Big news: online revisionism can have a positive effect on your business or personal life! Read a true-life story of online marketing efficiency and redemption.

For Workbox and me, two doses of online revisionism helped me (1) create a bit of really inexpensive marketing, and (2) look like a non-idiot sooner rather than later. Some will argue that I still do not look like a non-idiot, but that’s a separate issue and only tangentially related to this blog post.

1. Online Revisionism for Cheap Marketing

I mean updating and reusing old marketing assets, like a video.

A little history: eight years ago, I taught a class on website basics at the San Francisco Small Business Administration. The SBA must have thought I was enough of a hambone to appear in a video that promoted the SBA, so they got a pro videographer to volunteer (I think it was Doug Wolens of http://i-maginemedia.com), I created a script, then Doug shot and edited it. In the process, Doug added images of websites – two were Workbox clients, one was not – to highlight the points made in the script. So, I got this free, cool, little video to use for marketing purposes.

Years later, I got around to adding the video to my corporate blog. I wasn’t happy that the video highlighted companies that were no longer (or never were) active clients, but I didn’t know enough about video editing to do anything about it, and, frankly, it didn’t seem that important. It was accurate when it was made and I figured most folks would neither notice or nor care.

More recently, I looked at the video for the first time in quite a while, and decided it was time to pay someone to do some online video revisionism for Workbox.

The first website shown in the old video, the amazing Amy Reece’s http://www.leadereview.com, was used to highlight the “tell your story quickly” theme. Workbox did build this website and it did its job in the video at the time, and, amazingly, Amy is still using this website to run her business (this website is at least eight years old, requires almost no technical maintenance and is built on an .ASP platform – it just works)! However, I wanted to highlight a more recent website and promote the work we’ve been doing in the biotech and pharmaceutical markets.

So, I chose http://www.macrogenics.com to replace it, and focused on their product pipeline. If you’re not in the biotech/pharma industry or market, a company’s pipeline might not mean much to you, but, believe me, it’s critical – it tells customers, partners, investors and potential employees a whole lot.

Pipelines are so important in that industry, I wrote two blog posts about it. The first is about pipelines in general and the second is about a WordPress plugin we created:

> WordPress for Biotech & Pharma: It’s All About the Pipeline

> Pharmaceutical Pipeline Plugin for Wordpress

The video’s second theme is “stay up-to-date.” Unfortunately, the law firm website we chose to highlight this theme no longer exists, and the firm itself (Tomlinson, Zisko, Morosoli & Mazer) is closed. Fortunately, I’m still in touch with several of the attorneys from that firm (in particular the brilliant and tech-savvy Rick Horning at http://www.snrdenton.com).

I replaced the old law firm website with the Life Sciences Foundation website (http://www.lifesciencesfoundation.org) for a few reasons. First, they do a good job of staying up-to-date with interesting content. Second, their content is related to the life sciences/biotech/pharma industry, so that matched my goals, too. Finally, we’re rather proud of it (the extremely talented Gregoire Vion did the design – http://www.grgwr.com – and we built it with a kick-ass PHP/MySQL CMS).

For this site we also created a groovy timeline scroller built on HTML 5, and gave away the specs and script in a blog post, so I wanted to promote that, as well:

> Scrolling Timeline in HTML 5 – Mac, Win, IOS, Android

Finally, a website Workbox did not build was highlighting the third (and last) theme in the video, which is “collect contact information.” The website was for a company called Fluidance. Its URL redirects to http://josieadele.com, and more specifically http://josieadele.com/category/collections/fluidance. I don’t remember meeting Josie, but her work is lovely.

http://mcdill.com (McDill Associates’ marketing website) replaces Fluidance because … well, I just like the way it looks. They’re awesome, the site design is awesome (they created the design, Workbox built it on WordPress). ‘Nuff said.

The old video was edited by a provider I found on Elance (his name is Cagatay A. and his URL is https://www.elance.com/s/cakturk/). I’m delighted with the work and, although I won’t mention the price, it was less than a nice dinner here in SF.

Here’s the new video: http://youtu.be/fNhx3OqCdew

Here’s the old video: http://youtu.be/_GmrogzSsVk

… they’re only 1 minute, 13 seconds long …

I hope you have some old assets lying around that can be updated this easily and inexpensively, and that this post might inspire you to dig them up – online revisionism can be good for biz.

2. Online Revisionism: Look Like a Non-Idiot by Using a 301 Redirect

After I uploaded the new video to YouTube, I created a little blog post to promote it, and immediately Tweeted, LinkedIn’d and Facebooked the post. Unfortunately, I misspelled “timeless” in the blog’s title (“timless”).

If you know WordPress, you know that the post’s URL included the misspelling, too. So, I had 2 errors to correct – the post title and the URL. Ugh.

The solution was to edit the post title and URL while simultaneously adding a 301 redirect to the new URL. Fortunately, with Workbox’s handy versioning feature for WordPress, I could easily create and preview the edits and keep the old post live, while Gleb edited the .htaccess file. Once he was done with the 301 redirect, I published the edits.

Here’s our blog post on the WordPress preview feature: http://blog.workbox.com/wp-pages-versioning-drafts-revisions/

Idiot URL: http://blog.workbox.com/timless-tips-3-things-your-website-must-do-updated/ (note: “timless”; now redirects)

Non-Idiot URL: http://blog.workbox.com/timeless-tips-3-things-your-website-must-do-updated/

Bonus: we made the change before Google or the Wayback Machine cached the error! Speedy revisionism rules!

However, although I’m in favor of online revisionism, I have to admit that Workbox is in fact “timless.” We have no Tims, Timothies, Timofeis or Dmitrys at Workbox (which, when you consider the prevalence of the name Dmitry in Russia, is surprising – especially given the fact that we had five at one time many years ago).

And whether my three tips are “timeless” or not, only you and the future can determine. A little online revisionism did, however, save me some money and, I hope, make me look like more of a non-idiot. But, like all online marketing, that judgment is in the viewer’s eyes.

Happy online marketing!

Eric Weidner

Although this video shows a slightly younger Eric Weidner, it contains timeless advice for small businesses who want to build a website.

1. Tell your story quickly so visitors immediately know why they should care about your business.
2. Keep the content up-to-date so your company looks alive.
3. Gather contact information so you can market to visitors.

We updated this video to feature our wonderful clients MacroGenics, Life Sciences Foundation and McDill Associates.

See the video now:

In the normal course of business events, it may happen that some government bureaucracy or other could decide that the content in your pharmaceutical product website does not meet their tight and often confusing standards. Unfortunately, while you’re editing the content and going through the approval process, you might need to make the offending content inaccessible to the public – in other words, you have to kill the website.

The only good news is that it isn’t that hard to make your site disappear. The key is to take a few steps to be prepared. Also, you won’t actually need to delete the website – you’ll simply hide it from public view.

Here’s how to build your own “kill switch:”

1. Prepare for the worst

1.1. Create an emergency landing page. This should contain whatever critical information your team thinks is necessary for visitors to see if they come to the site’s URL, like contact information or a contact form. For some pharma product sites, you will also need to have a link to your prescribing information and safety information and any running promotions or discounts (often in PDF format). This emergency landing page should be named index.html.* Also, you might want to include any analytics codes in the page so you continue to track stats while the main site is down.

Keep this page accessible in case of emergency.

1.2. Register with Google Webmaster Tools. Be sure you are registered with Google’s Webmaster Tools to manage your company’s website.  You will need this authority to remove all pages from Google’s index so people won’t accidentally find old page content or URLs cached by Google.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Google will walk you through a process to confirm you are the actual site manager.

1.3. Register with Bing Webmaster. Similar to Google, Bing has a webmaster feature and can remove your site from its index so people won’t accidentally find old content or URLs. You should be sure you register your site here, too.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

1.4. Create a 301 redirect script. This script redirects from all existing URLs to your new emergency landing page.

Here’s the text:

redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html

When you add this to your .htaccess file, anyone who goes to a URL from the “dead” site will instead be immediately redirected to the emergency homepage. Keep this code accessible in case of emergency.

1.5 Create a robots.txt file. This file will prevent most search engine robots from indexing the site pages, and removes old pages from the Internet Archive’s popular “Wayback Machine.”

The file should contain this text:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Hopefully, you will never have to actually use your “kill switch;” however, if you do, here’s the process:

2. How to kill a website: the process

2.1. Upload emergency index.html. If your site currently defaults to index.html, either rename or move this file and put the emergency landing page index.html file in its place.

2.2. Edit your .htaccess file. Add the 301 redirect text to your .htaccess file. Your webmaster or IT team may have to do this for you.

2.3. Upload the robots.txt file to your website’s root directory. Your webmaster or IT team will know what to do.

2.4. Remove all pages from Google’s index. Login to Google Webmaster Tools, and follow these instructions:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663427

2.5. Remove all pages from Bing’s index. Bing shows how to do this here:

http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/hh204505.aspx

2.6 Move the old website. Copy the entire old website to a password-protected directory so your team can access it.

Again, I hope your company never has to take down a website, but a little bit of preparation can help if you do find yourself in a situation that requires you use a “kill switch.”

Also see our previous post: Pharmaceutical Product Website Management: Helping IT and Compliance Do Their Jobs

Have any questions, comments or other ideas? Please let me know. – Eric Weidner

* You can name the emergency page anything you like (like whatever.html) since you’re doing a 301 redirect to a specific URL, but we think it is simpler to name it index.html.

UC Santa Cruz’s world-famous Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems apprenticeship program is helping change agri-business. The www.growafarmer.org website helps alumni, along with the growing community of beginning farmers, with resources, event information, and a beginning farmer forum. A shovel might not be as sexy as a guitar, but the results sure taste good!

Some site highlights:

• Job listings
• Land listings
• Alumni current and past project and business descriptions
• Farmer Forum
• Google map integration
• Member messaging system
• Online and alumni member management system

McDill Associates (www.mcdill.com), a superstar marketing agency that specializes in the food and beverage industry, trusted Workbox to take their beautiful designs and turn them into a powerful WordPress website.

We’d like to brag about the easy-to-use, but super-sophisticated slideshow feature we customized for them, but ultimately, we think the results speak for themselves:

A detail of the slideshow feature:

The old site:

Workbox is extremely proud to announce the launch of Jazz Pharmaceuticals’ new website. The design was created by the talented and insightful Dennig Marketing Group, and Workbox built the site with highly customized WordPress for the content management system. This is the fourth iteration of its corporate website Workbox has built for Jazz over our seven-year relationship (we started with Jazz before they were a public corporation!).

In addition to simplifying the overall look and feel, we standardized the site’s subnavigation (and utilized right nav). We believe visitors will find it fast and easy to use.

Jazz’s bigger news is that they combined forces with Ireland-based Azur Pharmaceuticals to create a new entity: Jazz Pharmaceuticals plc.

Workbox looks forward to continuing work with the amazing team at Jazz and is currently “migrating” all of Jazz’s product websites from static HTML to the WordPress CMS.

Workbox is excited to announce the launch of Liquor License Connection at http://ca.liquorlicenseconnection.com. This new business is changing the way liquor licenses are bought and sold in California by giving license owners and buyers a more transparent, efficient and inexpensive way to engage in the sale of liquor licenses.

Currently, most buyers and sellers need to work through a broker to help them navigate the paper-work intensive and confusing process required by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Liquor License Connection, however, gives liquor license sellers and buyers a simple way to negotiate a price and complete a sale. Liquor License Connection also streamlines the documentation process for buyers and charges much less than typical brokers.

Additionally, Liquor License Connection shows comparable sale prices for similar, recent transactions (known as “comps”) to registered users so there is less mystery involved in the transaction negotiation.

Finally, if a particular sale requires a little extra assistance, or other services are needed, Liquor License Connection has highly experienced partners who can help with liquor license expediting, escrow, 500 foot surveys, legal services and recording services.

Again, we are very excited to be part of a business that could radically change and improve an inefficient and confusing industry.

What Workbox is doing: all technical development, UI and online marketing consulting.

Overview: An outline of recommendations for managing development, editing, approval and publishing of pharmaceutical product marketing websites.

For: Website developers, in-house IT teams, in-house marketing teams, in-house compliance teams.

Like all product websites, pharmaceutical product websites have to meet the sales, marketing and IT needs of their parent companies. But they also come with a bunch of other requirements that are unique to regulated industries (particularly if the products are non-OTC).

Legal, compliance and regulatory teams and agencies may need to review, approve, “roll back” or completely eliminate specific content, pages or entire websites – and it often needs to be done immediately. This can be a surprisingly difficult (and potentially costly) process if you aren’t prepared.

So, after putting out a few fires and assisting frantic IT teams, here are our recommendations for managing pharmaceutical product websites.

1. Full backup upon every major site edit, and backup archive.

First, regulators may ask to review your full site as it existed on a specific date. Second, your legal department may require the same thing. Finally, you may be required to “roll back” the website content and functionality to a previous version on a site-wide level. So make sure you have a full backup that you can present online if necessary.

2. Four functional copies of the website for different purposes and stages in the development, approval and publishing process.

First, the live/production site that is visible to the public.

Second, a password-protected “validation” site that will be used by compliance, regulatory and legal teams to review and approve the site before it is published and replaces the existing live site. Once this is approved, this site is moved to production.

Third, a password-protected “test” site for marketing and IT teams to review content edits made by the marketing team and technical edits made by the development team. Once these teams approve this website, it is moved to validation.

Fourth and finally, a development site dedicated to your development team to work on and test technical edits.

3. Rapid shut down process and assets.

This is the worst-case scenario: your compliance team or a regulatory agency requires massive or site-wide content edits and the existing site simply cannot be visible to the public until a new website and content is approved. Some people call this a “kill switch” or a “shut down site.” No matter, you need to be prepared for the worst. Please see our blog post dedicated to the process of taking a website down (the “kill switch” process).

4. A content management system (CMS) so you can quickly edit content and “roll back” content on specific pages.

A good CMS makes it easy to edit content and, if required, “roll it back” to a previous state if issues arise. A CMS will also keep track of when edits were made and who made those edits. Finally, it can make it easier to manage “moving” the site through the various sites in the approval process.

5. SVN system for the development team.

This is a little geeky, but it helps the development team track technical changes and when those changes were made across all your websites. An SVN is an invaluable tool to keep things coordinated and manageable.

Some folks may think that this set up is excessive or too time-consuming, but non-compliance or regulatory errors can be extremely painful for a company. Also, Eric Weidner recently spoke with a corporate insurance attorney who mentioned that insurers are starting to look more seriously at how pharmaceutical companies maintain website assets and the processes they have in place for potential emergencies. This is definitely a case where “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

If you have additional ideas, think your business has a great way of handling website management, or think we missed something, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you!

Yours, Gleb Aksyutchenko and Eric Weidner

Workbox client Ampio Pharmaceuticals will open NASDAQ tomorrow (November 1, 2011) morning.

Congratulations to the entire Ampio team!

The Life Sciences Foundation’s website (www.lifesciencesfoundation.org – recently built and launched by Workbox) showcases important events, people, discoveries and organizations in the life sciences from the 18th century to the present. One of LSF’s goals was to create a dynamic, scrolling timeline feature that would give users an idea of the site’s subject matter, emphasize the presentation of “years and events” and help users quickly click into content.

We were all originally inspired by Google’s corporate timeline and all the great, free stuff they provide, but we needed to add a bit more functionality and design grooviness – and every bit of content, from the images to dropdown menus, had to be managed through our PHP-based content management system.

Ultimately, we decided to build the basic functionality using the jQuery Draggable plugin and jQuery UI animation plugin. Workbox’s technical architect, Kirill Egorov, decided not to use Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile solutions as they he felt that were too complicated and cumbersome for our purposes. So, a simpler solution was found. We’re going to show the code that specifically handles dragging/listing.

Identifying the device (function IsTouch):

We also used the jQuery Touch plugin, but it had to be modified because the start position of the “timeline” layer didn’t work correctly for our “move” event. Originally in the plugin, the start position of the layer to drag was defined as follows:

In the “touch” method we rewrote the piece that has to do with calculating the shift for “left” position:
Replacing this line:

with these

_startPos[0] — position of the pointer at “touchstart” event
_startData[0] —shift of the left position for the dragged layer at “touchstart”

Finally, this is how we initialize the component:

As a result, the timeline scrollbar works on IOS and Android mobile browsers!
Please feel free to use this stuff, give us feedback and send us links to stuff you’re built using it!

Cheers, Kirill Egorov, Gleb Aksyutchenko