Web Consulting Washington DC

Callwave.com

On average, studies are indicating that the average professional is interrupted every three minutes with email, answering calls, chat requests, etc. This apparently is costing us all about 2 hours out of each day, just trying to get back to completing our primary work.

How does anyone is actually anything done?
When I consult professionals about their communications, one of the usual “ah ha!” moments I get is when we get around to talking about it means to be mobile, starting with their cell phones.

I usually ask a few questions:

at your office
Do you get a lot of calls during the day?
Do you have to stop your work to answer them?
Have you ever considered using an office assistant to handle your calls?

outside of your office
Do you have to call your office voicemail to check your voice messages?
If you are able to forward office calls to your cell phone, do you often forget to do so?
Do you use your voicemail to screen your calls?

If you answered “Yes” to any of these, read on.

Setting up your cell phone as your single source of voice communications is the one the first basic steps to going fully mobile as well as maintaining your sanity.

I tried that already, but I couldn’t screen my calls on my cell phone like I can with my office line.

With Callwave, now you can, and far better than what your office line could ever do.

Callwave is another free service that I consider a must-have for professional or small business. At its core service, it is a Voicemail-to-Text transcription service* (a-la-Jott.com’s voice-to-text transcription service). By enabling certain Callwave features, it can help you gain serious productivity and allow you to be completely mobile.

If you’re like me, most of your calls tend to be urgent but very few of them are not drop-everything-right-now type of emergencies. So, I have to be able to screen these calls, at the same time I have to maintain my interruptions to a minimum if I’m expected to get anything done.

Here’s how I recommend setting things up

Step 1
Forward all calls to Callwave’s voicemail.Whenever I don’t pick a call or I have my cell phone turned off, all my callers are sent to voicemail on Callwave’s service. In order to make that work, you have to use what most major cell phone carriers call Busy Call Forwarding (Verizon is *71). What this does is send the caller to Callwave’s Vtxt enabled voicemail instead of your carrier’s default voicemail.

Step 2
Have Callwave send voicemail transcriptions to your cell phone’s SMS. As soon as my callers are done leaving a voicemail, Callwave sends a txt message to my cell phone with the transcribed voicemail. This feature comes in very handy whenever I happen to be somewhere that I can’t take calls but I can read txt messages.

Step 3
Make sure Callwave sends an email message with the full audio to your email account. Callwave then sends an email of this message to my Outlook Hosted Exchange service. I filter them into an Outlook folder that archives them. This enables me to store the audio of every message I ever received, with searchable transcribed text as record of my messages. No more full voicemail boxes or lost messages.

Step 4
Install Callwave’s Internet Answering Machine to screen your calls at your office (or laptop). Last but not least, when I am my office, it plays voicemail audio through my speakers with the use of Callwave’s Internet Answering Machine. This lets me screen the calls for emergencies, without having to stop whatever it is that I’m doing.

The last tip I recommend is setting up twice day to return calls, once in the morning, and once before COB. With Callwave, you definitely rely on your cell phone as the single communications point, while keeping the interruptions to a minimum, but allow for truly important emergencies to get through.

This agrees entirely with the principal of centralizing your information storage, while distributing access across various mediums. A topic I will be coming back to from time to time.

*These transcriptions are sophisticated automated transcribers. While not entirely accurate, it helps you get to the gist of the call without having to pay for expensive human transcribers. But trust me, it’s pretty darn good.

BTW, this post falls under a new category, Total Mobility. This is category will cover services and gear that I use that keep things going smooth, wherever I happen to be.

Jott.com is one of the best new services I have come across recently. If you’re a web marketing or technology consultant like me, you probably find yourself driving to and from client locations a good deal part of your working week. The time I have then lets me collect my thoughts about the meeting I just had or the next steps on a project that I am working on. For whatever reason, it tends to be a particularly productive time to brainstorm for SEO phrases and content ideas.

Unfortunately, these productive brainstorming sessions leave me with thoughts that I need to annotate somewhere, but wait a second, what am I crazy, I’m driving! I need to keep both hands on the wheel. Oh and how temping it is to grab my Moto Q, usually charging in the seat over. It almost seems too easy to just pick it up and attempt to type a note to myself.

Yeah, I know, bad idea.

Thankfully, Jott can save my ideas and my life, by transcribing my voice instructs into my email, while I keep my hands on the wheel.

What’s Jott about?

“Jott™ is a revolutionary new service that automatically converts your voice into e-mail and text messages—anytime, anywhere, with any cell phone. Jott™ makes you more productive and efficient by capturing your ideas, notes to self, tasks, and more without using your keypad.”

- Jott.com

For road warriors, here’s four easy steps to setup Jott on your phone.

Step 1
First, sign up with an account on Jott.com. They will send you a typical email with a link to verify your account. Then fill out a couple of questions to let them know what type of cell phone service you have and whether or not you want Jott to email you, text message you, or both.

Step 2
What you to do next is add 1866-Jott-123 in your contacts list and then save it as one of your quick dial numbers. Mine is #5. If I press and hold 5 on my cell phone, it automatically dials and connects to Jott’s service. By reading the caller id, Jott knows I’m the one calling, and presto, you get the pleasant,”Who do you want to jott?” question. Setting up quick dial depends what type of phone you have, but most modern cell phones work roughly the same.

“Ok, but your still picking up your cell phone while your driving to press 5, that’s not quiet safe is it?”

Step 3
The next step is to get familiarize yourself with your voice-activation services. Again, this depends in large part to the type of phone and/or type of service you may have. Moto Q’s have built in voice-activation in the phone itself. My hands free device allows me to voice-activate Jott’s service with a quick press of button, nothing more complicated than turning the radio in your car.

Step 4
Use it. I have all my voice notes sent to my inbox for future reference and processing. But I also like getting them sent to my cell phone via SMS. By asking Jott for a “Reminder”, I can set Jott to send me a note at a future time and date. If I happen to be in a meeting or in an environment where I can’t leave my cell phone ringer on, I will be get a transcribed version of my note via SMS Text*.

There are a number of uses for Jott but collecting my thoughts on the go and sending myself reminders, I have found to be what I use it for most frequently. It’s quiet remarkable how easy it is to use and how sophisticated it’s transcribing technology has to be to make this magic happen so accurately. I haven’t tried blogging with it, but I am told it does a pretty good job as well. I will have to try that sometime soon.

Right now Jott.com is free, in beta, I suspect it will have some nominal fee associated with it when it’s ready for primetime.

*Note: Make sure you have an adequate plan for SMS. Overage charges are very expansive so keep an eye on your phone bill and make sure you have enough service cover your typical usage.

LogoLounge.com

This is probably one of the best sites I know to keep up with the world of logo design. Bill Gardner of LogoLounge puts together an annual Logo Trends report is just fantastic.

Logo Design
Creating new websites or blogs from scratch can be an overwhelming process, particularly for new businesses or clients whereby this is their first foray into the online world as content providers. There are just so many possibilities and decisions to make.

Let The Pros Do It
Occasionally, a client asks me to get involved with a logo creation and selection process. You should always hire a professional or a agency to develop the creative materials. My professional web consulting background stems from years of web programming and development. While I can definitely tell you how the aesthetics of your website/logo are impacting your business, I am not going to be the guy to design your logo. And unless you are a graphic design, you need to hire a professional. Creating art and discerning the quality of art in a market, are entirely separate skills.

Function And Form, Always!
I have long since learned (as well as the entire web industry) that function and form must go hand in hand. Consider it an absolute.

The example, is this blog I have started. We have all the sophisticated functionality of a WordPress blog in place, what are we missing? We’re missing a compelling ‘look’. Something that signals to visitors that this is a substantive site with valuable information.

“But I like this template, what’s wrong with just using the WordPress basic template?”

A visitor coming to this site is less likely to come back. It has a “template” like feel to it. The message a template site delivers is that the author doesn’t care enough or isn’t capable to provided a unique site design that represents itself as ready to serious business. And the more experienced the visitor is with the web, more likely they have been exposed to default templates that come built in.

I do care, by the way.

The Making of WCDC
One of the goals of WCDC is to implement many of the techniques and concepts of developing websites by not just talking about it, but by developing this blog and reflecting on it. So trust that, a logo and design template are on my list of To-Do’s for WCDC.

It should not go unnoticed the order I recommend when creating a website from scratch is how I am writing these posts. Its my hopes that I can chronicle its growth and share with you the many things that go into developing a great website.

Step 1
Find an available and suitable domain name by stopping BustAName.com.

Step 2
Get creative and put together a logo. Stop by LoungeLogo.com for ideas concepts.

Step 3
Develop your site design (I’ll come back to this).

Of course this a grand over simplification, but it is the initial first steps.

BustAName.com

When starting a business, coming up with a name for you business, to me, is probably one of the tougher things one has to do. It seems easy, it should take a lot of thought, some trial and error and some research. It use to be you could simply come up with name, check to see if it was trademarked, and if wasn’t previously held by someone else, all you had to do is write it into your articles of incorporation and “tad-da”, you’re in business with a brand new shiny name.

Now-a-days, you can not brainstorm a name of a new business without taking into account whether or not there was a suitable and available domain name for it. I would venture to say that you’re more likely to find someone squatting on a good domain name, than you are finding it already as a registered as trademark by a competitor in your industry.

The reason is thanks to cybersquatters, these guys are out to make bunk by registering all the common domain names that anyone could want, sitting on them until they find someone to resell them to you at a marked up price. It’s a bit like scalping tickets for a popular concert. These folks have no intention to do anything domain name, other than selling it to you at a premium.

So, thanks to these guys, many times finding a domain name and thus a name for your new company, is a little more about compromise. Someone may very well have your first pick of a domain name, but by playing around a little with some variations, you can find a great alternative domain name without having to dole out hard cash or go to battle with a cybersquatter over it.

Fortunately, there’s a easy tool to help you come up with variations. Bustaname.com is simple ajax based site allows you enter various keywords or phrases and it displays which combinations are available.

Three Simple Steps
1) First add keywords and synonyms that relate to your business name that you’re hoping find a good domain for, then click add.

2) This is where they appear and you can get further suggested words by placing your mouse over the blue arrow.

You can remove any them simply by clicking on the red icon.

3) Anything that appears under Available Domains is yours for the taking, if you want them. They even connect directly to popular domain name registrars (yes, inexpensive ones!).

TIP: Exclude some variations with the use of Groups

If you play around with it, you’ll realize that you may want to try various combinations of some keywords and at the same time excluding others. For example, try combinations with the words “frames” and “framing”, but do not want available domains showing both such as framesframingart.com, all you need is click on Add Group and drag both those keywords into the group.

Good domains are easy to say and easy to spell. Just remember, you’ll be saying it a lot so make it easy on yourself.

Start with Bustaname.com to help you find a good one for you. Good luck!

Here’s a few E-Commerce facts found collected by SMBTN Network (smbtn.com).

3/4 of online shoppers say they would not return to a website that took longer than 4 seconds to load.
Akamai, 11/2006

Online retailers are acquiring new customers at a 15% annual rate versus 2% for traditional brick and mortar retail outlets.
Deloitte & Touche USA, 11/2006

Consumers are 50% more likely to be influenced by blogs and e-mails than TV or radio advertising.
EPM Communications, 04/2006

93% of consumers say they are unlikely to purchase from or even return to a website after encountering annoying pop-up ads; 89% are annoyed when they need to install extra software; 83% are annoyed when registration pages block access to online content.
Hostway, 07/2005

79% of small businesses shop online regularly.
Jupiter Research, 07/2006

16% of consumers say they would contact a vendor through e-mail. 68% of consumers say they would use the phone number listed on a website to contact a vendor.
Nielsen/Net Ratings, 09/2006

54% of consumers referred a friend to a vendor found online.
Nielsen/Net Ratings, 11/2006

93% of those who have a net worth of $10 million or more have purchased a luxury product on the internet in the past year.
The Luxury Institute, 07/2006