So, you think you want a new website?

By Jeff Komlos, Information Technology Project Manager

Often times, this can be where the knowledge train ends. Quite frequently, a client will profess their desire or need for a website, but have no idea where to take it from there. Rest assured, you are not alone. With the presence of the Internet growing at an incredible rate, this trend is only going to continue. It becomes increasingly cheaper to run your business virtually. To help you along this course, I have put together two groups of questions that should help you answer two things: 1) Do I need a website? 2) What do I need to provide and what needs to happen to move forward?

1) Do I need a website?

This one is pretty easy to answer. Read through the questions below:

--Am I sharing a message?
--Am I sharing information?
--Am I selling something or is this for a business?

If you have answered "yes" to any of these questions, you are probably in a good spot to explore having a website developed. At this point, several options are available to you. You can go with a templated approach or you could go with a completely custom-built website. Using our company as an example, we provide solutions for both the templated sites and for the custom-built sites. With a templated site, there is a lot more structure to the look and feel, as well as what functionality is available. One advantage to a  templated design is that it is usually more geared for the budget-conscious consumer. If you are on a tight budget, this is the direction I would suggest looking first. You get a quality site, with a smaller price tag.

A custom-built website tends to be more expensive since we are not able to reuse work we have done in the past. The benefit of a site like this is that it can be built to meet your every single need, no matter how complex or unique. It can also have a completely unique and custom look and feel that no other site has. These types of sites can involve integration to a back-end database or set of information that you may already have in place. The options are limitless.

Now that you know you need a website.........

2) What do I need to provide and what needs to happen to move forward?

Here is a list of questions that you might consider or be prepared to answer when moving forward with a development firm. This will help you minimize the amount of time required in the "Analysis and Discovery" phase of the project.

--Do you have an existing website we can explore?
--Roughly, how many pages do you anticipate this site having?
--Do you currently have hosting for this site arranged?
--Do you have any logos, pictures, etc. or will we need to provide all artwork/images?
--Will this require a shopping cart or the ability to accept credit cards?
--Will this require secure access or any type of account access?
--Will you be storing/passing any sensitive information?
--Does the client expect to create and modify their own website content?
--Do you currently own a domain you wish to use for this site?
--Do you have a timeline for this project?

This list is ever-evolving based on current practices and capabilities of the Internet. However, this will help you and your new development firm get the project off on the right foot.

The Power of the Paper

By Rachel Hardin, Sales and Marketing Assistant

Marketers are constantly under the microscope to come up with the latest and most innovative ways to attract more customers. From the traditional direct mail postcard to whacky out-of-the-box expensive innovations, just about every possibility seems to have been tested at one point or another. So, what is it that actually WORKS?

The answer is simple; go back to the basics. Time and time again, it is direct mail (postcards in particular) that has proven to be effective in both cost and return on investment. There are particular ways to get the most out of your company’s dollar when it comes to direct mail postcards. The most important of the “musts” include:

• You must invest in your mailing list.
• You must be creative with your postcard headline.
• You must encourage the reader to do something with a call-to-action.
• You must choose postcard images carefully.
• You must narrow your point of focus and be specific. 

 Keeping these pointers in mind, the traditional direct mail postcard can take your company a long way without wearing out your entire marketing budget on a single mailing. Let FCi help you get back to the basics!

To automate... Or not to automate? You must first start with the three T's. (Continued)

By Ed Sweeney, Information Technology Manager

If you can reduce the three T’s, you will make your process more efficient. This is exactly what our IT staff did with our POD process. First, we eliminated all paper manifest for the POD portion. So, once the customer service representative processed orders that contain POD material, no paper manifests are generated and no delivery of manifests to the print department is needed. We used our internal development staff to create a software service to run that automatically watches for new POD orders to arrive, then pulls the appropriate print ready file from a repository, appends a job header and drops the file in the print queue. One added benefit that we took from an end user complaint is the job header seamlessly integrates with our Xerox iGen4 and other Xerox printers by containing all print spec information that gets pulled in by the printer, such as what tray to pull from, number of copies and finishing specs.


In addition to the above paper and process elimination, the print operator (end user) now has a 26” touch screen monitor to use that tracks all POD orders and where they are in the process at all times. The touch screen monitor also contains an interface for the print operators to use a new dynamic inventory on-the-fly filing system that is used to store print jobs as they are completed, which now eliminates manual sorting and searching. Once a print job is completed, another dynamic status screen is used in the picking area for the picking personnel to see what POD orders are complete and ready to be pulled, and what orders are still in process. This eliminates unnecessary steps and keeps the order process seamless.

This summarized version gives you an example of an automation project that when executed by involving the end user and eliminating the three T’s, most any system or business process can be improved. For all you IT staffers out there, be sure to listen and watch before you build.

To automate... Or not to automate? You must start with the three T's.

By Ed Sweeney, Information Technology Manager

We all know the saying, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” and this holds true in the information technology environment as much as any other department in any business. As internal IT departments are constantly buried in work, it is usually the case that if something isn’t broken or no one is complaining about a process, it most likely won’t make it to the list of projects for a system or process upgrade. This should be a lesson to all of us in the technology industry; you must listen to the end user. Whether the end user of a system or process is the “squeaky wheel” or not, the end user is performing the work, so the end user is the person(s) that need to be involved when revamping a system or process. You can’t rely solely on management or the IT staff to fully design a system or process to make it more efficient.

We recently completed a system and process improvement project here at FCi (Fulfillment Concepts, Inc.) to make our Print-On Demand (POD) process more efficient so we could handle greater volumes. Where did we start? We started by shadowing the end users that perform the manual tasks from start to finish, from processing a POD order, to the time the order left the building. By doing this, you not only see first-hand the pain points, manual processes, and turnaround time,  but you also lend an ear to the end user to hear their suggestions and experience what their pain points are.

So, what to automate? Well, you start with the three T’s. You find areas to eliminate Time, Travel and Touches.

Please stay tuned for our next post to find out how FCi eliminated Time, Travel and Touches with our new Print-On-Demand process. We will also include what we found to be the "pain points" in our shadowing of the end user.