Cold Spring has offered website maintenance services to clients since 2001, billed at an hourly rate. Approximately 70% of our clients have us handle updates to their sites rather than pay for the up-front cost of integrating a content management system (CMS) into their websites. Our policy is to post updates within 3 business days and, with the exception of really busy periods, we’ve been able to do that for all minor updates. Redesigns and larger projects, obviously, need to have their own time line established.

The original decision to bill hourly rather than charge a monthly maintenance fee was made in an effort to minimize our client’s expenditures. Small businesses maintain a tight bottom line and we didn’t need to charge them unnecessarily if we weren’t doing any work on their sites. Over the past few years, however, we’ve learned there are some reasons for establishing a monthly maintenance budget:

• Rush updates – Cold Spring is a small enough company that we don’t always have the ability to post updates within hours of the request. With a maintenance plan in place, we have the resources available to have a web designer on call and thus make the changes in a timely manner.
• Performance review – In business (as in life), if there’s no pressure, it doesn’t get done. Yet websites are important marketing pieces for small businesses. Removing dead links, investigating website traffic and making changes based on usage, adding new technology and keeping the site up-to-date can all yield a positive return on investment
• Budgeting. Simply put – it’s easier to run your business if you know what your expenses will be every month.

Does it make sense for your website? Since hosting a site is only about $10/month and a domain name is $15/yr, there’s almost no annual fee to have a website up and running. Will an extra $300 or $600 per month help bring in more business? Putting a few additional dollars to making the site perform is an important step we’d be happy to discuss with you!

It’s been a week of SEO over here in Sutton, MA. Lots of search engine optimization discussions, quotes, overviews and work. Time spent doing searches, discussing searches, and especially poring over Google Analytics statistics. Why? Because that’s where the pedal meets the metal in designing marketing websites. Return on investment. We can’t measure success through direct purchases without a shopping cart. But we can look at the traffic, keywords, geographic profile and more. And in doing so, we can justify our work and convince our clients to reinvest in their websites.

Sometimes there’s not a lot of convincing that needs to happen.

What’s the value of being found online? For a business selling a $10 trinket, a lot of trinkets are going to have to be sold to pay for the cost of a professionally built website. Most businesses, however, market products or services that sell for a lot more than that. What’s a single new client worth to a financial advisor? Five thousand dollars a year is a fair number. How about a client for a lawyer? There’s a huge range, but perhaps a bit over a thousand. And it’s not just the ‘white collar’ jobs either. Painting a house might result in several thousand dollars of revenue. Repeat customers are the lifeblood of many tradesmen; plumbers, electricians and carpenters will realize thousands of dollars from new customers over the span of their relationships. Even chiropractors, acupuncturists and other health practitioners, despite earning between thirty and ninety dollars per visit, will see new patients many times and, over the course of a year, earn over a thousand dollars from a single new client.

So how’s it work? Well, the real SEO primer is a bit long to write and there’s a ton of information online already. But after building websites for 200 small businesses and tracking results over 8 years, at least I can talk about getting businesses found in Central Mass or whatever your local market is. See, it’s totally a case-by-case thing. For a big client link meltsnow.com, we’ve been able to get them ranked #1 on Google for a number of their search terms like ‘mag flakes‘ without regard to their geographic area. That’s partly because of their market, partly because of their competition, and partly ’cause Rob over at Chemical Solutions is all over this stuff with me. For clients like holdenacupuncture.com and riveracupuncture.com, we need to look at their geographical market. Searching for ‘acupuncture‘ isn’t going to work for a one-person business. Instead, we need to branch off in two directions. We need to target alternative key phrases like ‘chinese herbal medicine‘ or ‘craniosacral therapy‘ (if you’ve never had that done, please call Robin or Emily!). We also need to target a location. Leicester or Worcester, MA is the specific area. We might expand that to Central Mass or other towns near Worcester as well. When we’re done, we get a couple of the top spots for searches like ‘central mass acupuncture‘.

Is that it? It’s that easy to make money on the web? Heck no. Why do you think Cold Spring Design’s still in business? But that’s a start. More later – or contact us and I’d be happy to evaluate your business, your market and your cost to be found…

For those of us who’ve been environmentally conscious for years, the current Green revolution is a bit surreal.  This stuff is popular now?  When’d that happen?  Does that mean it’s okay to be part of the crowd, or do I want to push to the front again?

Of course, there are a world of shades of green!   I lived ‘forest green’ while thruhiking the Appalachian Trail.  Heck, my brother’s trail name was ‘Green One’!  He’s ‘bright green’, I think.  Now?  I’m ’sea green’ at best.  True green comes from removing wasteful consumption from our lives, and that’s something I’ve done only fairly well at.

Cold Spring operates out of two home offices and Chris’s is smaller (and greener) than mine.  We both heat and cool the offices and have the computers running much of the day and night.  In addition, we have websites hosted on about 8 web servers around the country – that’s using some significant electricity!  We do well on paper, using a ream every two months or so.  Our electricity is pretty green too, since we pay to ‘green it up’ by paying for renewable energy.  We drive our cars on business only a day or two per week, doing almost all our business via phone or video chats.  Pretty good, eh?

So, is our business green?  Websites have become de rigour for small businesses as well as large ones.  Our sites serve as flexible marketing pieces, building trust inexpensively and providing another contact point with clients.  Our clients spread their marketing budget between their websites, print ads, direct mail, radio, tv, billboards and other advertising medium.  How do we compare on the green scale?

We save on paper and ink costs, we save on gasoline for transport and delivery, but we lose on electricity.  To come up with some useful metrics, we need to look at what the cost is to have a website up and running.

Designing and building the average site is about 30 hours of dedicated computer time.  We host our sites with approximately 100 other websites on the same computer, thus sharing those resources.  The computers run nearly 24×7×365, but let’s call it 4 days electricity per year because of the shared usage.   Call the life of a website 4 years, spead the development time over that time and we’re looking at approximately 108 hours per year of electricity at about 200 watts per hour.  That looks like 22kWh per year (or about $3.50 if you have to buy it yourself.)

How’s that compare to the impact of paper, ink, gasoline and electricity used in other marketing efforts?  I’m guessing pretty well, but I’d be happy to hear what you think!

But Cold Spring Design finally has a new website!

It’s been a long, hard struggle to get version 3 of the Cold Spring site posted! Version 1 took longer than it should have, I remember. You’d think it’d be a gimme, a software/web developer having a website! But client demands always squeek louder than your own marketing needs. So it wasn’t until March 2002 that Cold Spring’s first website went live. Those were the days that I was migrating from software and database development to building websites exclusively. My primary client had just outsourced all their software to India and forced me to evaluate my goals. In retrospect, I owe them a great big thank you! Perhaps I’ll get to design their next website!

Cold Spring Software Design was up and running strong by late 2003. Clients were coming in steadily and my services were in demand. I’d started hosting websites in addition to designing, building and maintaining them. But as Robert Browning said, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”  I took a leave of absence from the company, brought in a reliable friend to handle my existing clients, and took off for 5 months to thruhike the Appalachian Trail.

I’ve never looked back. That is to say that, while I reflect upon that trip every day of my life, every day also brings more and more opportunities. I was able to redesign my website and release Cold Spring version 2 upon my return from the Trail. Good thing, too! Life has the wonderful ability to get as busy as you can handle. And then some.

So it’s only now, 28 months later, that version 3 is on the proverbial books. Jeff Lerman is no longer doing business as Cold Spring Software Design. Instead, Cold Spring Design, Inc. has a life of its own, and there are simply not enough hours in the day.

But then again, I’m a firm believer that you can do anything you want to do.

You’ve just got to take the first step.

Welcome to the Cold Spring Design blog! This is a inside view of the company: who we are, what we do and why we do it. As if the copy on the website isn’t personal enough!

This month’s Fast Company magazine has a couple great articles that caught my eye and really sparked some thoughts. Honestly, however, I find it funny that a magazine with that title captures my attention, because I’m really a slow company kind of guy. Are you following the Slow Food revolution at all? My wife and I are relatively environmentally conscious and pretty food conscious as well. We’re looking forward to moving into our new home (& office!) in a few months and starting up the vegetable garden. It’s just how we want to live our lives. It’s how I want to run Cold Spring Design as well. I’d rather build the company slowly and sustainably then boom, profit, and flame out. In the process, a lot of small businesses get a low of great websites and service at great prices. We all win.

So back to the magazine. The first article by Bill Breen, ‘No Accounting for Design?‘ is right on target. It’s about equating design to value, and as artists have known forever, there’s no accounting for taste. At least, that’s correct when assessing individual taste. But the Internet makes individual taste a relatively moot point. Bill Breen says that “good design is good business” is the growing consensus, and that’s good for us. Good design sells. We know it sells products, but it also sells companies and brands and ideas and more.

So how’s this affect small business web design? We’ll be the first to admit that our designs are 95-98% designs. There are plenty of design companies out there who can consistently turn out 99% and 100% designs – but can you afford them? Small business is often about spending money wisely! We agree that good design is good business. And, even if we don’t take the time (and don’t charge you for the time) to evaluate the return on your investment, we’re giving you good value. Ask our clients. You gotta spend money to make money, and good design is a good place to start.

What’s the other article that caught my eye, you ask? Why, it’s the Final Word – a letter sent by Whole Foods Markets CEO John Mackey to his employees. Now, you must know that I love this guy! In 2002, already in his position as CEO of Whole Foods, he thruhiked the Appalachian Trail (Strider, AT02) in 4.5 months. His company has performed incredibly and he had the strength of character to fulfill a huge dream of his while living many of his other dreams. I followed in his and many other hikers footsteps in 2004 (Squish, AT04) and the hike has changed who I am and how I think.

John Mackey’s letter was not a happy one – it warned of slowing sales growth and precipitated a 23% drop in the Whole Foods stock price. But he did it right. He announced that executives were going to be paid more in order to keep them with the company. Instead of capping salaries at 14 times the average pay of an employee, the salary cap was raised to 19 times average – compared to the average Fortune 500 CEO at 431 times average! In addition, he dropped his salary to $1, stating that he no longer wanted to work for money.

This man stands out. In an excerpt from another Fast Company article, he talks about his hike:

“My trail name is Strider,” he says. For someone tall, lanky, and energetic, it seems an innocuous enough choice. “I’m a great admirer of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,” Mackey says. “Before I was in high school, I had read it five times. And one of the characters I admired was Strider.”

But as with much about Mackey, that nickname is not quite what it seems. “Strider isn’t his real name; it’s his nickname on the trail. He is really Aragorn, the king. But he wasn’t a king on the trail. In 2002, when I was hiking, I was certainly the richest guy hiking the Appalachian Trail. I was a kind of secret king. But that wasn’t my identity, or my role, on the trail.”

That’s doing it right. My idea of doing it right is living my dreams while building Cold Spring Design, Inc. into a Slow Company – an incubator for small business websites where we all grow and succeed together.