Sending out email newsletters or other email marketing tools is a lot more affordable (and more effective) than sending out printed material. Also, it gets  you moving in the right direction, which is toward a more fully developed digital marketing program (more on that in a later post).

Getting started is easy.

Step One: Choose an online email marketing service and set up an account. Account set-up should be free, so don’t use a service that charges you to set up your account. We always recommend MailChimp because we use it and love it. Another good service is emma, and there are many others to pick from. One thing to check when you are deciding on which service to use is how they charge. Some services charge by the length of your list. Others charge per email sent. Some offer both options. It varies, so choose what’s most appropriate for you. One thing we love about MailChimp is that if your list isn’t too large, you may be able to do your sending for free… which is always affordable.

Step Two: Build email marketing into your firm’s overall content strategy. All of your marketing messaging… all of the content you are producing should be working in harmony. That’s something your content strategy will help assure. It is important to coordinate your marketing efforts, so give some thought to what you hope to accomplish by reaching out to your community.

Step Three: Once you’ve got your head around why you’re doing this and what you want to say, develop the content for your first mailing. The content people out there will understand that quite a bit of thinking should go into this. Things like knowing your audience and what they want to know, because this is about them, it’s not about you. Give them something useful, and try to structure your email content to provide a bit of value, along with the promise of even greater value if they click through to your website. And build that value into your site. Your goal is get your audience to come to your site and engage with you in some way.

Step Four: You now need your email template design. Many services provide stock template designs, but it’s much better to use a custom-designed template. Your email is making a statement about your firm’s brand, and it’s design really needs to match and support that brand. If you don’t have one on staff, you will probably want to work with a professional graphic designer who has experience creating custom email templates. And once they have the template looking the way you want, have them show you how to plug your content into your new template and get your email ready to send.

Step Five: Go over your mailing list and make sure it’s a good one. Every name on the list should be okay with receiving email from your firm. Bring your list up to snuff, because you don’t want to be accused of being a spammer. There are negative consequences to that. So, when you know you’ve got a good list, upload it to your new email marketing service. Actually, this step can happen right after you set up your account, but the point is, it has to happen before you can send anything out, so make sure you allow time to do it.

Step Six: Send out your first email, and start checking your analytics to see who all is opening it. Be happy.

Step Seven: Put an email newsletter opt-in sign-up on your website to add new names to your mailing list.

I’m not trying to make light of how much actual work goes into this process, because there’s a lot effort involved. But in relative terms, getting this particular marketing tool up and running is something you can accomplish fairly quickly and with a limited investment. In return, you will have significantly upgraded your digital marketing infrastructure, and you’ll be in a position to greatly expand the way you think about how to reach out to your online community.

Right out of the box, this presents you with several significant challenges.

First, it seems that nearly every community in America (and beyond) is trying to do the same thing, so you have the problem of being heard. Plus, there is a fairly standard set of data that your prospects use to compare their potential location sites. How do you make your data set stand out? And how do you make your case sufficiently compelling to get you on the short list and perhaps even get a request for more information?

We believe the use of interactive infographics can help you.

The use of this packaging approach will certainly make your content stand out from the crowd. It also will make your information engaging and very easy to use and understand. In short, it will help you make your story far more compelling to the people you’re trying to reach.

Here are several examples that show you what we mean.

In our work with the Kansas City Area Development Council and its partner organization Kansas City SmartPort, we have used a variety of infographics and interactivity to make the work of location advisors a little easier.

KCADC Community Profiles

On the ThinkKC.com website, the KC metro area is presented as a map showing its 18 counties and 50 communities. Clicking on a city or county automatically brings up an demographic snapshot of that location, with the option to click into a more detailed description.

» View project info

KC SmartPort Trade Corridor Network

On the KCSmartPort.com website, KC’s robust distribution and logistics infrastructure is presented as an interactive system of maps that allow the user to interactively turn on and turn off different elements of the regional transportation and logistics infrastructure so they can not only see each element, but also see how the various elements relate to one another.

» View project info

Custom Report Generator

KCADC’s ThinkKC.com website uses extensive text, graphic and numeric data to present in-depth demographic, tax and incentive profiles of the KC metro area. It’s a lot of information for a site consultant to sort through, so site visitors are able to specify the topics they wish to see, and a custom report is generated automatically, which can then be downloaded as a PDF file.

» View project info

Demographic Map System

Imagine collecting data related to your region’s industries, transportation infrastructure, demographics from both a local and national perspective. That’s what we’ve done on KCADC’s ThinkKC.com Map Center. The site visitor is able to select any of these general topics and then click through a variety of data presentations within each section.

» View project info

KC SmartPort Real Estate

Having a strong portfolio of available real estate opportunities is critical to attract new businesses to your community. For the KCSmartPort.com website, we created a an interactive real estate feature that uses graphic icons to distinguish different types of properties (intermodal, logistics, buildings). Each graphic icon provides a rollover data snapshot and a link to a more detailed property profile.

» View project info

This development begs the question… why are so many people choosing WordPress?

We believe there are several reasons. Perhaps most important is ease-of-use, both for designers and for their clients.

EASY TO USE

During our time as website designers, we have worked with clients to create and maintain sites built with WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and hands down, WordPress is the easiest to use. It is incredibly intuitive.

With both Joomla and Drupal, we’ve had clients simply throw up their hands, tell us they couldn’t maintain their own sites, and ask us to do it for them. That doesn’t happen with WordPress. We typically spend about an hour or so going over the WordPress CMS with clients, and then they’re off and running.

The WordPress CMS enables clients to make updates to both text and images on their sites with no problem. Images and other media are uploaded and stored in a media library where they accessed as needed, or simply deleted. Edit fields can be set up for each area of the webpage template where text is used. Plus, for more advanced users, they can access the page’s HTML to make formatting changes if they wish to.

Creating a new page is just one click away. When a new page is added, the user chooses which section it goes in, which page it goes under, and which page template it should use. WordPress uses these choices to automatically add the page to the site’s navigation system.

CUSTOM THEME DESIGN

Many people have used the popular WordPress.com website to setup a free blog, but the CMS which designers use to create your website is located at WordPress.org. We use that CMS software to create your website, which can incorporate a blog or not. Blogs are a small part of what WordPress is able to do.

WordPress does provide many pre-designed themes (website look & feel) a user can choose from, but any client concerned with their brand will require a custom theme design. But even though a professional web designer is required to create your custom theme, WordPress does make this an easier task than the other CMS tools, which also no doubt has added to its popularity.

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

If you think you may ever want to incorporate a blog in your site, then WordPress is an obvious CMS choice. It was originally created to be a blogging tool, and it is way ahead of any other CMS when it comes to blogging capabilities and options. And if you don’t want a blog early on, you can easily add it later.

But you may not want a blog at all. Is WordPress still a good choice? You bet. We’ve created as many WordPress sites that don’t have blogs as we have sites that do. In the past year, WordPress has introduced enhancements that make it a truly full-featured CMS that provides a very solid website foundation, which can be expanded significantly through the use of various component plug-ins.

SOME TECHNICAL ADVANTAGES

If you’ve had your website for awhile, you may have been through the process of deciding whether you wanted a CMS-driven website or a static site. Before the advent of open source CMS options (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal), most websites that sported a CMS were custom programmed, and were quite costly to develop. Clients who wanted smaller sites had more limited choices, but there were affordable solutions, such as using Dreamweaver to develop sites that were basically static, but that used library items and include statements to help facilitate site-wide updates. Clients often used programs like Adobe Contribute to maintain their sites. This type of approach actually worked fine for many organizations, but there were a number of built-in limitations.

Adding new pages was difficult because of the various steps involved in building the page into the site’s navigation system. With WordPress, all of this is simply part of the page building process, and is something the client can do without the help of the site developer.

Also, when it comes time to refresh or redesign the site, rather than have to deal with design alterations to all of your website pages (which could be 50 to 100 or in some cases significantly more), the redesign effort is focused on the site’s template collection. So even if you’re using 10 different page templates, that’s still substantially less work, which means less money spent on development and design.

There’s a lot more flexibility in the new WordPress CMS than has ever existed before, which bodes well for both web designers and their clients.

NO CMS IS PERFECT

Every open source CMS has plusses and minuses. Whether your developer chooses WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or some other proprietary CMS, none of them are perfect. You will encounter occasional bugs and limitations… that’s the nature of application development.

But based on our experience, we think WordPress is the best CMS currently available.

SOME SAMPLE WORDPRESS SITES

Here are several WordPress sites we’ve developed. Some incorporate blogs and some don’t.

• Mason Bruce & Girard – features multiple templates to accommodate different information requirements
• Hollywood Farmers Market – uses WordPress’ blogging capability to handle website news updates on its homepage
• Crossroads Christian Church – features extensive use of plug-ins, including a powerful calendar plug-in
• Lantana Group Consulting – features an active blog that’s built into the website

COMPARISON SHOPPING

Here are a couple sites that compare WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

• Google Trends – shows relative use of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and MoveableType
• The Open Sourcery – a WordPress site that offers pros and cons of three main CMS
• Slayerment – a Drupal site that details features of three main CMS

For those who don’t know, Yulan Studio is named after the yulan magnolia tree, which is of Chinese origin. Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Magnolia denudata, known as the Yulan magnolia, is native to central and eastern China. It has been cultivated in Chinese Buddhist temple gardens since 600 AD. Its flowers were regarded as a symbol of purity in the Tang Dynasty and it was planted in the grounds of the Emperor’s palace. It is the official city flower of Shanghai.

We selected this name because we wanted a name that reflected our strong interests in gardening and in the cultures of Asia. In addition to choosing a Chinese-related name, we (without realizing it) started our business in February 1999 on the first day of the Year of the Rabbit… this is based on the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac. This in itself is somewhat auspicious, but there’s more. It just so happens that both of us were born in the Year of the Rabbit.

So there we were, two Rabbits beginning a venture on the first day of the Year of the Rabbit. Call me superstitious, but I feel good about that. And now, 12 years later, we’re approaching our 12th anniversary, and beginning another Year of the Rabbit. So expect a celebration during this year’s Chinese New Year!

Plus, I can’t write a post like this without giving credit to our clients. We think of you as our very good friends, and we’ll always try our very best to come through for you. Thanks for making this possible!

During 2010, we began a new branding project for a marketing research firm, which is getting close to it’s launch date. This project started at the very beginning, with a brand identity template and brand manifesto, followed by the selection of a new company name, logo design, core content development, website design… and we’re getting close. It’s exciting.

If it’s January, we must be working on the Annual Dinner & Symposium event for the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute. Lisa is working on collateral designs as this blog entry is being written. This year’s theme is a good one… “Patient Centered Research: Maximizing Outcomes, Minimizing Disparities.” We’re happy to support any effort to get quality healthcare to all who need it, regardless of their circumstances.

We’re also in the process of updating the design and functionality of the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor website. This site was developed as a marketing initiative site for the Kansas City Area Development Council. Unbeknownst to many, the Kansas City area is home to the world’s largest concentration of animal health and nutrition companies.

And of course, in addition to our larger projects, we’re performing ongoing maintenance work for many clients. One example is Portland-based PAE Consulting Engineers, a firm that recently opened a new San Francisco office and has needed support with its email and website announcements.

LONG TIME CLIENTS

We spent a lot of quality time with long term clients Kansas City Area Development Council (KCADC) and Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute (KCALSI).

KCADC’s principal website — ThinkKC.com — continues to evolve and add new features and capabilities, including a brand new blog! The challenge in developing their new blog was to develop a completely seamless integration of a WordPress blog into this existing (and very complex) website.

Plus, we worked with KCADC to upgrade and launch a variety of smaller, targeted websites supporting special marketing initiatives, such as the new KCAdvancedEnergy.com site. KCADC has long been a pioneer in the use of the web for economic development and business recruitment.

We also worked with KC SmartPort, one of KCADC’s partner organizations, to update the look of their website and restructure the site’s content architecture. A new feature added to the site is an interactive map system that shows available commercial real estate properties.

KC SmartPort also had us create a new front-end design for their Real Trade Data online application, which is integrated into a new Trade Data Exchange website.

We worked with KCALSI on their Annual Dinner & Symposium and the Research Symposium they hold each year in conjunction with the CVC Central convention.

These are major efforts that require both web support and extensive collateral design, including direct mail pieces, advertising, publication design, and event handouts and signage. We also began a redesign effort for KCALSI’s website, which will deliver during 2011.

Another longtime client we helped through a challenging process this past year was the SimmsMann-UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology. The staff at the Center decided to provide a way for their patients and clients to purchase health supplements and cancer care items online. We worked with multiple vendors to help them put their new program into place.

WORDPRESS SITES

2010 turned out to be the year we jumped into WordPress site design with both feet. In addition to the aforementioned blog we added to ThinkKC.com, we developed five new WordPress sites for new clients, some of which incorporate blogs and a couple that simply take advantage of WordPress plug-ins and its superb Content Management System (CMS). Our new WordPress sites include:

Mason Bruce & Girard – a natural resources consulting firm headquartered in Portland. For this site, we selected WordPress because the client wanted a full featured Content Management System. A fun aspect of this project included several scenic photo shoots. We worked with Portland photographer Amy Ouellette.

Hollywood Farmers Market – a popular farmers market located in Portland’s Hollywood neighborhood. We created a WordPress structure that incorporates a blog into the site’s homepage. Using this approach allowed the client to keep the homepage fresh with the latest market news by using her blog posts.

Lantana Consulting – a nationwide consulting practice specializing in new healthcare document standards. As one might expect, the real strength of a consulting practice like Lantana is its consultants, all of whom are introduced via a complex jQuery feature element on the homepage. We worked with Optimal Accords owner Joy Kuhl on this project.

Crossroads Christian Church – a protestant church located in Shawnee, Kansas. We selected WordPress for this website because of ease of integrating a number of effective WordPress plug-ins to accommodate the site’s complex requirements, as well as the need to provide the client with a powerful CMS.

Boodleworld – a blog-centric site developed for a California-based financial planner. The client wanted to feature a book he was writing and promote a national conversation about money. A blog made perfect sense as a tool to support that conversation.

I Heart Oregon – this is Lisa’s personal hiking and outdoor adventure blog. It was Lisa’s passion for hiking that led to her development of the blog, but it was her passion for design and technology that led her to refine her custom WordPress template design capabilities until she could make the blog look and behave exactly the way she wanted.

OUTREACH EFFORTS

Lisa was very active this year with her AIGA Portland sustainability work, plus she attended three conferences related to advancing technology. Investments in technology training included a March trip to Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive, followed up with attendance at Portland’s annual WebVisions and WordCamp conferences later in the year.

In her role as Sustainability Chair on the board of AIGA Portland, Lisa and her sustainability team organized a series of successful events promoting the development of sustainable design practices. Foremost among these is the popular SHIFT event, where 10 different participants each present for five minutes on sustainable design.

Because of Lisa’s success in developing AIGA Portland’s sustainability initiatives, she was asked to speak at the national AIGA Leadership Retreat held in Chattanooga this year. At the event, she gave an “inspiration story” presentation on how she founded the initiative, and the progress it’s made over the past two years with the hope of informing other chapters and motivating them to develop similar programs.

Lisa also successfully completed an Agent of Change class sponsored by the Center for Earth Leadership, and she contributed a chapter to The Portland Bottom Line, a book designed to offer advice to small businesses that are trying to become more sustainable. And if all of that wasn’t enough, she contributed two designs to a collection of stories about Portland called Our Portland Story, which was a crowd-sourced book that matched designers with writers. One of her designs was chosen for a gallery show at Backspace in Portland’s Old Town.

John continued his work with the Society of Marketing Professional Services by serving as the Chair of the Education Committee, which is tasked with developing a series of educational events for members of the Portland chapter. He also served as project manager for a six-month American Marketing Association community outreach volunteer project designed to support a local non-profit, which for John was the Bradley Angle domestic violence organization.

On the writing front, John continued his work in screenwriting, winning third place in the screenplay category of the Kay Snow Writing Contest. He also began to experiment with the burgeoning self-publishing phenomenon by self-publishing a collection of poetry called Repairing Shattered Glass, with the cover and inside pages designed by Lisa.

Purchase a copy of the book on the Our Portland Story website.

Portland Bridges story

Portlandia story

Because I founded AIGA Portland’s sustainability initiative two years ago and have worked to advance that program, I was asked to contribute a chapter to the book. My story is about wanting to do something to make a difference, and my personal journey of working within the design community to advance the cause of sustainable design by bringing this discussion to as many people as possible.

WebVisions

JQUERY WORKSHOP

To get started, I attended the half-day workshop: “jQuery for Designers” taught by David McFarland, author of CSS: The Missing Manual, JavaScript: The Missing Manual and Dreamweaver: The Missing Manual.

jQuery is a JavaScript library that makes it easy for tech-minded designers like me to add interactivity to a website without the need to code JavaScript programming. jQuery can be used for everything from simple web components to complex, full-featured interactive user interfaces.

I’ve been using jQuery to create photo galleries and slide shows, but I wanted to learn more about how it works so I could do more with it. Since taking this workshop, I’ve been able to understand the basic workings of jQuery and expand my capabilities considerably. The latest project I worked on incorporated the Fancybox plugin to add functionality for the user to click on an graphic elements to view embedded videos in a “thickbox”, or separate viewer on top of the web page without leaving the page.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Thinking the Unthinkable: How To Spark Disruptive Innovation: Luke Williams of Frog Design talked about how creative insight today needs disruptive thinking. Through disruptive thinking, which is the opposite of following the crowd and doing what is expected, you can come up with creative solutions that get people’s attention… and win.

SESSIONS

Go with the Flow: Erin Malone, Principal with Tangible UX, offered advice for social sites on ways to engage users and create loyalty:

• Make the sign-up process as easy as possible, which may mean no sign-up at all. Consider using Open ID, such as Facebook Connect, so users can sign in by giving permission via Facebook.
• Encourage people to revisit your site often by featuring regular users and their contributions; offer badges, rewards or points.
• Re-engage users that have left your site by showing them new features and show how others are using your site.
• Create connectedness: the more people are connected, the more active they are. “Recommendations” and “Suggested people you may know” are tools to add connectedness.
• Encourage people to share activities offline and then re-connect online. (examples: Facebook Events, Upcoming.org, Meetups)
• Allow users to contribute content to have more ownership and thus loyalty to your site.
• Security matters: give people control over their info that is shared.

Effective Personal Branding: Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Swami at Network Soutions, highlighted how to use the power of the internet to get connected and control your online profile:

• Set up Google Alerts to get info on when your name, your company, or an interest of yours is published online. The speaker uses this technique to make sure personal info about his children — like their home address — aren’t inadvertently shared online.
• To show your expertise in a particular area, join online communities and participate by commenting on blogs, in forums and by answering questions (LinkedIn).
• Become a publisher and create content about your expertise on your own website or blog, then share that content via social sharing tools.
• Setup a Facebook page for your business, as well as a LinkedIn profile and a Twitter account. Link to these on your website or blog and invite people to join and follow.
• Use Slideshare to upload presentations you’ve given.
• Upload press releases to  PR World and Pitch Engine.
• Most importantly: be a useful conversationalist.

The Human Interface: Christopher Fahey, founding partner and user experience director at Behavior, talked about how technology is becoming a mask with people now spending a majority of their time in front of screens. That might make marketers want to create interfaces that mimic humans, but instead of trying to replicate humans like super-realistic robots, is just creepy. Create interfaces that make people feel comfortable. Think about the personality users can engage with. At the Jet Blue kiosks, instead of a screen with “Enter PIN and press button”, they say “Howdy”, “What’s Up” and “Hi There!”. This approach is not only more fun, it usually makes people more comfortable with using technology to access your services. Two of my favorite examples of great human (or chimp) interfaces are MailChimp and Wufoo for forms.

Mobile is the Future: Jason Grigsby, CloudFour.com blogger, indicated that mobile strategies should include:

• Device detection so mobile users are automatically routed to a mobile version of your website. Unless the mobile device is an iPad, in which case the expanded version is more appropriate.
• Create consistent experiences on your website and mobile site or apps. People expect to be able to perform the same functions regardless of which version of your site they visit.
• Mobile sites should be created, not ported. Think about the user experience on a mobile device and adjust your content structure to accommodate it.
• Don’t rely on Flash since it is not supported on the iPhone or iPad.

IDEA+OLOGY: The Designer’s Journey; Turning Ideas into Inspired Designs: Stanley Hainsworth, tether, showed examples from his new book of designers successfully bringing their personal interests into their work. “Do that which is close to your heart” Stephan Bucher

Design-Thinking for Social Change: Ryan Russell, founder of the non-profit For the Next, gave inspiring examples of what can happen when designers do work based on what they care about. Pressing issues can seem insurmountable, but design-thinking is making a difference. The key is know where your heart is. A deep personal connection is needed and it needs to be what is important to you, not what you think others find important. To find out what matters to you, ask yourself these questions:

• What is your personal design philosophy?
• What do you believe is the purpose of design?
• How could design serve something bigger?
• What do I believe is the most pressing issue of the day?

Take your time to think about what you want to do. It takes time. Going through these exercises will give you a genuine voice. Once you have found your “cause”, share your ideas publicly. If you’re not ready to do this, then you’re not ready to make it happen. People that share your thoughts will gravitate towards you and create a new opportunity for you to work with others. Create a team of  like-minded people to accomplish more working together.

In addition to getting a chance to get to know other chapter board members, the retreat is a great place to learn about AIGA’s direction and new initiatives. Here’s what AIGA is working on:

• Design for Social Change: designers are increasingly being brought into problem-solving sessions for their design thinking and facilitation skills. Example: Aspen Design Summit
• Design ProBono: AIGA is encouraging designers to give back to their communities by donating 5% of their time to pro bono projects. AIGA provides listings of pro bono projects seeking designers on its website.
• Living Principles: the inward-focused Center for Sustainable Design has been replaced with the outward-facing Living Principles and a new Living Principles website has launched. The new approach is to invite dialogue across businesses and industries instead of a focus strictly on designers.
• Documentary about AIGA: Lynda.com created a documentary video about the history of AIGA and the benefits of membership.
• AIGA Make/Think design conference videos are now online.