In this video blog, President and Co-founder of Onsharp, Joe Sandin, reflects on how Onsharp got started 10 years ago by 2 college interns with a passion for web-based solutions.  Joe also comments on how Onsharp has come to be the company it is today, as well as his vision for the next 10 years of growth and success for the company.  Check it out to see where Onsharp has been, where Onsharp is now, and where Onsharp is going.

Onsharp, a professional web consulting firm in Fargo, is celebrating its 10^th year of business this month.  Located at 474 45^th Street South in Fargo, Onsharp was founded in July of 2000.

The company was started by two college interns, Joe Sandin and Matt Hardy, who shared a passion for the web and yearned to share that passion with businesses in order to help them reach their full potential and remain competitive in a dynamic business setting.  Through the several local and nationwide projects Sandin and Hardy received, they realized the full potential and power the web held as a communication tool, channel for sales, and more.  Sandin moved the company to Fargo, ND in 2003, and since then Onsharp has expanded its service offerings, skilled team of professionals, and its client base.

Onsharp continues to grow with an energetic and passionate determination to help businesses create web-based solutions.  The core values of innovation, an unparalleled customer experience, and measurable results are behind every project and interaction with Onsharp, and the company has both an experienced staff as well as a proven process model to ensure growth and success for their clients. Onsharp now offers six core services: web strategy, web design, web development, web marketing, web optimization, and web hosting.  Onsharp also offers a hosted service, SmartPay, which provides web-based billing and payment integration for businesses to help them save time, money, and the environment.

“The key to our success at Onsharp has always been and will continue to be our talented and energetic team,” comments Sandin.  “Without their collective expertise and passion for what we do, the results that we have brought to our clients would not be possible. I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of the Onsharp team members that have worked so hard in pursuit of our vision of driving success. I would also like to thank all of our clients, past and present, who we have been fortunate to serve.  We are extremely grateful for your business and we look forward to long-lasting partnerships with all of you for many years to come.”

At Onsharp, the overarching vision is simple: Drive Success. Whether it be for clients, employees, their families, or the community, Onsharp strives to create success in the lives of all people, businesses, and communities it serves.  Offering a full array of services, Onsharp is here to ensure your business is making the most of the web to leverage measurable results.  For more information about Onsharp or SmartPay, please visit www.onsharp.com, www.gosmartpay.com, or call toll-free at 1.866.ONSHARP.

Onsharp is always looking for great information to share with our followers. “Web Design Trends for 2010” is one of the more interesting and well done presentations I’ve seen all year. In the presentation, Tijs Vrolix does a wonderful job describing five “Don’ts” for web design this year. With permission, I am sharing those “Don’ts” with you today: 

1. Forget about Smiling Business People

We’ve all seen them. From financial websites to consulting firms, so just say no. 

2. Puzzles 

We get it. The “missing piece to the puzzle”. 

3. Globes

A globe is meant to depict a “worldliness” and describe geographic availability. Can’t it be done another way? 

4. Gears

Yes. Onsharp is guilty of using gears. The major problem: in the real world, they wouldn’t actually function. 

5. Light bulbs

Representing ideas and innovation with a light bulb is a little… unimaginative. 

So maybe our additional comments to Tijs’s five “don’ts” are a little harsh, but there is one running theme throughout those five “don’ts”— Lack of originality. Your site should grab peoples’ attentions and be unique. Admit it. You’ve seen those five images on nearly every business site you’ve visited. 

Tijs suggests: Simplicity, invisible complexity, Big (text, headers, footers, call to action), arty, and the bigger picture. 

Onsharp’s design services can help you avoid the “don’ts” to produce a well designed and highly functioning site to enable your business to reach your 2010 goals. 

Click here to begin designing with Onsharp

Click here for Tijs’s Presentation

What about the 3D process?

Now that you have an idea of what we do, and how we do it for you with our services, what about that process? We use the 3D process consisting of three phases: Discover, Develop, and Deliver. Get it? Three “D’s” make up the 3D process. 

We always begin each project with a Discovery session. You tell us what you require: a way to place orders online, decrease costs, a more reliable email system… and we will begin the Discovery process of what technologies we can use to meet your requirements. We’ll even be able to tell you exactly what your project will cost based on your requirements before we begin Development. 

Development is where the technologies found in Discovery are implemented. Our developers will code away while our project manager keeps you informed of the progress. Based on your requirements outlined in Discovery, we create a system that functions they way you need it to. Our project manager sends you progress reports (weekly, monthly, or whenever you wish) to keep your project on course. Once initial Development is complete, we put your solution through rigorous testing. Okay, the testing isn’t that rigorous on the testers, but we do make sure everything is functioning and is up to your standards before we launch or “Deliver” your project. 

When we launch your finished project, it may end the project itself but it does not end the 3D Process. We continue to deliver measurable results for your business. The Deliver phase begins with the deployment of your project to the appropriate environment and continues with ongoing user training, technical and user support, and measurement of the solutions’ continued success. 

In one sentence, Onsharp helps businesses utilize innovative web based technologies to reach business objectives by measuring results; all with an unparalleled customer experience. But not everything can be described in one sentence, let alone, one blog. We admit, this wasn’t as fun as some of our other blogs, but we know you probably had questions the site just wasn’t answering. And if you have more, leave us a comment or send an email to info@onsharp.com . 

Missed the other blogs? Here are links to the other two! 

http://www.onsharp.com/blog/post/What-exactly-does-Onsharp-do-Part-I.aspx

http://www.onsharp.com/blog/post/What-exactly-does-Onsharp-do-Part-II.aspx

As mentioned in our blog called “Web Marketing Strategy”, one third of businesses have a strategy for online marketing. That leaves two thirds without an online marketing strategy let alone a complete web strategy! If you have a strategy, there are probably measurable elements such as your bounce rate, cost per online conversion, and maybe even savings from electronic invoicing and bill payment. 

Why is having a web strategy important? You have goals and objectives for your business; you must have a strategy for each part of your business to be effective and efficient in reaching those goals and objectives. Web strategy is important because it is a very powerful, often overlooked resource that will help you reach your objectives and become successful in your ventures.

Just like a marketing strategy or an operations strategy, a web strategy has a very important role in mitigating risk, increasing value, and aligning everyone involved. Similar to building a house, you want to know before you begin building which parts of the house you want and where as well as how you want the house to look. A contractor will begin by asking you pertinent questions regarding your lifestyle and what you hope to achieve by having a custom built home.

Just the same with a web strategy, our strategist begins with asking you what your business objectives are for your business and your requirements for a web solution. After determining goals and objectives of your business as a whole, the Onsharp 3D process continues with the Discovery phase. Knowing your objectives and requirements, Onsharp researches the available web technologies and presents possible solutions. The deliverables that result from the Discovery phase include weekly status reports, sitemaps (blueprint for web sites), wireframes for each page, and a statement of work that outlines implementation costs and time estimates for development.

After Discovery is the Development phase where Onsharp’s talented team of developers create the actual solution from the materials created during Discovery. Deliver is the last phase of the 3D process.

A great web strategy includes measurable results. During the Deliver phase we work with you to determine a reporting schedule based on your set metrics that determine the success of your web solutions. For example, if you want to increase the number of web leads you receive, then a number will be determined to help you measure the results your site is producing. Without the measurements, how do you know if your web technologies are successful? Without a web strategy, how do you know what web technologies can do for your business? Not all business owners are web experts and getting a little help from Onsharp in Fargo can help you get the best value from your web technologies.

"Small is the new big," according to Seth Godin. Where businesses used to want to appear to be big, they may now want to look small, cutting edge, and nimble. Small businesses, by this reckoning, should revel in their fresh, new identity and their close-to-their-roots feeling. And many do.

Good for them. What if you still want your business to look a little bigger than it really is? You may be in an industry that still places mroe trust in larger businesses. You may plan to be much bigger next year than you are now, and prefer to begin as you mean to go on. You may just prefer the idea of a bigger business.

You can do it online. And we can help.

We're not talking about deception, here. We're just talking about a highly professional self-presentation.  Here are some steps you can take to give yourself an image worth growing into:

• Have a professionally designed website. Nothing says "just getting our feet wet" like an amateur website, and yes, everyone can tell.
• Put thought, effort, and a bit of money into your logo design. This is an investment, but you can get a lot of mileage from that one investment, and it fixes your company's identity the way few other things can. This is not the place to choose something generic or auto-generated.
• Use a corporate style. Avoid down-home, handmade effects. Sure, they can be attractive, but a polished, professional air makes you look like a larger company even if you're really working out of your garage. A traditional font, rounded corners, and neutral colors may be elements you'll want to use -- discuss it with your designer. Don't be shy about that, either. Your designer can help you create just the image you want to present.
  
• Use a consistent style. Large companies get everyone to use the same style in their correspondence and writing; you should do the same. 
• Say "we." Even if you're the only employee right now, you can still say, "We carry..." or "We'll have that for you..." or "We've been in business since..." Just be sure to keep it consistent: don't say "we" sometimes and "I" sometimes, or you'll seem confused.
• Use online services to pick up the slack. SmartPay e-billing, SugarCRM, professional email, and other online tools give you a "big company" look from the beginning.

Onsharp is in the business of designing and building beautiful websites, as well as providing web applications and development. We're proud of the appearance of the sites we build, as well as of their overall quality and optimization.

But you have to wonder: how much does that matter?

Search engines can't see the beauty of a website, and they don't have much aesthetic sense anyway, what with being machinery and all. They don't choose sites because they're beautiful, or reject them because they're ugly.

So perhaps an ugly website would do just as well as a beautiful one. 

We don't think so.

Here's why:

• Part of the beauty of a website may be its colors and images, which the search engines cannot in fact see. But part of the beauty is the website's bones -- its information architecture, which search engines can see. Given equal quality of content, Google will choose a cleaner, standards-compliant, fast site over a poorly-built one. Well-built sites look better to humans, too, as it happens.
  
• Part of what makes search engines choose one site over another is the number of links the site has from other sites. Links are generally placed by humans. People are more likely to link to your beautiful site than to an ugly, poorly-designed one.
  
• People are also more likely to click through to your beautiful site from Twitter, Facebook, and other places that show a screenshot. That traffic can be great for your business, regardless of what the search engines do.
• A beautiful site will be more appealing to your visitors, and they will be more likely to become customers. A professionally-designed, attractive site makes your company look better to people who visit your website. You look professional and trustworthy, so visitors are more likely to shop at your website or to visit your place of business.

Onsharp is a Fargo web design and development firm. We build websites and web applications,  and also provide a full range of web services for businesses and organizations here in Fargo. 

One of our offerings is SmartPay, an electronic invoicing solution that allows users to go green, save money, and streamline their office systems. 

Last week at the Hilton Garden Inn in Fargo, area businesses joined us for lunch and a conversation about SmartPay.

Ryan Conley of InterceptEFT spoke. InterceptEFT is our partner for merchant accounts, and co-developer of the SmartPay system. While businesses can choose to use other providers for their merchant accounts, we recommend InterceptEFT for complete security.

Joe Sandin, CEO of Onsharp, also spoke. Then Jennifer Rise of 702 Communications shared her company’s experience using SmartPay.

The businesspeople who came to learn more about SmartPay had lots of questions, and the seminar was definitely interactive. We felt that we'd learned a lot and had some great opportunities to share with our fellow Fargo businesspeople.

If you missed the seminar, you didn't miss your chance to talk about SmartPay or about Onsharp's other services. Come and see us, give us a call, or email and let our representatives contact you.