Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us today Ryan. You’ve spear-headed Clear Channel’s digital billboard program, revolutionizing outdoor media by giving advertisers a way to reach their prospects with a much more targeted and timely message. Can you tell us a little about yourself and how you landed this unique position?  
 
I began my career with Clear Channel Outdoor in 2005 as an account executive selling traditional outdoor media. When Tampa Bay became only the fourth Clear Channel market to build a digital billboard network, they needed someone with a mix of sales, marketing and programming experience to lead the way. I couldn’t help jumping at the opportunity to be a part of such an innovative, exciting new medium, which I believe to be the future of outdoor advertising.
 
Outdoor media has been up against some serious challenges lately; new signage restrictions, environmental concerns and most of all, other less expensive forms of advertising. How has your digital billboard program helped you to keep outdoor media competitive with the other  choices business owners have for advertising their companies?  
 
Our digital products allow us to solve a much wider range of marketing objectives, which has brought in a whole new group of advertisers who have traditionally opted for more flexible mediums. Advertisers are no longer bound to using a single message for the length of their campaign. Now they can change by the week, by the day, or by the hour. Some of our detractors are starting to see billboards in a different light as well.  With the ability to aid the community by posting Amber Alerts, wanted criminals and hurricane evacuation routes on our digital billboard network, citizens are realizing the advantages of incorporating the technology in our community.
 
What unique advantages would an advertiser benefit from when using digital billboards instead of traditional billboards?  
 
The biggest advantage of digital outdoor over traditional vinyl billboards, is that advertisers have the ability to rotate multiple designs, and change their message as often as they like with zero production costs. This presents a world of creative possibilities. For instance, car dealers can rotate dozens of designs, each one featuring a car from their inventory with an updated price point. A restaurant could advertise choices from their breakfast menu in the morning, switch to lunch specials mid-day, and tempt people with their dinner offerings during the afternoon commute. We even have the ability to link elements of the design to the Internet, creating a live dynamic element on the board. For example, a news station could feature a headline that changes automatically as it changes on their website, or a radio station could show the song that is currently playing. We’ve had clients display countdowns to special events, live sports scores, current interest rates…The possibilities are endless.
 
Are there any disadvantages?  
 
A common concern is that of having to share space with multiple advertisers. Conveniently, Clear Channel Outdoor has a variety of products and programs to meet a wide range of marketing goals. If a business wants to reap the benefits of outdoor advertising, but has no need to change their message over the course of their campaign, traditional vinyl billboards are still as powerful and effective as ever.
 
Most  experienced marketers know that no one should rely on any single form of advertising, so in your opinion, what other forms of media best compliment digital billboards, and are there any that don’t work well with them?  
 
Technology has changed the way we consume media, which has negatively effected most advertising mediums. Conversely, the two mediums actually benefiting from the digital revolution are outdoor and the Internet. When you think about it, the two make a nice pair. Digital billboard technology isn’t much different from online banner ads in that there are no production costs, and changes can be made quickly and effortlessly. By combining the two, it’s possible to reach people at home, at work, and everywhere in between with a marketing tool that’s powerful and pliable.
 
Billboards in general can be relatively pricey for most small businesses. What do you recommend as a starting monthly budget for that small business owner who wants to launch an outdoor media campaign?  
 
When it comes to budget, the question used to be “How many billboards can I afford?” With the Digital Outdoor Network, the question becomes, “How many spots can I afford?” By changing the frequency with which your message appears, we can create programs so that advertisers with a wide variety of budgets can use digital outdoor. While national advertisers can spend hundreds of thousands on a digital campaign, we have programs starting at $500 per week that allow local businesses to enjoy the benefits of digital outdoor as well.

Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us today Melissa. You’ve been running a successful telemarketing company, Rich Enterprises, for over ten years now, helping to generate leads for your clients while they focus on running their business. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in this industry?

I have always been in sales and in a variety of industries. I worked as a telemarketing representative for two years and was able to learn the telemarketing side of business. I eventually decided to establish my own company so that I could run the business differently. I wanted to begin with a strong team approach where every marketer’s opinion is valued and the marketer can really take charge of the account and use their personality to enhance the campaign.

When we first started, we focused on business to government (B2G) campaigns and then transitioned to business to business (B2B) campaigns since the demand was much stronger for those services.

Most people have mixed emotions about telemarketing and are afraid to utilize it for marketing their business because of some of the questionable ethics that have become associated with it over the years. In your opinion, what are some of the differences between ethical and unethical telemarketing techniques?

It can definitely be a “rough and tumble” industry and most of the reputation and bad press comes primary from the business to consumer companies. We have all received those annoying calls at dinnertime with a telemarketer that is clearly reading verbatim from a script. But for the most part, the business to business (B2B) campaigns are not like that. Quite simply, you cannot have success if your team sounds like “telemarketers” and simply read the script.

Unethical telemarketing includes repeated contacts with someone that is truly not interested and using manipulative and coercive tactics for an immediate sale. Those unethical tactics simply would not work for our market. Our B2B audience is much savvier. The skills to reach decisions makers and present to business owners or managers are much more refined. The initial sales calls cannot sound like a 30 second infomercial, but rather has to be about assessing their initial interest level and potential needs in a conversational manner.

I firmly believe that business ethics cannot be legislated or learned. Ethics are ingrained in you. If you want long term business success, the ethics will either make or break your business and reputation.

Even though they have little, if any time available to dedicate to sales calls, most business owners are afraid to outsource it because they are concerned about how their company may be represented. What can you say that would ease their minds?

With the bad press that the industry receives, I can certainly understand their concerns. However, if outsourcing is done correctly, it will sound as though the calls are coming directly from their office (not from an outside telemarketing firm).

Business owners should only select an outsourcing company with a strong history and longevity, extremely qualified staff, and procedures that ensure the program is going as planned. Avoid using companies that have questionable reputations and companies that take shortcuts from the onset. Make certain that the outsourcing company has a solid plan for your program.

Any successful program begins with a true understanding of the client’s needs. There should be a written plan regarding the campaign including what types of companies should be contacted, the scripting or the approach, and how objections will be handled.

For the cash-strapped entrepreneur who can’t afford to outsource their sales calls, what advice to you have for finding viable prospects for sales calls?

The first step involves defining your target market. You should define your prospects in terms of company size, industry, and geographical markets. Of course, you can sell to a variety of markets so you should identify each market you would like to pursue.

Next, you should customize your approach to each target market. For example, you cannot approach attorneys and auto mechanics in the same way. Even though your product or service may be used by both markets, they may use your offering differently and have different motivations for their purchasing decisions. Be aware of the differences and similarities between each market and consider how best to reach that market.

Having a unique market niche (or niches) will greatly enhance your results. You can find new prospects through existing business contacts, local business associations (like the Chamber of Commerce), or you can purchase contact lists from lead list vendors.

I think the biggest challenge for people during a sales call is the introduction, and many find themselves bumbling along in an effort to get their prospect to like them. Do you have any tips for generating interest quickly and efficiently?

The key factor in initial sales calls is an understanding of your true goals. Of course, your long term goal is to build a relationship and secure the sale, but that usually does not happen in just one sales call or visit. Your immediate goal is to create an initial interest, so that you can continue building that relationship. It takes time to know your prospects and their needs.

Practice your 15 second approach. Know the three key points that you can say in less than 15 seconds that will entice your listener to want more information. Too often, we try to cram every intricate detail into that initial conversation, but details can wait until the prospect is ready. Just supply them with enough information to peak their interest.

Everyone has a different opinion on how many times to call a prospect before giving up on them. If you call too few times you may miss an opportunity just because they were busy or out of town. If you call too many times, you can waste your time and appear desperate. Without a doubt, each situation is going to be a bit different, but do you have any general guidelines?

With most prospects, we will make 3 to 5 attempts to reach them and during that time, we will also leave a few voice mail messages. It is critical that the attempts are spread out over a 2-3 week time frame. After 3-5 attempts, we then move that contact to an exhausted status and we will try again in another month or two.

You should also ask the receptionist for a good time to reach your prospect and follow their feedback. They may have staff meeting on Monday or maybe they don’t work on Fridays, so use this information to plan the best time to reach them.

How has the economy affected the telemarketing industry and your clients?

The last six months has been very interesting. We experienced a decrease in business during the fourth quarter of 08. However, we used that time to continue with new marketing efforts and now business is a strong as ever and still growing. I believe that the economic changes should force every business to re-evaluate their marketing strategies to make their business stronger – rather than just accepting the decline in business and waiting for the economy to improve. Now is the time to implement new initiatives.

Many of our clients are more aggressive with their telemarketing campaigns. In many cases, their competition has gone out of business, so our clients are often using telemarketing programs to secure those un-serviced accounts. We do have some clients that are holding until the economy improves, but for the most part the economy has resulted in additional business for us, so that we can help our clients secure new business – even in today’s economic climate.

Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us today Kim. You’ve been done a lot of things online, but I think you’re most recognized as a usability expert. How did you develop your expertise, and of all the paths you could have chosen, what made you choose this one?

I’m never sure which industry I fall into, frankly.  I started out with web design in 1995 and quickly realized I had a passion and talent for SEO, which was encouraged by the company I was working for at that time.  Cre8pc.com launched back then as an SEO teaching site and was popular enough that many people continue to contact me for SEO services, despite my having switched to usability and software QA testing in 2000.

As a user interface engineer, while I loved the design work, I was never as good as the guys I worked with when I reached the point of working with the best in the business at Verticalnet. I could code but not visualize designs. I could organize. I had a gift for detail and a strong leaning towards logic, as well as heaping loads of passion for the user experience.  VERT management was smart enough to see that and put me into their newly created web software application QA testing department. There was no usability person in QA and other than Jared Spool, Alan Cooper and Jakob Nielsen(and a few others), few teachers.  I was fortunate to have been mentored by a Human Factors PhD while at Verticalnet. Soon enough, I developed my own blend of QA usability testing, based on the discipline of software application functional and user interface testing. 

The interesting thing was that I freelanced in SEO at night for my own clients and was teaching it in the old Cre8pc Website Promotion club in Eteamz (later Yahoo! and it is now Cre8asiteforums.com).  I could bring my knowledge of SEO to UI and QA work and accessibility, which I also picked up.  I learned in time that I was extremely valuable as a well rounded person who could understand and support web designers, and the goals and requirements of company management.  In the end, usability work won out because search engines were dying and the challenge and fun were gone. All anyone had to do was wave money in front of an engine and rank was theirs.  So I focused on what happens once site visitors arrive.  Today, I offer a blend of both usability and SEO.  I have a team of folks I team up with on projects.  I’m a strong team player and like working that way.

Most websites fail miserably when it comes to usability. I think part of that is because people think that everyone else thinks like they do. What can they do to open up their thinking and create a more usable website?

Test, test and test more.  Many site owners are held hostage by their web designers who want to add things that may not be right for the company or target users.  It’s not that they’re selfish. It’s that they love to design and there are gobs of toys to play with.  I don’t blame them.  However, they may be less trained in the usability side, or not thinking of special needs users, or perhaps don’t understand the difference between women and men and how they interact with the web.  Some don’t understand SEO, but most have the basics down these days. 

A website is never for the site owner. That’s rule number 1.  When approached from the perspective that you are presenting something that benefits others, everything from site requirements to design to marketing changes.   One of my services developed by chance because site owners were frustrated and had no idea how to communicate with their designers.   They needed a mediator.  So I’m called in or emailed for an objective outside opinion during the site-build phase.  Site owners are nervous and want someone with experience and a wide background to seek support with on how things are going, if they’re on the right track, if any design choices are “wrong”, or just to hear me say, “Your people are doing great work for you.”   It’s scary to spend money on web sites and not be sure if it is going to work when it’s rolled out to the public.  
 
What are some of the more common usability mistakes that you see and what can people do to resolve them?

Poor color contrasts.  Fonts that are too small or can not be resized by their browser.  Ads, navigation and polls that pop up and cover up content.  Pages crammed with too much information.  This is quite common and comes from the belief that if you don’t show everything at once, nobody will know what you offer.  The truth is, visitors will follow tasks or browse as long as they’re confident where you’re taking them.  Therefore, lead with well defined link labels in the navigation and embedded inside content to pages inside the site by creating interest.

For example, I’m working on a site for someone introducing something brand new and slightly unusual.  His Internet Marketer changed my “Personal Experiences and Feedback” navigation link to “Testimonials”.  I suggested they reconsider that, because the word “Testimonials” is not that compelling.  Most people figure they’re fake anyway.  But in this case, the site is about someone who has direct contact with people doing a unique, personally developed type of bodywork.  He claims that his work changes lives and he leans heavily on word of mouth.  Therefore, they agreed to switch it back to “Personal Experiences”.  If there was more room, I would have pushed for a verb, like “Read”, or if he had video testimonials, link to that page with “Listen to Personal Experiences”.  The trick is to understand motivation and persuasion.

Jakob Nielson once claimed he had over 2000 usability heuristics.  Every web site needs testing or reviews on a regular basis because human-computer behavior is constantly evolving. How we interact with the web is important to marketing.  The worst mistake is to put up web “brochure” and think it will have any impact on revenue.  These are the days of social conversation and user generated content.  We can no longer talk to, but rather, we’re being encouraged to speak with our customers.

As new technologies emerge, they offer new functionality but at the same time, they cause new problems. Once upon a time, Flash was probably one of the worst perpetrators. What new technologies adversely affect usability today? 
 
Any technique or technology that interferes with a user task is not recommended.

It’s not the technology that’s the problem. Rather, how it’s applied.  Flash is fine, but it must come with user controls so they can slow it down or stop it.  Flash images can be valuable marketing tools for artists or products that target human senses. However, the implementation is sometimes a deal breaker and creates page abandonment instead.

Ads that load over content are ridiculous.  I’ve been to sites where the ad sticks and can’t be moved or closed.  Are they not testing for this?  AJAX is nice but has usability issues when bookmarking pages.  Drop down menus are a pain in the neck because they cover up text and can be clumsy to use.  The fun stuff is fine as long as it’s not hindering site usage and this is why tracking and regular site testing are needed to help understand what may be hindering task progress.  

Technology, such as Flash or AJAX can help make some tasks much easier for developers, but more often than not, they are used when they don’t need to be. Do you have any guidelines to help someone decide if they should utilize a particular technology from a usability point of view?

This is when Requirements Gathering comes in.  The majority of companies still don’t invest in the time and resources to do this and I’ve seen where not doing so creates serious problems for businesses.  Before a stitch of code is laid down, I suggest preparing a document that lists all site goals, and organizes every nuance from target user, specified tasks, and whether SEO, accessibility and usability are site requirements.  Everything is documented and from that, site guidelines are prepared for consistency.  Test plans are created to make sure every requirement is met.  This is when it is discovered that the usability requirement that states, “Content must be clear and easy to read” is validated and if something like an ad or navigation drop down covers up content, this is considered a “defect” or failed metric  and must be corrected.

People always ask, “What do you think of my site?”  I want to say back to them, “Who cares what I think.  Does it meet your site requirements? Has it been tested?  Has each requirement been validated? Are your site guidelines being adhered to?  Have you checked your logs? Do you have it set up for data analysis and tracking so you know for sure what’s not working as per your requirements?”

(I wrote How Web Site Requirements Keep Your Project from Exploding to help people understand better what I mean when I talk about this.)

For the website owners who aren’t quite ready to invest in your top-notch usability services yet, what are your top three recommendations improve the usability of their website?

Register the site with Google Analytics and take advantage of their free tools.  You can’t improve anything until you know what’s going on. 

On the homepage, answer the Who/Where/What/Why/When/How questions, preferably above the page fold.  When you offer good reasons for someone to stay put, they will.  And remember, it’s not about you. The emphasis is on what you can do for your customers, as well as why, when and how you do it better than anyone else.

Avoid “clunky” designs.  We’re already stressed out, okay?  Break up content with shorter paragraphs and insert small images if they help communicate your message.  Create “gutters”, which are vertical columns of white space that allow us to breathe.  Soothing colors are calming. Don’t make it look like there’s a food fight happening on the homepage.  Site visitors are really tolerant folks and they’ll stick with your site when you provide a pleasant experience in ways that motivate them.

Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us today Chris. For those outside the design community who may not know, you are pretty much at the top of the food chain when it comes to CSS. Let’s start off with the standard “how did you get started” question?

Thanks for the compliment. Although I’m not sure there is a food chain, we’re all in this thing together!  I think I “got started” in about middle school. Since then, through all of the twists and turns of life, I have been a computer nerd. That has manifested itself in a number of different ways, from hardcore gamer to programmer to designer. When I do anything, I try to dig really deeply into it and get seriously involved. I always knew I loved web design, but college didn’t quite prepare me with the skills I needed to get into it. I ended up working in the printing industry out of college, all the while tinkering with web design and wishing that’s what I was doing. Eventually I managed to get an interview with a design company losing their web guy and squeezed my way into that job and that’s where I’ve been ever since.

CSS is a double edged sword for most designers. It can be tough to learn, but once you master it, you can get a hell of a lot more done in less time, and editing a CSS-based website takes less time and effort. Some people still cling to old, outdated methods to design websites, such as using tables and frames. What advice to do have to help get them over the hump and start using CSS?

I think CSS gets a reputation for being difficult to learn because of the position people are in when they begin. CSS is one of the very first things you need to learn when first starting out in web design. So those people are coming from a “never coded anything before” angle, so of course it’s going to feel difficult at first to understand the strange and abstract concepts at play. CSS might also be learned as an afterthought for already experienced programmers. The syntax of the language itself is trivially easy for them, but they just aren’t designers at heart, so it feels difficult to accomplish designs that look very nice.

If someone is coming from the angle of having being designing websites with tables for years and years and “it works for them”, I’d tell them to consider all the very tangible benefits of CSS layout. Sexy, clean, semantic markup, for one thing. Accessibility, lighter weight pages, better SEO, non source-order-dependent markup, flexibility… Between all that stuff, they should be excited to get to work trying it. And the fact is, it’s just not that difficult. Someone working on the web for years should have no trouble adapting a little to start building pure CSS layouts.
 
 A lot of search engine optimization professionals are starting to see the power of CSS in terms of organizing their code to present content in the most efficient and effective manner to both search engines and visitors. What are some of the most critical opportunities you think they should be taking advantage of with this, and what could they do that might potentially cause problems?

The source-order-independence of CSS layouts is a big one for SEO. In a table-based layout, if you have a left sidebar with ancillary content, that is certainly going to come first in the markup and thus seem to be of higher value and importance to a search bot. A left sidebar in a CSS layout can easily come after the right-side main content, and avoid that problem. Likewise, an excessively large menu system could be placed at the bottom of a page in the markup, but visually in the header.

The biggest SEO advantage of CSS layouts is how slim and trim your HTML becomes. If you are doing it right, nearly every tag in the HTML purely exists to describe the content it contains. This makes quick work for search bots, who will understand the content and hierarchy of your page very clearly.
 
 
Internet Explorer 6 seems to be breathing it’s last few breaths, making many work-arounds obsolete, while CSS itself has undergone a number of changes that give if far more flexibility than ever before. In your opinion, what are some of the coolest, most useful things people can do with CSS today?

It does feel like IE6 is dying more and more these days. I’d say in a years time we’ll see a large percentage of designers just ignoring it like we do with Netscape (for example) now. One of the biggest limitations of IE 6 was the weird hacks we had to use for alpha transparent PNGs, which never seemed to work quite perfectly. It has been a problem for so long for us current-generation designers that many of us just don’t even bother using them anymore. Next generation designers will never have known that pain and the cool possibilities of transparent graphics will be in play more.

@font-face is also very real and as soon as Firefox 3.1 is out and widespread I think we’ll see a ton of this. Magazine style sites are going to get a lot prettier!
 
 
On the other side of that coin, what are some of the biggest weaknesses of CSS today and what can designers do to work around them?

CSS has plenty of weaknesses. Grid-like layouts are way harder than they need to be, which always fuels the flames in the tables vs. CSS wars. Obviously font usage is kind of a mess, but beyond that web typography is severely limited. Kerning is far too difficult, we can’t have type follow a certain path, we can’t have type knock out backgrounds or have backgrounds of it’s own easily. Unfortunately the answer for a lot of this isn’t “add a bunch of new stuff to CSS3″. Some of it is root/fundamental problems that will likely need a root/fundamental rewriting of the language. If you think CSS3 is going to take a long time…

Some of the really simple shortcomings are solvable via JavaScript. Think of the lack of support for nth-child selectors, which make zebra striping a table trivially easy. Doesn’t work in IE of course, but jQuery has an :odd selector that makes it incredible easy to implement that DOES work in IE.
 
Your website, CSS Tricks, is loaded with tutorials along with one of the most active CSS forums I’ve found. You already had a full-time job when you started it; what was the motivation behind it?

The day it started it was a part of a network of sites I had going intending to be sort of help/resource sites. CSS-Tricks was there specifically because we didn’t have anything web related yet and all the stuff I was learning from building all these other sites had me reeling with ideas. So now I had this outlet to be writing about the cool stuff I was learning about web design. Turns out that is what I enjoyed the most and so when the other fizzled out, CSS-Tricks kept going strong. It has always been a combination of wanting to help people and share ideas, a record keeping mechanism for myself, and the desire to make a buck or two on running a successful site.

Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us today Neil. You’ve been working with PHP & MySQL for quite a long time and recently started working heavily with WordPress. Your blog, WP Dude, has really been taking off. What brought you to the IT industry, and what motivated you to eventually shift to your chosen niche of specializing in WordPress?

I have been working in corporate IT for years now, I went straight into IT from college. The last five or six have years have been in Internet facing systems. I went freelance, again in corporate IT, but the culture of big business IT left me cold. I was into blogging and developed a couple of sites (since flipped or left to die) about a couple of topics, and it occurred to me that I could develop a business supplying services to blog owners. The rest is history, I have been developing WP dude for about six months now, I finished my last corporate gig in April and I am now full time into this new business, it is still in a start-up phase but I am loving every minute.

I like to write, deep down I want to be a writer rather than a techie so the combination of writing about and providing a technical service are ideal fits for my skills and things I enjoy.

I am a bit of a blogging evangelist, I just love the fact anyone can create a blog (for free on Blogger or wordpress.org) and write their stuff. There are no editors to say no to the content. Much of it is very poor, but there is some excellent stuff out there making people think, stuff which would never match an advertisers profile and get published otherwise. My RSS reader is crammed full of quirky blogs I love the medium.

You’ve been offering WordPress consulting for people who are somewhat technical and just need assistance with specific tasks. Would your consulting services also be appropriate for someone who is less technical? What is the benefit in hiring you instead of just slugging through the support forums?

I think my benefit is that some people just don’t have time or inclination to wade through the forums. They may spend hour upon hour searching for a solution, struggling technically to implement the solution and the time they have spent is time lost in their core business when they could have hired me. I provide solutions to people who just want to get on with blogging and creating content.

An analogy I would use is a plumber, I could read the DIY manual, then buy the tools, then change the shower head. But it would be a quicker neater job to bring in a plumber for an hour.

I’ll assume that you probably hear a lot of the same questions over and over. What are some of the more common misunderstandings or misconceptions about WordPress?

Trying to get over the concept of a trackbacks or pingbacks still send my head spinning, the other thing people struggle to get their head around is the concept of a page versus a post on WordPress.

I think WordPress is extremely powerful, both as a blogging platform and as a content management system. Right out of the box, it’s pretty SEO friendly, easy to set up and use, and there is a plugin available to accomplish just about any task one can imagine. Is there a situation you can think of where it wouldn’t be an ideal choice? 

In my opinion It is not that good for e-commerce, I know there are a couple of plugins to add products and shopping carts to a WordPress blog, but I am not too sure about them, but would love to hear of a success story. When you are searching for a products you know what you want, you type in red widget size 12 to Google and you expect a product page with a price. You don’t want to wade through blog content to get to the item you want.

A solution such as Shopify, Magneto or even an e-bay store is better than a WordPress blog with an e-commerce function in my opinion.

There are thousands of plugins, and many of them do the same thing, so separating the proverbial wheat from the chafe can be tough for a WP novice. Some of our top picks are All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, What Would Seth Godin Do, and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. You’re the resident WP expert; what plugins do you think people need to be using?

I use all the ones you mention, a could to add to your list are backup plugins, I use two, one for the database backup and the other to backup what I think of as the code base, the WordPress files, your uploaded images etc. They are WordPress backup, and WordPress database backup.

The other thing I would recommend to everyone is the security scanner plugin, a fantastic utility which does a penetration test of your blog security and then provides a report of the weaknesses