As you probably know, it’s a good idea to keep the content of your site updated and to add new items to your site periodically. This is good both for your readers, who need new content as an incentive to return regularly, and also for search engines, some of which prize regularity of updates as a sign that a website is backed by a growing, active concern.

Well, we take our own medicine, of course, and so we’ve updated a few pieces of our site. You may want to check out these updates. They include:

• On our front page, the box on the right now has a third tab, “News,” that lets you read the five most recent headlines on our blog and click into them.
• Some of you may not know what we look like. Well, we’ve finally updated our bio pages with photos, so now you can put a smiling face to that smiling voice you’ve been talking to all this time. Check us out.
• On the blog itself, we’ve added a number of nice, modern touches. First, over on the right under our list of links, you’ll find a new RSS icon to let you subscribe to our blog feed and read it using RSS aggregators. Also, at the bottom of every post, you’ll find a number of icons for social bookmarking, tagging, and sharing sites - like del.icio.us and digg - to allow you to share posts on our blog with others, assuming you’re a member of those services.

Is there something that you’d like to see on the site that’s not there now? Let us know!

A recent interaction with a client got me thinking about how doing something that seems like helping a client can later come back to hurt your business. Here’s the situation:

We’ve worked for a few years with this client. Let’s call them Client A. We were connected to Client A through another client and built a site for Client A’s former employer. Client A then went out on their own to start a new company. We built that site, too.

Because we liked Client A, we gave them a bit of a break on price, especially as they were a new business. That price break cost us some, but we figured it was worth maintaining the relationship and helping a new business get off the ground.

Once that business was up and running, Client A started another. We built this website as well. This time, the client had an even smaller budget than before, and though we wouldn’t take a site with a budget this small from a new prospect, we took this one in order to maintain the relationship and because we like Client A.

Again, the decision cost us, and the last few legs of the project were rocky because the client wanted more than the budget allowed, but we eventually launched a good site for them.

In the last few weeks, the client asked us to give a quote on a new project. We decided that we couldn’t keep giving big discounts on work for this client, because we’d done it twice already and because we’re too busy to handle that right now. So we quoted the project at our standard rates.

Client A wasn’t very happy about this price and is now using another web developer for that project. It’s possible that we’ve lost them as a client altogether, which wasn’t our goal.

And here’s the unusual thing: The problem isn’t with the client. It’s with us.

By giving those price breaks and not telling the client about them, we trained the client to expect our services at a certain price. Rather than giving this client out standard price, we tried to “help them out” and reduced our prices. When the most recent quote came in so much higher, of course Client A was surprised! That’s what we’d trained them to expect and they probably had no context to understand why the price had been raised so much.

So, by trying to help and cutting our rates in a few instances, we caused a long-term problem, may have lost a client, and have left the client feeling badly towards us. Pretty far from our original goal of trying to maintain a relationship and help a new business get a solid start, huh?

Bottom line? Giving “hidden” discounts and cutting prices to meet the client’s budget rather than charging what the project actually costs is a bad strategy for the long-term. It’s tempting to do, but as 3000K matures we’re not going to do it.

Unfortunately, we had to learn that lesson in a way that may have damaged a good client relationship. I hope that’s not the case, but perhaps it’s the price of learning and maturing. And it’s too bad.

Write to the Top/Better Communications is a corporate-writing training and consulting company located in Lexington, MA.

They approached us with a pair of needs: to refine the look of their website and to create a “private sales tour” system that allows their sales force to give guided sales presentations to prospects.

The largest component of the job was the “private sales tour” area, which allows for the creation of user accounts to access the password-protected area, the addition of new sales content to that area, and security features to ensure that only authorized prospects are able to see this valuable intellectual property.

We also made a nice, clean modernization to the site’s main page and a corresponding minor changes to other pages.

You won’t be able to see the sales tour unless you’re in the market for corporate-writing training, but if you are, we suggest you click on over to Write to the Top and drop them a line. They do great work.

Visit the site.

A while back we advertised our need for a traffic manager. Well, we did our interviews and we’ve found our person.

Starting today, Christine Kurtz is joining 3000K as our new Communications Manager.

Christine comes to us with a great track record of experience in both the corporate and non-profit worlds. Most immediately, she’s coming to us from the Worcester Art Museum, where she served as the Manager of Youth and Family Class Programs, overseeing a thriving program of students and instructors.

Prior to that, she worked in a number of non-profits and museums, with the Air Force, and in corporate training.

Her addition not only strengthens our non-profit offerings, but will also help us more closely manage projects, give even better attention to clients, and make everyone happy with her delicious chocolate-chip cookies.

Clients will begin hearing from her soon and meeting her soon after that.

We’re thrilled to have her and look forward to the many ways in which she’ll help 3000K develop + grow.

Something we’ve learned in the last few years is that how you say goodbye to a client is just as important as how you say hello to them.

A lot of people are most concerned about saying hello, getting to start working with a client, convincing them you’re the right company for their needs, but by the time a client is ready to leave, companies and their staff frequently don’t think about how they say goodbye. They just do it, and do it oftentimes in an angry way.

Of course no one likes to lose clients, but it happens to everyone and how you deal with it says a lot about you as a company.

We try to say hello and goodbye in the same way. You don’t find this at all companies, of course. More than once we’ve taken over an account from another web developer or web host and found them to be less than cooperative in helping their client transition to us.

We try to be as cooperative as possible. For instance, this week we completed the transition of one of our oldest clients to another provider. They left not because they were unhappy with us, but because the path they want to pursue and the path that we’re walking aren’t the same anymore.

We didn’t fight their transition, we worked with it. We were in constant communication with them and their new web company to make sure the transition went smoothly and that their business wasn’t interrupted.

Thanks to this, instead of this client disappearing into the ‘Net, they sent us a nice email, thanking us for our help and the service we’d provided them over the years. A much nicer way to end a business relationship than with anger on both sides, right?

And relationships are really what this philosophy is all about. No industry or region is so big that you can afford to treat people consistently badly. You never know when you’ll run into an old client again (at a new job for them or for you, for instance) and leaving them with a bad taste will poison any chance you had of working with them again.

For 3000K, since so much of our business is built on networking, relationships, and referrals, this would be potentially fatal.

Instead, by concentrating on how we say hello and goodbye to clients, we’re able to maintain relationships, keep the door open for future collaboration, and keep ourselves on client’s mental lists of comapnies to refer when the time comes.

It makes a big difference.

We all thought the web platform would come from one of the big players, most notably Google. It was going to be the Google OS that would compete with Microsoft and prevent Yahoo or eBay or Amazon from dominating the ‘net. With thousands of the smartest minds around Google has the intelligence to create the platform of the future, with their vast server farms and tremendous reach they have the technology, and with its stock flying high Google undoubtedly has the money.

I think the investment by Jeff Bezos shows that 37signals is making their own play at the web platform, however, and they’re using a fundamentally different strategy. 37signals is working to change how we think about ourselves, our place in the world, and how we work - not just provide tools or an API to tie our products to.

On their blog post announcing the Bezos investment Jason states:

“It will be great learning from Jeff as we build 37signals into one the great companies of the next 20 years.”

With the success of Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, Writeboard, and Ta-da List we have seen the signals winning strategy for web app development. Ruby on Rails is a hot framework that is empowering the community to follow in their footsteps. And, as the quote above shows, they have the ambition.

The 37signals approach includes a final unique element that Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Google), have lost. The signals are winning the hearts and minds of developers. Every day thousands of people across the world are heavily influenced by the signals blog and live by the philosophy encapsulated in their book, Getting Real.

Package all of this together and it’s clear that 37signals is a pioneer in the frontier of web applications, provides a framework for cutting-edge development, and, most importantly, is changing the way we think about ourselves and how we work. They have won the hearts and minds of many smart, eager, focused shops across the world that are at the forefront of “Web 2.0” development.

It’s not an OS strategy like Microsoft used in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but I think that 37signals has a greater chance at impacting how a web platform develops than than Google, Yahoo, eBay, or even Jeff’s little company, Amazon. Their challenge is to keep hold of those hearts and minds. Staying small is an important step toward maintaining that place, but presents its own difficulties (especially keeping good people, maintaining influence, and not becoming smothered in an increasingly populated arena).

Let’s see how this all plays out.

The thing that is perhaps the most overlooked by companies when developing a new website or online marketing campaign is the copy that will be used in the project.

In many cases, companies leave writing to an employee who has another set of job responsibilities, but can also write a bit. Sometimes this works out fine (and has with many of our clients); Other times, the results can be disastrous. Having the wrong person write the copy for your project can hamstring you before you even start.

It’s odd that it ends up working out that way. Companies hire web and print designers, photographers, PR firms, etc. to do work in their specialty areas. Perhaps that’s because they’re seen as experts with skills that don’t readily exist in-house. Perhaps these companies don’t see writing as the same kind of skill. After all, everyone has to write most every day, right?

Well, maybe.

An example of the importance of having a professional write your website or marketing copy came to my attention this week. It involves LRMR Marketing, a marketing company closely associated with NBA star LeBron James.

LRMR, according to its website, is “[changing] the sports marketing prism through leveraging sports celebrity and corporate infusion of partnerships.”

Maybe you’re starting to see the problem. That sentence’s clarity is hazy and its grammar jagged.

And the problems mount: “In today’s global watchdog public, it’s easy to have a PR blunder.”

There are other problems with the site’s copy, of course, but my point isn’t to put LRMR down or make fun of them. The site’s text could probably be raised to an acceptable level with just a few hours of work.

My point is that having these kinds of problems undermines LRMR’s credibility, their professionalism, and, since they’re a PR/marketing agency, their ability to market.

My point, also, is not that we all need to be perfect. We don’t and we can’t be. There will always be spelling errors in websites to be caught, areas where phrases could be leaner or clearer, grammar mistakes that get missed (in fact, if you look hard enough, you’ll probably find them in our site).

The point is that you reduce that overhead, and start further ahead of the pack, when you employ a professional writer to work on text for your site or marketing pieces.

3000K has a staff writer for this purpose and works with external copywriters because we strongly believe that excellent site text is one of the details that separates a good website from a great one.

You may not be able to immediately recognize a site that’s been written by a professional, but man can you ever tell the ones that haven’t been.

Thanks to Henry Abbott at True Hoop for catching this one first.

The CentMass Association of Physicians (CAP) is a network of nearly 200 general practice doctors and specialists who practice in the Central Massachusetts area, especially Leominster, Fitchburg, Worcester, and surrounding towns.

When we began the project, CAP did not have a website. They needed to build an attractive, easy-to-use site that allowed people seeking new doctors throughout Central Massachusetts to easily search for and contact doctors and specialists in their area and in the medical areas they required.

The design for the site was created by our colleagues at Chiarella Design. We executed it as standards-compliant code.

The project was brought to us, and managed, by our partners at AP Associates, who also wrote much of the text for the site.

The website we created together meets CAP’s goals and includes a powerful administrative system that allows CAP staff to easily add, edit, and delete doctors and their information from the search database.

View the site.

We’re in the middle of developing a web based application (code named Orbit) to help small businesses operate more effectively. It’s part of a larger orientation we have toward creating web properties that help small businesses and organizations develop + grow.

Soon we’ll be launching the first of these, a mini-app of sorts that helps creative professionals determine what hourly rate they should be charging to cover their costs and make a profit. This tool will be free and allow people to compare scenarios to see how making changes to staff, hours worked, billing rates, etc., impacts the bottom line.

We hope this will keep our friends in the biz working profitably. It should be perfect for individuals and small teams.

What to charge is, however, just one of many problems people have. And we’re looking for more to work on.

So here’s my question: What numbers matter most to your business?

Keith McCormick is an independent statistics and data mining trainer and consultant. He trains people on how to use SPSS and data mining software and consults on projects in the same areas. And he goes way back with Eric. Like back to undergrad college days back.

So, when Keith wanted to get a web presence up and running to support his consulting and training, he knew just where to turn.

We created a WordPress-based site for him that allows him to handle his own content updates, letting him quickly provide new information, tips, tricks, and feedback to his students and clients.