If this is your first time here, please consider subscribing by
RSS or by email. Thanks for visiting!

Jeanine T. Abraham, entrusted nextSTEPH to design and create a website to promote her acting career.

A client upgraded to a broadband connection for their office and they were not receiving any email inquiries. Another company did the installation. They blamed me because they were not receiving any inquiries. They even went as far to “terminiate” my services.

I then decided to have their inquires routed to multiple accounts for risk management purposes.
When I was going to chalk this up to experienence, they call me and says that they recieved a lead. They apologized and would prefer to leave things as they are. The lesson here, no matter how difficult a situation may be, always have a back-up plan during a major move or overhaul.

I received a pink slip from a company that I worked for part-time due to budget cuts. Instead of sulking, I had forged ahead full-force and got into the pink slip mood. My birthday was the next week, so I sent out an Evite to everyone and called it the Pink Slip Party, complete with a Pink Slip dress from Bluefly. Its kool to take lemons and make lemonade.

Mélange Internationale selected nextSTEPH to make an old vision a new vision for the 21st Century. In additon to the website, nextSTEPH also customized Mélange’s MySpace page and MySpace Blog.

The first item that has taken many licks and kept on ticking is my Creative Nomad Zen NX Player. I didn’t want to jump on the iPod bandwagon because I had many .wma (Window Media Audio) files and I wanted something that could play both .wmas and .mp3s.

I’m content with just the music for now. If I win the lottery then I’ll upgrade to the Creative Zen Vision:M 30 GB MP3 and Video Player (Light Blue).

nextSTEPH has launched a MySpace page design service that enables people to enhance their MySpace pages to the look and feel of their websites. Take a look at the MySpace pages created by nextSTEPH at http://www.nextSTEPH.com/MySpace.

Monthly, I try to do a “vanity search” to see what the online world has on me. I was pleasntly surprised to see that I was included in Mommy, Inc.’s Thursday Thirteen. The Mommy, Inc. blog is the creation of Shannon Cherry, fellow Wild Women Entrepreneurs board member and PR Diva extraordinare of Be Heard Solutions and Cherry Communications.

You have a website because you want people to visit it, but what happens when they arrive? What actions do you want them to take? What is the ideal scenario you would want your prospective visitor, customer, client, to do on the website? This month’s tip will go over the different types of online goals, how to define, and identify them.

Types of online goals:

1. Page views – this is the foundation of all website goals. This may seem simple in principle, but it can be challenging. News sites, jobs sites and the like have this basic goal in mind. If a news article is spread over 4 pages, the marketing analyst measures how many people reached page 4 (or finished the article) over how many people began the article on page 1. Page views are important because those metrics may dictate advertising rates for that section.


2. Downloads – This may be also an essential goal. A download does not necessarily mean that one person performed one download. A site can have multiple types of downloads like:
   
   
   
   1. PDFs (Adobe Document format) as takeaways that people can refer to when they are away from the computer, (i.e. commuting). Some examples are an instruction manual, a brochure, a magazine, or an application;
   
   
   2. Multimedia files such as music, sound (i.e. podcasts) and/or video. Sites like Vh1.com and iTunes.com have the top ten or top twenty downloads for the day or week;
   
   
   3. Flash files – how many people download a flash file.
   
   
   4. Download a blog feed (XML files to read on a feed reader)
   
   



3. Forms – How many people fill out a contact form on a website is only part of the story. There are different types of forms out there, such as:
   
   
   
   1. Search box – how many people performed a search;
   
   
   2. Subscribe form – how many people subscribed to a newsletter;
   
   
   3. Contact form – how many people filled out a contact and/or feedback form;
   
   
   4. Message Boards/ Guestbooks – how many posts were posted
   
   



4. Purchase – How many people make a purchase online. How many people put items in the “shopping cart”, to how many get to the confrimation page ,to how many people successfully check out?

The above are some items that may be considered goals for a website. One should not be solely invested in just one goal. It is recommended to use a variety of goals. Visitors do not accomplish the website goal in the same manner or in the same time period. Someone may need to download a whitepaper or subscribe to a newsletter before they decide to fill in a contact form, or make that call in order to make the purchase.