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.
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.
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.
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.
We have been working with the online jewelry retailer Mykonospa.com for the last year to increase search engine rankings. We started out by targeting the most highly search Pandora Beads & Charms initially in 2009; providing the highest ROI for the client. Results have been good:
Building content for eCommerce Websites can be tricky. When someone comes to a category landing page they want to view the products; not paragraphs of text. So I wanted to share with our readers an easy work around on how to add content to eCommerce landing pages with out ruining the User Experience.
Step 1: Modify eCommerce Software so you can add content to the top of the page & the bottom of the page.
Step 2: Write & Publish a short paragraph at the top of the eCommerce Landing Page
Step 3: Write & publish a few paragraphs at the bottom of the eCommerce Landing Page. This way you can still have a good amount of text on the web page to tell search engines what the page is about while keeping the focus of the page on the products
Now you have an eCommerce Landing Page that is both user friendly both also search engine friendly. It is important to note that you can rank product pages #1 in the search engines with out too much content; but the more keyword optimized content the better!
Mykonos is a retailer of Pandora Jewelry, which is based out of Pennsylvania. Mykonospa.com is an ecommerce web site that sells authentic Pandora beads, Pandora bracelets as well as Pandora charms and more. They are one of the few authorized Pandora jewelry retailers. After creating a website in 2008, Mykonospa realized that it would have to take advantage of a new kind of eCommerce web site design if it was ever going to surpass its competitors.
The idea to create/revamp the ecommerce web site design came when the owner wanted to expand the business, but also wanted to set their company apart from its competitors. In order to get started, we first implemented a flash application called ‘Build a Pandora Bracelet.’ This application operates by pulling products from the ecommerce shopping cart database, which allows users to build their own bracelet.
Next, we incorporated a drag-and-drop feature to the ‘Build a Pandora Bracelet’ application in order to make it more user-friendly. This idea has proven to be a great success with thousands of users utilizing this feature in order to build their own bracelets. To further increase sales, we also added two additional features: 1) a shopping cart built in to the flash application (which allows a user to easily purchase all beads and charms that they’ve created), and 2) a print button (which gives each user a print-out of each product along with a sku and a description.
Building an extensive web site from scratch can sometimes be complicated as well as costly. Because Mykonospa.com was working within certain budget constraints, we decided to go a slightly different route. Rather than focusing on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, we instead launched an aggressive link building campaign along with a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, which has resulted in a 225% increase in website traffic for 2009.
Open up these applications: Word (with your text in it), Notepad (it’s in all programs> accessories folder if you are a windows user), and your websites edit.
Copy the text one paragraph at a time into notepad. Once inside notepad highlight all the content and copy it again.
Then open up your editor and click the copy and paste from text icon. This should open up a small window.
Click crtl+V to paste the text into that window and click ok.
Once the text is inside your editor you can start manipulating it with links, italic, bold, ect…. This is important because the editor will work a lot better if you follow these steps rather than copying and pasting directly from word. The reason is word will bring along some extra code messing with the editor and it’s formatting.
If you need to copy over bullet points from a word document follow these steps:
Follow the steps above first and then in the editor click the bullet points one at a time.
After each bullet point copy the text from the word document and paste it into the copy and paste from text icon (read above).
Repeat the steps for each of the bullet points to make sure the formatting is done correctly.
I hope this has helped you with some of your wysiwyg and fck editor formatting issues. Please feel free to contact WebBizIdeas.com with any of your questions.
We provide a service called website architecture (a.k.a. website planning) where we plan out your entire website before we start coding. This is absolutely critical when making a custom website or software, and is why we put everyone of our websites through it. I could write a long article about why it’s important but I will refer you to this image. It depicts the importance of planning and our process perfectly.
WHY WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE IS IMPORTANT IMAGE click here
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.
