Who is your web site built for: User or Observer?

By Mark Burgess | January 30, 2015

Friendship [and a web site] can be like a bowl of wax fruit: beautiful until you bite into it [try to use it.] Web site visitors can be divided into multiple camps: buyers vs browsers; students vs teachers; readers vs. watchers and on and on. Critical to web site success is the division between USERS…

Top 10 Web Site Features #1

By Mark Burgess | February 2, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC “All the talk of getting my words out of mere electricity and onto sturdy disks had lulled me into the notion that the disks were actually sturdy. Now they suddenly seemed quite fragile.” – William Zinsser “Writing with Word Processor” While not the sexiest and certainly not the…

Top 10 Web Site Features #2: Finding the Contact Us Button

By Mark Burgess | February 3, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC 1. Backup at the same frequency as changes 2. Finding the “Contact Us” Button This is another seemingly unimportant and often neglected web site concern. While a web site is an asynchronous communication device, it can still facilitate dialog. “Asynchronous” because the message sending and receiving is not…

Top 10 Web Site Features #3: A Responsive Mobile Design

By Mark Burgess | February 11, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Backup at the same frequency as changes A Contact Us form with multiple recipients A responsive “mobile” design Responsive web design (RWD) is a web development approach that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website, depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being…

Top 10 Website Features #4: Website Logistics

By Mark Burgess | February 18, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Backup at the same frequency as changes Finding the Contact Us Button A responsive “mobile” design Website Logistics Life’s about logistics. With the right support systems, you can do anything. – Mark S. Burgess In the military, according to Wikipedia, a quartermaster is ”generally a relatively senior soldier…

Top 10 Website Features #5: A “Clean Well Lighted” Home Page

By Mark Burgess | March 6, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. – Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean Well-lighted Place” In Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”, we listen in on three men in different stages of their lives from young to middle age to old. Hemingway’s sparse prose and clipped…

A Day in the Life of a Web Architect

By Mark Burgess | March 30, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Taking a break at the midpoint on my series, Top 10 Website Features I thought I’d keep track and write about a day in the life of a website architect here at Page Mountain LLC, staff of one. I usually hit the desk, coffee in hand, between 6am…

Top 10 Website Features #6: Building Your Agile Website

By Mark Burgess | May 18, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC When was the last time you went into your kitchen for a drink of water and the water glass went from empty to full instantaneously? Have you ever had a vegetable garden as depicted on the 60’s cartoon The Jetsons where you threw a seed into a pot…

Top 10 Website Features #7: Storytelling Copy

By Mark Burgess | October 25, 2015

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Who wrote what’s on your website? When was the last time you read through it? As mentioned in earlier editions of this series, human beings in the West, read. They read top-to-bottom, left-to-right; see faces before objects; objects before colors; colors before text and finally text…where they spend…

Top 10 Website Features #8 The Checklist

By Mark Burgess | March 9, 2016

For the final three parts of this ten part series, you get my client Revelation Worksheet.  Developed over years of building sites for clients, this list helps turn end-of-project surprises into meaningful discussion to catch issues at the beginning. The checklist comes in four parts: Branding and Purpose Website Logistics Presentation Project Management We’ll start…

Top 10 Website Features #9 The Checklist: Presentation

By Mark Burgess | March 29, 2016

Website presentation addresses the physical interaction of the site with its visitors

Top Ten Website Features #10 – The Checklist: Logistics and Project Management

By Mark Burgess | April 4, 2016

For the same reasons you can’t just slap a website onto a company and expect it to work, no amount of branding, user interface design and content management will make the site work if the more mundane tasks of logistics and project management are not attended to.  As with the rest of The Checklist, the…