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 has the tools you need to give your small business a big business look, with a small business budget. Contact us to discuss just how we can help you grow your company -- and look fully grown while you do it.

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.

Rep. Pomeroy recently spoke here on the importance of small businesses in job growth. Small businesses have created over 22 million new jobs in the past 15 years, so it's no surprise that experts on both sides of the aisle agree that small business is the growth engine for jobs.

There's also widespread agreement that the web is the growth engine for small business.

How can the internet help you grow your small business?

First, you can open your doors  online for much less than what it costs in the physical world. Even if you plan to grow someday to the point where you need a big building downtown, a business can get started with a good website. As you grow, your website allows you to communicate with customers, get the most for your marketing dollar, and maintain a 24/7 presence where your customers are.

 Second, you can save time and money with web applications. Onsharp offers electronic billing with SmartPay, customer relationship management with SugarCRM, and a myriad of services with the Onsharp Core,including email, calendar management, geocoding, content management, e-commerce integration, and much more. Beyond these basics, Onsharp's crack development team can create solutions just for your company. 

This robust functionality lets a small company look and feel like a bigger company to clients and prospective clients. With the savings in time and money that result from having so many of the basic business functions take place on the web, your company can concentrate on growth.

Call Onsharp today to begin the conversation about what our business can do for your business. 

 

When you need your computer or your website to do something new for you, there's one essential decision you have to make first. It's not how much room you're willing to give to the new software or which software company you should support or even how much to spend. It's this: do you want an off-the-shelf solution, or something designed for you?

Many businesspeople don't even consider this. After all, when you need a chair, you don't begin by contacting carpenters and upholsterers. You go to the store and buy a chair. Just so, when you need new software or a new application, you may go to the store and stand in the software aisle. You read the packages, ask the clerks for advice, or perhaps call friends to see what they think. Eventually, you pick the thing that seems best and install it.

This is not the only way. And it isn't necessarily the best way. Off the shelf solutions can have drawbacks:

• They may not do what you want. You may have a list of characteristics and functionalities you want in a solution, and you may not find anything that has all those characteristics. You may just have to choose the closest thing, or put together several different packages in order to get everything you want. Often, you'll find that the exact functionalities you want don't seem to come in your price range, or that you have to have other software in order to do what you want with one package.
  
• They may do more than you want. This may not sound like a bad thing. Often, we buy a software package for one thing, and we think of the other stuff it does as free add-ons that we might use someday. However, we're paying for all those added things. If we want an invoicing package, should we have to pay for the calendar that comes with it, which we'll never use? It isn't only the cost of the solution, either. A software package with lots of options can mean a steeper learning curve for your staff and use of more resources in your computer.
• They may not suit you or your company. A solution designed for lots of people to use may not work quite right for you. A solution designed for you will mesh with your workflow, not require workarounds. It won't look as though you've patched it in. Onsharp's SmartPay, for example, is an electronic invoicing solution with a customizable portal. That means that your customers see something recognizable when they go online to pay their bills. This makes them feel secure and makes you look good. "Customizable" means that you save, compared with a system completely built for you, but you still get the benefits of a solution designed with you in mind.

You might find the perfect software package or application ready-made. If not, don't feel that you have to compromise. Call Onsharp at 701.356.9010 to discuss your needs. You may be surprised at how much difference our solutions can make for your business.

At Onsharp, we're committed to remaining at the cutting edge of technology. This is important to our clients because it means they can be sure that the solutions we provide are the best possible, and will last the longest without needing to be replaced. 

But this can mean that some of what we do seems a bit mysterious.  If you hear someone here saying, "Hey, can you build that site in php?" -- well, just what does that mean?

Here's a quick guide to the computer languages we use here at Onsharp:

• HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. This is the language that tells your computer's browser how to show a page to you. The English on this page has been marked up (that's why it's markup language) so the computer knows which parts ought to be in a list and which bits should be emphasized. HTML also directs your computer so that you can see pictures and click on links to go to other places on the web (that's the hypertext part).
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. This language works with HTML to make beautiful computer pages. The colors, shapes, and where things are on the page are all up to the CSS in a properly-built web site. That's the "style" part. The "cascading" part refers to the fact that your computer follows special rules to determine which style information to apply in particular cases -- that's rather technical, and doesn't affect your experience of the website. But the style part sure does; if it weren't for CSS, this page would just be plain blue letters on white, straight down the page. This is where the art comes in.
• XML: Extensible Markup Language. XML is similar in some ways to HTML, and there is a fusion of the two called XHTML. XML is more versatile than HTML, but it's still a markup language, so it's still used for making pages of English (or other human languages) do what we want them to in a computer. 
• PHP: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP doesn't exactly stand for something the way HTML and CSS do; it originally stood for "Personal Home Page," but now it's used for much more than personal home pages. It's a language that lets developers put commands into a web page, making a dynamic web page -- that is, a web page that does something. This allows things like searches and calculations to be done from a web page.
• C# and C++: C# is a programming language -- a language that tells the computer to do things. With C#, a programmer can make a button that does something besides go from one place to another in the internet. C# communicates well with databases, so it's great for applications that need to sort through data and make decisions. C# is especially good for the internet, so we also use C++, a related language that will work well in other contexts, too.
  
• Javascript: Javascript, and the related Jscript and Jquery, let designers and developers add extra things to HTML. This is how we can put Google Analytics into our websites, for example. There's a script, a set of instructions for the computer, that tells the computer to count the number of visitors coming to your website. Since Javascript lets the browser respond to things that computer users do, we can use it to make a website let people know when they make a mistake filling out a form, or to build a site that automatically updates a calendar.
• SQL: Structured Query Language. SQL is a database language. A database is an organized collection of information. SQL lets your computer go and find information. You can ask for all the carburetors at a particular price point, or all the accounts that are past due, and the computer will track down that information for you. SQL can be used for a lot of different things.

That's a lot to know, isn't it? Fortunately, you don't have to know all of this. Onsharp has a great team of developers, designers, and web professionals who will use these languages (and new ones, when they're developed) to make sure that your web projects, from webpages to Web 2.0 applications, do exactly what you need them to do.