Joomla 1.6 is about to be released! How exciting!

Joomla.org have gone through 14 beta releases so far, in their efforts to ensure the end product is robust and as bug free as possible.  It’s this dedication to quality that entices Salsa to continue to use and highly recommend Joomla for not only our own website, but those of most of our customers.

1.6 is planned to be released on November 29th, 2010.

Some of the principle differences of Joomla 1.6 include:

• New Access Control System – Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content, removing the need to implement 3rd party components to deliver this functionality.
• Unlimited Depth Organizational Model – Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.  Previously, this functionality was also available via various plug-ins, with varying levels of complexity/cost to implement.
• One-Click Extension Updates – Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.  Similar to it’s competitors, Joomla will now allow you to easily update extensions with one click via the admin tool, rather than having to upload new files, install, etc.
• Semantic XHTML Layouts – Provides a better baseline for content presentation.  Will help in the delivery of accessible websites, and more consistency around content layout.

A more complete list can be seen here.

Any Joomla site can be upgraded/converted to 1.6, however the effort required to do so will vary considerably depending on:

• Version – The current version of your Joomla site will determine how much work is required to upgrade – some really old versions may require a re-build of some areas.
• Customisations – Although it is rare a Joomla site’s core infrastructure is customised, if it is, then there is more custom work required to implement any customisations.
• Components – The more components that are installed, the more work is required to upgrade the site – each component will likely require individual upgrade, and some may not have a 1.6 version available.

Our general advice is to wait a while before upgrading a site to ensure all required components are supported (the component vendors may take a while to implement 1.6 compatibility), and also to ensure any other production bugs are removed.

If you feel there are highly strategic benefits of upgrading your site immediately, we can provide some assistance and guidance about the best way to do this.

Our rates are so high because *this* guy goes through bananas like you wouldn’t believe!!

There is an old adage that goes something like “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”… and this one … “You get what you pay for!”.  Ah, the cliches are endless.

Seriously though, we get this question a lot.  There are a lot of ways to answer the question, and a lot of theories around what a website is worth. After being in the industry for about 12 years now, I believe you get what you pay for (well that’s not true if you deal with a really big over-priced agency that can demand any price they like) … AND also believe that some businesses don’t need to spend a fortune on their website!

If your business is very small, doesn’t have a huge marketing budget, or doesn’t see the web as a strategic part of the business growth, and is a strong offline business (accounting firms are a good example of this), then it’s not likely you need to invest heavily in a web presence, and can get away with having it built by a freelancer or a small agency, however be warned…

I’ve compared digital agencies and freelancers in another post.

As the owner of a mid-tier agency, I can tell you categorically that we charge what we do, to survive.  If we charged less, we’d have to provide a less superior service (and compete with the commodity end of the market), or disappear.  Here is why:

1. Experience - what a surprise huh? Building websites isn’t just about slapping together a design and crunching out a few pages of code.  Anyone that’s had a bad website built knows that there are endless amounts of pain associated with a site that has been built poorly: It doesn’t render properly in the browsers it should; hosted in an unreliable environment; CMS wasn’t setup correctly so you can’t edit all the things you should be able to; the site doesn’t appear in the search engines; it looks unprofessional; usability is poor!  We’ve learnt all these lessons the only way – the hard way!

2. Staff – you’re buying a service, not a product.  The quality of the service you receive depends solely on the quality of the staff that are providing the service.  It’s all about the people you’re dealing with.  The larger, and more professional the agency, the more talented and expensive their staff will be.  There’s a reason more experienced staff are more expensive!  It’s like choosing an accountant – if you go to an inexperienced accountant straight out of school, they’ll be cheaper, and you’ll most likely get poorer advice than from an Accountant that has been working in the field for years.  Probably not a great idea considering the difference that could make to your tax return – why make the same mistake on your website?

3. Infrastructure – Salsa has a dedicated Program Manager who’s sole responsibility is to ensure projects are run to schedule, and to the highest standards.  Our support team is dedicated purely to helping customers maintain their sites after they go live (as opposed to trying to get our developers to support client sites while they’re busy on building new ones). We also ensure the staff are well looked after – we have someone that manages the office, the beer fridge is stocked, the coffee machine is ready for our next client meeting, organises team events, & client xmas parties.  Happy staff make great websites, which makes happy customers.

4. Quality assurance – about 3 years ago we heard a story from a client of ours that had a website built by another agency, which was lost about 90% way through the build cycle.  They had a server problem, and the site that had been worked on for 3 months, disappeared over night – no backup, no copy on a local machine. Nothing. They had to start from scratch.  More professional agencies have backup systems, version control mechanisms, project management tools, development-production synchronisation processes, testing infrastructures… the list goes on.

5. ROI – a site that doesn’t return any customers isn’t a lot of value.  There is a LOT to learn about creating websites that work.  From design (read Blog posts from our Creative Director to appreciate how important good design is – yet another example of amazing staff) to prominence in the search engines, to integration with back-end sales systems – they’re all important aspects of creating websites that work.  It’s not too hard to do the math on what a good website will return for you when compared with other marketing medium, but it’s futile if the site isn’t built with ROI in mind.

6. Your professionalism online – this may sound pretentious, but have you ever driven a BMW, then gotten into a Hyundai?  Not that Hyundai’s are bad cars – I actually think they’re exceptional value for money, but you’d obviously notice the difference in quality and experience if you had the M3?.   If your potential clients look at your Hyundai website, and your competitors BMW website, who do you think they’ll choose?  We’ve found that making a BMW quality website, while more expensive, ends up returning far more to customers in leads, inquiries and sales, and so we focus on delivering quality websites that sell.

BUT I JUST WANT A WEBSITE – WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?!

Here is how you can decide – checkout the portfolio of the providers. Are they of the quality you would like?  Are they BMW’s or Hyundai’s?  Are their customers of a similar size/level of professionalism to you?  Maybe even call a couple of the customers – get some honest feedback.

Bottom line, if you get a price that is considerably lower, you should expect a compromise on some or all of the above.  That doesn’t mean you can’t get a cheaper website, but (wait for the Cleche) “You get what you pay for!”.  When ever we compete against agencies of a similar size to us, the prices are always comparable.

When we compete against smaller agencies, they’re always cheaper.  The clients that understand the difference, are the ones that we love to work with.

I have this conversation at least once a week with clients.  About 20% of our new customers come to us to have an existing site re-built from a proprietary CMS, into an open source CMS such as Joomla, Drupal or WordPress; or Magento or OSCommerce for eCommerce sites.  They feel locked into their CMS, and their provider.  We’re exclusively an open source house, so I am biased, but strongly believe that there is very little advantage in using a proprietary CMS to build any website.

Effort

The amount of work required to build a site in a proprietary or open source CMS is generally the same.    It could be argued that a proprietary system is intimately understood by the developer, and as such the site can be built faster;  however many development houses have built up just as much knowledge in Open Source systems, and so this isn’t a challenge – as long as you choose an agency that specialises in your chosen open source CMS.

Initial Costs

When building a site using a proprietary system, the client is usually paying to help cover the costs of development of the software development exercise.  This means setup costs are in fact higher, even though the effort required is similar.

Ongoing Costs

Most proprietary CMS systems have licensing costs attached to them to cover the cost of maintaining the software.  Also, for any additional components that need to be added to the site, these typically also attract their own maintenance costs.  We’ve recently re-built a website for the same cost as the annual licensing fees the client was paying – and this was a substantial site (tens of thousands of $).  What’s more, the new site is far better!

Flexibility

Open source code can be edited by anyone; anyone that has the right skills of course.  You can take your site to anyone that is skilled in your particular system, or language, and have them make changes for you.  Alternatively, if you run a proprietary system, edits can usually only be done by the provider.  This of course means less access to appropriate developers, and typically higher prices.  Also many proprietary systems will only implement changes that can be rolled out to their entire customer base, so that they don’t have to maintain too  many different versions of the software; so getting customisations can be difficult.

Intellectual Property (IP) Ownership

Most open systems are covered by the GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), which basically means you have the rights to do whatever you please with the code, and any customisations that are applied under contract.  On the contrary, most proprietary systems are owned solely by the developer.

Portability

Mentioned already in flexibility, open source sites are able to be picked up and shifted to just about any other hosting/support provider.  Proprietary systems can often only be run on the developers environment, as they like to maintain ownership of the IP.

It has been reported that Joomla alone, which is the most popular of the open source CMS tools, is responsible for 1.5-2 million websites (out of about 16 million active CMS driven sites).  WordPress is probably responsible for even more!  So these open source tools are also very, very widely used, being used for some of the most high profile sites on the internet.

Most DIY projects end up either saving time OR money; rarely both.  Managing your own newsletter campaign, believe it or not, will save both of these precious resources.

Bockers & Pony (www.bockersandpony.com.au) recently saved a small fortune by managing their own newsletter marketing campaigns.  There are really good email marketing tools available now, allowing non-technical users the ability to create professional, html newsletters with very little effort.

Typically to achieve this, clients would write their content, select some images, send them to their agency with a list of subscribers, and then have the campaign constructed and sent manually.  The process of getting the content together, going back and forth with your agency a few times, run some tests, make some tweaks, etc, takes just as long as actually doing it yourself!

Tools like www.campaignmonitor.com and www.mailchimp.com allow the construction of these emails via an easy to use wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor.  The systems also integrate seamlessly with just about any website, so all subscribers, etc are stored directly into the email system, rather than having to be imported each time you run a campaign.  The unsubscribe functionality can also be integrated, meaning there is effectively no manual work required to manage your subscriber list.

Simple wysiwyg content editing

You’ll need to have an agency design, construct and test your email template once only, and you can then re-use that template over and over for each campaign you send out.

The cost of getting it setup right is typically about the same as having 2-3 campaigns sent by an agency – so you will recoup your costs very, very quickly, and create more flexibility about when you send your campaigns.

First thing to mention, is that it’s not often I see a business succeed with little or no money invested to get things started.  However it usually takes someone at least one try to learn this truth – and hopefully this Blog post will help save some time and pain in that learning process.

I always recommend engaging a professional agency (like us) to help execute a web project, as it’s often an important part of getting a new business up and running successfully.  This article is aimed at those that don’t want to spend that sort of money, and instead are looking for a cheap & nasty solution to help get them started.  Salsa doesn’t provide these services, but here is what we’ve learnt over the years.

Sorry I know it sounds cynical.

Once you’ve taken care of the paperwork (register a business name – https://online.justice.vic.gov.au/cav/br-home, and register your domain name – Google “cheap domain names”), you need to get a website built.

If you have $1,000 – $2,000 to spend on a website.

The cheapest way to get this done is to use a pre-existing Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress, or Joomla, or Magento or OSCommerce for an eCommerce website.  You should then look to download free, or buy a template for the site, instead of paying for a custom design.

Some places to get templates from:

WordPress – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Joomla – http://www.joomlashack.com/

Magento – http://www.silverthemes.com/

www.templatemonster.com is also a source of hundreds of themes, but the quality is inconsistent.

Once this is done, you need to then get someone to build it for you.  www.nachomedia.com.au can help put together a template website at low cost.  Or if you know a freelance developer, have them do it for you – should be around $1,000 for a WordPress/Joomla site, and $2,000 for an Magento/OSCommerce site.

They can probably help you with hosting also.

Credibility is important – so perhaps set up a 1300 number if you can – and have it direct to your mobile phone or land line – makes you look more professional, and doesn’t cost much.

If you have nothing to spend on a website!

Try setting up a Facebook page.  It costs nothing. See this post on how to do that: http://lazarus.salsainternet.com.au/2010/06/howwhy-to-create-a-facebook-page/

Take a look at Twitter also, if you have the time.

You can also redirect your domain name to your facebook page if you want to advertise the domain name, instead of the facebook page in your marketing collateral.

Get people to find you.

Once you’ve setup some sort of online presence as above, people need to find it.  To be honest, this is often the hardest part.

First, you should run a Google Adwords campaign (ads on the right side of a Google search results screen), as this is relatively low cost, and works instantly – you can setup a campaign, and get it running in a couple of hours – gets traffic to your site immediately.  You can check keywords, etc  at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You can also read about how to setup a campaign here: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/adwords-explained.html

Once you’ve proven the model works online, you can start to work on getting the site to rank well in the free/organic listings in Google (left side of Google search results screen).  There are 3 things that make this work – Structure, Content & Links. More info on how this works here: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/search-engine-optimisation.html

You also want to put your web address on your business card, flyers, email signature, etc to help get the word out.

As mentioned, this approach in my opinion is speculative at best, but costs very little, so maybe it’s worth a shot for those that haven’t tried before.

Good luck!

I had a discussion about this with a client last week – he’s a marketing manager for a large IT services mob in Melbourne.

We spoke about whether the basics of marketing have really changed.  BRW said in an article recently “the underlying theme for good marketing is knowledge: know your business, know your products and services, know your customers and know what your objectives are.” Amen.

Here is the definition of marketing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing:

“Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in products or services. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.”

It also goes on to explain the trends in marketing over recent history – and suggests the marketing orientation from “1970 to present day” is still the same!

If I was to read this 6 months ago, I’d have thought it was ridiculous – with the introduction of the Internet (on a side note – ever wondered what we did with our time before the internet? Anyway…), surely marketing fundamentals are now completely different compared to 40 years ago?  I’m certainly no marketing expert (far from it), but have learnt something about it over the years of helping run & grow Salsa – I sometimes wondered whether the fundamentals of marketing have changed at all?  I recently decided they haven’t. Even though the tools are different, all marketers are still trying to achieve the same result.

Here’s why:

If you’re a marketing manager, for example, don’t you need to still adhere to the same rules? Here are some simplistic examples of how the principles haven’t really changed.

Communicate clearly – the same goal applies today as it has in recent history.  If you can’t clearly communicate what you do, you’ll quickly turn prospects away to someone who can.  We used to use radio, tv & newspapers.  We now also use websites.

Build relationships - a marketers goal is often to get a sales person in front of a prospect to start to build rapport.  The call to action of most marketing media (whether it’s radio, tv, websites, or whatever) is to have someone call, or visit a showroom, or a website (which often then sends them to a phone call!!).  Get in front of someone, build a relationship, sell them something – still the same.

Create value for customers – facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, whatever – the most successful are designed to actually serve a purpose.  Educate the prospect, allow them to gain value from reading what you have to say.

The list goes on – the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed.  There are a load more tools to use to drive traffic to your marketing material (Google Adwords is a revolutionary tool for generating traffic), but the basics haven’t changed.  Marketers don’t need to intimately understand how Google Analytics works – they need to pay an Adwords professional to run a campaign for them that gets them loads of relevant traffic.

The marketer then needs to worry about what happens when the client finds their website, and makes the phone call – how well is the prospect communicated to, how good is the person on the phone at building instant rapport, and what value can they add right away?

So don’t obsess on learning every detail on how online marketing works.  I say leave that to “online marketers” and worry about the marketing basics of your own business – for a maximising outcome.

I had a meeting today with a potential new customer, and they were just getting out of a bad relationship with their previous developer.  They mentioned that he’d “oversold” them on the capabilities of his organisation.  In fact, he didn’t even have an organisation – it was only 1 person.  His website, and the way he presented his business, made it appear as though it was a more substantial business.  Anyway, it turns out he’s going on a long holiday, and their site is supposed to have gone live in 2 weeks, and is not near ready… needless to say, they’re now looking for a new developer!

I  guess the point I’m making in a round about way, is that your site can be used to allow people to see who you are (in the above example he was lying, but let’s assume you won’t do that!).  It’s not only my opinion, but I’ve seen it time and time again – if your website visitors can see who you are, what your team is like, and get a feeling of comfort that they’re dealing with real, honest, people, your enquiries will go through the roof.  Not only that, the quality of the enquiries will be considerably better.

E.g. We run a marketing site using another brand name (email me if you want to know what it is).  This particular site is a brand that only generates leads for Salsa – there is no real business behind it.  The site itself ranks its butt off in the search engines – gets twice as much traffic as the Salsa site, however the leads are generally very bad in comparison.  There are about the same number of leads (in fact maybe even more) but they are much, much lower quality, and equate to about 5% of our sales, while the Salsa site generated about 40%.  I butted my head against the wall for years trying to work out why, and one day a client actually told me – after mentioning they’d actually come across the other site, but decided not to enquire; I asked why they did choose to enquire with us?

Their response was “because I felt like I was dealing with real people.  The other website didn’t look real”.  The site itself is as well designed as the Salsa site, however it does not contain any people – no staff page, no photo’s of clients, not even a stock photo of one of those ladies you see on every 2nd website!  Nothing that gives the user the feeling they’re dealing with real people, and so they don’t have any confidence, and don’t waste their time enquiring.

Get your staff onto your website, and watch your enquiries improve.

Here is our staff page: http://www.salsainternet.com.au/about-salsa-staff.html

WordPress and Joomla are by far the most popular open source CMS tools available – we’ve built hundreds of sites using these technologies, and so are intimately familiar with their structure, limitations, pro’s & con’s.  Until about 2 years ago, most clients didn’t really care what CMS was used, most didn’t know what a CMS was, but these days people are coming to us with some idea of their options, and often need a little guidance to ensure they make the right choice.

1. Content structure

If the site is just a simple brochure site, with a straight forward menu system (top/side menu), simple content pages, for example, use WordPress.  Similarly, if it’s just a Blog – use WordPress.   This site, for example, is built in WordPress.

If you’re looking to build a larger, more complex site, with a more sophisticated content structure (multiple levels of content), more than 1 menu system, more modular content (in left/right columns for example), and would like more control over what menu appears where, then use Joomla.

2. Community/larger more complex site

If you want to build a community site, including member login functionality that provides users with members only content, or create a feature rich website including user polling, banner advertising, user profiling, etc – then use Joomla.  Likewise if you want a corporate site that is more feature rich, including categorised content for case studies, or whitepaper download capabilities with integration into a 3rd party CRM database, use Joomla.

3. Administrator technical capability

If the website administrators are less savvy, use WordPress, if you can get away with it.  Joomla, while not hard to use, is hard-er to use than WordPress, which is just a bi-product of it being so much more sophisticated.

Wordpress admin - simply about managing content

Joomla admin panel - lots of options and functionality (although most only ever use about 20% of it)

4. Design

The design of a site can also lend itself better to either technology.  Simpler designs, using more traditional content structures (limited number of pages, less modular content, little interaction) are better suited to WordPress.  Either CMS is incredibly flexible in terms of being able to conform to just about any design, so that’s not really a consideration.

5. Future development possibilities

It’s painful to swap over (need to build from scratch – there is no “upgrade”, so make sure you consider the above points for future development also – if your needs are simple now, but they will grow later, you’re better off choosing Joomla right off the bat – it may cost a little more (5-10%), but worth it in my opinion.

6. SEO

You’ll read a LOT about which tool is better for SEO.  In our experience, the technology is only a very small part of the SEO story.  Both CMS’ offer the necessary infrastructure to effectively optimise a site, including (albeit with a free additional module or 2):

• Search engine friendly URL’s
• Ability to control meta data for each page
• CSS styling to support H1, H2, tags, etc
• And many more…

There are a bunch of other factors that weight into how well your site performs in the search engines (content, back-links, internal menu structures, etc) – so don’t let this affect your decision.  You can build the same site in either CMS and achieve the same SEO result.

The takeout – if your needs are simple, use WordPress, which is more geared toward Blog or simple brochure-ware sites.  Otherwise, use Joomla.

As a digital agency, we often take over projects for clients that have previously been handled by a freelance designer/developer, and find us regularly coming across the same reasons for the switch.  It’s important to note, however that for some businesses, I believe it is a good idea to actually use a freelancer instead of a digital agency to save money.

It’s fairly obvious I suppose, but sometimes, freelancers are a good choice for sole operators, or businesses with smaller budgets.  They have much lower overheads, so can charge lower rates.  It’s important you’re aware of all the pros/cons of such relationships however.

Nimble – often a freelancer can be quite nimble in the way they operate – you get to deal directly with the operator/owner/designer.  Changes can often be accommodated easily, and work is done quickly (as long as they’re not working on too many projects at once).

Pricing – as I already mentioned, freelancers typically charge lower rates as they have lower overheads such as office expenses, project managers, marketing, etc.  You just want to make sure they’re highly experienced, so costs down blow out later (look for a fixed price quote, with a detailed inclusions list).

Support – some freelancers are able to provide really good support if they’re easily accessible.  If your freelancer has too many projects on the go, you may find that the support is poor, or non-existent.  A digital agency may also suffer the same problem, so it’s important to ensure they have a dedicated support infrastructure to provide the help when you need it.

Expertise – obviously using a freelancer means that you’re limited to the expertise of one person.  This may be suitable if you’re after a good designer only, or just an SEO expert, for example.  If you’re after a provider that can provide strategic input, a wider range of design skills (often they’ll employ more than 1 designer), online marketing expertise, larger scale development expertise (in case your business grows rapidly), high-end technical support, then you should consider using an agency.

Stability – freelancers sometimes disappear.  A large number of the new customers we get from freelancers are the result of them disappearing into an agency, or taking a ski trip to Canada.  This can sometimes mean your site disappears, or you suddenly have no support.   Agencies can also disappear, but if you do a little research, and you see that they have a load of happy customers, have been around for a few years, and the owners have a stake in the day to day running of the business, then you should be OK.

Contactable – Agencies are often a lot more contactable than freelancers, with a team of people that can usually help you.  Freelancers may be in meetings, working on an urgent new project, or just too busy!

In summary, freelancers may be suitable if your business is very small/not well funded, if the web is not a huge part of your business strategy, your business is in an experimental phase, or your company has an internal infrastructure to manage the freelancer.  Otherwise, go with an agency.

Consider all of the above, and make a decision that best suits your business.

A couple of years ago, users didn’t want to be “engaged” online – they wanted to go to a website, do something (enquire, sign up), fix something (solve a problem) or buy something (shop!).   We’ve seen an incredible shift in the way people achieve this over the past couple of years with people now spending so much more time online.  Users now want more from their website browsing experience.  The introduction of social media (I still don’t like that term, anyway…) tools means that people have now become used to using the internet as more than just a tool, but as a part of their life. And so, they naturally expect a website to be more than just a tool – it needs to make them feel at home, make them feel like they’re part of something – not just enquiring, problem solving or shopping.

How many times have you checked your web enabled phone today?  How many times a day did you check it 2 years ago? We spend a LOT of time online now.

Your clients and potential customers now want to know who you are, what you look like, what your office looks like, what you did at your last team event, what was the name of your first pet!!  They want to build a relationship with you, and feel that you’re actually interested in telling them about yourself.  It needs to be genuine of course, as any relationship needs to be, so you do need to be careful, because this new world of online transparency means that if you’re not honest, it will easily show.  Marketing hasn’t really changed, it’s still about being able to genuinely connect with the people who care the most; however the tools we used to make us look like someone we weren’t (websites are so good at making small businesses look like big companies) are not enough – there are just so many ways to find out more about a person or company now, that you can’t hide behind a website – so you might as well come out and tell the world about who you really are. If you don’t, someone else probably will.

An interesting side note: the staff page on the Salsa website is one of the most popular (top 2%)

Take the following examples (thanks to Avinash Kaushik from a “6 Pixels of Separation” Podcast I recently listened to).  2 competing companies in Canada, both selling laundry products.

www.vim.ca - not all that engaging, imo

The first example is quite a simple site – shows some products (ok, good start), has a voucher to save $1 (wow!), then the standard marketing spiel (“makes tough cleaning easy”). They have content on the site about how to use their products, cleaning tips,  and home decorating ideas. Yawn. www.vim.ca

seventhgeneration.com - incredibly engaging

This example is not only a much more beautiful site (an enormous part of the ability to engage in my opinion), but also absolutely tells the website visitor all about who and what they’re dealing with.  They become part of something much bigger. “Protecting Planet Home”.   One of the major menu items is “Learn”.  In here you can educate yourself on the bigger ‘green’ issues they’re passionate about, read an active Blog, visit the Forum, watch video’s.  You can also see where people have “Asked Scienceman” a question, and can read his response.  They of course also connect via Facebook, and Twitter – you can actually see in their Twitter account that they’re interacting with their customers, answering questions and solving problems! Oh, they also have some product information on the site of course. www.seventhgeneration.com

I can’t wait to re-design our website.  Keep your eye out for it.