It’s about this time each year that I spend a little bit of down-time reflecting on the year at Viget Labs, our clients, our projects, and the design team. I peruse the web for reflections on 2006 and predictions for 2007 as they relate to the web, web design, and more. I think about company goals as well as personal goals. It’s overwhelming, inspiring, exciting, and laughable in some cases. So to put it simply, I’ve given up on a more lengthy, more insightful, and mostly regurgitated post on the state of web design and beyond.

Instead, I’ll simply offer this: links to several lists, each with 50 items. 3 of the lists speak to some interesting and successful sites that have made an impact this year. The other lists, well, perhaps you’re still looking for some New Year’s resolutions. Here’s to a successful 2006, and a happy and rewarding 2007.

• 50 Coolest Websites in 2006
• 50 CSS Web Designs in 2006
• 50 Loudest Websites in 2006

• 50 Ways to Save Our Children
• 50 Ways to Help Save the Planet
• 50 Ways to Improve Your Life

We have a holiday tradition here at Viget Labs.  While we love getting dozens of holiday cards from all our clients and contacts – all similar to the ones we used to send — we decided years ago that for us they were just too … ordinary. 

So Peyton (our creative director) suggested we pull the staff together for a bit of team-building and make our own little holiday gift to send to everyone.  The only rule is that it’s unique and interesting enough that gift receivers remember it.  Andy might also have a rule about the budget, but that doesn’t usually last (c’mon, it’s the holidays!).

The first year we made VigorBalm.  Then Vigoroma.  Then Vigelicous.  This year, it’s VigeTags — gift tags for the whole year.

Part of the tradition is to pick something that seems like it will be easy, but ultimately turns out to have lots of unforeseen challenges (like this year’s hole punchers breaking) which make us feel like Santa’s elves as we scramble to send them out before everyone’s gone for the holidays.  You can see some of the action photos and individual holiday wishes from everyone on staff at www.vigetags.com.  If you didn’t get your tags but would like some, just email me and we’ll be happy to send you a batch — while supplies last!

Happy Holidays everyone!

At a recent meeting about how we could help a prospective client drive more traffic to her web site, she made an interesting comment:

If we are seeing new leads generated with our Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, let’s just bump up the budget … we can spend more money there instead of hiring on new sales people.

We generally agreed with her assessment but, to really see Google and other search engines as a sales force, there are a couple of important things to keep in mind:

1) Make sure you are keeping tabs on the traffic you receive from any PPC campaigns. There’s a possibility that all this “great traffic” is leaving your site within seconds. Just as in a standard sales process, you need to qualify your PPC leads. Lots of visits should not signify success. Define success by if you are seeing more business, more links, etc.

2) Make some sort of attempt to calculate ROI. The easiest way to do that is to assign a value to achieving one of the goals you’ve set out to accomplish. For example, if a new lead generates $1,000 of business for you, how much would you be willing to spend on attaining another one? You may not have that sort of information available right now, but drive towards being able to justify what you spend on PPC campaigns.

The new Internet is all about sharing, and nonprofits are just the types of organizations that should be shared. You have messages that people want to associate themselves with. You have missions that people want to support. There are a lot of organizations out there competing for donor funding; but, the more visible you are, the more likely you’ll come to mind when people are making their giving decisions.

The old Internet was about broadcasting your message from your web site and sharing links with friendly organizations in the same field in hopes that your audience would find you. It was about providing information and content to people who had heard about you through your offline marketing efforts and wanted to learn more. The new Internet is about ubiquity. It’s about reaching new audiences through web sites that have little or nothing to do with your organization — web sites that anyone might use for their own personal networking, knowledge-finding, or media-sharing. The best part is that, particularly as a nonprofit, you can usually sign up just like anyone else and use these sites for free!

Check out this one-pager from NPower NY and Seth Godin for six quick ideas to get started.

Depending on your organization, you may also want to start a group on MySpace or post a photo library in Flickr. It’s necessary to relinquish some control over context,* but once you get past that, you can use it to draw people back to your site (where they can see your content in context). Better to have them see it somewhere else than not at all.

*Relinquishing control over context does not mean that you give up your copyright. Check the terms of service on any of these sites before you submit — but, most allow you to retain full copyright over your original materials.

Last night, I made it out to my second Refresh DC meeting out in Alexandria. (Thanks to The Motley Fool for hosting the event and providing great pizza and drinks.) If you’re not familiar with the group, Refresh DC is a group of web professionals (designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and other web professionals) who meet monthly to discuss relevant industry topics.

We had a great turnout last night, with over 40 folks who came out to listen to a recap of the Refresh’06 conference that happened last month in Orlando. Cindy Li, Jeremy Carbaugh, Jackson Wilkinson, and Jason Garber provided an insightful overview that highlighted each of the presentations that happened during the two-day event. So, instead of writing a recap of a recap, I’ll just direct you to the source. Here are the slides from last night’s presentation: http://sixtwothree.org/presentations/refresh06/ (The slides really just point to the original speakers’ presentations.)

I enjoyed getting a chance to meet and chat with a lot of fine folks there and a highly recommend it for all you web professionals out there. Next month’s meeting will be featuring guest speaker Dan Rubin, a designer/developer and published author, coming all the way from Ft Lauderdale, FL. Go to refresh-dc.org and sign up for the mailing list for reminders and details of upcoming meetings.

Also a big thanks to Rob, Peyton and Kendra for coming out and representing the design team. If you do get a chance to make it out to a future meeting, find us and say hello. On a side note, Viget Labs is actively recruiting for designers, developers, and project managers. Chatting with us at one of these meetings would be a great chance for you to gain some insight into what Viget is all about, and I promise you’ll meet some smart, fun people at the same time.

Interesting to see the top 20 domains according to Compete.com, all with 20 million+ unique visitors in October:

As Richard at Read/WriteWeb points out, techie-slanted Alexa tells a different story:

1. yahoo.com
2. google.com
3. myspace.com
4. msn.com
5. ebay.com
6. amazon.com
7. youtube.com
8. craigslist.org
9. wikipedia.org
10. cnn.com
11. facebook.com
12. go.com
13. live.com
14. blogger.com
15. aol.com
16. microsoft.com
17. comcast.net
18. imdb.com
19. digg.com
20. flickr.com

In this FAQ, Compete explains why their data — based on 2 million users — is more accurate than Alexa’s.

Why doesn’t everyone just use Google Analytics so we can all share and compare the same data?

Brian and I did a blog workshop last week with Pamela Sorensen. Pamela’s the VP of Corporate Development at ExecutiveBiz, a local digital magazine written for Washington D.C. executives. She is a very well connected trendster who recently started a blog and was looking for some pointers.

Pamela’s blog (Adventures of Pamela) is quickly becoming a place to go if you want to learn about the upscale hot spots of D.C. Since I spend many a Friday night at coffee shops or bookstores (i.e., I’m not cool), what interested me was her recent articulation on why she’s blogging (Why am I doing this?):

Through a blog, I can finally have a place where I can direct friends and family to the stories, happenings, people, places, things, humorous situations, without writing it through multiple emails or phone calls. Not that I don’t want to socialize with my f/f, it is just easier to get everyone reading the same material at THEIR leisure.

The most important thing to remember about a blog is that it simply is a means to easily publish your content to the web. There can be a million and one reasons for doing so and that is one of the most powerful elements of blogging — its flexibility to help you accomplish your goals.

When it comes to blogging, there definitely are “best practices” but not a “one size fits all” mentality. The way your organization executes a blog will be highly dependent upon why you’ve decided to start it (see To Blog or Not to Blog?).