Here is another of our latest websites, just launched for Coordinated Benefits Group.
They realized the importance of having an easy to navigate website with lots of up-to-date information to help their clients and prospects.
Special Feature – The addition of the Community Focus section is a great way for agencies to highlight local non-profit organizations they support. It also helps to draw increased web traffic to the site and keeps readers engaged when they visit the site.
Having difficulty coming up with a new idea or content? Here are six reasons to try crowdsourcing.
Our company, Wild Creations, is coming up on our six year anniversary. We have a number of new initiatives, and we felt now would be a great opportunity to shake things up and create a new “identity” for the company. We have a comprehensive plan that starts with the simply task of developing a fresh, new logo that captured the new company vision and the free-spirited, adventurous culture we encourage.
There was one problem.
Because we had developed our original logo and have been married to it for so long, it has been difficult to break the emotional bond we have to it. Indeed, every attempt we made internally fell short, and we were certain no outside firm could create a respectable replacement for our beloved “eyes.”
We were a victim of the IKEA Effect.
Then we decided to try crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining ideas, services, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, or more specifically, an online community rather than from traditional employees or service providers. We submitted a project on 99designs.com, the “world’s largest online graphic design marketplace connecting passionate designers from around the globe with customers seeking quality, affordable design services.”
The service is easy to use. You submit a project on the website with a description of your needs (in our case, a new logo). The online community of graphic artists then springs into action, submitting ideas with the ultimate goal of earning the project fee. Remarkably, for as little as $299, we had access to over 206,000 graphic designers, from all over the world.
The result was fantastic, and we received over 300 new and unique submissions. Ironically, we chose a design that did not follow our suggested guidelines (it has no eyes). It turns out we didn’t know what we wanted from the start, but we knew it when we saw it!
Crowdsourcing is a quickly growing industry, not only for graphic design but also numerous other services. If you are a small business owner, here are six reasons you should be considering crowdsourcing for your business:
Subcontracting a graphic designer could run hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and there is no guarantee you’ll like any of the designs they submit. Crowdsourcing gives you access to tens of thousands of designers for less.
Some businesses prefer to have graphic designers on staff in order to closely control the creative aspects of the business. Unfortunately this can be very cost prohibitive with salaries, payroll taxes, benefits, etc. As well, on-staff designers will not be fully utilized during down time.
Every new design project needs to be managed, from conceptualization through revisions to final selection. With crowdsourcing, you submit your idea and let the tens of thousands of designers manage the project for you.
You will most likely receive tens, hundred, and even thousands of creative options to choose from. While this could be a distraction, sites like 99Designs allows you to eliminate unappealing designs in real time, reducing the number of options as well as providing designers feedback.
With no paradigms, emotional attachments, or insecurities, the designers are free to be as creative as they want. Indeed, the more creative, the more likely they will get noticed and selected.
You can tap your professional, personal, and social networks to vote on your top choices, which will empower your fans and create excitement and anticipation for the contest.
Crowdsourcing is just starting to get the attention it deserves. It creates wonderful and affordable options for small businesses and entrepreneurs who need short term, creative work done. Indeed, prior to finding a new logo for Wild Creations, we used crowdsourcing to find the logo for our start-up crowd funding website, Jumpoff.co. It works that well.
Surely you have seen people glued to their smartphone screen while walking across the street or out at dinner.
But how does business insert itself into such familiar scenarios, knowing today there are literally more smartphones than toothbrushes in the world?
First consider your website. How will yours look on a smartphone or tablet? If you are expecting people to just “pinch and spread” your website while they are viewing it on a phone, you will rapidly lose mobile visitors. There’s only so much dragging and tapping and flicking a person can endure.
If your business targets people on the move, such as retailers, restaurants, dry cleaners, Realtors do, you just have to do better.
There are two ways to ensure that the experience of viewing your website on a smaller device is more pleasing. You may have heard of the two terms for this: Responsive Web Design (RWD) and Mobile. These are two markedly different approaches.
In creating a responsive website, you basically make your “big” website – your desktop website – adapt to the frame of whatever device a person is viewing.
With this approach, the site and its content will transform to match the width of the web browser used to view it. This allows the website to be viewed in an optimal way on every device from smartphones all the way up to large computer monitors. Since the site is programmed to conform to the device, horizontal scrolling never is required. Neither are panning or pinching to zoom as they are when viewing fixed-width websites on small devices. Buttons will be the right size to tap on small devices, etc.
Responsive web design senses the dimensions of the available screen and morphs into that receiving shape. There’s no more pinching and pulling. Everything is essentially visible from the start.
Still the content is “linearized” so that all people have to do is scroll down.
However, when people are on the fly, they don’t necessarily want to scroll down on a pre-squeezed page to read the deep content. They really just want the facts, ma’am.
Read More (Source: Laurie Macomber, Northern Colorado Business Report)
Stale content got you down? When was the last time your website got a little TLC?
If you’ve been putting off a website refresh, stop it already. The time is now. And here’s how.
Wrap your head around the situation that is your website. You know what you want it to do for you: assist your business. Now get specific about the goals your website should accomplish for your business and its visitors.
Define conversions: You may already have done this at some point but it’s worth doing again — from scratch. List the conversions you want performed on your site and then compare that list to your previous site goals. Maybe they’ve changed. Maybe you forgot about something that you needed to be reminded of. If you didn’t have a list of conversions as part of your website strategy from before, now you do. Let it guide your site design and content offerings.
Conversion examples are:
Assign priority: Take a list of site pages and silos and give them a rank of importance to the business goals. On a spreadsheet, indicate the goals a landing page or silo is responsible for. Key pages and/or sections of your site can be addressed first. You can use this spreadsheet throughout the refresh project to manage the updates to keywords, body content, Meta data and calls to action. Create a column for each of those essential elements on your spreadsheet as well.
Set deadlines: This is simply time management 101. If you have set dates for when you want certain pages or sections of the site reviewed, edited and published, the project is likely to keep moving forward.
Read More (Source: Virginia Nussey, Brue Clay, Inc., bruceclay.com)
Consumers are migrating away from PC-based Internet usage and are increasingly using mobile devices as their default gateway to the Internet, according to the latest release of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide New Media Market Model. The United States leads that trend, with Western Europe and Japan only about two years behind. In the U.S., the number of people accessing the Internet through PCs will shrink from 240 million consumers in 2012 to 225 million in 2016. At the same time, the number of mobile users will increase from 174 million to 265 million.
In 2015, for the first time ever, there will be more U.S. consumers accessing the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs.
“In the consumer world, mobile Internet usage is already beginning to displace PC usage, and the United States is leading this trend,” said Karsten Weide, program vice president, Media & Entertainment at IDC. “There has been much talk about how the future of the Internet will be mobile first and PC second. In the United States, that future is now.”
Additional findings from the New Media Market Model include the following:
“The Great PC Exodus on the Internet is happening because the PC was never truly a consumer product,” added Weide. “Many consumers use them because there was no better alternative. Now, with the huge and growing installed base of more user-friendly tablets and smartphones, there are.”
The IDC study, Worldwide New Media Market Model 1H-2012 Highlights: Internet Becomes Ever More Mobile, Ever Less PC-Based (IDC #237459), features the most interesting findings from IDC’s latest Worldwide New Media Market Model.
Source: Karsten Weide, IDC, www.idc.com
There is a general perception that good web design pertains only to a good-looking site, graphics-wise. But good web design is far more than the looks. There are several factors contributing to the effectiveness of a website because good design is aesthetically-appealing, content-relevant, and technically-savvy.
Overall, good web design can impact the traffic on your website. It increases your chances of making it to the top of Google searches which means effective advertising for your business. It also benefits establishing good reputation in the online community, thus expanding your network of customers and business partners. Good web design is always user-centered and continues to improve based on the needs of its audience.
Read More (Source: webdesignservices.com)
Every business with a Web site should make Search Engine Optimization — trying to get your site as high up as possible on Google and Bing search-results pages — a part of their growth strategy.At its most basic, “SEO” means finding ways to increase your site’s appearance in web visitors’ search results. This generally means more traffic to your site.
While intense SEO can involve complex site restructuring with a firm (or consultant) that specializes in this area, there are a few simple steps you can take yourself to increase your search engine ranking.
All it requires is a little effort, and some re-thinking of how you approach content on your site.
You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings. MarketingVox suggests that you keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar.
It’s also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they’re using to find your site, according to PC World.
You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?
The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords, PC World notes.
BEWARE: Putting ridiculous amounts of keywords on your site will get you labeled as a spammer, and search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of “keyword-stuffing.” Be strategic in your keyword use.
There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site — it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages, SEO Consult says.
You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content. MarketingVox advises that you also make the anchor text search-engine-friendly: “The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.”
As with all other SEO approaches, be sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into excessive linking — you don’t want your visitors to get annoyed.
Read More (Source: Bianca Male, BusinessInsider.com)
In an age of digital communities, your website should be more than “just another website.” It should be as distinctive as your business and offer a visually engaging and intuitive experience for your visitors.
Your website is your digital stage. You don’t have to be a superstar to engage with your customers, but with the right strategy in place you can make that impression.
Your website should tell any visitor what your business is about instantly. The moment someone lands on any page, blog post or even a 404 error page, your website should make them want to find out more – not click away.
How does your brand make visitors feel? Your web design strategy should ensure visitors feel what’s aligned with your business personality. Achieve that cohesion by using complementary colors, typography, images and site layout.
If a visitor can’t find what they’re looking for, they will look elsewhere. The evolution of web design has implemented standards of usability that people have become accustomed to – such as the location of the navigation menu. While you don’t have to be rigid in your approach (in fact, a creative approach is often the best one), your website should be easy to use and explore.
You’re not in business to be like someone else, so your website should reflect your unique approach. A poorly designed or “identikit” website could actually do more harm than good. Consumers have always been visually engaged and in a digital era of instant web-access your design strategy is an ongoing investment in your business.
Your website may look good but if you haven’t integrated social media into your design strategy, you may lose potential future admirers. Your design should be consistent across all social media platforms and instantly recognizable as YOU. Incorporating cross-platform functionality into your design is an essential part of your strategy. Using a Facebook “like”, “recent tweets” or “recently pinned” button on your website makes it easy for visitors to interact with you. A unifying design approach across multiple platforms reinforces your brand message.
Read More (Source: Jules Robson, waveapps.com)
Small business owners live and thrive in a world full of buzzwords, trends and fads; and innovators are always looking for the next “it” when it comes to running your business. How many headlines do we see on a weekly basis claiming that your business will sink without marketing method X or that Internet innovation Y will make or break your business in 2012? The world of marketing moves quickly. It’s easy to get hung on marketing’s flavor of the week and obsess over whichever buzzword claims to rake in millions in minutes.
A business isn’t built on buzzwords, unfortunately. What creates a successful business is patience, innovation and resourcefulness. Take away the smoke and mirrors and one quickly realizes that there’s no shortcut or quick-fix when it comes to entrepreneurship.
That said, some buzzwords are worth their buzz. Some innovations are worth looking into, and aren’t be-all, end-all if a business wants to get on board; one such example is crowdsourcing. Low-risk, high reward, and flexibility. Sounds like marketing snake oil, doesn’t it? Think again.
Crowdsourcing. You’ve probably heard the term thrown around on marketing blogs or perhaps just heard it in passing. It sounds like a token buzzword, doesn’t it?
The concept behind crowdsourcing is rather simple. Need a task done? Outsource it. Who performs the task? The crowd; a group of workers as small or big as you’d like, and most of the time, you don’t necessarily even know who’s doing the work. Sounds problematic, doesn’t it? Worry not, as crowdsourcing allows you to make the rules and determine which work makes the cut. You often only pay for what you need, meanwhile also having the flexibility to do work that needs to be done quickly and easily without relying on employees or in-house resources.
Read More (Source: Brent Barnhart, ChamberofCommerce.com)