Gatorworks | Baton Rouge Web Design & Development

All of us at Gatorworks wish you and yours the very best for a safe and happy holiday season.

What is one of the best ways to keep Top of Mind Awareness with your customers? Keep in touch! With an email newsletter you can market your services to clients and prospects in a low cost way. Here are five tips to ensure the success of your email newsletter.

1. Give them a reason to open the email with a good subject

The first thing that you do when you look at an article is read the headline. Same thing goes for an email; you read the subject. Make it attention grabbing and give it a hook to entice the reader.

2. Write original content that provides solutions to a target audience.

Write to a specific group. When you address problems people can relate to, they feel like you’re writing directly to them. (Which you are!) Solid, original content is important. No matter what your area of expertise, write about what people want to know about. Write about the solutions to their key issues. Be a resource. Give them a reason to hire you.

3. Don’t use big words!

We are often tempted impress people with large words. Write as if you were speaking directly to your ideal client and do it in a conversational tone.

4. Get them to look forward to receiving your message.

Post often, but don’t overdo it. I think the golden spot is between once a week to once a month. I set up a calendar with article subjects and dates. Have a reserve of articles written and ready to go so that if an emergency comes up, you won’t miss your deadline. Readers get used to your schedule and notice when an issue is missing.

5. Invite readers to provide feedback, questions, and topic suggestions.

The goal of all this is to get people to like and trust you. Leave it open for feedback, questions, or topics to talk about. Inviting feedback opens up a one-way communication into a two-way conversation. People appreciate the opportunity to give you their opinion or ask a question.

…3 Powerful Tools to Find Your Target Audience

If you build it, they will come…or so you thought. So you have a new website, but no visitors? What do you do?

A friend of mine, Jorge over at Reach Local, likes to use this analogy: “It’s like a gas station in a desert. You can build the best website ever, but if there are no people coming to it, it’s useless.”

Well, here are three tools you can use to increase your web traffic.

(more…)

Where can you see Mayor-President Kip Holden dressed like Santa Clause and singing like Louie Armstrong?  There’s only one place:  The Baton Rouge Area Chamber Holiday Celebration.

Gatorworks President Brian Rodriguez and I (both chamber members) attended the function held at Perkins Rowe in Baton Rouge.  It was amazing (albeit, a bit cold).  The After 8 band played while all the restaurants in Perkins Rowe set up booths serving out free food.

But the real treat was getting to see so many business friends, all in one place.  The opportunity to rub elbows with Baton Rouge’s best businesspeople is always too much to pass up.  A lot of laughing and cheer (and even some business) can be found at the annual event.  If you have never been or are new to the area, I highly recommend joining the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce.

Today I attended a meeting of the AAF Baton Rouge chapter, and I had a fairly eye-opening experience. I realized though I may work at a Graphic Design firm, I didn’t have any idea about any of the competition in the area. I really had no information from what I’ll call the “outside world”- meaning any company other than Gatorworks.

That being said when I went to this collaboration of designers and artists I was somewhat blown away. They spoke about their processes they went through in order to win the Addy Awards (awards given by the federation for excellence in creative design, marketing and advertising) and it made an impact as to how I view what I do.

One of the speakers (whose name is Greg Milneck) was the winner of an Addy for his work on some local commercials. Now when he spoke about his process it seemed at first that “Oh he’s talking about filmmaking, so this doesn’t really apply to me.” Yet, when I took time to listen and examine what he was saying it all made sense and really fit well into the process of my job.

Pre-production, pre-production, pre-production. Those were the three most important steps in his process. And if you think about it, those should be the 3 most important steps in pretty much any design process. Regardless of whether it’s print design, commercials, or web design, having pre-production as the primary priority in your process is pretty logical. He went on to say that regardless of budget “more time spent on pre-production will allow you to spend less time on the actual production and post-production saving you money in the long run.” That’s why it’s so important. For him, it was to avoid going to a set and having 30 cast and crew not knowing exactly what to do. But for people like me and my coworkers, it’s more about having the site functionality and content laid out in front of you like a blue-print. If it isn’t, the client will make mid-design changes, or even post-approval design changes which cause more time to be spent going back and repeating work.

He had others that he put less emphasis on, but the one that stood out to me as a web designer was “Cooperation between pre- and post-production crew.” Now in terms of web design, this struck a very resonant chord with me. More often than not, I’ve run into an issue in the closing processes of deploying a site because I didn’t inform the designer of the limitations of HTML/CSS. With an increase in collaboration between developer and designer, these hiccups and tiny setbacks that frustrate us all and run minutes/hours off the clock could easily be avoided.

This is why i think even though the speaker was talking about commercial making, the logic and process applies to all walks of life.

My purpose with this post is really just to share with you my experience at the luncheon and how it affected me. If you have any other steps in your design process or workflow that you find is imperative I would love to hear about it. Leave a comment or email me directly.

Last week Michael Hecht, President/CEO of GNO, Inc., was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule to speak to the EO Accelerator group. GNO, Inc. spearheads economic development for the ten parish Greater New Orleans area. Hecht’s speech was very inspiring, and it reminded us all that New Orleans really is a great place. Unfortunately, since Katrina (and even before) many people of the region focus so heavily on the negative aspects of the city. GNO, Inc. put together the “Greater New Orleans Reality Check” which highlights a quick punch list of positive aspects of the city.

One of the recent initiatives that Hecht and his staff are working on is the Greater New Orleans Digital Media Alliance. Hecht’s goal for The Greater New Orleans Digital Media Alliance will be to market the metro area to technology companies, advocate policies that support those firms, and work with universities to develop curricula that support the technology industry. The Times-Picayunne recently covered the story here.

I look forward to following GNO, Inc.’s initiatives as they help re-build the New Orleans business community.

In the Fall of 2008, our firm had the opportunity to work with the alumni association for the historic Baton Rouge High School. The organization wanted a fresh new identity package including logo, letterhead, and an interactive website. The logo to the left consists of a custom illustration of the BRHS bulldog. We worked very closely with the alumni association to make sure we maintained the great tradition of the school. We conducted research for the project by talking to current alumni, reviewing several old school yearbooks, and discussing our design audit thoroughly with the alumni association executive director.

Once we finalized the new logo and usage guidelines, we were ready to move forward with the new Baton Rouge High School Alumni Association website. The website is the central hub for alumni to learn about upcoming events, news, and useful links. We finished the website in record time, and we exceeded our client’s expectations. See what they had to say about us below!

“Gatorworks has done a fantastic job with the new design for the Baton Rouge High School Alumni Association logo and website. Brian and the crew met every expectation with professionalism and a great creative vision.  We look forward to a long and successful partnership with Gatorworks in promoting our goals for the Association.”
Lauren Ford, Executive Director
Baton Rouge High School Alumni Association

It’s finally here…our  new website! You know they say the carpenter can’t find time to work on his own house, and unfortunately for a while there we fit the stereotype.  However, we feel our new site has been worth the wait, as it will now really showcase our firm and its abilities.  Other than showcasing our portfolio, we hope to really engage ourselves in the local and even national design community. We are very excited to be able to use this website to better communicate with our design and CSS peers.

Check out some of our fun features such as our last.fm stream that will show you the most recent song each of our team members have played here at the office. Feel free to take a look at our flickr stream or stay informed with our twitter feed!

We hope that you will continue to support our firm and the many other local design and tech firms.  I invite you to stay updated with the tech happenings specifically in New Orleans by following my friend Chris Schultz’s blog here:  www.voodooventures.com.  In fact, Chris has a great list of the different happenings down in NOLA in this post:  Hitting a Tipping Point in Louisiana.

I’m sure many of you have heard of Stephen Covey’s time management practice where your time can be spent essentially in four “quadrants.” The box should have “urgent” and “not urgent” across the top along with “important” and “not important” across the left side.

So things fall into either Quadrant I: Urgent and Important, Quadrant II: Not Urgent but Important, Quadrant III: Not Important but Urgent, or Quadrant IV: Not Urgent and Not Important.

The idea is that you should keep your work in Quadrant II as much as possible, keeping up with things that are not urgent but are important. Obviously this isn’t exactly feasible on a day to day basis; however, at Gatorworks we take time out each quarter to focus solely on our Quadrant II time.  We did just that last Friday downtown at D’Agostino’s Restaurant.  D’Agostino’s was a gracious host in that they opened their restaurant earlier than they normally do on a Friday to accommodate our team. (more…)

We’ve been partnering with search engine marketing firm, ReachLocal, for about 2 years now, and I’m very satisfied with the results we’ve been providing our clients. Sometimes it can take a little while to fully explain how the service works if the interested parties are not familiar with search engine advertising. However, I have been able to break down the service into essentially 7 steps below:

1. Generate a comprehensive geo-targeted keyword list in regard to your company’s products or services. We estimate your list will contain approximately 1000 keyword phrases.
2. Set up accounts with the major search sites and allocate budgets across them, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask, and SuperPages.com. We have a “budget recommendation tool” that can assist you in determining a sufficient monthly budget that will reach your ROI goals.
3. Create online text ads that will grab attention and generate traffic.
4. Use our patent-pending solution to display a proxy version of your website and phone number so we can track the phone calls, emails, potential e-commerce sales, and forms submitted as a result of your online campaign.
5. Perform daily monitoring of your keywords and use our bid management software to give you the best visibility on the search sites in relation to your budget.
6. Because we can uniquely follow clicks as they become offline leads, we can also maximize your return over 3-6 months by focusing your budgets on the keywords that create the highest percentage of real leads.
7. Publish a daily, weekly, or monthly email (your choice) summarizing the campaign activity and provide password-protected online reports and lead history.

So, in a nutshell, that’s it! Of course, if you give me a call I can explain each one of those steps in further detail. Let me know if I can help!

I receive periodic emails from my friend Alex Velasquez over at Legacy Consulting.  I believe he usually tends to time his email blasts with holidays or generally recognized changes in the calendar year such as a new season or the beginning/end of a quarter of the year.  The emails are typically short and sweet, yet powerful.  I particularly enjoyed the one I received today from Alex.  It reads:

Inconveniences
Every success requires discomforts. It demands that we do things that we don’t like to do. So when inconveniences arise, look at them as necessary for growth and excellence. After all, we should desire pleasant results much more than pleasant methods.

It’s little tidbits of insight such as this that remind me of the tenacity that is required to be successful.  Feel free to visit www.consultlegacy.com for further information on Alex’s company.  Alex is also involved with the Wolf Creek Business Growth Institute where I will be sending one of my sales guys for training later this year.  Feel free to visit www.wolfcreekbgi.com for more information.

Gatorworks’ online advertising partner ReachLocal just received some additional funding!  Read the article on TechCrunch here: Search Engine Marketing Firm ReachLocal Takes $55.2 Million. We are very excited to be doing business with such a successful company and market leader in online search!

Company Background:

WCIT 2006 is considered by many as the world’s premiere Information Technology forum. The biennial World Congress drew over 2,000 business, government, and academic leaders from 80 countries. The delegates participated in the World Congress to ensure the positive impact of IT proliferation on the global community.

Business Problem:

The logistics team for WCIT needed to manage approximately 200 volunteers. The volunteers from all over the world needed to somehow submit their availability schedules for the week of the conference as well as many other pertinent materials. Then, the logistics team would need to schedule the volunteers to specific tasks and communicate with them on a consistent basis in the days leading up to the conference.

The Gatorworks Solution:

The GW web programmers developed an online secure system that allowed each volunteer to logon and submit their work availability for the week of the conference. In addition, the system allowed the volunteers to submit other materials such as the languages they speak or their contact information during their stay in Austin, TX. The WCIT logistics team had the opportunity to login to a secure universal control panel where they could retrieve all the data and print unique reports. Mass emails to the volunteers could be distributed from the panel as well.

Lucas Daniels President, Global CEC Director, Creative & Logistics Planning for WCIT 2006 had this to say about his experience with Gatorworks:

“The system performed flawlessly enabling us to manage multiple schedules for a large group of volunteers whose valuable work was crucial to having WCIT run smoothly. Gatorworks created this important tool in record time and they were straight forward and easy to work with.”