So here’s the way it works online. Quote me on it. I’ve been watching companies obsess over how to get more people to their websites so I’m going to sum up almost everything I’ve learned in this statement:

People don’t follow companies
they follow information.
If you provide the information,
people will follow you and the companies will pay you for the people.

The center of the online world is SEARCH. Not your website. It never will be. So stop focusing on getting people to your site and start focusing on providing relevant content in as many places online as possible.

UGC- User Generated Content has been a buzzword lately regarding the future of the web. In the old days it was all about building pages that looked cool with annoying flash intros leading the way. If you are still on that bandwagon, now’s the time to jump off. One of the best ways to build traffic to your site is to add a bit of user interaction to it.

Of course there are a lot of other things you need to do to build traffic and here is a great article from Ian Lurie that I highly recommend.

Here are seven tools I think are extremely valuable to help build up user interaction and pave the way towards returning visitors.

1. Wordpress – Wordpress, in my opinion, is the best blogging platform available. It is very easy to customize to match the style of your regular website and can be installed on your own hosting provider account. This blog is using Wordpress and is hosted on my account with GoDaddy. I modified it a bit to match the rest of my site. Blogging is very important for keeping your visitors in the loop. Don’t think that every day the same people will visit your blog page on your site. Most likely people will subscribe to your blog through an RSS feed. An RSS feed pulls your blog posts from your blog into a feed reader where someone can monitor your posts from another site. I use a service called Netvibes and have at least 15 different feeds coming in that I check every day.
2. Clearspring - I highly recommend Clearspring and would say that they offer the best widget creation and management tools around. What is a widget? A widget is a little tool that people can install in Netvibes, iGoogle or even their own web page, that can pull in virtually anything. Think of a widget as a wrapper. In that wrapper, you can pull in news, a flash-based tool, images, ebay listings, the weather or a calculator. I created a guitar tuner widget which I make available at http://www.guitar2ner.com. To date, there has been over 4,000 installs. In the widget, you can put a reference or link back to your main site. BAMM!! Instant advertising that people will see every day when they install your widget.
3. Wufoo - Wufoo provides an nifty way to place forms on your site and track them very easily. Forms are a pain in the butt. They always have been. With Wufoo, you can create drop downs, multiple choice options and more in a few simple steps. The form styles can be easily altered to match your site and you can customize the redirect web page and confirmation messages. Required and hidden fields are a breeze as well.
4. Buzzdash – If you want to add some quick interaction to your site while getting some valuable target information, take a look at BuzzDash. Easily create a poll and watch the votes grow as you see what people really think about well…anything.
5. Ning – I’ve got three words for you: Customizable Social Network. If you have a niche site and you know you have some contacts who would really enjoy being a part of something, you can create your own branded social network through Ning. Ning allows your users to add friends, write posts, send messages and more. Now you can create that social network for Hairy Guys with Modified Snowblowers.
6. vBulletin – vBulletin is perhaps the best solution out there for creating forums. No it isn’t free like phpBB, but it offers more flexibility and customization and is worth every penny of the license you’ll need to use it.

One other note about forums: You can actually install a forum on Wordpress as a plugin so that you don’t have to have two databases going that have to talk to one another. You can integrate a forum with Wordpress using the Simple:Press forum plugin.

There are many other useful tools out there, some of which I will talk about in the future. The tools listed above are specifically related to user interaction that can be generated from someone’s own website. Please feel free to leave questions or comments, and I will do my best to respond.

This morning I spoke with the marketing firm we brought in at work. Our conversation reminded me of when I was an undergrad at Cal State Fullerton studying for my B.F.A in Graphic Design. I had a crazy (but brilliant) professor named Bryan Cantley who always pushed us to the limit in our 3D Design class. The first day of class he locked the door at 8am sharp and informed us that we where about to enter what he called, ‘Design Boot Camp.’ I’ll never forget that day. I was pushed to the limit but loved every minute of it. My final project was an installation that was suspended from the ceiling. I was one of the few who scored a A in the class.

That class taught me that design is problem solving and discipline. Today I was reminded of that.

In-house graphic designers tend to get pushed from upper management and sales to crank stuff out with a due date of yesterday. As a result, the planning process and the needed foundational steps are often skipped. Many times, there is no way in heck a designer can have enough time in the planning phases if those planning phases aren’t realized or valued by upper management.

For example – I can kick out a ‘good looking’ logo in around 8 hours – A nice typeface, clean negative space, good use of color, etc. And, I can kick out an awesome whitepaper in a few hours. What begins to happen though, is the expectations for turnaround time become a little skewed. Yes I can turn out something ‘good looking’ very quickly. But if you have something good looking and you can’t answer why you did what you did, or how it supports the brand, then you just wasted a massive amount of time. Do they see it that way? Probably not. You produced something decent and hopefully it will assist in landing more sales. I stress hopefully.

It is important that the designer always always always know the message that needs to be supported through the finished piece. Only then will a designer be able to communicate the business-value to the company and justify spending more time in the planning process and less time just cranking out ‘pretty-looking’ things.

Here are some very important things graphic designers and marketers should work together on prior to hitting production.

• Brainstorm – Start with the brand. If the brand is all about ‘fun’, start writing down anything and everything you can think of having to do with fun. EVERYTHING. Don’t critique your thoughts, just jot them down. See how many you can do in a minute. Write them on post-its. Put them on your wall.
• Reverse Brainstorm – Write down everything you can think of in a minute that conveys the opposite message of your brand. What is not ‘fun’?
• Focus In – When you narrow things down a bit, then you can start to ask questions like, “Out of these 50 typefaces, which ones convey the feeling of ‘fun’ the most?”
• Design Elements – Think about the design elements: Line, shape, value, texture and color what helps the concept of fun? Avoid design elements that make it look pretty but don’t support your message.
• Keep The Phases Separate – Plan first. When you get to the design phase, don’t focus on editing or refinement no matter how sloppy or stupid you think something is. You’re going for concept quantity. Once you have a plethora (I love that word) of concepts then you can go in and tweak them. It’s very hard not to tweak designs as you go if you know in your head it looks unfinished. Trust me I know.

Remember the focus isn’t on designing something good it is on supporting the brand and message. In this process you are paving the way to supporting your time spent in research and planning. If every step you make is reinforcing your brand, it suddenly has business value. That translates to revenue. If upper management can associate your design and marketing research with business value, bingo! Everyone’s on the road to better communication and better success as a business.