A good website is all about getting the message across, and not about good design per se. Design should always be at the service of the message. For this reason, web content is the most important aspect of a website design consultation—content first, then design. The design should be chosen to complement the message, rather than first creating the design and then determining the content.
The point of having a website is to be persuasive. The message is what sells; design helps the customer understand and value that message. That is why content (the message) needs to have priority over design if a web project is really going to be successful. If design isn't entirely at the service of message, it is just candy. Customers typically don't go to sites to see artistic prowess, they go to sites to get answers.
Web content is so critical, both for its persuasiveness and for its ability to draw eyeballs to the site, that the Content Phase (which occurs immediately following the Kick Off Phase) is the often the longest part of any Trinity website development project. It is that important to get the messaging right across all areas of the site. Also of importance: make it easy to navigate through the various aspects of that message. Good web navigation helps to preserve message accessibility and continuity.
When properly performed, web design allows the message to stand out and create the maximum possible response. Then, web design is effectively used to ensure that response is presented with an outlet—such as engaging in a transaction.
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
The “awesomeness of you” (your business) can sometimes get lost in the day-to-day grind of business life. So one of the unique challenges of business is to step outside of the usual operating mode in order to focus on your marketing message.
Some companies switch gears in this way very effectively, and others do not. Whether you do or don’t, Trinity can be a powerful ally in creating and delivering marketing messaging.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that Trinity has a business intellectual mindset and can quickly understand—and then work to draw out—your important value. But even if you are very good at doing that yourself, Trinity has additional value to offer: we are language surgeons—able to craft a precision message for the right audience, at the right time, to deliver maximum impact.
Let’s take an easy, clear-cut example. You have a potential client, and have to deliver a proposal to win the contract. Trinity analyzes the RFP and communicates to you exactly what value you need to demonstrate, in writing, to the buyer. You provide the value, and Trinity creates the persuasive message that communicates that value—according to best practices and compliance requirements, of course! Seems like a good pairing of skills, right?
Developing high-value written communication, directed to your current and potential customers, brings great joy to Trinity. Sure, our work has its trials and tribulations. But at the end of the day, Trinity’s job is to help you to remember the “awesomeness of you”, and then effectively communicate your awesomeness to prospective buyers. What could be better than that?!
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
If we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, should we judge a proposal by its cover letter?
All too often in the proposal industry, the answer seems to be: no. In many cases, cover letters are thrown together as an afterthought, comprised of generic, clichéd boilerplate with little relation to the customer’s needs.
Trinity, however, believes that cover letters are a necessary condition for any winning proposal. It is true that an impressive cover letter alone is unlikely to secure the contract. But a poorly written cover letter (or even no cover letter) reflects badly on the offeror. Worse still, it represents a missed opportunity to demonstrate suitability for the contract, as well as a strict customer focus.
An effective cover letter will address the following crucial points:
Layering
Proposals should progressively increase in detail from the cover letter to the executive summary to the main body documents. Cover letters should not be as detailed as technical experience sections—but they should stand alone as high-level proposals, enabling any evaluator to gain a clear and immediate sense of the offeror’s services and benefits.
Attentiveness
Cover letters enable the offeror to develop a relationship with its customer. They should be signed by the highest-ranking person available. They should explain the offeror’s relationship with the customer (if applicable) and the offeror’s plan to deepen that relationship. Cover letters therefore denote close concern for the customer and its needs.
Customer-Focus
Cover letters should not represent opportunities for irrelevant self-congratulation. (“We are proud to offer…we are the best company…we offer world-class services.”) Cover letters should identify the customer’s specific requirements. They should clearly explain what the offeror brings to the contract to meet the requirements, with substantiation of past performance. Everything should be benefit-focused, directly relevant, and designed to leave no doubt that the offeror’s experience and expertise will deliver an excellent result on the contract in question.
“Hot Buttons”
Cover letters should identify the customer’s hot buttons—the needs and desires for the solicited contract. Introducing hot buttons in the cover letter enhances layering, attentiveness, and customer-focus, as outlined above. Crucially, as my colleague Anna Maurer observed last year, “identifying hot buttons informs evaluators (who may not be fully aware of such needs) that the associated solutions are of particular value to the buyer and merit extra consideration, yielding a higher rating for our proposal.” In other words, cover letters that address hot buttons can provide significant added value—before the evaluator has even looked at the rest of the proposal.
So it turns out that we can judge a proposal by its cover letter. In fact, if the cover letter is effective, it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that we should judge a proposal by its cover letter.
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
There is nothing subtle about a big, yellow, school bus. They are designed to be highly visible for the sake of the precious cargo they carry. But, an international bus manufacturing company wanted their big yellow buses to “say” more than “watch out for me, and drive safely”. They wanted to communicate the subtle, behind the scenes, qualities of their product.
VALUE in the manufacturing process, a LEGACY of quality control, and RELIABILITY of performance were the three key qualities the brand wanted to emphasize in their business to business communications. It was decided to do this visually by digitally “building” buses out of the letters that make up those key words.
Trinity Consulting Art Director, Chris Pelicano, worked up rough illustrations to demonstrate the strength of the visual concept. The client bought into the approach. The roughs were sent to photographers who shot the buses according to the angle, composition, and perspective in the illustrations. The digital manipulation team then applied the 3-D text treatment to the images to achieve the desired effect. The result was an eye-catching series of trade publication advertisements that highlighted the subtle message behind the big, bold, yellow buses.
Oh, yeah, the buses still say, “watch out for me, and drive safely!”
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
Recently, Trinity started using an online application called Notable to manage the review process for web design drafts (from wireframes to finished mockups). The application has really impressed us.
Notable enables Trinity web project managers, designers, and developers to operate more effectively. Design reviews take place in a shared environment, in which all participants are looking at the same draft(s) and applying comments using the same system. Among other benefits, this helps reviews to take place with team members who are not located at our central office, or who are juggling more than one project at a time.
Notable allows you to upload draft images for team/client comment. The system allows you to draw boxes to highlight one or more areas of the image, and apply comments to those specific areas. Notable records all comments to the drafts for future reviews.
Notable’s developers recently applied a solution to the application’s most blaring shortcoming—the inability for users to “comment on your comments”. The revised feature allows for back and forth conversations in threaded discussion.
Give Notable a try for free and see what it can do for you!
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
Trinity's graphic design process focuses intently on the client's need to communicate its message, mission, and unique benefits to its target audience.
The concept development and layout stages are considered the most "creative" aspects of the design process, because they are usually the most visually dramatic. These stages begin with conversation and end with the presentation of visual layouts. From that point, the delivery of finished art is usually a matter of subtle refinement.
It is easy to regard the delivery of the finished graphics as the end of the "creative" process—and the completion of the work. However, the implementation of all that wonderful, finished art still lies ahead!
Let’s use cattle ranching as an example. The ranch owner has big plans to make his beef known throughout the territory. He builds his ranch, buys and breeds his cattle, sets up his distribution chain, etc. He hires some creative cowboys to come up with a name for the ranch and develop a brand symbol. After exploring a number of options, he settles on a great name, a memorable symbol, and has a perfectly crafted set of branding irons made. There it is. He is done. Right?
Wrong. He has just started the implementation stage; he still has the hard, time-consuming work of applying the brand to hundreds, perhaps thousands of cattle on the open range (or pasture) and in packaged form, on the way to market. Not to mention the trucks that haul the packages, the drivers who represent the ranch and its products, the sales force, the buildings, the business cards, stationary, newsletters, price sheets, ads, etc., etc., etc.
The bigger the rancher’s operation, the more implementation there is. And, big or small, implementation is an ongoing task.
If you have something to say—and you want to be both heard and remembered—you have to say it, say it again, say it again, and then keep saying it. Implementation puts the creative work...to work! Implementation is where the real effort and expense is put forth. But, if you have invested in a good creative team to craft your identity and message into a perfect symbol, then it is worth the work to spread it far and wide.
So, when you decide to engage the graphic design process to package your uniqueness, remember that your creative investment won't begin to pay off until you put your design to work—or in other words, until you implement it.
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
Editor’s Note: This article is presented as it appeared in the May/June 2010 newsletter for The American Institute of Architects Northern Virginia Chapter.
Architects and Engineers pursuing business with the federal government have toiled with the Standard Form 330 since it was mandated for A/E procurements in 2004. Intended to streamline the submission and procurement process, the resulting SF330 leaves A/E firms with a significant challenge: how to present a persuasive message in a generic, limited form.
The SF330 requirement limits certain aspects of creative flexibility, and it is sometimes challenging just to complete the form. Occasionally, firms will attempt to color-brand the SF330 templates, or otherwise personalize the templates to their organization, with garish results. Boilerplate information is often cut-and-pasted into the forms without regard to proper formatting. As a result, completed forms are usually ugly and often hard to read.
For those who handle SF330 development properly, an opportunity exists to separate from the pack and create a competitive advantage.
To make your SF330 stand out:
- Be attractive. There is something to be said for visual appeal. Consider recreating the SF330 template (or purchase a professional reproduction) that looks appealing and makes effective use of space. Put forth the effort to make sure your text fits within the form fields—you can’t win if the evaluators can’t read your document.
- Be concise. Composing a complete and persuasive message in a small space is an art form. Those who master the art form can gain an advantage. Some solicitations place flexible limitations on page count or font size, but that shouldn’t be a reason to include excessive or irrelevant text.
- Be relevant. Your submission will already stand ahead of the rest by being attractive and concise, but you need the buyer to know that your firm provides the “best value” solution. Boilerplate marketing materials were not written for the buyer’s solicitation, so don’t use them for SF330 content. Everything from your Example Projects and Section H narrative to your relevant project descriptions in Section E should be crafted to be responsive to the solicitation.
Your ultimate goal: make it easy for the evaluator to award the project to your firm. By applying a little creativity and due diligence you can turn the apparent downside of SF330s to your benefit.
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
In February 2006, Trinity made a large leap and moved all production (live) websites and email services to a hosted environment (keeping its development infrastructure in-house). Hosting production services internally for Trinity and its clients required a good amount of time/money and necessitated the purchase of four T1 lines to handle bandwidth requirements.
By transferring all production services to a hosted solution, Trinity was able to consolidate its internal servers and reduce its number of T1 lines to one. This produced significant monthly cost savings. The cost of outsourced hosting equaled the cost of the three removed T1 lines, and actual cost savings were realized in no longer having to perform system maintenance.
A Happy Marriage with HostMySite.com
When it made the decision to outsource, Trinity reviewed multiple hosting solution options and ended up going with HostMySite.com, which came highly recommended by our industry peers and was highly rated for customer satisfaction.
Between 2006 and 2009, Trinity found HostMySite.com’s service and support to be beyond compare. In fact, whenever a new client came to us looking for a hosting solution, we only recommended HostMySite.com because of the knowledgeable and helpful tech support.
I cannot overstate the power of the trust relationship that we had with HostMySite.com—Trinity saved a considerable amount of time and money because of the quick and correct solutions provided. The best part: when you called for help, you actually got someone on the phone right away. There were no phone system prompts to go through; a tech would pick up the phone and was ready to help.
HostMySite.com and Hosting.com Merge—Things Get Bitter
Unfortunately, Trinity can no longer boast of its good experience with HostMySite.com. HostMySite.com merged with Hosting.com (taking the Hosting.com name) around May of 2009 and things went downhill from there—the quality of service degraded drastically.
At the time of the merger, Trinity was still recommending Hosting.com. In fact, based on available information we recommended Hosting.com’s new Cloud Hosting Solution to a client. (The client was running its mission-critical website on a puny shared Virtual Private Server (VPS) that could not handle the request load, and needed an upgrade.)
There was trouble with the Cloud Hosting Solution right off the jump. Before the client’s website was migrated (thankfully) to its newly built cloud VPS, Hosting.com’s Storage Area Network (SAN) backbone “broke” and all Cloud Hosting Solutions failed. Hosting.com had to move everything to its Network-Attached Storage (NAS) system to get things up and running again.
Hoping this problem was a fluke, Trinity continued with the client’s website migration—but the problems continued, one after another. The client’s site went down down so many times you would think it was Glass Joe from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out (that’s right, a NES reference). Hosting.com definitely was not meeting its service level agreement guarantee of 100% uptime (excluding scheduled maintenance).
Due to all of these problems, the client requested a change of hosting providers, and Trinity has gone through the process of creating a migration plan to execute a move.
Divorce on the Horizon?
Trinity’s problematic cloud-based Linux VPS experience with Hosting.com has been compounded by multiple problems experienced with non-cloud-based Linux VPS for multiple Trinity clients, as well as Trinity’s own website (http://www.trincon.net).
Trinity can no longer recommend Hosting.com to any of our clients.
With some minor exceptions, Trinity continues to experience good results with Hosting.com’s dedicated server solutions, and we will probably continue to maintain our own Windows servers there unless instabilities crop up. Trinity maintains a higher level of internal experience with the Windows operating system than it does with Linux, and thus does not need to rely quite as heavily on Hosting.com for technical support.
What Happened to Hosting.com? Conclusions.
It was extremely disappointing for Trinity to see such a great company lose its edge. Though we experienced occasional (and often understandable) frustrations with HostMySite.com before the merger, the overall experience was overwhelmingly positive.
Since the main problems postdated the HostMySite.com/Hosting.com merger, I can only guess that the merge caused Hosting.com to outgrow its ability to perform; there may have been a major brain drain from the company after the merge. I say this because of the system failures, gross oversights, and poor tech support that Trinity has experienced (as compared to what it was before).
My final conclusion? Overall, our faith in Hosting.com’s ability to perform has been shaken. If you need VPS or Cloud hosting, look elsewhere. Hosting.com’s dedicated servers are still good (at least, for now) and the tech support for the dedicated servers seems to still be above par, even if it does take a little longer for the problem to be solved then it did before.
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
The Aerospace Industries Association commissioned Trinity Consulting to create a new logo design for their SUPPLIER MANAGEMENT COUNCIL, an important membership subset organization.
Initial conversations with the client suggested that the new SMC logo could utilize the simple "wing" element and similar fonts as found in the existing AIA logo. (seen above right) The letters S-M-C, used as a monogram, might also be appropriate for the new logo, since the council would most certainly be referred to its initials. Graphic shapes resembling the fins of a jet turbine might also be a valuable ingredient in the final SMC logo recipe. Finally, to a lesser extent, the new SMC logo could also emphasize the "council" aspect.
An initial set of design thumbnails (shown above against the graph background) were created. They demonstrate how the designer quickly explored the merits of building the new logo on some of the key elements mentioned above. These thumbnails were too rough to show the client. Nevertheless, they are an integral part of the design process. They allow the designer to select the best design concepts for further refinement. The refined designs are then presented to the client for careful consideration.
Client feedback lead to additional refinement of ONE of the designs. Resulting in a logo concept that is a unique combination of jet turbine fin shapes integrated into a monogram of the letters S-M-C overlaid with a simple "wing" shape contained within a chromed ring. The finished logo artwork was finally rendered in three formats: a 2-color version in blue and black and two 1-color versions in black.
The set of finished logo files was delivered to the client along with a 3-page Logomark Usage Guidelines document which detailed the specific ink colors, display sizes, and file formats that would help ensure consistent use of the SMC logo and build brand equity. The client immediately introduced the new logo to its members as well as the wider aerospace industry through its normal communications channels.
As the new SMC logo accrues "flight hours" it grows in familiarity and consequently in value ... justifying the modest investment associated with updating and implementing a new corporate logo.
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
Last Fall, Trinity held a couple of internal meetings focused on self-improvement. The main question that we asked ourselves in those sessions: “What makes a ‘true consultant’?” We wanted to know how Trinity would define the essential skill set of a top consultant, in order to make sure that each consultant at Trinity was holding himself/herself to a high standard.
After much discussion and reflection, here is the “true consultant” blueprint that was established.
- Excellence in relevant technical knowledge
- High ethical standards
- Intelligent problem solving, including
- A strategic mindset, with attentiveness to maintaining objectivity
- Having the big picture vision while still cultivating an attention to detail
- Intellectual agility/adaptability
- Diligence and creativity in conducting and applying research
- The ability to apply logical diagnostic tools to problems
- Appropriate prioritization of tasks and goals
- Knowledge of risk assessment and management
- A proper approach to creating business cases and analyzing cost/benefit
- Superior communication ability, including
- Present findings that comprehensively and effectively addresses all important data
- Empathy
- Broad and ready vocabulary
I won’t seek to explain the thought process that went into each of the outline points—right now, I merely provide them for your consideration. If you have any feedback, contact us!
To speak with a consultant regarding this subject, contact Trinity.
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