Spero Consulting

Our Capa­bil­i­ties

As an out­growth of devel­op­ing and man­ag­ing this site and our online retail store, we now design and develop web­sites and man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems (MIS) for firms, orga­ni­za­tions, and indi­vid­u­als. Given the dearth of sim­i­larly well-​designed, easy-​to-​use alter­na­tives, this area has quickly become a sur­pris­ingly large part of our busi­ness (and we’re noth­ing if not adapt­able). In addi­tion, this ser­vice inte­grates well with our exper­tise and com­pe­ten­cies that you can read about here, here, and here.

• Given our firm’s exper­tise in pub­lic rela­tions, we can develop exter­nal sites as part of an over­all pub­lic relations/​web mar­ket­ing cam­paign that util­i­tizes such tools as Google AdWords.
• Given our exper­tise in infor­ma­tion eco­nom­ics, includ­ing fields like decision-​making and cost sys­tem design, we can develop inter­nal, qual­i­ta­tive man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems designed to keep track of the items that you wish to keep track of, but more impor­tantly to pro­vide answers to the ques­tions that you have about your busi­ness or organization. See our essay Details Are Not Infor­ma­tion for more on the topic. Our sys­tems are easy-​to-​use, com­pletely search-​able, and for larger orga­ni­za­tions, totally inte­grable with other large-​scale data­bases, e.g., billing sys­tems, etc.

Our Approach

Hard­ware and Hosting:

We advise clients to out­source web site host­ing and e-​mail ser­vices. For most firms, we see no rea­son to oper­ate one’s own expen­sive servers when very reli­able and very inex­pen­sive alter­na­tives exists. For most firms, there’s not much that is truly mission-​critical about an infor­ma­tional web site and e-​mail accounts.

A suf­fi­cient host­ing account for small-​to-​medium sized busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions usu­ally costs under $300 per year with a rea­son­able max­i­mum of about $4,500, and that is a lot of stor­age and a lot monthly band­width. (We should all be so lucky to require that much capac­ity.) We rec­om­mends folks who reside in Toronto, who despite being Cana­dian, speak per­fect Eng­lish. Their servers and backup servers are geographically-​dispersed through­out the east­ern half of the USA. We’ve been quite pleased with them.

Server Tech­nol­ogy and Software

We uti­lize open-​source soft­ware and server tech­nolo­gies sup­ported by some of the largest and most respected firms and orga­ni­za­tions in the world. Open-​source means that it is free or very nearly so, and often avail­able at no charge through the host­ing service.

Not only is it free, but it is also very cheap. Upgrades are free, easy-​to-​perform, and they seem to be thor­oughly and exten­sively tested prior to their release. There is no catch. Instead, small-​and-​medium-​sized firms can enjoy many of the ben­e­fits of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy. We think it is a beau­ti­ful and long-​sought phe­nom­e­non and results from a com­bi­na­tion of the advanced state (and afford­abil­ity) of hard­ware tech­nol­ogy and a con­ver­gence of incen­tives among soft­ware devel­op­pers and others.

It is a great time to be alive and engaged in com­merce. Large com­pa­nies offer free ver­sions of soft­ware to inhibit com­peti­tors or to reduce depen­den­cies on erst­while sup­pli­ers, and small devel­op­ers give aways plu­g­ins (addons with spe­cific func­tion­al­i­ties) in hopes of receiv­ing dona­tions or con­sult­ing engage­ments. We take and use the best from both seg­ments, and offer those sys­tems and rou­tines to our clients as part of an inte­grated package.

Our approach is to fol­low the Golden Rule, and treat clients as we would treat our­selves, and, that’s exactly what we do. (We use the same soft­ware ourselves.)

We’re not young, art school grads with no sense of the real world look­ing to design pretty-​but-​slow sites while we await our chance to design the next killer game at Nin­tendo (or whomever), but we do think our graph­i­cal designs have a cer­tain flair and ele­gance to them. And we’re not coders try­ing to adapt 1990’s tech­nol­ogy to our clients’ demands for an easy-​to-​maintain web site. We’re con­sul­tants look­ing for an easy-​to-​manage web pres­ence, and that’s what we offer our cus­tomers, too.

Our Plat­form

For infor­ma­tional (non­trans­ac­tional) sites, we use the most pop­u­lar con­tent man­age­ment plat­form in the world. We then inte­grate addi­tional plu­g­ins that we found and use at our own sites. These addons help orga­nize the site, track vis­i­tors, assist with search engine opti­miza­tion, or per­form a vari­ety of other essen­tial tasks that improve ease-​of-​use, vis­i­tor expe­ri­ence, or secu­rity. They pro­vide func­tions that you’ll want (or will want when you know about them) but have nei­ther the time or incli­na­tion to find, eval­u­ate or install.

Our clients have no inter­est in learn­ing how to code in html or any one of the other mul­ti­tude of pro­gram­ming lan­guages. We don’t either, espe­cially when free – or nearly free – off-​the-​shelf pack­ages work so well.

More­over, our clients have no desire to become depen­dent upon a web designer or web­mas­ter for sim­ple con­tent and struc­ture changes that they should be able to accom­plish them­selves, espe­cially for con­tent and announce­ments that should be updated (or removed) fre­quently. Ever vis­ited sites where out-​of-​date sales cam­paigns or expired offers show? That won’t hap­pen when we empower you and your employ­ees to man­age the site’s content.

We build CMS-​enabled web sites. CMS stands for content manage­ment system.

Mod­ern sites have three components:

1. the look or the design template,
2. the infra­struc­ture that per­mits deliv­ery of con­tent and man­age­ment of the site, and
3. the actual con­tent or mate­r­ial pub­lished on the internet.

We design the look of the site – to your detailed spec­i­fi­ca­tions or our artis­tic impulses if you’re unsure – which is kind of like being an architect.

We develop the infra­struc­ture that gives the func­tion­al­ity, secu­rity, and ease-​of-​use that you seek, which is kind of like being the builder. We also help develop and/​or edit the con­tent that will appear on the site, which is kind of like being the inte­rior designer or rear­rang­ing the furniture.

In the old day of sta­tic of html pages, these three func­tions could not be eas­ily or cheaply sep­a­rated, but that’s the beauty of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion and our plat­form. Now, just like a house, once the site is built, nei­ther the archi­tect nor the builder is needed (unless major ren­o­va­tions or expan­sions are desired).

What that means is that if you can use a word-​processing pro­gram or write an e-​mail, you can man­age the con­tent of your own web site. That includes not only adding or edit­ing words, but also chang­ing the menu struc­ture and adding and delet­ing pages (from view or per­ma­nently) and attach­ing files to be downloaded.

We empower you to pub­lish to the web.

It’s so easy that we’re using the same web-​based plat­form for inter­nal record-​keeping – it’s a data­base – and qual­i­ta­tive man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems. (Look for more infor­ma­tion on that topic, soon, or just ask us for examples.)

Also, it’s so easy that with­out any instruc­tion we’ll send a user name and pass­word to you so that you can explore the back-​office of our sam­ple site at Design​.Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.com.

In the back-​office, you can also track vis­i­tors and learn how they arrived at your site, i.e., which search terms were used to locate you. You can then visit those pages and see where you rank. You can also see vis­i­tor counts and the pages within your site that they visited.

Of course there’s more fea­tures and func­tion­al­ity, like easy-​to-​administer – web cal­en­dars, but if you’re inter­ested in our ser­vices, you prob­a­bly want to know more about our process.

Our Process

The design and devel­op­ment process usu­ally con­sists of the fol­low­ing steps:

1. Buy host­ing account and domain name.
2. Develop infra­struc­ture and design graph­ics, includ­ing the pro­vi­sion of pho­tog­ra­phy ser­vices, if nec­es­sary, and depend­ing upon budget.
3. With organization’s own­ers, man­agers, and employ­ees orga­nize, enter & edit con­tent and forms.
4. When rel­e­vant, set user roles and permissions.
5. Trans­fer e-​mail accounts to new host.
6. Go live.
7. Guar­an­tee work.
8. Pro­vide main­te­nance con­tract if desired for server-​related issues and soft­ware upgrades. Oth­er­wise, the ease of our con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem per­mits our cus­tomers to man­age­ment their own con­tent: announce­ments, pages, menu struc­tures, etc.

Steps 2 — 7 are the same for exter­nal or inter­nal sites.

A Few Samples

Besides this site, we designed and oper­ate a web store at BWAMShop​.com (a long story that you can read about on the home­page if you are interested).

Here are sites we did for other con­sul­tants: PDIn­no­va­tion, InsightRis­ing, and Metreks. At Metreks, Cur­tis spends a decent amount of time blog­ging and build­ing read­er­ship. In fact, he has had blog posts picked-​up as arti­cles in trade magazines.

Here are a three pro-​bono sites that we did for our Church, school sports asso­ci­a­tion, and sub­di­vi­sion: StAls​-Wex​ford​.org, StAl​sAA​.org, and OakhavenHA​.org. They look sim­i­lar: the first two by design, and the third one for effi­ciency rea­sons. All the graph­ics are ours, includ­ing the header at the ath­letic asso­ci­a­tion site that was derived from a photo of a bon­fire on our patio. Here is an exam­ple of a web-​based cal­en­dar, that is very easy to use.

Obvi­ously, we can’t show any inter­nal systems. Almost all the sites show exam­ples of con­tact forms, etc.

If you have any ques­tions, please con­tact us or call 724.940.0255 or 412.779.9028.