Where Every Drop Counts: A Concluding Entry

I am happy to say that this past Saturday, our Senior Project presentations were all well-received. Though I myself was incredibly nervous, I looked upon an audience of classmates, faculty, families, and even BASIS.ed representatives and definitely felt more encouraged during my presentation. :)

Throughout this research project, I gained a greater understanding and appreciation for small businesses, social media, and TPN. The sustainability and growth of Marvin Medisoft’s marketing endeavors are extremely important for a lifesaving product like TPN 2000, “where every drop counts”. I discovered the power of social media in marketing, awareness, and overall connectivity in an increasingly digital world. I also learned my way around a small medical software business and gained valuable experience throughout my research.

A huge thanks to everyone who came to see BASIS Scottsdale’s many wonderful Senior Projects!

I’m so lucky to have had this opportunity to research in a new field of interest, acquire experience as an intern, and communicate my findings to others.

Thank you so much for reading my blog over the course of this project!

Signing off for the last time,

Mia Lu

The Last Stretch

I can’t believe it’s already the final week of our internships! I hope everyone had a great week. I started mine off with good ole’ wisdom teeth extraction. The procedure went well, and I took pain meds for the first time ever.

Besides that, I worked on more SEO research and website details, mainly sending last-minute feedback before receiving the WordPress website manual. With access as the site’s administrator, I have the ability to edit and add to the site as need be. The manual looks easy to operate, so it should not be difficult to fix grammar mistakes, include an updated newsfeed, and manage user login/registration and customer testimonials in the future.

This week I also spent time polishing up my PowerPoint presentation for this project. I've linked the PDF version of the PowerPoint for you all to view. I, along with all of my fellow Senior Research Project participants, will be presenting our findings on May 7, and I'm very excited to share my experiences and hear from my classmates. 

I am happy to say I will be posting again in a couple of weeks in a concluding entry to this blog.

Until then, I wish all of my classmates luck on committing to schools and hope that the finalizations of the Senior Research Projects go well for everyone.

Mia Lu

(Don't) Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain

While the website is being set in motion, I want to touch on my research behind the scenes of web development: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I think it’s important to mention this subtopic in my project, since it is extremely significant for a business or organization’s (or really, anyone’s) online presence.

Since I am thoroughly lacking any substantial knowledge of SEO, I decided to look for information aimed towards fledglings like myself. Google searching “SEO for beginners” gave me plenty of options; the first result I came upon looked promising, so I dived into Moz.com’s “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO”.

I’m very glad and grateful that this chapter-based guide is concise and relatively easy to follow. Each section presents information accompanied by relatable examples, helpful diagrams, and amusing cartoons (including monkeys, robots, pandas—and there’s even a unicorn!). I’ve done my best to understand all ten chapters, and I definitely got used to taking classroom-like notes throughout my reading.

I have broken down the main sections of the guide and provided links to their respective chapters if you’re interested in checking them out:

1.  Crawling and indexing
2. Relevance vs. popularity
3.  Search queries and intent
4. Search engine marketing and problems to avoid
5. Navigational search engine friendly design
6. URL construction, title tags, and meta tags
7.  Usability/user experience and empathy
8. Content development
9. Keyword research
10. Link pattern building
11. Tools, misconceptions, and measurability

I would say if I had glanced at this list previous to my research, I wouldn’t have known anything. On the flip side, these may look familiar to anyone with web experience, especially those into coding—shout out to my classmates Alex and Kyle in their efforts to create a video game.

One of the most important reoccurring concepts throughout the guide was the advice to “build [your website] for users, not for search engines”. In all efforts to create a successful online presence, the user—or customer, in the case of my project—is the most significant. Anyone can essentially manipulate the search engine in his favor, but success won’t last without user satisfaction. Incorporating social media into one’s efforts is also associated with online triumph.

If you ever have the chance to research or study SEO, I do recommend at least briefing yourself on it. I had very little interest in it at first, but I learned to value its importance in our web-based world.

Hope this was interesting and “user-friendly”. :)

Mia Lu

Lists and Logos

After a look at the first draft of the website, I made a list of suggestions and possible improvements in my handy dandy notebook (sorry, but I just had to include that reference for all of you Blue’s Clues fanatics). When I had looked at the current site, I made a similar list, evaluating each web page and its content.

Now it was the newbie’s turn to be improved. The list ranged from picture quality, font consistency, and overall layout to inactive links, loading times, and scroll-down features. My favorite aspect of the new site is the clean and modernized look/layout, without being too flashy or loud, which I find is unfortunately the case for some business websites.

On another note, the aspect of the site that needs the most improvement, in my opinion, is the Testimonials page, which appears unprofessional and lacks much substance, seems “inactive”. I brought this up to Ms. Vaidya, and she suggested that I look at other business sites, especially Marvin Medisoft’s competition, to see what features were appealing. Upon this, I discovered that these sites included client logos in proximity to their testimonials, or on separate “Our Clients” pages, and I really liked how it looked.

Later, Ms. Vaidya sent me a list of current clients, and I proceeded to search online for their respective websites and logos. I copied and pasted around thirty-five client logos onto a Word doc and sent that to the designer to add to the testimonials and rename the page “Current Clients & Testimonials”.

I plan to continue this website project until our requests are seen to (hopefully, ASAP).

Meanwhile, I’ve been continuing my secretarial duties as well as looking at other TPN products that rival those of Marvin Medisoft’s just to get an idea of the competition from an outsider’s perspective as well as from a business intern’s point of view. I will definitely go into more detail about this in one of my future posts.

Hope you all have a good week!

Mia Lu

Sneak Peak

Over the weekend, I finished sending the “highly recommended” materials that I discussed a bit in my last post. Soon after, our designer messaged us with a link to her first draft of our new website. I was very excited to open it and see her work.

For a first draft, the website looks pretty good. There are currently seven working pages: Home, About Us, Why TPN 2000?, Product Features, News, Testimonials, and Contact Us. We still need to work out the Web Conferences page and integrate our social media sites into the News page to create our own newsfeed.

The design is simple and modernized, but I think the overall look should be improved—more professional in appearance to portray the seriousness of what our business stands for. There are also formatting issues we need to address, particularly with pictures and text alignment. But I think as long as we communicate what exactly it is we want to see, we will be able to see progress.

Until next week,
Mia Lu

Post-Offer Prep

Your Order Is In Progress, Part II: This is a short post that elaborates on my experiences with web design discussions and confirming orders.

After receiving the web design offer, I did not expect many other requests from the designer, since I thought we had already discussed the project in detail. However, even though we “filled out the requirements”, there were five highly suggested to-do items we had to prepare and send to our designer:

1.    Document with the list of all pages and content

2.   Logo/branding suggestions or files (in case branding is already done)

3.   Images related to your business (in good resolution)

4.   4-5 links of reference websites (your competitors)

5.    Primary terms you want to dominate on Google

All of these tasks have to be completed before the designer begins the actual project. The most time-consuming one was creating the document of the current website content and text. Copy-pasting has always been one of my favorite computer features, and it was definitely very helpful, but I still needed to open all of the embedded links on the site to copy onto my document, which took longer than I thought. Then I spell-checked the entire document and added section headings to designate website pages and important links. When I finished this task, I attached the document to our order conversation. I’m so glad I’m finally done with it.

In my previous post, I mentioned a user login on the website, through which registered customers will be able to access private information, including TPN 2000 training videos and user manual (the latter of which Ms. Vaidya has already sent). I am currently working on uploading tutorial/demo videos to YouTube and sending these links.

It’s been a busy week, and I will continue to work on these tasks over the weekend, so the site can be designed sooner than later.

Have a great Easter weekend!

Mia Lu

Your Order Is In Progress!

I’m excited to announce that I’ve finally chosen a web designer to redesign Marvin Medisoft’s website! Yay! After sending a few more project proposals and looking at potential contracts (which included estimate price, a factor that eliminated a few), Ms. Vaidya and I decided on a Fiverr designer. She’s very patient, timely, and accommodating, and she’s actually one of the first I contacted back in Week 4.

We clarified our design requests with her: multiple pages, modernized look but not too flashy/busy, same content as current site, RSS feed from social media (integrate with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), blogging capabilities, news feed, user login with access to private information (TPN user manual, training videos, etc.), and a website manual (admin panel) to make updates/add text ourselves in the future.

The designer talked about creating the website on a WordPress template, since our original CMS (the platform is called xoops, but it’s pretty outdated) is unfamiliar and difficult to work with. I’ve heard good things about WP, so I did not hesitate to let her use it for our site. She also discussed logo design, and hopefully I can work on that project as well.

Today, after solidifying all of the details, we asked for a final offer, and she sent one through Fiverr. It’s a simple ordering and payment process, but I was still eager to click the green “Order Now” box in the corner (it was very inviting).

Now, every time I go on Fiverr, our message conversation is marked “Offer” with a little tag above the order that reads “Requirements Submitted, Order in Progress”. It reminds me of an Amazon order, except that this purchase could change the face of a business (literally).

I still have items to discuss about the overall site design preparation, and I can’t wait to share my findings.

I’ll be posting soon!

Mia Lu

Hi, This Is Mia, How May I Help You?

A quick mention that today is Kick Butts Day, “a national day of activism that empowers youth to stand out, speak up, and seize control against Big Tobacco”!

Aside from that, I’m back to work, and I’m continuing my search for website designers this week.

While in the midst of constant back-and-forth, question-answer conversations with designers on Fiverr, I decided to post a design request on Upwork to see if there were any candidates there. Like Fiverr, Upwork allows clients to message freelancers individually or make postings public to open up the job to anyone who applies. I thought the latter would be very beneficial for us to make the best hire, so I put my web design request on a public setting.

I didn’t realize the effect this would have until I began receiving multiple notifications from Upwork and separate individual emails from applicants asking me to consider them as possible contenders. And the calls started to come soon after.

Though I’ve previously blogged about acting the secretary, I’ve only accomplished the written part—pen-to-paper notes. I’ve rarely answered the phone during my time at Marvin Medisoft, and when I did I only took brief messages for Ms. Vaidya. Now I found myself in the interview process, inquiring about web design proposals, searching through my notes for answers to their own questions, flustering around for words.

I’m not very good at talking to people on the phone, and this interview process confirmed it—at least in the beginning.

During the first call, I forgot to introduce myself, and when we finished talking the designer had to ask who was speaking. To me, “Mia Carlson” seems like an ordinary name to spell, but I guess the translation got fuzzy on the other end, because when he emailed me afterwards, he wrote, “Hi Miaca Erlsom”, which I really had to laugh at. After that little mix-up, Ms. Vaidya advised me to answer all future calls with “Hi, this is Mia, how may I help you?”, which definitely lessens the awkward confusion if interviewees ask for my name.

The second call went a bit better (he definitely knew my first name was not Miaca), but when I was asked to spell my name, I think I blurted out, “‘M’ as in ‘Mia’”, which I’m guessing isn’t very helpful.

Third time’s the charm? Not for me, apparently. “I” sounds like “Y” (go figure!), so this particular designer wrote back, “Hello Mya”.

In the fourth call, I finally figured out how to spell my own name, ask the right questions, and jot down notes at the same time, but I was still nervous on the phone.

Throughout this process, I learned the ways around a phone interview, the value of customer service from a business perspective, and the tricks to sounding out my name and its letters very clearly.

I am currently in contact with six candidates, mostly by email (where I am much better with my words), and I hope to decide on one by the end of the week.

Crossing my fingers that I’ll find the best person to hire!

Mia Lu / Miaca Erlsom / Mya