Peaches and Powerful Customer Service
It’s Friday evening, and my wife decided that it was time to let grandma take care of our teething baby so that we could go pick peaches and get away for a few hours. Given that most of my Fridays are spent right here, in front of a computer, trying to figure out how we’re going to get through the next week, I cheerfully went along to spend the lovely summer evening with her.
Picking peaches was great–we talked to the owner of the small orchard for awhile about what to look for in a good peach, and I of course asked about proper picking technique (which annoyed my more experienced wife). Anyway, we picked our peaches, drove to their house to pay, and had a short conversation about finding something to eat in the nearby small town. The daughter who weighed our baskets was pretty sure we could go to the cafe on Main Street, so we paid, thanked her, and went on our way to find the restaurant she had described.
As we were driving, I got a phone call from a strange number. It was the owner of the orchard calling to tell us that she had heard we were looking for something to eat and her daughter had been unsure if the cafe she had recommended really was open. So the owner took it upon herself to call all of the restaurants in the tiny town to check their hours. Sure enough, the recommended cafe was closed, but the next door pizza place would be happy to stay open for us if we were already on our way.
Wow. Talk about amazing customer service. Both businesses went out of their way to work together to accommodate us out of town strangers for no good reason. We weren’t asking for anything special and we weren’t spending much money at either place, but both made an incredibly strong impression by making a small and inexpensive but valuable (to the us, the customer) extra effort. It made me want to give them even more of my business and promote them to everyone I see for the rest of the picking season.
Pretty powerful stuff. I sure hope our company is doing one-tenth as well in serving our customers.
Oh, and if you’re anywhere near Whitewater Kansas, be sure to stop at Entz orchard off of Hwy 196 and Webb road, and then head down to Whitewater Pizza for dinner….
Basic Wireframe Tool – Free PDF Download
(website) wireframe
- a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages – Wikipedia
Wireframes are a great way to get ideas out into the open quickly for discussion. You obviously don’t need anything fancy to create a basic wireframe or idea sketch (heck, a stick and patch of dirt work fine!), but we’ve found that adding a little browser chrome really helps to facilitate the process and communicate the rough ideas more clearly to a broader audience.
You can download our tool for creating wireframes for free here:
And here are a few basic principles for creating successful wireframes:
- Take a layered approach. Start by thinking about the general flow of your website or application, outlining the main actions and user experience first. Then move to more detailed sketches, creating basic layouts for each of the individual pages.
- Don’t be too literal. Your wireframes will provide the most value if they are quick sketches done in succession–broad strokes to capture main ideas, not detail oriented designs. Your pixel-perfect designs will come later.
- Embrace the power of iteration. Paper is cheap, and although you don’t want to be wasteful, going through a few sheets at this stage of the process will save boatloads later on in the process. Don’t be afraid to sketch out a half-baked idea to see where it leads. Ask for feedback, then incorporate that feedback into your sketches. Read about usability, and follow best practices for those techniques which are commonplace and need to be recognizable and easy for users. Build upon early sketches.
- Remove all unnecessary elements. Once you’re happy with the direction things are headed, look back over the designs to see if you really need every part of the design. Chances are you have an unnecessary feature or two that doesn’t add enough value to justify keeping. If this is the case, remove it early on (trust me, it will be much easier to start development, and, surprisingly, your users will thank you later when you give them a simple interface!).
So start sketching! You don’t have to be an illustrator, or even in the design business to gain from sketching out your ideas. If you’ve got a website and sense that some aspect should be made simpler or easier to use, use this basic wireframe tool to communicate your idea to your web developer! They’ll thank you for the clear communication.
Flint Hills Design Launches fhdMail
Today we’re proud to introduce fhdMail, a new email marketing campaign manager from Flint Hills Design.
We’ve been doing HTML email campaigns for a while now, and they’ve been great. But, being the perfectionists that we are, we started wondering if there was a better way. And so we created fhdMail.
We invite you to read about why fhdMail is better than your standard email campaign delivery service by visiting the website. But we’ll give you one concrete reason why fhdMail is better right now: the cute, furry little prairie dog character that we’ve affectionately named Flint. I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy being greeted and guided by this fun little guy in the midst of serious marketing work?
To learn more about how Flint and fhdMail can help your organization do effective email marketing, give us a shout. We know you’ll enjoy it.
Incorporate RSS Feeds Into Your Website
We recently needed to incorporate an existing RSS feed into one of our websites. After a bit of research, we stumbled upon SimplePie, and incredibly easy to use PHP class for integrating feeds into your website.
We were able to successfully pull in an existing RSS feed within five minutes of skimming the documentation. It then only took a few minutes of tweaks to the PHP and CSS to get a finished product. Wow. Maybe the name comes from being “easy as pie?”
Need to incorporate an RSS feed into your website? We highly recommend you check out SimplePie!
History and Vitality
A recent trip to Phoenix, Arizona provided me with a very interesting contrast to life in North Newton, Kansas.
Phoenix felt like a place with way too much money that grew far too fast. Companies sprung up all over the place but were firecrackers then fizzled. Acres upon acres of car lots seemingly overflowing with the latest and most expensive models sitting full but lifeless, abandoned. Endless office buildings with for sale/lease/rent signs posted on all sides, competing for space with the ancient saguaro cacti relegated to narrow patches of immaculate landscaping. It made me wonder why we try to force so many things that seem unnatural and out of place with the environment.
For the marketing purposes of my trip, it made me realize the importance of highlighting a good company’s history and vitality. Those companies which are doing good work and thriving, even in this down economy, would benefit from not hiding this fact. Likewise, companies with long histories and scores of satisfied customers might benefit from making their history known. They should be proud, and their customers should be proud, that the products or services they sell were valued in the past and still are today, despite all the economic ups and downs…
