advice

Expired Domain, a hiccup that could cost you $$$

March 3, 2016 by Moran Media

Expired Domain? DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!!!!

expired domain - a problem you don't want - listen to Moran Media on how to avoid this

Just this week three of my clients experienced an expired domain. What’s a domain? It’s the URL that is your website. As in www.mywebsite.com or in my case, Moran Media’s domain is www.remoran.com. This happened on three different platforms. Each time it was something silly, like not having auto renew enabled, having old credit card information, or insufficient funds in their account.

Depending on who they were registered with the repercussions were different for each. One had a grace period where they had time to correct the information and get their domain back before their site went down. Another missed the notice their transaction failed and only noticed when their site went down. Another got a notification as soon as the transaction failed but their domain registrar turned off their site right away without giving them a chance to correct the information.

For some people this could be disastrous. Most domain registrars give you a grace period to get everything in order, some may not. Make sure you know what your registrar will do if you miss a payment. If you don’t catch it in time your domain could be sold off to the next bidder, this is not something you want. You’re reputation could be ruined by a competitor or a detractor, your site rankings could be harmed, your customers might think you have closed.

How can we avoid this?

Just follow a few simple steps

Make sure you know the rules of your domain registration and it’s a company you can trust.
- What’s the grace period?
- What happens on expiration?
- What’s their customer service number if you have an emergency?
- How’s their customer support?
Make sure your information is accurate and up to date with your registrar.
- Email goes to an account you check daily.
- Phone numbers are accurate.
- Credit Card information is always up to date.
Set your account to auto renew.
- If you can, use a credit card rather than a bank card or paypal so it can renew without much effort from you.
Mark your calendar for renewal time.
- This way you can change the card that is used to pay if you need to.
- You can pay for multiple years if you like.
- You can add a promo code or coupon code and save some money.

In the old days of the internet there were a lot of scams. You’d get a renewal notice from a company, pay for the renewal and then suddenly you switched registrars. Thankfully that scam is seen a lot less these days, but it’s still good to note who your registered with. This will save you headaches later. I always advise keeping that information with your passwords and all of your other business information, so you always have it.

Have you ever had your domain expire?

Don’t Stop Blogging

October 21, 2013 by Moran Media

I always tell my clients that they should be updating their website’s blog at least once a week. That an active blog means their page isn’t static and it gives customers, clients, their community, a reason to come back to their site, and it gives google a reason to crawl it. I also tell them that if they have something new they need to post it! Yes I am terrible at taking my own advice. When I start working for a client I am only thinking about their needs, so my page often goes without updates.

Like most advice in life, it’s often not followed by the one that gives it.

Truth of the matter is that you get busy, and sure, I know the best tricks to handle that. Write a bunch of blog posts ahead of time and let the auto schedule publish them at the right time. Again, not followed. Heck, I have designed and redesigned a bunch of sites over the summer and haven’t even put them in the portfolio let alone made a post about them.

It’s hard to remember to promote yourself when you’re running around busy actually working, and when it’s a one woman shop you can’t delegate these small tasks on someone else. Most of your life you have been raised not to brag, and when you post about yourself or your product it can feel like bragging.

Still, these tasks need to be done. When a new customer comes to your site and sees you haven’t posted anything new in a year they get the impression that you’re not an active business. They have no way of knowing you’ve been busily attending to your customers because they only see your inactive site.

What’s the solution? Well it isn’t going back to business as usual. It’s time to try something new, create a new routine for yourself to get you back into blogging and updating your site. Perhaps give yourself a reward each time you complete a post? It sounds simply and possibly silly, but we as humans respond well to positive rewards. Find something small that you value and reward yourself with it, something as small as a relaxing bath, or playing your favorite game on facebook, an extra hour of TV, a muffin, you name it! Find something to reward yourself for good work.

Besides, if you blog/brag about the good work you’re doing, you will likely start feeling even better about what you do.

Marketing Monday: Spec Work

October 15, 2012 by Moran Media

Spec Work Example, the Sample — image by TopicSimple, www.topicsimple.com

I mentor a few artists just starting out and I’m often asked about this. Spec work, or the contest model, is never a good idea. I’ll explain why, on both counts.

Spec work is asking a designer, many designers to work for free with no guarantee of compensation for their hard work. More so, it doesn’t show a designer’s best work either. In the end both the designer and the customer feel short changed. The above video explains it so well, but it also brings up another important point.

Don’t work for free. It sounds nice, a friend of yours needs a logo or a website and you want to help them out so you offer to work free. Just like Spec Work, working free of charge takes the design relationship out of the equation. You feel like a burden is put upon you because you’re doing this work free, not to mention that your customer doesn’t provide enough feedback for you to design appropriately. The customer doesn’t feel comfortable treating you like they would a paid designer. The customer doesn’t tell you what they didn’t like about the project or they are afraid to press their ideas too much, after all you’re doing this as a favor. In the end both the designer and the customer feel like they were taken advantage of and neither are truly happy with the end product, in the worst case scenario the customer ends up not using the work and everyone’s time is wasted.

They often say money in a friendship can ruin a relationship, in this case lack of money ruins it. If you charge your friend, even at a discounted rate, for the work then they have ownership of their end of the project and you can build a professional relationship that’s key to the design.

Contests are another area to avoid. I have a rule, I don’t do contests. Much like spec work, a contest eliminates the ability to have the customer/designer relationship we’ve discussed is needed for any project. Worse yet, in a contest you don’t get to negotiate your terms and often even if you don’t win the contest, they contest holder owns the right to your work. Contests pay you once for something you’ve made (yes, there are rare cases when a contest winner went on to being the go to designer for the customer, but that’s not the norm) and they can then use it indefinitely any way they like. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, it’s not that far from normal contract work, except normal contract work your best is being sold and there is often more work after that. When a customer asks me to design a logo they often come back to me to create their stationary, business cards, website work, you name it. I can make sure my logo is being used properly and not being distorted, the logo always looks good, the customer always looks good, and I can be proud of my logo.

I’ve worked for agencies that have run design contests, most of the time the intention was good, to give exposure to young artists in school. The problem is that even though we liked the logos produced, we couldn’t change them, because it was a contest winner, and the logo suffered. We ended up with a logo that we were 80% happy with. I have no idea who designed it, and there wasn’t a way to get in touch with the designer, because it was a contest, we the customer had our hands tied. In the end, it was bad for both of us.

The key ingredient to success is the design relationship, getting feedback from your customer, being told what works and what doesn’t work. If you can’t handle some one saying they don’t like your design or even “it’s ugly”, you are in the wrong business. Designers need a thick skin, and often we need to push our customers to tell us what they don’t like. Only then will we have a stunning design.