After seeing an article on Freelance Switch, Prospect to Client Tracking Spreadsheet, I figured rather than using just a document, why not build a simple web app to solve the same problem?  The article/document was the sole inspiration for LeadSHIFT.

I loved the idea of tracking the time from initial contact to signing a contract.  I also wanted to track things like which types of contact (email, face-to-face, phone, etc) and which types of project types (web design, app dev, consulting, etc) had the highest conversion rates.  If you know that you convert 75% of leads on the phone vs 45% with email why would you not get the lead on the phone?

Another great piece of trackable information would be referrals.  I thought wouldn’t it be great to see which contact referrals generated the most revenue or had the highest conversion rates.  Then when the time …

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Each agency has their own launch checklist and I thought I would share ours here at CWS.  Over the last 5 years we have been refining our process to a simple list of steps to follow on each site launch.

Just about all of these are no-brainers but maybe there are some that you haven’t seen that you can add to your launch process.  We keep the site on our testing server throughout development  so our clients can see how the site will look without having to send screenshots or show them a laptop at a meeting.  Once we have sign-off on the testing server, we begin this launch process.

Edit .htaccess file for redirects

Rather than having 2 different URLs for a domain (http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com), we prefer to point all traffic to either the www. or the site without the www but never both.

Double check email addresses for

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I always found it very useful to see how other designers and agencies took websites from start to finish.  I think that I am comfortable enough at this point to share our design process here at CWS in hopes that it can help some young up-and-coming web professionals.

Phase 1 – Requirements Analysis
This is by far the most important phase so that time is not wasted during the rest of the process.  During the requirements analysis, it is our responsibility as the web design team to interview the stake holders and learn as much about the project as possible AND get a feel for what the stake holders are looking for.  We ask them questions about their customers, ask them for a list of good (and bad) looking websites, determine whether or not they have a logo and color scheme selected.  These are only a few questions but the …

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I want everyone to take a step back from their website.  Think about who the site is for and what the objective is.  For most business owners and professionals, they look to their website as a sales tool ultimately.  While the objectives (generate more leads, increase awareness, educate consumers, etc)  might be slightly different, your website is usually providing information to others (as opposed to yourself).

With this in mind, most of us (including CWS at times) design sites and content for ourselves before considering the audience and users.  We become so wrapped up in our own content and source material that it becomes hard to distinguish what is actually important to the users of the site.  We think about what looks good to us and stop there.  Obviously we all want to be proud of our websites but we must be careful not to look past the audience in the …

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After building applications (on and off the web) for the last 10 years, I’ve come to respect frameworks and learned how to harness their power.  I am a firm believer of understanding the underlying language but it seems these framework creators are making their frameworks easier and easier to use.

For our latest app, LeadSHIFT,  we researched quite a few frameworks before choosing one for the backend and plan on porting the app to another to become familiar with its features.  I’ll give a brief overview of the ones we used below.

PHP Frameworks

After spending some time seeing which PHP framework I wanted to use, I finally decided on CakePHP.  I liked the fact that it had been around for quite a while with frequent updates and a strong community behind it.  When choosing a framework, a strong community is incredibly helpful when you run into trouble. …

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