I was in a meeting with a client this week about their plans to redesign their website. He wondered if the organization should invest in responsive design. Wha? “Hold on,” I said. “I don’t think going mobile-friendly is optional these days.” But, he argued, responsive design adds to the project budget and his site doesn’t […]
Whenever I meet with clients about their websites, the conversation inevitably turns to the topic of stock photos. Most companies are photo challenged, so they ask us to help them find good stock imagery. My answer? Just say NO! to stock photography, especially of people! I feel hypocritical even writing this blog post because this […]
As marketers, we’re obsessed with metrics. And since email is a primary means of communicating with our members, customers, prospects and partners, it only makes sense that we track open rates (the number of people who actually open and read our emails) and click rates (the number of people who click on a link). Here […]
A couple of months ago, we got a call from a client. Getty Images notified them to say that one of Getty’s images was being used on the website and they didn’t have record of the purchase. The website in question was built about 13 years ago and we had little documentation about the images […]
I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 7 over the weekend and immediately realized why the Internet is buzzing about this OS upgrade. I did a webinar last week on mobile strategy and one of the attendees asked, “how will iOS 7 affect web design?” Once again, it seems Apple is leading the way and creating […]
When I’m presenting to prospects and clients, I almost always get the question “How long will it take to design my website?” As you can imagine, the answer is usually “It depends.” Depends on what? In my experience, a design timeline will depend on the scale of the project, the amount of content to migrate, […]
I had the pleasure of welcoming Colleen Stone, Principal at Stone House , to Matrix Group last week. I invited Colleen to come in and do a Friday Forum (lunch and learn) for my staff because while my team was working with Colleen on her website, I was struck by how similar her process is […]
Not so long ago, clients and prospects would call me and say, “Joanna, I want my website to be more interactive.” They wanted to move beyond a website that just had a lot of text to one where visitors could fill out online forms, make purchases online, register for meetings, etc. Today, I would say […]
Version 13.2 of MatrixMaxx was released last week and it had several notable, new features related to visualization. The first is an infographics builder that lets clients chart meeting registrations against membership data and individual demographics. For example, a client might chart meeting registrations by member type, job level and job function. The second is […]
Last week, Matrix Group launched a redesigned version of this blog, TheMatrixFiles.net. Why redesign my blog? I wanted to update the layout and colors, I wanted each post to be more social, and, most importantly, I wanted the site to be responsive. Responsive web design is “an approach to web design in which a site […]