This Saturday will be BootCamp PGH — plans are coming together nicely and we’ve had a lot of people register.

There’s still room for more though, especially you! So go to the site to find out more and sign up today.

Last night I participated in a panel discussion at eTuesday!: “Maximizing the Internet.” My fellow panelists were Doug Hammer of WSI Internet Consultants and Tim Sweet of Nauticom, and both had excellent information to share.

For my part, I focused on the most common problems I see on small business websites, and how a small business can avoid or solve them. Here is the core of what I said:

A lot of the problems I see with business websites can be sorted into two groups: Problems of Too Much, and Problems of Too Little.

Examples of the Problem of Too Much:

• Too much text, long paragraphs of multi-syllable words (tech or marketingspeak) that no one will ever want to read
• A list of everything the company does or has ever done
• Photos of a dozen “featured products” rather than one or two features

Examples of the Problem of Too Little:

• Hidden contact or location information, or no contact information
• No single sentence to say, very simply, what the company offers or sells
• No tie-ins to the rest of the company’s marketing/advertising

Both the Problem of Too Much and the Problem of Too Little have the same root cause: Not looking your site the way a customer or prospect would. (Of course, your website can have a number of audiences: prospective customers, current customers, potential employees, current employees, vendors. The same issues apply no matter which type of site visitor you need to serve.)

To think about how to solve the Problems of Too Much and Too Little, consider an example of a site with a great home page: Flickr

If you’ve never heard of or looked at the Flickr site before, you can tell within seconds what the site is about — or at least, what they want you to know about them: they want to be known as “the best way to store, search, sort and share your photos.”
New visitors to the site see that message loud and clear. Everyone can search or browse photos easily. And members can sign in to jump into the meat of the site. It’s the clearest home page on the Web.

How can you improve your home page?

1. List the people/kinds of people who you expect (want) to use your website.

2. Prioritize them. You can’t help everyone equally, so you need to be selective. Who’s most important for your business right now? Prospective customers, current customers, investors, press? Rank the order in which you want to serve their needs on your website.

3. One by one, define what each kind of visitor wants from your site, and revise your content and design to make sure they can get that information quickly.

Have you seen the ad “The Stress Monster“?

Dr. Grant McCracken has written a nice analysis of how this ad works, and why it does a good job of promoting Propel Fitness Water:

Stress Monster is dedicated the simple proposition that exercise makes stress go away. This is well established as an understanding in our culture. It’s well established as a reality in the lives of millions of Americans.

Meaning management sometimes goes like this. The idea is not to find a new meaning for the brand. The idea is go after an existing meaning with new vigor and skill. In the language of marketing, the idea is to “own” an idea that is already out there.

When we say we “own” a meaning, we mean we have discovered it’s [sic] most essential, powerful properties and made these as our own. This is hard to do well, but when it works the brand (Propel) and the meaning (stress reduction) are mutually presupposing. When they’re done really, really well, it is now impossible to think about one without thinking about the other.

And that’s the way, I think, to think about Stress Monster. It is part of Propel’s effort to own stress reduction. Does this ad succeed? I have to say they made a pretty good run at it. (No pun intended.)

Takeaway messages:

• Thirty-second ads can still work, even in the age of PVRs and fast-forwarding, if the ads themselves are visually interesting, cleverly thought out, and well-executed.
• Understanding the meaning of your brand — how the market sees you today — is the first step in creating marketing of any kind that works.

At the Propel website you can see two other current ads from the same campaign: “Powerwalk” and “Uphill.” For me, all three ads are compelling. “Stress Monster” hits me the most, probably because I think of exercise primarily as a stress reduction tool. As I sit at my computer working on a Sunday, the idea of running a couple of miles and letting the world fall away looks pretty darn great.

I get energized watching “Uphill” too, because I like Liz Phair, whose song “Extraordinary” provides the sound track, and because I identify with the woman in the ad, pushing herself to superhuman feats of strength and endurance — even if those feats are executed on an exercise bike in a crowded gym. And of course the ad also works for/on me because I long to be slim and fit like the woman in the ad.

Each ad in the campaign highlights a different motivation for why people work out, yet all three motivations integrate with the tagline “Fit has a feeling … and a water.” Nicely done.

(Link thanks to Sam Ford at the MIT CCC.)