1. Plan, plan plan!

By starting off with a clear and well thought out site map, you are circumventing 90% of problems that can typically arise. Build the site map with everyone’s input. Make sure all parties involved have their voices heard in how the site should be designed and organized and make sure nothing is overlooked. Taking extra time and care in this step will make all the next steps that much easier.  A very helpful and FREE service that allows many people to work on a site map for a website is WriteMaps (http://writemaps.com/)

2. Delegate

Once you’ve got the basic structure of the site laid out it’s time to divide up the work. Depending on the size of your team this could be quite complicated or relatively easy. The writers will need to start outlining the copy, the designers will need to work on some design comps, the UI folks (user interface) need to start thinking and planning how the site should look and function and ensure the ease of use, developers need to begin identifying all of the components they will need to develop, and start organizing databases and their structure. Everyone has their tasks to do and now’s the time to do them. Just make sure every one clearly understands what they are responsible for and that nothing is overlooked!

3. Check in

Whether you have a large team or you’re building the site by yourself, schedule checkins periodically throughout the process to check over all the work, ensure that it’s been completed, verify that it’s correct, and make sure nothing is being overlooked. Depending on the size of the site and the length of time you have to build it you might want to have checkins scheduled every day or every couple of days. Definitely once a week at a minimum.

4. Test

As you start nearing launch it’s time to get testing. If you only do two items on this list make it Plan and Test. Test early and often and really step it up before launch. Test on every browser on every operating system and on every device you can get your hands on. Ask friends or coworkers not related to the project to test it.  One great thing to do is to find someone who might not be as technically savvy as the rest of your team. Sit down with them and just watch how they interact with your site. Doing this you will find them acting in ways you never expected a user to act. This can give you great insight on how you might optimize your site for users of all experience levels. But the important thing is to test, test, test!

5. Plan for errors

So the project is ready for launch. You’ve planned a great site, delegated the work to the team, followed up with them in checkins and have tested the site. All should be good now, right? What could possibly go wrong? Of course the answer is anything and everything!  There’s no way to make sure you’ve eliminated all chances of errors so just plan accordingly. If you’re launching a redesign of an existing site maybe do the launch when traffic is usually low, if you’re launching a brand new site do a soft launch and make sure it’s working for a while before you tell everybody.

With these tips, you should be able to launch a website without any major hiccups and hopefully keep the entire process relatively stress free! Do you have any good tips you can share? Or better yet, any horror stories about disastrous launches?

LinkedIn

1. Integration with Microsoft Outlook

With the release of Microsoft Office 2010 Outlook will have LinkedIn integrated into it. Users will be able to keep up with their Connections’ Network Updates, email their Connections, and manage their inbox all from within Microsoft Outlook. Users will also be given a quick link to add or invite people to their LinkedIn network. This way, when your new prospect emails you, you can quickly add them to your LinkedIn account with a simple click. I know not everyone will use LinkedIn in Outlook, but it will certainly bring in a lot of new users who just don’t remember to visit the website or never got the hang of it. Now that it’s integrated into something we all do, it’ll be easier for it to become a habit for a lot of us.

2. Follow In Groups

If you’re like me you want to keep your Connections as sincere as possible and only add those people who you actually know or have worked with. But sometimes you find some great thinker or similar spirits in some of the groups you participate in. While it wouldn’t really make sense to invite them into your network you still want to be able to follow them easily. Enter the Follow In Group feature that allows you to follow the activities of other users within the groups you both belong to. Sounds like a perfect compromise.

3. Faceted Search

LinkedIn greatly updated their search feature by adding 8 facets to each search you perform. Now your results can be narrowed down by Current Company, Past Company, Location, Relationship, Industry, School, Groups and Profile Language. If something still can’t be found with all of that, then it’s probably not there anyway.

4. New Navigation System

This one was sorely needed. The team at LinkedIn move most of the navigation to a horizontal, drop down menu across the top. While drop down menus aren’t always the best solution, this one is very reliable and nicely organized. The best part is that freed up a lot of real estate lower on the page which then allowed the important information on the page to move up as well and make it easier to find. Great solution.

5. Syncing with Twitter

Everyone who’s anyone started syncing with Twitter last year and LinkedIn was no different. However, they orchestrated the syncing in a pretty smart way. I don’t know about you but I don’t feel confident that 100% of my tweets belong on a forum as professional as the profile of my business identity, but a lot of them are. To solve this, they created a super simple way to filter what’s posted from Twitter and what’s not. Once you’ve got the account connected you can chose to turn on a filter that only posts from Twitter to LinkedIn if the tweet contains “#in”. Easy to remember and effective.

6. Developer Network

Now this is very similar to Facebook opening up it’s platform for developers, but I still think it’s a great think for LinkedIn and anyone who uses it. We saw how quickly we started seeing nearly all website allowing users to connect to their site through Facebook and reporting back their activity. Hopefully something similar will be done with LinkedIn as well as some surprising, new ways of using it, too. This one is still pretty new so it’s something to watch in the future.

7. The New iPhone App

The biggest news from LinkedIn for me was the complete redesign of their iPhone app. Their previous one was fine but there wasn’t much to it and not much you could do. In the new one you can search, mark profiles as favorites, change your Network Update and view others’, send and receive messages. You’ve also got a fully functional address book and allows you to transfer contact information between two people when they bump their phones. Pretty sweet. Download it for your phone here.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wild-Veggie/67303401927

The new Wild Veggie Facebook Landing Page

The Nike Swoosh, created by Carolyn Davidson

1. Don’t tell the whole story

A common error many business owners and designers make is wanting to tell the whole story at once. Logos, however, have a very, very limited window of time in which they can communicate a concept – even faster than billboards. They can rarely convey more than one, simple concept at once. A great example of this is the Nike logo which represents a very large company that does many things.  Their logo does not illustrate their retail stores or their training equipment. You don’t see any shoes or gear. Their website and iPod products are all absent. Instead we see a simple mark that quickly and simply illustrates the idea of movement. That’s the core of the Nike brand. It’s a bold concept that is simple to comprehend and is expertly illustrated in their logo.

The Fed Ex logo, created by Lindon Leader

2. Interesting Shapes

Another common error for anyone designing a logo is to focus only on the positive shapes. Many times a new layer of depth can be added to a logo by playing with the negative space. Any good designer will tell you that you need to make sure that your negative space is as interesting as your positive space, but sometimes you can take that to another level completely by using the negative space to tell an additional part of the story. Take the FedEx logo for example. Many people saw this logo for years before they noticed the negative space between the “E” and the “x.”  By tweaking the type very slightly the designer was able to “hide” a forward pointing arrow into the logo and use it as a secondary way of communicating what the brand stands for, which I would take to be something similar to “going.”

The Amazon logo

3. Hidden and Multiple Meanings

You can also hide content or secondary messages into the logo in plain sight. This can really create a subliminal suggestion in the brain and help engrain in the viewer’s mind the concepts you are trying to communicate. One logo that does this very well is the Amazon logo. On first glance you see the word Amazon and notice a little smile underneath it. Ok, so Amazon is happiness. On second glance, you notice this smile is actually an arrow that looks like it’s coming into the word. So Amazon is happiness and it brings it to me. Then, upon a very close inspection you realize the arrow goes from “a” to “z,” suggesting to the view that Amazon’s got everything from A to Z to bring me happiness.  I think it’s very clever and certainly gets the brand’s position across, whether you notice it at first or not.

4. Update

Old Science Channel Logo

Once you’ve developed your logo, you should protect it at all costs. Be very selective of how and when it’s used, since it is a graphical representation of your company and you don’t want it used and abused. However, even though I am a staunch advocate for protecting your logo from bastardization or fads, there are times when a logo update is important to keep your brand fresh and relevant.  One logo that was redesigned this year was the Science Channel. Their original logo did have a science look to it, but it was very complicated and hard to read. In the new logo, you can see that they dropped the “The” from the name, which by itself made the whole thing much simpler. They also drastically changed the whole look to appear almost as if it were an entry on the periodic table of elements. The design is very easy to read as is the concept. Overall, it was a huge improvement over what they had.

The New Science Channel Logo

The new Pepsi logo

Another example of a logo redesign is the recently released Pepsi logo. It hasn’t been quite as successful. This logo came from nowhere and seemed to instigate change for the sake of change. No real, clear definition of the brand or its position. While I don’t mind this redesign and actually kind of enjoy the asymmetry of the new logo, I can’t really argue with the following diagram. (Couldn’t find who to credit the diagram below to, but someone did post a timeline of some of the minor changes in the Coke logo here.)