Morris Industries is at the forefront of innovation in the agricultural equipment market. The company’s forward thinking attitude and passion for customer service made them a perfect match for zu. The Morris team worked closely with our strategy department to craft the structure and content of the site and to ensure users could quickly and easily navigate Morris’ extensive product line.

The new site features large, dramatic imagery and intuitive navigation, as well as a Russian site to speak to international customers. Other features include:

• A Searchable “Find a Dealer” map
• Listings of upcoming trade shows
• A new Careers section
• A News section
• Become a Dealer and Dealer Login sections

Congratulations to the Morris team—it was a pleasure working with you!

Established in Saskatoon as a small cabinet-making shop in the early 1980s, Superior has grown to a company of more than 200 employees in three locations across two provinces. They have also won numerous awards for their products. When Superior came to zu, their old website was dated and the page backgrounds were dark. They wanted a new site that would showcase their abundant kitchen styles and options in a presentation that would breath light and space.

THE PROJECT
The crew at Superior took the same care and attention in their approach to a new website that cabinet makers would take building cabinetry. Several key Superior personnel including two top executives were involved in the initial project digital strategy and analysis. zu provided strategy workshops to educate their staff, while they toured our staff through the company’s factory and showroom to inspire design and content for the new site. The team then set out to discover what could be achieved with the new website within the scope of the project.

Superior’s goal was to position itself as a company that offered more than just cabinets. They provide not just products but service, from the beginning to end. The Superior team remains a support through the entire process to provide an outstanding and highly regarded customer experience.

One of the main objectives for the new site was to allow site visitors to book appointments with a Kitchen Designer online. We added key features to the site, such as the Kitchen Planner, where users can save favourite styles to a Design box, and the Product Showcase, where users can click through photo galleries featuring a wide array of styles, accessories, layouts, and finishes. These features help to streamline the planning and booking process for potential customers before they even begin building or renovating. A Customer Experience section introduces customers to Design and Installation team members and helps them find Superior product dealers and showrooms across the prairies.

THE FEATURES
The Kitchen Planner feature filters sample kitchen designs by budget, colour and layout. Images are filtered by design type—Old World, Urban, Contemporary and Traditional—then pulled in from flickr, an offsite image gallery and repository, to speed up loading time on image-heavy pages. Customers can choose what they like in the Planner and save their images to a Design Box.

The Design Box feature allows customers to collect images that show the kitchen styles they like. When their collection of favourites is complete, they can send their images to a Superior Professional Designer as they book an appointment. This particular feature simplifies and streamlines the process of browsing, planning, deciding and booking an appointment to plan a new kitchen.

Other site features:

• Tool Tips: This home-page feature highlights kitchen details and gives a glimpse into the drawers and the behind cabinet doors of Superior kitchens.
• Find Us: Powered by Google Maps, this tool helps users find the nearest Superior dealer.
• The Design Corner (blog): Enables Superior’s Designers to post blogs and lets viewers follow their favorite Designer’s blog.

THE OUTCOME
The end result of the strategic planning, collaboration and meticulous development was a user-friendly and effective retail presentation site with large photographs to showcase a huge array of available products and associated services. Congratulations to the entire Superior Cabinets crew. It was our pleasure and privilege to work with you!

The Backstory
In early 2010, Feronia was about to go public, offering an investment opportunity in large-scale commercial farming and plantation development in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, the company needed an online presence to show how its operations fulfill a vision to transform African agriculture and address a global need for food. So when Osaka Capital approached zu on Feronia’s behalf, we knew we could deliver a concise, investor-focused site.

Feronia’s is an intriguing story, with 100 years of chapters conveying a value creation strategy of “world-class farming conditions” without deforestation and with a vision to help feed more than two billion people. Along with its sustainability, development and growth drive, an investor relations (IR) focus was key from the onset to communicate Feronia’s vision of becoming “the largest agricultural company in Africa.”

Strategy
Our Strategy team first explored Feronia’s key stakeholders: potential and existing investors, communities and their citizens, and the environment itself. The team then reviewed the company’s branding guidelines and existing print and PDF material for investors. From there, we created an information architecture that addressed Feronia’s audiences and reflected its competitive strengths. The company’s sustainability practices warranted a separate section, featuring its own schools and hospitals, and maintained a prominent and consistent theme throughout the rest of the site.

Design and Development
The Design crew incorporated stunning photography, provided by Feronia, with modern style to capture the company’s history and its vision to drive Africa toward self-sufficient food production and profitable exportation. As a recently public company, scalability of the site and content was crucial for Feronia so it could grow online as the company worked towards its mission. Our Development team brought the site to life with IR features, social media sharing and a News & Press Release content management system module for convenient content access.

The Result
Feronia now greets website visitors with rotating banners depicting lush African crops and a commitment to sustainable agriculture, along with key growth facts. Deeper in the site are operational strategies and information about the highly skilled management and Board of Directors. To engage potential and existing shareholders, we pulled Feronia’s competitive strengths from existing materials to create an Investment Highlights page and compelling infographics for the homepage.

Through partnering with Osaka, we delivered a website that visually showcases Feronia’s agriculture roots and its flourishing grandeur. And, while the company continues to grow, so must its online story. Next up for Feronia is a French version of the site, along with a “Feronia in the news” video gallery and archive.

We were privileged to work with this growing company and we thank Sangeet from Osaka and her Feronia team for choosing zu!

About Feronia
Feronia Inc. is a large-scale commercial farmland and plantation operator in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (“DRC”). The Company uses modern agricultural practices to operate and develop its oil palm plantations and arable farming business division. Feronia believes in the immense agricultural potential of the DRC for high-quality foodstuffs and edible oils, given its ideal climate, excellent soil and highly skilled and experienced workforce. Feronia’s management team is comprised of senior agriculturalists with extensive experience in managing both plantations and large-scale mechanized farming operations in emerging markets. Feronia is committed to sustainable agriculture and environmental protection, and to providing support for local communities. For more information, visit the new website: www.feronia.com.

zu has been working closely with the Health Quality Council (HQC) of Saskatchewan as part of a Quality Insight project to build a web application that provides meaningful reports on the most relevant indicators of health care quality in the province.  These solutions enable the HQC and its partners to make better decisions for health care and move forward with confidence and clarity.

Project context
Each year, the HQC has traditionally produced a print and PDF report summarizing the state of health care in Saskatchewan based on a selection of key quality indicators.  The HQC realized that this approach, while  transparent and informative, didn’t adequately solve issues of timeliness.  With reports created only once a year, and the time lag between data measurement and publication as long as 6 months, the Council and its partners have found it difficult to verify whether their system improvements were correctly aligned and delivering the most meaningful benefits.

One key reason that the Health Quality Council approached zu was our previous proven experience in both the health care industry and with performance management solutions. zu’s ability to provide rapid, customized, online solutions to the HQC and its partners has been instrumental in easily identifying appropriate performance indicators, achieving buy-in from partners, and avoiding the long delays and high costs of complex ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions.

The Quality Insight tool
Together with the HQC, zu has built an online performance management system that can

• deliver accurate reports frequently;
• provide reports in a variety of meaningful formats;
• empower HQC’s partners to better understand the areas of improvement; and
• demonstrate system change through continued tracking.

The Quality Insight project continues to be delivered in an economic climate where funding is limited, where health care priorities are varied and sometimes conflicting, where appropriate performance indicators have not always been well established, and where the supply of high-quality data is not always feasible. However, the flexibility of the project implementation team has been vital in ensuring the project’s continued success.

Key features of the tool

• dynamically report on KPIs based on various stratification variables (age, sex, facility, region, etc)
• ‘On the fly’ loading of new indicators and indicators updates as data become available.
• Add and adjust targets/goals for each indicator.
• Import current and historical data for indicators as soon as ready (data is most frequently exported from SAS).
• Data is stored in a robust and flexible data warehouse.
• Immediately analyze data through executive dashboards, detailed graphs, “sparkline” graphs, data tables, and a selection of other appropriate reports.
• Customize a taxonomy that can connect and group data in meaningful ways.
• Responsive performance even with large data loads.

The Quality Insight project has helped the HQC engage better with its partners to find solutions that will improve care delivery and reduce costs. Sharing business intelligence continues to facilitate discussions around barriers, overcome resistance to change, align strategic priorities and improve communication.

So, what is the outlook for the health care industry?  Is it ready to implement business intelligence tools?

Business intelligence tools in health care
The Health Quality Council is on the forefront of health care organizations that are implementing solutions to provide business intelligence. At zu, we see these steps in the context of a worldwide trend to implement wider process improvement practices and increase public accountability for health care management. zu also recognizes that many of these improvements are driven by increased legislation and regulation (e.g. in the USA, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, also known as the HITECH Act).

In taking the temperature of the health care industry, we see not only an industry that actively seeks performance management solutions, but an industry that intelligently differentiates and selects those solutions that are most suitable.  The industry continues to move beyond clinical applications used in the day-to-day care of individual patients and towards solutions that engage professionals and help them predict the evidence-based priorities of tomorrow.

Elk Ridge Resort and zu started the process of building their new website earlier this year. The resort’s main goal was to be known for more than just their golf course as in fact, it is a year round destination.  This meant creating a balanced website and highlighting not only the golf course but the many other features of the resort. With great photography, we were able to show off the new lodge, spa, four season activities, the resort as the perfect wedding destination and so on. The fancy new sitemap was built by our Creative Director, Albert Jame.

To get in the game at the beginning of the project, zu’s designers even headed up to Elk Ridge to take in a weekend at one of the cabins. We don’t really know how much work went on that weekend, but the designs definitely hit the mark. Over the next few months, zu and Elk Ridge worked through the rigorous back and forth of approving designs, planning out content and finalizing features.

The designs and the content really came together on this project thanks to our Content Strategist, Susan Bond. Susan would work with our designers as well as the client ensuring the designs weren’t compromised by content insertion and instead married the two together to create a tight piece of work. These things, along with the beautiful Elk Ridge imagery, create a really prestigious looking site.

There were quite a few new features born out of the designs and these expanded the initial scope of the project. Our lead designer, Brett Ede, came up with the cool new idea of what we eventually deemed, ‘The Reason Generator’. This feature on the home page delivers a list of reasons why you’d want to visit Elk Ridge. Once our development team got a hold of the site, they brought other features to life like the online Elk Ridge gift card purchase, the plan your stay feature linked directly to Elk Ridge Resort’s reservations system and even a season selector to see exactly what’s going on at Elk Ridge year-round.

zu was lucky to work with a great client like Elk Ridge who understands the importance of a strong web presence. We are pumped to continue our relationship with Elk Ridge Resort and we’re already chatting about the next latest and greatest feature additions to the site. Thanks again Elk Ridge!

When we heard that the City of Saskatoon was asking the same question to its citizens, we felt there was a good opportunity to take advantage of all the online communities. A major event was planned to bring citizens of all demographics together for a summit never seen before in Saskatoon. Saskatoon Speaks launched with a full arsenal of event planners, interactive producers and urban architects. Working with the experienced people at Toronto’s Urban Strategies, they looked after the campaign and offline plan, while we took care of the online strategy. Led by a newly formed group formed by the City, we were all under the gun to think, design and produce a socially friendly website to help promote the event and get ideas flowing.

With time not on our side, we originally based on the idea of aggregating social media like StampsConnect, and soon realized that this format wouldn’t exactly fit the needs of Saskatoon Speaks. So, we set out to build something based more on blogs rather than relying too much on public content from Youtube or Flickr. The heart of the site is its blog, which is categorized into the main topics of conversation: City Centre, Economy, Environment, Moving Around, Recreation and Culture, Growth, Social Well-Being. The city has hired special content producers and moderators to ignite discussions around these topics, hoping to get some genuine interest from people who really care where this city is going.

The site uses Facebook’s commenting and liking system, which makes it easy to join in and spread the message. Like StampsConnect, the site pulls in Youtube, Flickr and Twitter, when users follow proper tagging procedures, but doesn’t rely on this content as the main draw.

Once again, policy was always a heated discussion topic. As far as governments go, the City was pretty open to our suggestions as we supplied a guideline for their team, which primarily served as a loose do’s and don’ts list. Everyone involved realized that in order to harvest the most genuine ideas and opinions from the people, we had to insist on a very open and transparent communication policy.

This site is a constant work in progress and should grow as content gets added and the Summit comes to a close. It’s been a while since we last worked with the City. zu developed City of Saskatoon’s original website in the late 90s (pretty sure lots of our people didn’t even know that), and it’s good to see we haven’t skipped a beat.

I’d like to make mention to all the people involved, including Carla, Tyson and Nikki from the City, Tim, Marc, Andrea and Pascale from Urban Strategies, Shad, Kim and Colleen, and Kara from On Purpose Leadership, Daren from Deezine.ca, the guys from Ear to the Ground Productions who produced the video and of course our guys at zu, Andrew(S), Dustin, Levi, and Tyler. Yay teamwork!

The essential missing piece is convergent thinking: taking all new ideas, isolating the best, and determining how to apply them. Knowing which ideas are best is where experience and expertise come in. Regardless of what issue is being solved—an aesthetic experience in art or a mechanical problem in engineering—determining the best solution means being aware of the environment in which the problem exists. This includes hard knowledge of concrete environmental factors—what has come before, the limitations of the medium, implementation and recurring costs—and soft knowledge, such as accurately evaluating how different solutions will be perceived by stakeholders and end users. A solution that doesn’t correctly assess the environment is not creative—it’s naïve.

Convergent thinking is why most boardrooms environments fail at generating creativity, since part of the process involves coming up with ideas and quickly discarding some (usually most) as impractical or outright useless. Everyone is more comfortable refining their own ideas than others’. Walking on eggshells around an idea that should be discarded drags on the creative process interminably.

If you want to be more creative, learn more about your problem and your industry. If you are stumped on a web project, then either you don’t know enough about your client’s and their end users’ needs, or you don’t know enough about the possibilities of your toolset. The biggest implication of this is the realization that creativity isn’t about a “spark” as much as it is about hard work. Once you’ve put in the work to understand your problem and its ramifications, the ideas will flow—and they’ll be good.

In the same time period, the physical size of displays has also generally increased but now includes a lot more variety. A decade ago, 15” desktop screens were common, and 20” screens were about the largest in regular use. Today, anything under 19” is uncommon for desktops, with screens ranging up to 30”. But notebooks with smaller screens are everywhere, netbooks with displays even smaller yet abound, and mobile devices proliferate with comparatively tiny screens. Technology solutions have largely helped deal with this disparity, such as the iPhone’s easy zooming feature for web browsing. And with 1024 x 768 as the current default minimum target resolution, it’s really only phones with lower resolutions.

But there’s another, related issue: with the disparity in screen sizes and resolutions comes a compounded variance in pixel density. While a standard desktop 20” widescreen monitor at 1680 x 1050 has a pixel density of 99 pixels per inch, my 15” MacBook Pro running the same resolution is 128PPI. An older 19” CRT at 1024 x 768 is 67PPI, almost half—meaning that elements such as text are physically half as big on the newer screen. And mobile device disparity is even greater: the iPhone 4’s 3.5” display at 640 x 960 is 326PPI.

Designers need to rethink the scales they’ve always used for design. Increasing pixel density means that 10- and 12-pt fonts are basically illegible on many screens. While we’re accustomed to working to the lowest common denominator (for screen resolution), we need to be actively considering higher-end users in terms of pixel density.

One mitigating factor is that most browsers have now adopted the “zoom the entire page” model instead of “make the text larger”, resulting in a better experience for those outliers who we fail with our designs. But relying on technology to compensate for our failure to accommodate our users isn’t a reassuring thought. There is a definite opportunity here for designers focusing on legibility and usability to lead the way on web design trends.

The navigation drives home SIAST’s primary messages of diversity and workplace rewards suited to individuals. The primary needs of site users—viewing current opportunities, and finding SIAST careers—are also addressed at this top level.

With the site as part of SIAST’s “Total Rewards” campaign, the accompanying content was put at the forefront. Integral to the campaign are the stories and testimonials of current employees. Knowing that pages titled “testimonials” get very little traffic (users see them as inauthentic and overly promotional), we instead designed the site’s architecture around providing the stories as a primary part of the site design, available on every page. The implementation keeps the stories close at hand and avoids constantly overwhelming the user with text. Typical user apprehensions over testimonials are lessened by the sincerity of the stories, which focus more on personal growth than on marketing catch-phrases, and are augmented by the photography, which is professional but not polished and uses actual employees rather than unrealistic stock photo models.

SIAST’s stories of Total Rewards have been worked consistently throughout the site, with the diversity of experiences in the testimonials tying in to the overall message. Unlike many corporate careers sites, SIAST has kept the content fresh by adding new testimonials regularly, ensuring that anyone repeatedly checking career postings will see a new story every time.

Common to many institutions, SIAST is tied to an existing careers system that has been outside the scope of the website work to date. Job postings are currently viewed as PDFs, creating problems with searchability and reuse. An eventual reworking of this system will facilitate the spread of job postings to aggregators and allow individual job postings to be dynamically pulled to relevant areas of other SIAST websites.

Anyways, it turns out the most successful companies deliver an “experience”, in addition to whatever else they are doing. (So please take that as a given or go to the MX conference for yourself). The main dividing point in how brands or companies deliver an experience to their clients is whether it is delivered in a ‘prescriptive’ way or in an ‘adaptive’ way. The former is how Disneyland presents their experience of ‘Magic’: “come here and we do it to you”. On the other end of the scale is Harley Davidson: “Buy this and become a modern day rebel” (instructions not included).

Now, many investors, especially more advanced ones, have a planned experience in mind when they hit your site. With mathematical formulas and ratios set to plug in your numbers, these investors use an adaptive approach to create their own experience using materials you passively provide. Most websites will support this type of experience by default with their filing cabinet of materials.

But can your website provide a ‘prescriptive’ experience? Is your website empathetic enough to less prepared visitors to consider how the parts go together to tell a story? Do you provide instructions and strategy to relate the various departments, performance measures, and operations into a cohesive whole? Or will your site come off as a poorly coordinated set of activities and assets, a somehow-successful holding company communicating little sense of priority, direction or focus to the whole enterprise. While the evidence is there, the vision that unites the actions will rarely be realized by chance without empathy for the naiveté of first time visitors. And everyone who owns you was once a first time investor.

While the big picture view may be found in areas of investor relations ‘magic’, such as a CEO’s speech, the greater whole is an unscripted landscape, good for adaptable experiences and poor for the uninitiated.

I’m thinking of an investor-oriented website as a new kind of taco bar, where all the ingredients are laid out, each in their little bowls and serving dishes; it might be delicious, but I’m unsure how to put it together. How does this work? How do other people do this? What is the key to understanding this? I might be fine after I get through it the first time, but I frankly need some prescriptive advice to get the most out of what is being offered.

So please feel empathy toward your first time potential investors, and make sure they enjoy themselves and don’t feel like goofs trying to figure out why you’re worthwhile eating, I mean buying.

Join us for this live webcast

Date: Tuesday March 16, 2010

Time: 11:00pm PT, 12:00pm MT, 1:00pm CT, 2:00pm ET

Cost: Complimentary

Register

Join Stephanie and David live as they walk you through basic strategies for how you can enhance your school’s online presence. Learn from current university, college and institution examples, showcasing some of the best websites, online initiatives, and social media tool use. Stephanie and David will highlight how you can develop interactive experiences to fully engage your stakeholders.

• Explore opportunities to reach your main audiences, including students, alumni, and potential staff.
• Examine simple social media tools that schools can use to more widely distribute their message.
• Review steps to take your interactive strategy towards the ultimate goal of creating an engaged, sustainable community, both on and off line.

Stephanie Hughes is an Account Executive at zu and has worked with a variety of educational institutions, including SIAST and SIIT (Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technology). Serving individual departments, entire school divisions, and specialized training centres has granted her well-rounded insight into the realm of schools. When combined with her knowledge of web trends, the newest interactive tools, and her own BBA and MBA experience, Stephanie will share a unique expertise with viewers.

David Francis is the Academic Director for SIAST’s Virtual Campus and has 15 years of experience in leading online learning initiatives. SIAST’s Virtual Campus is the institution’s centre of excellence for online course development and delivery, as well as website oversight, faculty training and print-distance materials. David will share his experiences in managing stakeholder expectations while delivering high quality initiatives for SIAST’s web properties and online training materials.

If you Google “twitter hacked” you will see that banks, politicians, large corporations and individuals experienced the same issues as zu did. You will also read that many of them did not know what to do and they started sending out panic tweets, which probably did more harm than the original phishing attack. It should be noted that in all cases, no follower data was accessed.

Here is what we did a few minutes after the attack. We quickly changed our password so that the phishing attacks would stop. Then we disabled the ability for third-party software, such as TweetDeck and TwitterBerry, to access our account. Finally, and this is the most important thing, we sent out a tweet acknowledging what happened, apologizing and saying we fixed it.

This let everyone know we were aware of the problem and we fixed it. What happened afterwards was a bunch of people thanking zu and supporting @zutweets.

Phishing attacks will happen to everyone at some point. It is part of being on the Internet. These are not a big deal if handled properly, so prepare yourself ahead of time.

CN, a North American railway, brings its business closer to its customers by providing live, updated information on every operational facet of customers’ shipments. It is an evolutionary approach in websites for customers who want it all.

About CN
CN is a leader in the North American rail industry. More than just a railroad, CN is a transportation company offering integrated transportation services including rail, intermodal, trucking, freight forwarding, warehousing and distribution.

Situation Analysis
The previous site design and architecture was outdated and cluttered. There was no existing database or content management system (CMS) and all content was built and updated in HTML. A current inventory of 2,500 pages was taxing to manage so content had to be condensed to 1,500 pages while maintaining multilingual communications in four languages. The functionality of the existing online customer tools (eBusiness) also required upgrades to establish a positive customer-centric experience. The CN website was mainly used by customers to carry out tasks regarding their shipments. However, it provided a confusing architecture to find information regarding how, what and where things could be shipped.

A complete redesign, reengineering and implementation of a third party CMS (RedDot) was required.

Goals
Due to the complex nature of the inherited assets in the existing site, the CN project required initiatives to be rolled out in phases. The infrastructure, navigation, appearance and usability of the website required immediate attention. Secondary goals addressed recruiting needs, investor relations reporting, corporate information and news, and customization of relevant target marketing messages. And finally, the eBusiness site required a redesign to better integrate with the new public site design.

Challenges
The true challenge of this project laid in the need for trust and transparency between parties in order to reach a common goal.  The zu team worked diligently with CN on coordinating a seamless project. Because the content was provided by CN, and the CMS integration was done by the CMS vendor, this created a need for zu to develop a strategy that would support third party CMS integration by acting as an intermediary between the CN web team and CMS vendor. zu Systems Analysts developed functional specifications that were  complex in nature and zu Developers had to undergo extensive training in order to clearly define the third party CMS requirements. Converting 5,000 pages of content required editing and proofing resources in four languages.

Solutions
The design and information architecture solutions were developed by zu and applied to the frontend of the new site. In order to create an intuitive user experience, simple and clean design enhancements were implemented and the information architecture was rebuilt to facilitate typical customer tasks and information needs. zu provided CN with the tools to update specific real estate in the website by assisting with the configuration of the CMS. This created more autonomy for CN to craft custom messaging when required and further eliminated HTML updates that once fell on IT. Customization tools were applied to the eBusiness components in order to create a customer-centric website which would enable the CN ecommerce sales channel to better achieve financial targets. zu created a strategy that enabled marketing users to insert tailored banners to communicate key information to investors and analysts.

Solution Summary

• New site design
• New site information architecture
• Technical strategy
• Functional specifications
• Development of cascading style sheets (CSS)
• Integration and support for third party CMS (Red Dot)
• Integration of third party data feeds and components
• Functional programming
• Reintegration of web analytics
• Content editing, proofing and insertion of 1,500 pages in 4 languages
• Integration of Google Search

Result
Despite an economic downturn in 2009, CN’s public website page views increased 25% year-over-year compared to its previous website. A service-oriented site allowing visitors and customers to quickly determine how, what and where they can ship was achieved.

Where You Fit In
The CN case study is an example of what zu values in a client-business relationship. The process of evaluating needs, providing strategic advice and working together to reach collective goals is what zu does best – regardless of a project’s size. With some of the freshest minds in the game, zu will find innovative ways to take your business to new heights. Combining captivating design with effective online tools will give your organization a fresh, new appeal.

“zu’s dedication, flexibility, creativity, and expertise made our project successful.” -Paul Clarke, CN eBusiness

Avoid big committees
Outside of jury duty, I don’t know where else these are genuinely useful, but they can be devastating to a website project budget. Long meetings combined with a dominant voice with little to say make it difficult for important information to be extracted to form any sort of web strategy.  If committees can’t be avoided, try to select one point of contact that interfaces with the agency, while bringing in committees during the early discovery phase and for major presentations.

Be committed
Understand that this is a team project and you are a part of it. Don’t be surprised if managing the website project is a full time position (or more).

Trust the team you hired
If you find yourself researching solutions or micro-managing the process, it’s probably because you don’t trust the agency or team you’ve hired. Do your due diligence to find a team that you trust in order to avoid second guessing during the project. Understand that your agency should be experienced in this sort of project and they might be suggesting solutions that will help to avoid cost overruns in the future.

Client experience matters
Having someone on your end who understands web development—or has experience on a previous redesign—will keep the project closer to budget. The more you can hit the ground running, the less time is spent on explaining and training. Rarely will an agency budget an exorbitant amount for hand-holding during a project, so these costs (i.e. additional meetings) usually come at the client’s surprise.

Rushed deadlines and last minute updates
Rushing a deadline for any reason will usually result in cost overruns. Whether from premium rates or pulling new people onto the project, you will have to evaluate the marginal benefit of a quick turnaround as opposed to working out a more realistic deadline. Last minute updates should also be avoided as much as possible. Even a seemingly innocuous change can require additional documentation, programming changes, and quality assurance checks that could be avoided if known in advance.

Details, details, details
The more details at the beginning of the project—even in the discovery stage—the better. Though many project details are preconceived before picking a vendor, most agencies will agree that being part of the initial planning stages and assisting with overall strategic planning and visioning results in a stronger end result.

Be an organized client
This is a simple piece of advice, but seems to always happen. From easily overlooked protocols like inconsistent labelling of files and lazy folder structures when submitting content, to arriving late for meetings, disorganization can turn the project into a puzzle.

Focus on doing a few things right
Scope creep is inevitable, so keeping it to a minimum should be your goal. It’s common that once the ball gets rolling, the client suddenly ‘gets it’ and new features are suggested late in the game. Ask yourself, ‘is it a deal breaker if we launch without this feature?’ Understand that there is life after the launch, so don’t be afraid to plan for and release new features later on.

Save up your changes
Good things come in bunches. That holds true for changes. If you can, save up your changes or updates and send them to your agency all at once. Sending a series of changes (and changes to your changes) in a combination of phone calls, meetings and emails results in reduced efficiency, and increases the chance that something could be missed, or that one change will unexpectedly effect another.

Keep the flow
Long breaks between approvals hurt the momentum. When projects restart after dormancy, it takes a while to get everyone back to working as well-oiled as before, which generally leads to things taking longer.  Your agency team may need to reacquaint themselves with the documentation on your project, review old code or design work to get their groove back, or may even be tied up with something else if the delay was unexpectedly long.

Understand what you’re in for
This isn’t so much a tip as a mindset you need to be in when starting a web project. Developing a website is an IT-style project, following much the same workflow process.  And while the IT manager mantra of ‘it’s going to cost four times as much and take four times as long as anticipated’ might not hold true for most web projects, it’s important to understand how quickly the entire process can unravel when the client and agency don’t have a consistent vision, clear strategy, and an understanding of what causes cost overruns.

Firstly, are you looking for a product company or a service agency? There is a difference and it may help to narrow the scope of your decision.

A product company will provide you with an entry level website solution. You can indentify a product company when the organization provides you with a quote without taking the time to understand your business as a whole. For a product company, the focus is usually placed on pre-designed templates and where your logo will be placed. They will not ask for your branding guidelines or about your long term objectives, or provide you with a maintenance schedule. The designer may also be the programmer. It would be like hiring your mechanic to be the interior designer of your home. I’m not saying mechanics can’t do interior design, I’m just saying they are not as specialized if they are a jack of all trades and experts at neither.

A service agency, such as zu, will take the time to understand your business. They will take the time to collaborate with your team, review all aspects of the marketing material, online and offline, and provide you with a phased approach for long term growth. A service agency will have teams of dedicated talent to ensure your story will provide the best results based on your desired outcome. However, they are more likely to cost more and take longer than your uncle’s nephew to build a site.

Secondly, what does your budget look like?

It might also be fair to say you just need an economic solution. You might simply need ‘something’ to get going and that is fine. But remember not to refrain from thinking big as your true focus should be the size of the impact needed to see results. Don’t underestimate the value of your website and what an exceptional user experience can provide to your bottom line. Finally, don’t underestimate how long it can take to roll out a successful project. Anything worthwhile takes time and if you rush the project you will be spending more money by repeating the process sooner than you think.

Thirdly, how is your website enhancing your marketing and communications strategy?

Websites have evolved to be much more than just a logo with business hours – although some companies still forget to add them. Whether it is selling sweaters, attracting investors or competing for tourism, making your website an effective tool for communicating your story should be a number one priority.

I would like to share a story which to this day surprises me. I was having a conversation with an individual who mentioned they had spent $20M on renovations to become a world-class destination in the tourism industry. They proceeded to tell me they allotted $6K to their website. That is a 0.0003% investment online to best reflect the entire renovation project. As many as 80% of their guests will determine if they should visit this world-class destination by viewing their website. If I were the owner of that company, I would want to ensure the renovation was best reflected online to maximize results. I don’t know of any top-notch web companies that could provide a great online solution with a $6K price tag. Yikes, sounds like a missed opportunity to me.

So before you run off to phone ten companies and request proposals, ask yourself what you want from an interactive agency. Take the time to research the companies you are interested in, compare portfolios, the size of staff, how long they have been in business and the differences in services. Compare apples to apples. Those comparisons alone will be key indicators in determining which agency is the right fit for you.