In putting this together, I thought there might be some value for other business folks looking to dip their feet in the blogging waters. First, it should be said that my blog is not one to follow for inspiration – it is what Seth Godin calls a “cat blog” – a place first and foremost to get thoughts out, not generate business. I break a lot of my own rules here, but that’s okay – as long as you know what you’re building your blog to do you’ll make out fine.

I believe that it’s possible to get a successful blog going within two months in about 5 hours a week, tops. These suggestions aren’t comprehensive – you might find things you agree with, things you disagree with, things I left out. Feel free to add or change anything you like – hopefully you find it valuable in some way.

Why You Need a Blog

For the uninitiated, a blog has a number of advantages over a traditional website for someone looking to cultivate a personal brand. These include:

• Improved search engine ranking. Because blogs are content heavy, usually keyword rich by nature, frequently updated, and categorized and tagged with even more keywords, search engines have a tendency to love blogs.
• Community building features. Blogs allow for people to leave comments, providing for dialogue between you and your readers. They also automatically track other bloggers who link to your posts, further improving search engine performance (since links to your site weigh heavily in search engine algorithms) and allowing you to see what others think of your ideas.
• Can be managed and scheduled with a minimum of effort. Unlike articles which are expected to be carefully thought out and perfectly polished, blog posts are often short, pithy observations. They are also very frequently reactions or observations on what other folks are doing (the short post linking to another person’s blog is one of the most popular types of posts.) This means you can quickly write a series of blog posts in a very brief period of time. Since you can schedule posts in advance, you can spend an hour or two reading other blogs and put together well over a dozen interesting, timely posts, scheduled to go out over a week or more.
• Allows people to get to know your personality. A big reason why people buy from someone is because they like them. While rapport building is easy to accomplish with networking, sales and other face-to-face channels, online rapport building isn’t as easy. Blogs are perfect for this, because they encourage you to write with personality. They also allow you to sometimes venture off topic into other interests (see 37Signals and their love for cars, or Tom Peters focus on meditation and organic nutrition.) People feel like they know you, respect you, understand you.
• You can “push” your material out to your readers. As you blog over time, you’ll establish a group of fans who subscribe to your blog, either by signing up for an email newsletter or by adding your blog to their list of RSS feeds. This means that you don’t have to hope people will remember your site and return, because your site will automatically let them know when you have something new to say.
• Opportunities for partnership and monetization. Once you have an audience that is sizable, you can do different things to extract revenue. You can serve up ads on your site (common and easy to do, but not extremely profitable.) You can take content you’ve written in previous blog posts, combine it and turn it into a PDF booklet. You can offer your list of email subscribers or RSS readers a discount on seminars, books, etc. And you can publicize speaking events, book releases and other marketing efforts to your audience (probably your most likely customers.) Finally, you can create partnership arrangements with other experts who have similar audiences and discuss complementary topics. These folks can ‘guest author’ on your blog for a month or more (and vise versa) giving you both opportunities to instantly reach new, interested people.

For all these reasons, a blog can and should serve as the centerpiece for your online marketing efforts. Below is a suggested implementation schedule for getting your blog off the ground.

Suggested Timeline

Week One

1. Get a blog installed on your site. You can use a variety of free software packages (I would suggest Movable Type or WordPress.)
2. Identify 30-40 other blogs that you’d like to use as inspiration. Look for blogs that have the following characteristics:
• high pagerank (you can find this out by going to Alexa and typing in the URL)
• a high comment count, or an indicator of the number of feed subscribers (i.e. lots of other people reading them – an example of a feed indicator is on the sidebar of 37Signals)
• similar subject matter (target audience)
• regularly updated (lots of opportunities for inspiration for your material, and plenty of opportunities to have lots of people see your comments.)
3. Start using a feedreader (you can download software like Newsgator, use a service like Bloglines, or create a customized Google home page with their reader included as one of the modules.) Once you have your feedreader, add the blogs in your list to it so you can automatically see when they are updated without having to go to each site every time.
4. Start looking for ideas from these blogs. When you find posts that you think are interesting, do a couple things. Leave a comment, including your URL. Then sign up for a bookmark service like del.icio.us – start bookmarking the posts you find interesting. This will do a couple things – you’ll be able to easily keep track of the posts for inspiration now or later (beats writing down the long URLS every time,) and the site has a cool feature that shows you other people who have bookmarked that post or site. When you click on their bookmarks, you can often find other similar posts from other blogs that they’ve found interesting – more inspiration for you!
5. Spend some time thinking about what types of things you want to write about, what you want your ‘voice to be’, etc.

Week Two

1. Get Google Analytics installed on your site. Just a quick copy and paste onto your templates, and in a few days you’ll have the most robust statistical reporting available.
2. Create an account at Technorati and add your blog to their list. Once you do this, you can have your new blog notify the service when you have new posts.
3. Create accounts at Digg, Netscape, Newsvine, and Reddit. These sites are what are called “social bookmarking” – people put links to articles, blog posts and other content on them and other people ‘vote’ on the link if they think it’s interesting. If you’re able to get a post voted on by a lot of people, you can get an enormous amount of attention very quickly.
4. Once your blog is set up, take old articles you may have written for other channels and add them to the blog. This will get your blog up with some good material right away.
5. Sign up with Feedburner, the easiest to use and most popular feed service. You’ll need to add a few lines of code to your blog to make this work, but once it’s up it will allow people to sign up for your feed and give you statistics on your subscribers.
6. Spend an hour or two going through the blogs you added to your feedreader during week one. Look for posts that you think are interesting.
7. For each one of those posts you find interesting, leave a comment. Add the link to your bookmarks (either with del.icio.us or your web browser, whichever method you set up last week) so you have easy access to it.
8. Spend an hour or two, or however long it takes, writing posts with your observations and thoughts on the posts you found. They don’t have to be long – a couple of paragraphs is usually fine. If you don’t have anything really interesting or valuable to say but you still think your readers would benefit from it, just write something like “Tom Peters wrote an interesting post today about X” and link to it.
9. Schedule these posts to go out over the next week. Don’t worry if you have multiple posts in the same day – this is fine (a good thing, even.) Perhaps give some thought to how to schedule them (alternating short posts and long ones, or rotating through subjects vs. stringing multiple posts together about the same topic of discussion.)
10. If you wrote a post that you think adds value (i.e. isn’t just a link or regurgitation of someone else’s post,) add the post to digg, newsvine, netscape and reddit.
11. Think about what worked and what didn’t, and come up with some ideas for improvement next week.

Week Three

1. Repeat steps 5-10 from above.

Week Four

1. Go through the same steps 5-10.
2. Pick some low-hanging fruit. Consider sending an email out to a group of people you know (perhaps including your house email list if you have one) letting them know about your blog. Ask them to take a minute to check it out, perhaps leave some comments on the posts, and (ideally) send a link along to a few colleagues.

Week Five

1. Same steps as usual.
2. By now you should have a few dozen posts, and hopefully some readers from your comments left on other blogs, initial search engine traffic, your colleagues from week three, etc. Take some time to look at your statistics on Feedburner and on your Google web stats. Look at keywords people are using to find you via search engines, look at the posts that appear to be the most popular, look at where people have come to your site from other blogs, etc. This will allow you to make educated guesses about the kinds of content people are interested in, on blogs that have proven effective in generating traffic in the past, etc.
3. Sign up for Squidoo. This is Seth Godin’s new company that allows anyone to create a website. What’s interesting about it is that since his pages (he calls them “lenses”) are all interconnected and link to each other, Squidoo lenses get very high placement in search engine rankings. Write a lens (or a couple) about the topics you want to be known for. Include links to blog posts you’ve written, links to relevant books on Amazon, etc. You can build a very solid lens in less than an hour, and if you make it useful it can get voted up. At the very least, it should eventually give you another page that links to your site. Search engines look at incoming links and the popularity of the pages that are linking to you – since Squidoo is already ranked in one of the 1000 most popular sites, this will boost your search engine ranking as well.

Week Six

1. The usual steps
2. Begin thinking about adding ‘theme’ for some days of your blog. You could have a day where you answer reader questions (if you get them,) or have a weekly post where you copy and paste the most interesting comments from the previous week (linking to their sites to give them publicity – good karma.) You could also have a weekly post that is completely irrelevant or mildly relevant to your expertise, just linking to a bunch of articles you found interesting online.
3. Consider experimenting with video. If you have a camera, you can sign up for YouTube and post videos online for free. These videos are taggable, votable and commentable (the same things that make blogs so compelling.) They’re also extremely easy to add to your site – you just copy and paste a snippet of code they give you into your blog post. Even better, OTHER people can and often do the same thing, giving you even more exposure. If you have any speeches coming up, this is an easy way to create some new interesting material (maybe take your presentation and create 5-10 short two minute snippets.) Other options include asking people at your presentation their thoughts on your speech (testimonials from real people, with faces.) Or maybe a series of interviews with clients of yours (publicity for them, value added for other people, etc.)
4. If you haven’t already done so, push out to your house list an announcement about the blog. Encourage them to visit, give them a link to a feed service so they can subscribe to your feed, maybe even encourage them to digg some of your recent posts. If you’re really lucky, you could even get them to create their own lens discussing your philosophies.
5. Take a step back, relax, and appreciate all you’ve managed to accomplish in 6 weeks.

This should get you started on the process of building a business blog and jumping into the world of online marketing. Again, would love to hear your feedback, comments, etc. If you have clients who are similarly considering taking the plunge, feel free to forward this to them as well.

This phenomena and the overall culture of consumerism in America has been wreaking havoc on my conscience of late. As a marketing major in college, I soaked up any book I could find on how to effectively persuade folks to buy. Night after night was spent in bookstores and libraries learning about action words and scarcity and the subliminal effect of guarantees and planned obsolescence.

But in the past few years, my exuberance for the marketing machine has waned considerably. It’s not that I don’t enjoy new things or nice things. It’s not that I don’t appreciate being able to instantly discover a dozen different solutions to any problem I may have. It’s not that I don’t find myself often a victim of neophilia – quite the opposite. But I wonder if all this psychological manipulation in the interest of consumption is going to have a bad impact on our lives in the long run.

I’m concerned because we’re learning how to become increasingly fat, lazy people with entitlement complexes. I’m concerned because we live in an increasingly more competitive world with decreasing resources, and we don’t know anything about hardship. I’m concerned because while I’m shopping there are hundreds of thousands of men and women in China and India who are patiently training and learning to mop the floor with me in the global economy.

More importantly, I’m worried about how much my identity, our identities are tied up in the things we own. We’ve moved from “those new ice boxes are fancy” to “It’d be great to have a Camero like that” to “I need a new game system” to “I deserve that Blackberry and the $250 pair of jeans.”

We’ve had a marketing machine around for a few decades, and it has blasted into our brains that our lives are somehow less fun, less meaningful if we don’t have the newest and best. We’re obsessed. Genetic or not, it has truly become an addiction. We work and live to buy and own.

We always joke about the yokels in the midwest who don’t have a clue. When our standard of living changes (which I’m almost certain it will,) I wonder who will look like the smart one – the guy who’s happy with his beat up F-150 and his blissful ignorance about Bluetooth and Web 2.0….or me and my New York apartment and Motorola PEBL and Google Calendar and keeping up with the Jones and envy because that guy has a really nice suit and why don’t I have one like that because we all know that I’m entitled to it.

“Once an organization is up and running, it’s almost impossible to carve out the time to find the marketing vision that will make all the difference.”

Marketing is so often thought of as something you ‘tack on’ at the end. Back in college I took a class on business planning. The big project was to develop a plan and present it to potential investors. I remember the one thing that students consistently did in their proposals was treat marketing as an afterthought. Even then, the marketing plan consisted of the obligatory biased focus group (which of course always had a positive result) and a breakdown of the amount of money they were going to throw into various advertising channels.

The idea that you have a company, and that one of the company’s functions or departments is marketing is a flawed one. The marketing comes first, whether you realize it or not.

I’ve come to believe (and as usual, I’m probably wrong) that there are only two marketing ‘plans’ that work. One is to have a product that is revolutionary, appealing, perfect at meeting people’s needs or wants. If you have a product like that, the marketing will be built into every experience the customer has with it. Telling others about the product will be painless, because the story is compelling. Writing copy about what makes it different is cake, because it’s plainly obvious why it’s different and beneficial.

The other way, if you don’t have a product like that, is to build in systems and processes that let you deliver the product or service in an incredible way. By giving each customer a ‘wow’ experience every single time, you compel them to tell others without having to ask. And when the time comes for them to purchase again, you’ve demonstrated that you’re the only option for them.

Neither of these have to involve a cent of traditional advertising, although they can. Neither of these require the marketer to come up with some gimick of gargantuan proportions. Marketing becomes easy. Suddenly you have all the time in the world to market, because everything your company does is the plan.

Love him or hate him, you gotta hand it to him – Mel Gibson is a pretty fantastic marketer.

His new movie, Apocalypto, may or may end up being good – it’s hard to tell from the trailer. But I’m willing to bet that millions of people will see the trailer in the next few weeks.

Why? Because in the middle of the trailer (about 1:46 in, to be exact) he has spliced in a single frame of himself.

Simple trick, and I doubt it will ever work again. But if you want to get a bunch of people to see the preview for your movie (and perhaps the movie itself,) something like this is a great way to do it.

Who wants to bet Mel is actually Jewish…

People tend to look at me funny when I talk about failing in business. They seem to still believe what we’re all taught in school – that failing in work or in a relationship or in a business means that the person failing is a failure themselves. However, I was fortunate enough to grow up with family and loved ones that didn’t believe this. They taught me that failure is simply a step on the way to success.

It was with that in mind that I decided to dig through the ash of my business and condense the lessons into the presentation I gave last week. Being surrounded by people who were all much smarter than me, I was worried it’d be a waste of everyone’s time. But much to my surprise, it actually went over fairly well – even got voted third best presentation of the conference. A couple folks suggested I talk about my lessons here as well, for the benefit of all (and by all they meant my two readers.)

This is the first in a series of posts about my hard-earned lessons in entrepreneurship. It’s about the thrills and pitfalls of starting a new venture. It’s not about the ‘business plan + venture capital = success’ formula that you often learn in school, but rather the ‘group of guys get together, pool their savings, and proceed to live off of Kraft Mac & Cheese for the next 6 months trying to build something worthwhile’ formula. It’s the formula that most people end up needing to pursue, and frankly, the only formula I know anything about.

I hope you find this at least marginally useful, and I’d love to hear about your own adventures.

Stop Stalling

Lesson #1 is to stop stalling, stop worrying, stop keeping one foot out of the water, and jump in.

The fear, the hesitation is understandable. The small business administration says that 9 out of 10 businesses fail during the first 5 years of operation. They also say that of those that make it, 9 out those 10 will go out of business during the next 5 years. Not very good odds, but you wouldn’t want it to be easy, right?

My stepfather is a business consultant in Colorado, has spoken around the country to small business lenders, and is generally a pretty smart guy. In high school he told me that 9 out of 10 business failed. He said that to him, that meant you have to start 10 businesses. Then he told me to do the dishes.

Those words framed a lot of my perspective. I was compelled to start a painting company my first year in college – managed to rack up $50,000 in sales, and then watch it all crumble around me. I failed, but learned valuable lessons about management, about the pros and cons of hiring one’s friends, about the right and wrong way to stand on a ladder, and about what happens when one stands on a ladder the wrong way and falls into a window well.

When my most recent business went down in flames, my worst fears about starting a business were confirmed. This time the stakes were much higher – I was out of school and trying to provide for myself. I had blown everything taking a risk, while my friends had opted to get jobs with agencies and consulting firms and real estate brokers. They weren’t making a ton of money, but they seemed to be living like kings compared to me. I bet subconsciously, I ended up leaving Colorado to get away from the situation. I felt like I had failed someone somehow, couldn’t bear facing them.

The day before I left I got lunch with my mentor from college. And she told me that I should feel really fortunate, because I get the opportunity to confront the fear that most of us never get to face. I get to face it, and then overcome it. And I didn’t really know what she meant at the time, but I do now.

Failure doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t hurt that much. In fact, there comes a point where you realize that if it weren’t for failure you wouldn’t know half the things you know now. You begin to embrace failure as a vital and necessary step on the path towards success. And so you stop worrying about failure, because you recognize it for what it is – an opportunity to learn and improve.

The consequences really aren’t that dire. Sure, your ego takes a hit, but as anyone who’s read this site for any length of time knows, my ego was certainly in need of a little whipping. Your friends and family still love you. Even the financial hit isn’t as bad as you’d think. I got into some serious debt, and it took 12 months to get out. But I dug out, got back in the black – even managed to save some money and buy a ring. I realized the worst thing that can happen in a failed business is you can lose money. And money isn’t nearly as big a deal as I thought.

So, since failure isn’t that big a deal – since failure gives you priceless lessons that help you the next time around – since failure is the next best thing to success – what in the world are you waiting for?

There has never been a better time to get into the world of business, especially if you’re a techie. There’s certainly been a lot of hype about the whole Web 2.0 thing. But it has never been easier for the little guy to compete online. You can start a business for far less than you used to – the barriers to entry are just about nonexistent. You can build a prototype quickly, and it’s actually COOL to not have everything worked out yet. You have an amazingly talented group of early adopters at your disposal who will be more than willing to help you refine (or define) your offering.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, the worst thing you can do is sit around waiting for a sign from God to tell you that the time is right. Waiting until you have the right idea, the right amount of money, the right team in place. The fact is that the timing is never going to be right. One or two, or all of those pieces will be missing. Someone once told me that starting a business is like jumping out of a plane, and your goal is to build a parachute before you hit the ground. The difference is that while it may hurt if you land without building the chute in time, you usually are able to get up and try again.

The point is to start. Today. How hard would it be to learn to ride a bike if you didn’t have a bicycle? How hard is it to learn how to start a business…without starting a business? Even if it’s part time, get out there and start something.

What can you start today?

I dedicated a whole chapter to this in A Bright Red Package – networking represents the number one way to get a job, generate sales, find a vendor or look for employees. The business world is entirely about people, and those who know how to network have a decided advantage against those who don’t.

When I left Colorado for Seattle two years ago, I did so without a job, without any interviews, without anything. But I did have my mentor from college – a former chair of the American Advertising Federation – and his confidence in me. I managed to sit down with the head of every major advertising agency in the city within a month, and it had nothing to do with me – his name and his recommendation did all the heavy lifting for me.

I’m convinced the only reason he was so willing to go to bat for me was because I broke the rules of traditional networking. I didn’t approach it looking for anything. My mentor from the year before (hint – build yourself a whole slew of mentors!) had mentioned him, and I just asked if I could meet him. One phone call later and we set up lunch. I learned a lot from him – he had been a professor, a managing director at a top 5 New York agency and an entrepreneur – but I didn’t ask for anything. Just thanked him, sent him a card, and stayed in touch. The relationship blossomed over time on his terms, not mine. The end result was an internship, and eventually a tap into any advertising agency I wanted.

Networking is not about reaping at all – it’s about sowing. It’s about looking for as many opportunities to help people as possible. It’s about saying thank you whenever someone does anything for you, regardless how small it is. It’s about keeping in touch with them, letting them know you still care about them. It’s about doing all these things, whether you think the potential exists for a profitable business relationship or not.

You’ll find that it comes back to you – in terms of business, but also in terms of a healthy, happy life. You’ll get referrals from the most unlikely of places. You’ll discover that the best doctor in town is just a phone call away when you most need it. You’ll discover that people love to help those who are generous with their time and energy. Call it karma, call it a psychological need on the part of humanity to practice reciprocity. Whatever it is, it will work in your favor to improve your business and your life.

Some quick tips for those looking to get started:

1. Join LinkedIn, create a profile, and begin tracking down long lost contacts. Coworkers, classmates, whatever. If they’re not using LinkedIn yet, invite them. You’ll quickly discover who knows who and what these people are looking for. (If you’re reading this, feel free to connect with me – would be happy to help you. Email is sean dot johnson at gmail dot com.)
2. Start helping people! Is someone looking for a job in banking? Introduce them to your buddy who works for Chase! Someone hoping to get involved in an NGO in Africa, and you remember having a friend who served a stint in Ghana? Hook them up.
3. Join a professional organization in your community, and get involved. They’re always looking for talented, hard-working people (I managed to get a temporary position with the Seattle Ad club in my first 10 days in the city.)
4. Have an enormous stack of thank you notes. Mail out at least one a day.
5. Before boarding you plane, pick up a few magazines. Rip out interesting articles, put them in envelopes and mail them to someone you haven’t talked to in a while who might be interested. Include a note telling them that you miss them and hope to see them soon.
6. Remember birthdays.
7. Most important, never keep score. That’s not the point.

Who can you reconnect with right now?

If these books represent the starting point, the beginning of conversations which he hopes to continue (with his blog serving as a big tool for such dialogue to take place,) then would it be prudent of him to make sure as many new folks are reading his books as possible? Otherwise, the risk is that they join a conversation taking place midsentence – lacking the context that the books are meant to provide.

I wonder how often that’s truly the case though. I think one of the things that makes Godin’s work unique is his effectiveness at getting the mind to work. It’s difficult to read his books or his blog and not immediately be compelled to find out more. I imagine that most people who stumble upon his blog are infected by the Godin ideavirus and promptly begin seeking out more info. It seems the Seth Godins and Tom Peters of the world are effective and compelling on the web because they focus on being remarkable, not on selling their products. As a result, people read what they have to say, become interested, and end up investing significantly more time and energy digesting the ideas they present. Their message is one of authenticity, and I think people appreciate that.

So, while one could make the argument that there are more people who would conceivably be compelled to buy books or go to seminars if one were to use their blog as a marketing medium, I think it comes back to the old ideas about what works in marketing, many of which were made mainstream by Seth himself.

1. Never lose focus on making something worth talking about.
2. Make your idea easy to spread (via blog posts and handy books one can take on the train or give as a gift.
3. Obsessively cultivate influencers or ‘sneezers’ to spread the word for you in a way no marketing plug could.
4. Spend time to milk your current success, but focus much more time on the next remarkable innovation so you avoid getting stuck.
5. Remember that current customers are 8 times more likely to buy from you than newbies.
6. Most importantly, be true to yourself and what you value. If it’s important to you that you be an idea person who makes people think, don’t worry about the fact that you’re losing out on a few sales.

I’m a marketer by background, but I realized a while ago that I buy from people who aren’t busy trying to market at me. How about you?

Whatever creative faculties I possess will have to wait to be flexed temporarily, however – the downside of being a growing company with an ever increasing client base is that someone has to produce all that work – and I’m now the lucky gent managing the guys who make that happen. The fact that they’re able to create over 200 sites a year is pretty amazing stuff – my job is to make that process even more efficient, and to push the proverbial envelope of what we do even further. A pretty daunting task – but I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge. We’ll see what happens.

As an aside – if you’re an amazing designer looking to add some unversity clients to your portfolio, feel free to email me at sean DOT johnson AT gmail DOT com. As the great Tom Peters says, it’s always the right time to look for great talent.

Google just keeps it coming. In the coming weeks you might start seeing little telephones next to sponsored ads on Google pages. It’s called ‘click-to-call’ and it allows you to call the company directly from your computer – likely leveraging the technology they’ve implemented in Google Talk. Google apparently pays for the telephone charges, and the advertiser pays a fee for every call they receive.

I wonder how that will pan out given the pseudo-anonymous nature of the web. While it’s compelling to think that a user is a click away from calling you, what are the odds they’re going to do so based on your ad? Getting me to click on to your website or landing page is one thing – getting me to have a conversation with you over the phone is another entirely.

Andy does a great job of focusing on creating a “usable” site – reducing the number of competing elements, being consistent with links, etc. But while he does quite a bit to create a page that adheres to the guidelines put forth by the many usability experts in the marketplace, the focus on structural usability leads to a site that ignores some other factors that can lead to a good experience.

Andy’s effort is below – I dig the rounded corners, the use of color, and the overall simplified look:

The biggest issue I have relates to the use of language, or more specifically the lack of language. While a site that is superfluous makes for a subpar experience, a lack of language can leave people wondering what to do. All it takes are a few well-chosen words to orient the visitor and give them a sense of what your space on the web is about – and how it can help them.

I also found the search box troubling. eBay recognizes (and probably has the research to back it up) that some people search while others browse. Leaving the site’s ‘departments’ out of the site would likely cost you a number of visitors, since the categories give the buyer an idea of what’s available to them. It’s the same reason blogs and social networking applications have embraced the concept of tagging – you might not be sure what you’re looking for immediately, and it’s often fun to just poke around.

Seth Godin talked years ago about the concept of a ‘banana’ – making it very clear what you want to draw the visitor’s attention to. While I agree with Andy that the gift guide promotion is a bit overkill, it remains a much more important ‘banana’ for the visitor than the ‘featured items.’ Banking on a list of random products (real estate near the Grand Canyon, a banjo, etc.) to reel visitors in isn’t likely to succeed. A promotion that appeals to everyone (Christmas shopping) serves as a much more suitable lead-in.

Reading Andy’s submission got me thinking about how I’d handle such a redesign. Given that I’ve had a few days to relax, my brain has felt slightly recharged, compelling me to take a similar crack at it. As I mentioned, I liked a ton of what Andy did. I tried to work with his first effort and improve it since he’s done a lot of quality work already. After incorporating my suggestions above, my humble submission is as follows:

I’d love to hear your thoughts – feel free to pick it apart, continue to improve it, or go in a completely different direction. Exercises like this are good ways to refine one’s eye for sites that are not only functional, but effective. I thank Andy for giving me something very solid to work with, as well as for the inspiration to tackle such an interesting design scenario.