I work from a coffee shop in the morning 3-4 times a week. It’s both parts a joy and curse of being a freelance designer. It’s great because It provides a place for me to begin the work day and get in the mindset to start working. I also get to meet the occasional new person (like the nice Scottish couple I met this morning who are hiking the Continental Divide in the coming days) and the old friend or work acquaintance. It’s a curse in that I harbor a healthy addiction to caffeine.

In addition, my coffee shop mornings also give me the chance to catch up on work related reading and reflect on what works and doesn’t in the world of marketing and design. Today I’m thinking about 2 weeks. That’s how long the recently released Canfield Brothers site I designed has been up. As I track all the sites I design with google analytics, I am forced into a reality by the numbers pouring in from the Canfield site. Getting people to visit a website is not necessarily the amount of work you put into it, the amount of planning and development dedicated to the project or the level to which you strive to build in web 2.0 features. Attracting visitors basically comes down to how interested people are in the subject matter – and people are obviously interested in bikes.

I know, I know – that’s pretty frickin’ obvious, Aaron. Way to provide insightful writing. But over the past 2 weeks I have been constantly reminded of another site I did and how it compares/contrasts to the Canfield site. On this other project, a team of marketing/sales/design personnel spent countless hours and money on the design and development of a new web 2.0 feature loaded site. We joined social networks, created a blog and used gooogle adwords to name a few of the steps we took to market the site and the product. While the site was a huge success, in that it increased traffic to the site considerably, we were happy to get the same amount of visitors in a six month span that the Canfield site has gotten in 2 weeks.

While you may expect me to say that I will now only cater to Canfield-like sites and go after the companies that provide a product/service that is widely appealing to the general public, that’s not the case. Every company and their marketing/design needs provide a special set of challenges. True, acquiring a large user group is easier with some projects, but addressing the challenges of each project and finding a way to work through them is part of the fun of this work and I have always enjoyed being as varied as possible in both the media I work in and the clients I cater to. However, it certainly does make me consider what other projects I can get involved with that take advantage of subject matters that appeal to a wide range of people – like biking. I guess the bottom line is that it sure is nice to be really popular sometimes!

Aaron