MOX • ie \’mahk-see\ noun

1. Quality of one’s character displaying energetic initiative and determination. 2. Behavior characterized by daring courage, pep and spirited mobility. Mary showed a lot of moxie in her speech to the student council.

MOX, Mobile Optimized eXperience, is a new acronym to describe your site’s or app’s user-experience as it specifically relates to mobile users.

The MOX you offer to your site’s users goes beyond simply having a site that looks good on a mobile device. To have a web presence with real “MOX-ie ” requires a business to thoughtfully carve out a deliberate path for visitors on the move. Site’s with a high MOX Score offer fresh web content and mobile-optimized, or device-responsive page layouts.

Businesses with real MOX-ie have a mobile analytics profile setup that specifically charts and tracks mobile usage so they can continually adapt to mobile trends.

Get Your MOX On!

If you haven’t yet decided to get a mobile optimized version of your primary website, then it’s time to start seriously considering this rapidly growing traffic segment. You likely consume mobile web content every day yourself – on your phone, your tablet, your GPS device or in your car. Your site’s content is no different  – except that it is less accessible or not at all accessible on those very mobile devices.

1. Get Real
The first step is to realize the scope of the mobile surge. Stop ignoring this group by forcing them to laboriously pinch, squeeze and swipe their way to information they are dying to have now.

2. Get Aware
Take some time to research how mobile is affecting the internet as a whole and your industry specifically. Consider your own behavior when you use your smartphone or tablet. How do site’s you visit often appear on your phone? What differences do you notice when you browse the web on your phone?

3. Evaluate Your Site
Visit every page on your site, read each page thoroughly, click each link and submit a message from the form on your contact page. Take a deep breath and honestly evaluate the MOX with some simple questions:

1. Did your site load quickly on your phone?
• Mobile users expect instantaneous load-times.
2. Are you forcing them to load pictures large enough for desktop viewing?
• Mobile users and carriers are paying for and/or monitoring bandwidth.
3. Does your navigation and other links allow users to click with their thumb?
• Don’t force mobile viewers to “pinch open” the page to click a link
4. Does your site have hover effects that assume the user has a mouse?
• “Hovering” on a mobile device is awkward and frustrating

Keep Testing

Mobile devices come to the market at dizzying speeds. Keep testing your MOX quarterly, maybe monthly or possibly whenever new content is added for mobile users.

Is there a better way to spend a chilly Friday evening in December in Kansas City? Buttonwood Art Space, in the Downtown Crossroads District, will be showing the photography of Lynette Ubel among other artists on Friday December 9, 2011.

About Lynette Ubel

Lynette has a lifelong passion for art fueled by a deep sense of creativity (from ubelimages.com). When you browse her photography on the site, or are lucky enough to be able to peruse her artwork in person, you quickly get a sense of the truth of that statement because of Lynette’s unique perspective of what she photographs.

According to Margaret Skove, curator at Blanden Art Museum, “Lynette Ubel is a master of color and composition – her choices reflect artistic choices. Through composition and ambient atmosphere choices she creates a unified visualization that resonates deeply to her (and the viewer) as a sought-for truth.”

Winery Door, Mendoza, Argentina

Lynette Ubel is a client of Revisin which provides web and support services to Ubel Images as well as Ubel Designs, which features her book design services. Scott Schaper, owner of 4-year old Overland Park based Revisin, comments, “we are really proud of the way both of Lynette’s sites turned out. The attention she receives is completely expected because of the quality of her artistry.”

“One of my favorite pieces is Winery Door,” Schaper continues. “This is a piece from her Medley of Images collection on the images site. I was drawn to Winery Door because of the simple mystery it presents. The door forces the viewer to reflect, ‘Am I inside looking outside, or am I outside viewing a reflection of the chilly path I just took?’ ”

“I had to have that door and it hangs in my home today. Anyone with an opportunity to see Lynette’s work up close should definitely go to a viewing; you’ll get addicted like I have.”

About Buttonwood

According to their website, Buttonwood is “located in Kansas City Missouri, atop historic Union Hill and is provided through the philanthropic dedication of Jon & Wendy McGraw and Buttonwood Financial Group, LLC. We routinely host four to five “First Friday” Opening nights per year, are a member of the Crossroads Art District, and offer the art space free of charge as an event space to non profit organizations.

CCVI approached Revisin Web Development, who has been their web partner for 3 years, to design and develop the Food Fight site to increase awareness and encourage community participation in the annual event.

According to Traci Todd Murphy, Marketing/Communications Manager for CCVI, “It took us awhile to get a website for Trolley Run but for Food Fight, our decision was much quicker. The event gained momentum (selling out in its first two years) and started taking on a life of its own. Going online just seemed like an obvious approach.”

Revisin also worked with CCVI to design and support the Chiefs Charity Game website in 2010 and 2011 while CCVI was the beneficiary of the Chiefs Charity Game.

“Working with CCVI has been an honor for us and we were elated when they asked us to be a part of Food Fight,” said Scott Schaper, Owner and Founder of 4-year-old, Overland Park based Revisin. He continues, “CCVI is an important organization for the  Kansas City families they impact every day and it is our pleasure to support their efforts online.”

The Childrens Center for the Visually Impaired (CCVI) is the beneficiary of Kansas City’s popular annual Sabates Eye Centers Trolley Run. Revisin designs, supports and maintains that web property for CCVI as well.

From the Food Fight Website (ccvifoodfight.org):
CCVI Food Fight 3 is a culinary competition benefiting the Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired (CCVI) complete with three battling chefs, a secret ingredient and a panel of judges.

The event also features Blind Wine, a silent and live auction plus local restaurants competiting to take home the title of People’s Choice Award for best tasting station.

From the CCVI website (ccvi.org):
The mission of the Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired is to prepare children with visual impairments, including those with multiple disabilities, to reach their highest potential in the sighted world.

More Social, Less Media

Remember this as a universal truth about Social Media: every moment spent online, is an unconnected moment. It’s non-social (and, at times, anti-social), unconnected behavior.

For Social Media as a strategy to work, you have to commit to being social and you can’t do that when looking at a computer screen.

To be clear, here are list of some social activities:

• Seminars
• Going to Bars
• Conferences
• Golf
• Weddings
• Business Dealings
• Contract Negotiations
• Prospect Lunches

These are considered social for 1 very good reason – none are done alone (if you play golf alone, stop it). All require connecting to other people around us to be effective, entertaining, productive, whatever.

In contrast, here are a list of non-social activities:

• Updating your LinkedIn Profile
• Updating – anything
• Posting something, anything on Facebook
• Blogging
• Wishing for sales
• Putting off your seminar series
• Writing in your planner
• Making Lists
• Tweeting
• Reading tweets
• Surfing the Web

See the difference? All of these are solitary activities that to be effective require working alone. Now, is posting on Facebook not a good idea? No at all (hint: it’s the ‘media part’ of Social Media, not the ‘social part’). Like list making, some may find it an essential part of their day – but they are not social activities. That’s where the ‘Social Media Craze’ has caught many people off-balance…we are bombarded with the message that the platform itself IS the social aspect and that’s precisely what feels so foreign or unsatisfying about them. Having absorbed the wrong message for so long (and having a complete lack of the proper message) we have mismanaged our expectations of their proper place in our lfe balance.

Social Media platforms, like Twitter, Foursquare or Facebook are only records of our social-ness. All can agree if we spent a much greater share of our time engaged in activities like those from the first list then we do activities like those on the second, we would happier, richer, more-connected and more entertained.

The message (or content) is your key to maximizing the overall effectiveness of your complete website design and leveraging the power of the web to turn casual site visitors into paying customers.

As web designers, developers and marketers, we speak with business owners about their website development and e-marketing every day. Like you, they are busy individuals. We know that writing effective content can be a chore. Even if you are blessed with a command of grammar, sentence structure and composition, it may be difficult to find the time to hammer out clear, concise content for the web (a unique medium, to say the least).

Of all of the components of a web project, the most burdensome is often the written content. And those who insist on developing and managing their own content sometimes run into cost overruns due to delays or required re-writes. The following is a list of ten ways to wreck your web content and create a result that does not engage your prospects or encourage them to pick up the phone.

In all of their infamy, here are the Top 10 Ways to Wreck Your Website Content:

1. Don’t Research
We see this all the time. Clients don’t bother to scour the web and see what their competitors are doing right and wrong for their own prospects and clients. Make lists of their website pages and identify the content that appears convincing.

2. Fail to Identify Your Target Audience
It would be wrong to assume that your content speaks to anyone and everyone equally. Your core audience may have questions about your specific type of product or service, so it would benefit you to assume they need that useful information. Design a path for them to get to it.

3. Hire a Relative or Friend to Write Your Content
While they have more time than you to sit and type the words that come to their head, don’t assume that what they put together is perfect or even good enough for your clients and prospects without applying any critical thinking first.

4. Duplicate Content from a Competitor Website
Disregard, at your own peril, that search engines know every word on the web and know who wrote it first. Your domain will be penalized by search engines for stealing content from another site. Your competitor is watching you and can easily detect their own content around the web and may sue you for infringement.

5. Don’t use the Google Keyword Tool to Research Keywords
This is classic failure of non-professional web publishers. I cant’ believe I am writing this down. If the top keyword search phrases for your Mobile Pet Grooming business are “at home pet grooming” and “pet grooming services,” be sure to use them in your site content.

6. Write Long Complex Passages of Text
Anything that drones on and on without coming to a clear point, makes the failed assumption that people who are quickly searching for something specific actually enjoy reading pages and pages of text. They don’t. No one wants to read your exquisite, long-winded copy.

7. Don’t Include Images
Humans feast with the eyes. It’s a better read when text content is occasionally broken up by related imagery.

8. Don’t establish your Credibility
This is a key principle of influence. If you don’t clearly state who you are or speak about your business purpose and intentions, you are forgetting to tell your readers about the benefits you will provide to them over the competition.

9. Don’t include a call to action
Now that your prospects have managed to find your website, ask them to pick up the phone and call or fill out a form, send an e-mail, tell a friend, etc. You have them. Sell!

10. Don’t bother to include a blog
Blogging is an easy way to reach out to your prospects and increase your page rankings, consider a couple of blog articles a month. It’s 3-4 hours of work a month, not too much effort.

In closing, I’d like to remind all of our blog readers and clients that – although it seems astonishing – there are website owners who have gone to great lengths to follow each and every one of these 10 Ways to Wreck Your Website Content to the letter. Let’s hope it’s your competitor.

In our business, color plays an important role in the design of all marketing materials. Color impacts your logo, your website, your mailers, and the entirety of your brand and message through the psychological meaning that your color selection conveys.

Red, as an example, is symbolic of power and sensuality, strong emotion, panic, temptation, hunger, and danger.  Red is the most physical color in the spectrum.  Red is untamed and unrelenting.  Red is so powerful that it must be handled extremely judiciously. However, red, while a color associated with blood, action, passion, aggression and such, can also be cooled with complimentary colors the same as blue can be warmed. For instance: as color compliments, red and green come together to conjure images of winter holidays. In this case, red is less of a hot color and more of a symbolic color of that particular holiday. When paired with purple, red sheds some of its aggression for a more regal feel.

Another important point about the red spectrum: suggestions such as “seeing red” or “rolling out the red carpet” each have opposite meanings. But they each get their point across equally as effectively, due to their application and association.

But what colors define my products and services, you ask?

Good question. To answer this, we must first define the message we are trying to convey.

As we’ve just completed a brand new website for Watts Family Dental in Overland Park, Kansas, I thought that this would be an excellent chance to provide an example for illustrating the use of specific colors in marketing to a specific type of consumer.

In the dental industry, you balance two main messages that you always want to relate to your patients.  The first message is Professionalism (quality, skill, accomplishment, dependability, achievement).  The second message is Trust (calm, clarity, balance, health, reassurance). Any book on color theory will point you to a couple of colors that encompass all of those messages.  They are blue for Professionalism and green for Trust.

Blue is not only the color that elicits a feeling of serenity and tranquility, but it is also associated with high authority, justice, honor, quality, skill, and moral behavior.  If you are in the dental profession, you can hardly avoid noticing ads in magazines for toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, tooth brushes, and whitening products. Chances are that each of these advertisements will be predominantly blue.  Take a walk under a clear blue sky, down along the shore of a calm sea and think Lapis, Azure, Sky Blue, Cerulean, Cobalt, and Periwinkle. Blue is authoritative.  Blue is respected.

Green is a color that is so plentiful in the surrounding natural world that people respond on a highly-emotional level to the presence of greens.  Green is the color we associate with health, trust, harmony, reliability, vitality, balance, as well as refreshing and cleansing thoughts.  Step into a field of wind-swept grasses on a bright spring day and think Emerald, Turquoise, Teal, Viridian, Celadon, and Jade. Green is good for you.  Green is stress-relieving. A great color for dental websites indeed, wouldn’t you agree?

In the end, these are colors that are consistent with dental (and some other healthcare) industries. There may be a color that defines your industry and business as well.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with color, just be mindful of what kinds of emotional responses may be triggered by your selections.

A good designer with the right knowledge about color theory and the emotional impact of color can easily create a color palette to meet the business needs of your marketing materials. They may also add contrast and color compliments to color schemes, websites, marketing materials, etc. that can be used to set off colors in one’s identity or to draw attention around aspects of a page (like guidelines for the viewers eye).

Think about the power of knowing that one fact. It means if your brand (or product, store front, website, trade-show booth) is approachable enough to encourage a transaction (or sampling, walk-in, click-thru, visit) all you have to do follow through with what you said you would do and the seeds of trust are planted (validating that experience takes the most time).

The 5 Phases of Establishing Trust

Establishing trust is very similar online as it is offline. Let’s look at a simple offline scenario. Imagine you are traveling on business in an unfamiliar city. You need to eat and here is how it might unfold:

Phase 0 – Closed: No Risk (no will to transact)
At this point, you weigh just staying in and just munching on the free nuts

Phase 1 – Approach: Risk is Taken (willing to transact)
You visit a new restaurant close to your hotel

Phase 2 – Initiation: Trust is Seeded (transaction initiated)
Your favorite entree is available, which you order

Phase 3 – Experience: Trust is Rooted (positive experience)
You love your food, like your server, settle your bill and leave satisified

Phase 4 – Validation: Trust is Tested (story telling)
You tell your friends about the restaurant and it turns out they love that place too (validation)

Phase 5 – Establishment: Trust is Invested (positive branding)
You go back to the restaurant when possible

So…What Could Go Wrong?

During Phase 4, we humans display really uncanny behavior; that is we begin to seek out, or at least become sensitive to cues that validate or invalidate our experiences. The strongest among us become malleable lumps of clay as we go about life. How so?

If we wake up in the middle of the night throwing up, we will very easily connect, rightly or wrongly so, the food with the nausea. We are likely to reject any other possibility. If we read a bad review, we are likely to not admit going there at all. If our friends turn out to hate their food, we have a greater propensity to have our seeds of trust uprooted.

Phase 4 makes or breaks the establishment cycle. But, the good news is, we are over half way to the goal – people are using your product or consuming your services. Now is the time to act – swiftly.

Timing is Everything – Helping the Validation Process Along

What can we do to validate the experiences of our users? Do any of these sound familiar?

• Over deliver
• Go the extra mile
• Follow up
• Send a thank-you
• Re-engage them
• Send them a reminder
• Give them a new reason to visit
• Reward them with a discount
• Buy her flowers
• Do the unexpected
• Recommend another business
• Act on their requests
• Make them look like a hero

The list goes on and on right?

Fast-Tracking Phase 4

I’ll finish with a quick story. I dropped my car off at a repair shop and left with a bid for $350 for parts and labor. I got a voicemail about 2pm saying the work was complete. When I arrived to pay my bill, the total was $95. When I (delightedly) asked why the discrepancy, the serviceman simply said, “It didn’t take near as long as I thought it would to install the parts.”

Period. Matter-of-fact and with no regrets. He could have easily said 250, still saved me money and I would have been happy. I didn’t take my vehicles to a different garage until he retired.

That garage figured out how to fast-track phase 4.

Tell us your stories about establishing trust.

Google fans and users worldwide identify themselves with the ideals of this company. What may seem the strangest thing of all is the fact they are an internet search company; not a soft-drink, expensive footwear, jewelry piece, a leather purse or an organic bottle of milk. A SEARCH COMPANY!!

Google has somehow taken the geekiest part of the web experience and turned into one of the most powerful brands on earth – in the space of a decade. Here’s the funny part – in large part, Google’s goal is to get you off their site as quickly as possible!

Essentially Google has created the boring database query and made it sexy. That’s why we say, if they can do it, with something so lame, you can do it with interior design, pizza, legal services, roofing or lattes.

Successful pain reduction endeavors:

• For the blue, there are shoes to buy.
• For shoe sellers, there is retail space.
• For retailers, there are security cameras.
• For the sleepy – lattes.
• For latte sippers, the cardboard sleeve.
• For advertisers with drooping sales, there is ad space on the latte sleeve.
• Umbrellas sell quickly during a downpour.
• $8 beers are a hit at the stadium, but not at the liquor store.
• Beer drinkers have to go (you know).
• Leaky toilet owners call plumbers.
• Plumbers mark up their part supplies.
• Home sellers buy mulch.
• Mulch vendors in busy housing markets buy more shelving.
• Laptop users buy security products.

See? Everyone is in the pain-relief business. By filling the needs you identify in the markets you serve, your services provide the healing salve for someone’s pain.

Are your products and services pain relieving or not? Are your marketing efforts giving the right message to your market?

Outsourcing, really? Yes! Really. Small business owners (SBOs) think outsourcing is for the big guys. In fact, SBOs carry a lot of baggage with this term. It evokes anger and resentment of themselves or someone they care about being let go from a large corporation in favor of cheaper labor overseas. It reminds them of poor quality and for many it is part of their sales strategy to NOT outsource.

American Made. We offer [blank] in-house. Ring a bell?

Redefining What Outsourcing REALLY Means
If you think outsourcing means hiring someone from India or China, think again. If you think outsourcing is expensive, yields less control and bad for America and bad for business – keep reading.

Come on, am I really expecting you to start interviewing foreign firms for outsourced talent? Of course not.

I am talking about the new outsourcing. It’s time to bring outsourcing to a more personal level. Here is how I am defining “outsourcing:”

outsourcing n. – The act of delegating a task to someone else, preferably an expert who can consistently perform said process better and/or faster that can you do it.

Said another way, outsourcing removes items from your inbox, task list or desktop (your actual desk). Think of why you started your business for a moment. It’s because you wanted to bring your world better interior design, better pizza, better trucking, better eyecare, better roofing, better plumbing or better medical care. But as you started your business you had tasks A – M get dropped in your lap for your attention.  To name a few:

1. File your payroll taxes.
2. Generate new business.
3. Layout a new postcard mailer.
4. Learn mail-merge in Word.
5. Create a logo.
6. Register with the state.
7. Start Twittering.
8. Get a PO Box.
9. Review an employee’s performance.
10. Enter stuff into Quickbooks all the time.
11. Meet with your CPA to go over your return.

And on and on and on and on and on. Sound familiar? And last on the list? Or better, lost on the list? You guessed it: the good stuff like eyecare, patient care or making pizza, decorating a new bath, laying the perfect floor or installing a new kitchen faucet.

So why do we let the mundane get in the way of our success and happiness? It’s time to outsource. How? It’s easier than you thought.

1. Have someone handle quickbooks for you for 3 or 4 hours a week. Check!
2. Hire a service to handle payroll every other week for a couple hundred bucks. Check!
3. Meet with a graphic designer to handle the new postcard. Check!
4. Sign a power of attorney with your CPA to handle that IRS call back. Check!
5. Opt out of some “daily specials” online. Check!
6. Join a referral network to get new business in the door. It works! Check! Check (the depositable kid)!
7. Call a support company and have them upgrade or explain Office for you – or try Google Docs. Check!
8. Hire a nerd from craigslist to automate your daily/weekly backups. Check (every week).
9. Identify any other processes that can be totally automated and get someone to set it up. Check.
10. Have a professional executive assistant like Lettiann Betts help you. Check out her company, My Bella Zia, for that one perfect thing she can help you with! Check!
11. Partner with a local business or 2 to “share” a Quickbooks person. Check.
12. Take an afternoon off and have lunch with your child at their school, then take a drive/golf/read/get a massage…set your out-of-office email. Check.

All of these are outsourcing. Stop sweating every little detail on the list and surround yourself with experts who love to do what you ask them.

The effects are amazing and cumulative! What took you 2 hours every week to handle quickbooks will take a QB guru 25 minutes. If you start small and make a commitment to reduce the mundane, you will free up your time to provide those services that make you more profitable, more productive and truly happy.

You will notice. Your clients will notice. Your family will notice.

Happy outsourcing!