I remember walking up to store owners in DHA Lahore, asking them if they would want a website for their store. I am talking ‘back in the day’, while still at college, six to seven years ago.
A lot of the times, people would respond somewhere in the lines of, ‘I have heard of them websites, tell me what it is and maybe I will get you to make it for me.’ The Marketing students reading this, take note, this was the introductory stage of the product life cycle and ‘theory’ like that. Anyways, I would tell them what it is and how they could benefit from it. (Yes, 6 to 7 years back, there was less benefit of an online presence for a local store in Lahore, and it was much harder than it is now to sell websites and web development. But the benefit for a website developed in Lahore for a local business was beneficial back then as well).
I did try to sell websites by being very cheap. I stopped doing that years ago. For a very valid reason of course; quality comes at a price. I put a lot of effort into making a website, I hire expensive programmers to code even the basic of codes to get the best out in the market. Of course, sometimes I mess up, but I know I can deliver, God willing, because the cheap guy hardly wins. At the end of the day, I don’t pay the expensive programmer just because he is expensive, but because he or they deliver on time and deliver what was asked after following best practices. Goes without saying, I learnt that the hard way. The very hard way.
Now, things have changed. Now people usually ask for a website themselves. Surely, the times have changed. Website development in Lahore has definitely picked up, with a lot of people offering web design and development services. At the end of the day, it will not be who is offering what, but it will be how are they servicing the customer. For as I still strongly maintain, business is about relatoinships and their maintenance thereof.
One thing that surprises me to this day is that how lightly people take email.
This may be due to the fact that email is ubiquitous enough to even qualify as the perfect computer application.
There may be a lot of businesses that sell products or services through a ’shop’ that may never have used email (or letters or faxes for that matter). On the other hand, hardly you will see a company selling products and services through an ‘office’ that do not use email (or letter or faxes!).
That is why, in an attempt to service the email market of the world (we can start with Lahore! ), Treetech is offering a business email package, designed for companies who use email as their primary mode of communications. I have high hopes for this product/solution/package.
Just like Picasso relied on his technical ability of using a paint brush, so does the art form of Advertising relies on research findings and set procedures. But at the end of the day, it is art.
And the following is the work of an artist, using the right tools.
Who ever is going to visit your site? Why would they? There are billions of web pages out there, why would someone just stumble upon your page?You actually paid someone to design a website for you? Did not your 15 year old nephew offer to do it for a ride on a motorbike or something?
Who really reads a blog? There could possibly be no use of someone no one has ever heard of saying whatever he or she wishes to say…
The User Interface for the new Wordpress deserves to be noticed, not because it is good, which it might turn out to be, but because it is done-up by the people behind Happy Cog, a user-interface-design firm.
Wordpress has certainly come a long way, and the massive popularity of this blogging platform owes its credit not to the fact that it is opensource, but to the fact that it is so darn good-to-go and intuitive!
It plays nice with the search engines, the adminitration side was already well above average (even before being done up in the new 2.5 version), the themes that were available were so well thought out and well documented that learning web development itself became a charm!
I always have had a leaning towards ‘legally free’ software, and this platform has been my ‘weapon of choice’ to give to Treetech’s website clients. We actually write a theme for Wordpress, make some (a lot, in fact) tweaks with the WP core, and viola; search engine friendly and functionally sound website is ready!
While moving servers, that I did, again it seems, eons ago, the comments to that post were stuck in the middle. Thanks to God, the comments (which really are the heart of any website journal or blog) were only stuck and not lost.
Finally, I found the time (it’s Sunday today, please! ), to actually port the comments from my backup database to this website. It took a good one hour of my time, going to phpMyAdmin to access the “backed-up” SQL dbase
and then porting them to wordpress, comment by comment. Then moderating the comments’ timestamps (thank you Wordpress!) to get the chronology of the comments in order.
Finally, the post is ‘back in business’. If you do feel inclined, check it out here.
Thank you all who have commented and made that post a good discussion on Marketing and the Internet.
Unfortunately, it has not been done up properly. In fact, it has not been done up at all!
A lot of the website visitors are going to the website packages, only to be perhaps see just one ‘package’ (where the offering is so vauge that it may make your head hurt).
This has happened to others as well; paying attention to others’ websites will make you neglect your own. And this will go against practically everything that you preach.
The user experience needs to be improved. God willing. Here we go…
The primary job of design is to ‘disperse’ your attention in predetermined ways.
If you want your customers to click on ‘buy now’, the design should, in one way or the other, work towards that. Many-a-times, a design will take all the attention with the content being pushed in the background.
And by design, I am not referring to graphic design only but also information design. The following video of people missing out on your message should emphasize the importance of establishing the focus and then working towards it.
The sheer penetration and availability of the Internet can pose some interesting challenges in the realm of design.
Imagine an information kiosk in a village somewhere near the small city of, say, Pakpattan (in the province of Punjab, Pakistan). Now, assume that someone who actually knew what he was doing designed and developed the kiosk and it is ‘live’ and updates itself using the Internet etc etc. And the kiosk provides information regarding agriculture. Brilliant. People just walk up, click on, say, pesticides, and see its application methods with regards to different crops. Or click on crops and see different methods of fertilizer applications, pesticide and water use etc. All good. But what if you were to design such a system?
Recently, Treetech launched the Property Standard website and I ensured that basic SEO techniques were followed. The beauty of sticking to basics is that things get done and one is not confused or preoccupied or distracted by little fluctuations. For example, basic SEO is all about writing website copy with the audience in mind, and not the Search Engines. Many ‘SEO experts’, especially here in Pakistan, will cram their websites with their targeted keywords in an attempt to get their clients’ websites onto the first page of Google search results. This produces results in terms of ‘getting on the first page’, but that is not the desired result. One wants his or her company/business to be on any search engine’s first page because as more people see the results, they have a chance of converting to users by actually visiting the links. The real ‘game’, if you may, actually starts when a user is at your website. Getting users to your website is a challenge, yes it is, but if your user finds the website too crammed, boring or useless then the user will never be converted to a client.
Now, coming back to the Property Standard website; they are in the business of advertising properties from across Lahore to prospective buyers. Just see the following image of what Google did to their website because Treetech just followed basic SEO techniques:
), Treetech is offering a 
You actually paid someone to design a website for you? Did not your 15 year old nephew offer to do it for a ride on a motorbike or something?
Wordpress has certainly come a long way, and the massive popularity of this blogging platform owes its credit not to the fact that it is opensource, but to the fact that it is so darn good-to-go and intuitive!
The page has been there for some time now.
