You may want to have the Facebook like / recommend button on every page of your website. The standard code works great unless some of your pages are secure, using the https:// protocol. Ecommerce websites are the most common example.

This is an easy fix for domains, such as Facebook that support SSL. To avoid browsers SSL warnings that create high anxiety for your website visitors, don’t specify the transport protocol.

In plain English: instead of using http:// or https:// in the code that Facebook gives you, use // instead.

User Experience #1 - Image by Paul Veugen

A recent study from Forester found that emotional and engagement is the key to gaining and keeping customers.  Now has any well versed marketer will tell you this is marketing 101 but once you dive a little bit deeper into the report it reveals some interesting findings.

First it the report concluded that companies are investing 58% more in web design than last year, and 37% of these companies are investing in behavioral analytics.  One shocking number is that 90% of companies fail when it comes to site experience.

(more…)

Download Special Report (PDF)

The internet exists mainly because we are social animals. Social media is just the latest form of groups of people sitting around the campfire.

One such example of this comes from Groupon a group buying service who attributes much of its success and growth to the ability for users to easily share the daily deal with their social circle.

We see this happen often when we login into Facebook. Someone sharing the latest GroupOn or LivingSocial deal and enticing their friends to join them in purchasing. You could argue that GroupOn wouldn’t even have had a chance if it wasn’t for the popularity of social media.

There have been other attempts of similar services in the past but those have not grown as fast or as big. We’ve watched the rise of GroupOn and would argue the main reason for this is the usage of social networks.

When developing a social network what are the key elements you want in place?

People are getting sick of registering and declaring their friends on each and every site. Lost passwords, multiple logins, and entering the same information over and over is one of the reasons why new networks fail to grow to their full potential.

We have include more within our special report titled How To Build Social Media into Your Social Networking Website

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect is Facebook’s latest addition to its development platform. It enables developers to leverage the power of Facebook’s social context in existing, third-party Web sites. The platform features seamless, one-click authentication, Facebook friend account linking, distribution back into Facebook streams, and the full power of the Facebook REST-like API and FQL. Utilizing Facebook Connect for authentication has proven to dramatically increase site exposure and new user registrations.

OpenID

You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID, you control how much of that information is shared with the websites you visit.

OpenID is rapidly gaining adoption on the web, with over one billion OpenID enabled user accounts and over 50,000 websites accepting OpenID for logins. Several large organizations either issue or accept OpenIDs, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, Sears, Universal Music Group, France Telecom, Novell, Sun, Telecom Italia, and many more.

ALLOW EASY OF SHARING CONTENT

One key element you want to design within a social network is the ability for content to be shared with other social platforms. A great example of this is a recent change by YouTube. You’ll notice that when you watch a video from YouTube you get these options:

That is just the beginning, to learn more about what elements your custom social network should include visit this page to download our special report on How To Build Social Media into Your Social Networking Website.

Does social media have a place in corporate web design? This question is one we get asked often and we have put together not only this post but a great special report that you can find here: Social Media and Corporate Web Design.

So does social media have a place in a company’s website or is just for blogs? The short answer is yes. Social media has worked it’s way into every element of the web. Twitter itself was recently inducted into the library of congress and Facebook is working on taking over the internet with Like buttons. If this reason wasn’t enough then we move onto the generational issue.

The younger generation really does expect a corporation to be participating in some form of social media. Social media into corporate web designs should be completely embraced. The one thing it shows above all else is that the organization can be reached, cares, and wants to engage with their customers.

Expectations

When the web first hit mainstream it became obvious that if you didn’t have a website you weren’t considered “in business”. Many consumers simply didn’t trust companies that did not have a website.

This same paradigm of thought is starting to come to social media. Increasingly the younger generations are expecting that a responsible organization will engage within social media.

Social Elements of Corporate Web Design

Social Media and Corp Web Design (PDF)

I’ll summarize here what we have put in our report. These are the top elements that you should have within your corporate web design. I should mention that each industry and vertical market will have it’s own networks and interaction points but we can generalize on the concepts:

• Follow Us Buttons. These are the buttons or icons that link to your social presence, these should be prominent and be on 95% of your web pages.
  Share Buttons. These allow your users to easily share your content within their own social circle. We also suggest these show up on the majority of your web pages.
• Widgets. Widgets allow you to pull content from the social networks themselves. These can be powerful as well. These create a element of social proof but also allow for another interaction point for your user.
• The About Us Page. Studies have shown that one of the most visited page of a website is the about us page. We recommend that you make the about us page a business accelerator page–think about copy, headlines, and calls to action.
• The Team Page. If your company embraces social media include these connections on the team page.
• Social Media Page. We also suggest that you put together a roundup page of all your social media efforts. The users that care about social media will find this page helpful.

In Conclusion

Social media has a seat at the table of corporate web design. It’s an important element of any modern corporate website. Generally the more that you participate within social media the more that the ROI becomes apparent. The key is just to make sure that you are not just putting in social connections just to check off a box– you have to mean it and spend the time and effort with the engagement.

GlenboorkLumber.com was a client who had an outdated website and was in need of a revamped content management system that would be easy to update as well as search engine friendly. After consulting with the client to learn more about the kinds of services that they provided, we were able to figure out the best way to display their services by altering their corporate web design.

When altering the corporate web design for this Minnesota lumber yard, we stuck with the client’s original colors of red, white and blue. We then determined what the main aspects of their business were and made sure that these various aspects were displayed prominently on the site. These business aspects included the following: multiple locations, calls to action, products and services, and establishing company credibility. In order to display their locations, we put the information for the locations in the header of the page. Next, we created easy to navigate dropdown menus so that potential customers would be able to view all of their products and services. Finally, we created a news section in order to display upcoming events. To ensure our web design met the clients expectations we first built a web prototype.

The previous corporate web design of this particular client was old and outdated and failed to show the client’s size and reputation in the lumber industry. Additionally, the old design was not user-friendly and resulted in visitors to the site being confused about what the client had to offer. For this, and other reasons, we had to make sure that the new corporate web design captured the client’s vision. In order to accomplish this, we planned out the website prior to building it. Working with the client’s sales manager, we made sure that we had an understanding of all of the client’s products and services as well as what they wanted to say on the website. Afterwards, our website architect was able to successfully plan out the flow of the new and improved website within a wireframe.

Besides selling more products by getting bloggers to write reviews on them, you can increase your search engine ranking from the links created during the review process.  As many of you know building links coming back to your website helps increase your websites search engine ranking.

When you send a product to the approved blogger they will write a review and most likely add a link in that review going back to your website.  This one-way link is a huge benefit to your websites search engine goals.  Most of the time Google gives bloggers higher search engine rankings because they are updating content regularly.  Your review will be one of those pages that are weighed heavily, talking about your product, and linking back to your website.  These are the three major components to any link building campaign.

How Do I Tell What Links Were Added In A Review?

The power of Tomoson is its reporting features.  After a blogger writes a review they need to verify it with a simple piece of code they copy into the review.  This piece of code serves two purposes:

1.       It will display an icon stating this is a review the blogger got a free product for (Which is now required by law for all bloggers to do)

2.       It will capture the review so we can display it in your Tomoson.com control panel.

The second purpose gives you, the promoter all the power to review what was written, how many links are in the review, and where they link.  This makes Tomoson.com not only a powerful sales tool but a powerful SEO tool as well.

Next week we’ll review the tomoson.com Control Panel.

Tomoson.com Link Management Control Panel

Discountinvestmentadvisor.com is a membership based discount investment advisor website that allows its members to sign up, take a questionnaire and be placed into a suggested stock portfolio. Members who join the web site pay a fee to be on the website and, as a result, are allowed access to update information regarding suggestions as to what stocks they should invest in. Owners of this web site have full control over adding, editing, or removing stock portfolio information at any time.

The issue with this particular client’s web site was that even though it was membership based, we needed to create a CMS backend in order to allow the owners to have text editing capabilities. We changed the corporate web design to allow the owners to add images, change meta tags for search engines and change content without needing to know any coding language or html.

Because the client needed a number of customizations to the drupal platform, we decided to plan out the corporate web design before coding it. We consulted with the client who then worked with our architecture consultants to understand the client’s vision. After it was approved, a prototype was subsequently developed and sent over to our graphics team and coders for final implementation.

As a part of the corporate web design, there was also a section for portfolio management where each client takes a questionnaire which is then placed into a recommended portfolio based on conservative to aggressive. As a result, the client needed a system to make it easy for them to calculate both year and earning percentage in order to better control the portfolios. We created a portfolio management system that would allow each administrator the ability to update information instantly, thereby making it easier to manage their portfolios. We also produced a questionnaire creator that would give administrators the ability to change questions and the value of each answer, thereby manipulating the questionnaire to fit any portfolio that they wanted.