might mention to you that your website doesn’t look good or isn’t encrypted or secure (SSL).
- Your site breaks in modern browsers (e.g. appears abnormally small or everything shifts to the left). Also, it likely doesn’t present well on mobile phones and tablets.
- You haven’t updated your site in a few years. In this case you are likely going to fail standards for performance, security, and accessibility, not to mention having a dated look and feel. (Ask us how our pattern library helps hedge against the need to redesign every few years.)
- Examine your site in tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights. This utility site will help you see performance issues.
Fail by comparison
Your website, regardless of the industry, is subject to the scrutiny of prospective customers. These customer don’t just visit your website, they visit many others throughout their time online. When visiting other websites that perform well, they are forming an opinion on how websites should appear. If yours doesn’t look and perform like what they’ve seen in their typical web browsing, that will factor into their opinion of your business.
This is your chance!
You can choose to make your business prospects better with a better online presence. This is the time to choose between an opportunity for a no-charge website makeover or leave and do nothing at all.
A No-Charge Website
Yes, that’s right, you are not dreaming. We are giving away a custom, made-to-measure, B2B website, hosted on our secure platform at no charge for two years.
Why are we doing this?
Because we’ve developed an innovative new model for building and managing B2B websites. We have new technology, new design approaches, new means to ensure sites stay secure, up to date, and useful to the business. We just need some people to test our systems and give us feedback. We’ve been testing on our own company long enough and need some outside input.
Are you ready?
It’s super simple, just fill out this form and tell us that you are interested. We’ve only sent this offer to a small number of businesses. In fact, this offer is only for those we reached out to. We will reach out and ask some more questions to see who is the best candidate to offer this no-charge website. Once we have selected the makeover candidate, we will not contact you again, unless you want us to.
Hey, you made it to the bottom of the page.
Below are some of the most frequently asked questions about our product and this offer:
We needed a small item that we could easily ship and that would work as a tchotchke. We chose the tape measure because of two things.
- Our makeover offer was sent to businesses with websites that didn't measure up to current best practices and standards. We know...that seems insulting, but we figured that you probably knew anyway.
- We call our custom website process "Made-to-Measure." (See more below: "What is Made-to-Measure")
Think of it like renting office space where the building owner takes care of the building, landscaping, common areas, and all the infrastructure (electric, gas, water, security, fire, etc.). You just move in your furniture, business systems, and people—in this case, that is your content and your strategy.
In the men's suit industry there are generally 3 types of suits you can buy: Off the rack (think department store), custom (think $5,000+ suits from a tailor), and made-to-measure (the hybrid of "off the rack" and completely custom).
When we make websites we use design patterns that we have already built by observing best practice trends on the web. We use these patterns to create custom sites. It reduces the time to build, which reduces cost, and it reduces subjectivity in the design process.
In our vocabulary, it is a minimum viable product, the smallest thing you can deliver as a viable product to get customer feedback and determine what to add next to make it even more valuable to the customer.
We mean exactly that. You can use the system at no charge for the first two years. Not only that, if you choose to leave our service, you can take the site with its design and your content with you.
We understand. Today, so many unscrupulous marketers try to trick people. We don’t do that! We truly need early adopters so much that we are willing to offer a first one at no charge. Think of it like priming a pump.
If you are not selected for the no-charge website-as-a-service, then you have several choices:
- Ask us to not contact you anymore. We will honor that request. We treat people how we want to be treated.
- Ask us questions about how to improve your current site and strategy. We have a lot of expertise in the space and would be happy to answer questions as time allows. There would be no obligation, just friendly advice for having participated in our process.
- Ask us to keep you up with the winner’s progress and their custom site build. We won’t spam you, just send updates.
- Ask us to build you a site anyway. Maybe our dad will let us offer a discount seeing as we need more early adopters. We just can’t give them all away for free. We have expenses associated with each site (staffing, technology, hosting, etc.). But again, it doesn’t hurt to ask for an early adopter discount.
Well, sort of... We have carefully selected website makeover prospects based on certain criteria. We know that your organization meets most of it. We would need to look at that company and see if they fit the criteria. Just fill out the form, then we’ll chat with you.
The sites we build are custom. We use this phrase to describe them: "custom, made-to-measure, pattern-based, B2B website...in the shortest possible time!"
Right now, using our Sprint-to-MVP process, we build custom, made-to-measure, pattern-based sites in 4–6 weeks. If you didn’t know, that is super fast for a custom site that follows industry standards and best practices.
That’s an awesome question. We love to talk about this...but it’s a little long.
Our years of experience in designing and developing websites for businesses repeatedly showed us that the old way was broken. Our research also showed that the old way was leaving large segments of the B2B marketplace behind. So, we developed these theories:
- Website designs have evolved into predictable and reusable patterns, so long, drawn-out, cumbersome design processes are unnecessary.
- Owning and maintaining the necessary server infrastructure is a challenging and risky burden that business shouldn’t have to take on. So we thought maybe we could bear that burden. After all, you don’t have to own a building or a fleet of vehicles to do business effectively, so why not apply the same thinking to things like websites.
- Many B2B organizations don’t have sufficient talent to properly care and feed a viable website or marketing technology stack, so maybe we could do it for them.
We call it a "Tchotchke Ambush!"
A trinket, a bauble, a thing of nominal value. Things you might get at a trade show.
Sorry! Our “parents” gave us a budget and we spent it all.
About this page. You are the target of a Tchotchke Ambush—a strategy to get the attention of our ideal customer by sending little trinkets of nominal value.