We launched our brand new website on June 10th, a soft launch. We shared early on our process, we’ll go into a bit more detail about why we chose the content management system we did, and what we are using that help us (and our clients) to do more with our site.

We develop about 40% of our web sites for clients in the Joomla content management system. Joomla is the most widely used CMS in the world (more than 10 million downloads). We develop about 40% of client websites in Drupal, about 10% in WordPress and about 10% straight up HTML / Dreamweaver / Simple CMS sites. We also have a few sites that are built entirely on an e-commerce platform, such as Magento Commerce (now owned by e-bay).

Joomla is idea for the client who has some DIY leanings. Joomla is easier to install and configure quality off-the-shelf components like event registration systems, shopping cart/ecommerce packages, social media platforms for members, and other such tools. Drupal is easier to develop templates and custom applications, search interfaces and other such ‘programming’ intensive tools. We’ll explore further our process, our use of a new content tool that offers way more flexibility to content in Joomla in future posts. For now, tell us what you think of our new site! Http://www.triadesignfirm.com.

The Marketing Mentor and the Marketing Mix Blog are some of our favorite resources. Almost 18 months ago, we hired Ilise Benun in a six-part sales training session for our (then) partners to learn to sell as we began to reform our business. Ultimately our partners didn’t want to be in that role, and Tria is a different company but working with Ilise gave me a ton of valuable insights and reminders about marketing.

The way to bring in new customers is simply to go find them – at business networking groups, speaking engagements, conferences, on the phone, guest posting on blogs, with good Search Engine Optimization. The way to keep them engaged  until they call you back is to use social media & blogging to deepen the engagement, remind them occasionally via e-mail marketing. The last six months of Tria have been an exciting ride, and the seeds we’ve sown are paying off into prospects, customers and projects. Watch for our link to the podcast soon!

The best part about bike commuting is how ‘close to the ground’ you are. This morning on our commute, we could smell doughnuts baking at the QD bakery.  Of course there are always unpleasant ones – trucks or even the occasional manure wafting from Lansing’s agricultural areas if the wind is right. But this morning, for nearly four blocks, all we could smell were the doughnuts! Our 4yo daughter exclaimed “I smell something!” Indeed.

Route in: Burcham to M.A.C. to West Circle Dr. to Kalamazoo St. to River Trail at  Cedar St. to Elm, South on South Washington to Moore’s River Drive (drop 4yo and 11 month old at day care). Moore’s River Drive to Washington to Grand Ave, to North Washington Ave (Tria Marketing & Design).

Friday is bike to work day (officially, nationally), and I also have a client and intern meeting to set up that day. George has Lansing Rotary’s meeting. His is a short walk from our Old Town office. Mine’s on Michigan Ave, so I’ll be taking advantage of all those FREE RIDE CATA coupons I have, walking to Bus #1 on Shiawassee (or wherever it leaves, I’ll be checking the CATA website) to meet a client and an intern on our project. I’ll document Bike to Work Day in photos and post them on our blog and social media.

May 17-20 is National Bike Week – and part of National Bike Week (an initiative to get people active and out on bikes) is Bike to Work Day, Friday May 20.

We’ll be documenting our bike to work that week (and other weeks) and showing how it’s done, practically, by business owners in Lansing, Michigan.

The Plan:

We have to get from our house in East Lansing (near Marble Elementary at Hagadorn and Burcham) to REO Town (our children’s day care is off Moore’s River Drive) to Old Town, where our offices are. We have to take two children, ages 4 and 11 months safely, with a diaper bag and cooler, our business items, including at least one laptop. We think this will take us 45 minutes. By car, it takes 25 (including stops to drop off the kiddos).

The Bike:

Co-Motion road tandem. It’s a way fancy bike for the kind of bumpy, intercity trail like the River Trail, but it’s the only tandem we have. If I were doing this solo, I’d do it on a commuting hybrid – fatter tires than a road, but road geometry (for speed). Some may prefer the more upright riding of a true commuter bike.  A 2-seater Bell child trailer.

The Wardrobe:

We must plan on professional dress at the office. For our casual office, it means dress slacks, business shirts and a business jacket for both of us. It also means, for me, a jersey dress, like a wrap dress would be suitable. We plan to stash a week’s worth of clothes and shoes at work, but one day I will ride in my work clothes to document how that works (George commuted 4 miles by bike for years wearing business attire). We happen to have a full bath (come join us in Old Town, we have suites available in our building for very attractive lease rates!) so I plan to freshen up at work. I will be riding in bike clothes – fitted shorts with padded chamois, fitted jersey, bike helmet, gloves, shoes that clip into my pedals.

If you’re riding to work without a place to shower, wear a bike jersey, but wear your business trousers (or for women, a skirt), and change into a shirt or blouse at work. You can stash a jacket or sportcoat at the office the previous week. Black works with everything! A dress shirt can be carefully rolled into a pannier bag or backpack. You can easily stash heels in there too, or you can wear ballet flats with regular pedals (not with the fancy clipless pedals). Men can wear regular dress shoes.

Once you get to work, duck into the restroom with a pack of unscented baby wipes, remove your jersey, freshen up with wipes and put on your business shirt. It’s amazing what baby wipes can do! (I commuted to the office 11 miles back in 2003, a hot summer, and we  had no shower in our building on the west side of Lansing.) For women, you might try using a silk scarf under your helmet to keep your hair in place, but I have medium length, straight hair and that seems to do fine under a helmet.

The Route:

Burcham Bike Lane to Abbott Road south Bike lane, to MSU Bike lane (West Circle out past Jenison to Kalamazoo). Pick up the River Trail at Kalamazoo and near 127 (there’s an underpass). River Trail all the way south to the southern extension through REO Town, across the river to Moore’s Park and to day care. Back out the southern tier River Trail to the connector to the Old Town route, up under 496, to Old Town Grand River and Grand River to Washington, where our office is.

The time:

We have to be at work by 9am. We will leave by 8am to allow for the stop to drop off children and gear.

The Cost Savings:

$7.50 per day in gas. $4.09/gal x 10mpg x 18 miles RT.

Calories burned: about 600 for each of us. x 5 days a week = 3,000 or just under 1lb of weight loss per week. I don’t need to lose weight, I think George might want to get down to his cycling weight (5-10lbs less). I merely get to add an entire meal to my day! (or guilt-free QD doughnuts!)

Follow our progress, with photos, documenting the daily challenges (cars, geese, water over the trail, bees and more) on our Bike to Work plan. We intend to keep this up all summer long!

I was listening to NPR the other day, on my way to a meeting with a client. They were interviewing the Dropkick Murphys (a Celtic punk band) who were explaining that the band didn’t have to change their strategy when the new album came out because they were “everywhere, all the time” already. Besides being a fan of the band, I realized this is exactly what every entrepreneur needs to think about their marketing. Be everywhere, all the time.

Marketing is not a “when we get to it” activity. For virtually every for-profit business (and most not for profits too), marketing is the only activity that actually creates revenue. All other activities create cost.

So, how does a business, in 2011, be everywhere all the time? You can find out how to get more marketing in your day at the next South Lansing Business Association lunch on April 27, 2011. (and keep watching this space as we share with you how our clients are everywhere, all the time!)

They take a lot of gestation to mature, you really can’t appreciate how much you’ll  have to feed them at first and they can get very large fast.

We have undertaken thousands of web development projects in the last 15 years. Much has changed since those early days in the mid-1990s. There are more easy to use and low-cost-to-produce tools than ever before. There are tools suited for every type of business, every skillset and every market.

In fact that’s part of the problem – there are so many choices, a lot of entrepreneurs freeze when it comes to deciding how to even tackle this big project. I’ll share what we’re doing as we revamp triadesignfirm.com.

We first sat down to an analysis of our markets. Who are they? Why do they buy from us? What do they need to know when researching services we offer, and what do they need once they are clients? Where can we find them? What do we want them to do when they are on our site. What do they want to do when they are on our site? You’ll remember this from that first meeting with you where we asked you a lot of questions and came armed with a 34-page document to answer them in. We first drafted a free-flow of these answers at first

We then drafted an outline to map these answers. It doesn’t have to be formal – I prefer a straight up outline, mine’s not even typed, but written out amongst sketches and doodles of site design.

Then, we moved to design, had a discussion, researched other sites we liked and sketched out ideas. Noah is executing a terrific design that captures everything that we need (for the moment).

In the process of migrating and rewriting our copy – the single biggest task in the project for most of our clients – we changed our minds. Several times. Nav bars got added to. Content was restructured. This is OK, we always anticipate this when we design your site, and we build some scope creep in to the project.

We have encountered no significant technology hurdles in  the project. We are not adding any complexity in version 1.0x of the site that we’ve not mapped out already. It’s much easier to launch a finished smaller site and add to it.

I’ll share our progress as we finish up our site. So if you’re just done with (or just considering) a web development project, I’ll echo your feelings: it’s a big task and it can be overwhelming. I take it one page at a time.

It’s easy to blame economic troubles on the people in Washington (or just down the street, in our case, here, north of the Capitol.) But for most entrepreneurs, your personal economy depends on your ability to market consistently.

Before I jump up on my soapbox, I’ll say to you that I’ve been burned by not marketing consistently, and it’s something I harp on to my clients all the time. I actually do speaking engagements about this (most recently, at the SBTDC’s FastTrack entrepreneur program in late May.)

I’ve recently embarked on a major marketing push (I’ve blogged about this before) which took a short break for me to have my second child this summer, and I’m now back on it. I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going. I hope you’ll take away the things I’m doing and be inspired to put them to work in your business.

• Today, after putting out a few fires, I took a ‘break’ – and my break was to finish editing an email newsletter I started three weeks ago.
• I then edited and published a blog post (about social media) that I wrote two weeks ago.
• I sent an email to a prospective client whom I ran into at my local polling station (never know where those clients will show up at!)
• I need to leave a short note for my neighbors, a new retail knitting store, that I might be able to help them with their marketing. They know me (I get packages for them when they are out), but they don’t yet know what I do. I’ll write it up and put it in a fancy envelope and stick it on their door when I leave tonight.

All of these activities – according to my online time tracking system 40 minutes’ worth – propel my business forward today. I will spend about fifteen minutes later today researching new prospects to phone next Monday, during Marketing Monday’s cold calling session. Yes.  Cold calling. It’s not that hard, I’m pretty good at it, and the more shots I take, the more likely one is to hit the net.

Anyone can open a Facebook account or Twitter account in a matter of minutes. You can begin posting and wasting inordinate amounts of time using social media. But is there any return on investment for your business to be there? Not without a clear strategy.

• An integrated social media strategy – with your marketing strategy – gives you a goal toward which to work.
• It aligns your business goals with your social media efforts and ensures that you’re staying on message and on track.
• It streamlines the amount of time you should stay on social media (as a percentage of your day – social media is a great time waster).
• And it keeps you focused on tracking return on investment.

Social media maturity is moving your firm from the infancy stage of posting whatever comes to mind,  to really using it to drive customers to some action that benefits your business. That’s where a strategy really helps.

So how do you create a strategy for your organization? You can develop one yourself, of course: you can take advantage of the many (free) resources on the web that help inform you of best practices in social media. You can call us to help, too. We have developed simple social media strategy plans for clients that keep them focused on their message and on making sure they are linking social posts to trackable business activities.

Social media takes work, and like any marketing activity, it takes consistent work to see results. A shot in the dark here and there is going to turn off your audience. If they hear from you too much, they’ll tune you out. If they hear the wrong message, it will harm your overall marketing efforts. If it’s not your brand’s personality, your audience will be confused as to what you stand for.

Twitter and Facebook are getting all the hoopla, but there’s a larger scope that encompasses social media marketing – blogs, forums, youtube, flickr and online communities are big players here and deserve equal consideration. Add in game-based social features like Foursquare and review/rating tools like MojoPages or friend-based loyalty programs like Mogl and you have a lot of places to be social. A strategy helps keep you on target by focusing in on what works for your target market.

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NB a friend in social media forwarded this great article to me from Social CMO: Social ROI isn’t just about facebook and twitter – in fact, they aren’t nearly enough. http://www.thesocialcmo.com/blog/2010/11/the-truth-about-social-media-roi-and-why-facebook-isn%E2%80%99t-enough-to-deliver/