October, 2013

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October 2013—Late summer and early fall were as busy as ever for us, culminating in the design and launch of two new websites over the last few weeks. Our very latest client site, which went live late this month, is for SystemExperts, an IT consulting boutique in the Boston area with a strong emphasis on security services. Meanwhile, in late August, we launched an all-new site for a venture capital client in Boston called WAVE Equity Partners. WAVE is a private equity firm that invests in sustainability technologies that have the potential to transform multiple industrial and/or geographical markets. (As advocates of renewable energy ourselves, Radar Media is particularly fond of the WAVE business model.)

What’s particularly interesting about the SystemExperts site is its responsive design. Once we understood how important it was for the site to look and work equally well across all platforms–including smartphones and tablet devices–we advocated a responsive design approach. This is where the site is able to automatically re-format each page to fit the exact screen dimensions of whatever device and browser is used to access it.

Thanks to modern content management systems like WordPress and Joomla, and the increasing availability of cutting edge responsive design frameworks, responsive design is now easier to achieve than it once was.

Make Your Next Site Responsive

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It’s no secret that sales of desktop PCs and laptops are on the decline. Even Apple with its much-vaunted hardware, has seen a big dip in iMac sales, so far at least outweighed by increasing sales of iPads and iPhones. So if you’ve been seeing a spike lately in your smartphone and tablet web traffic steps, join the party.

With so many people now surfing the web on smaller devices, now may be a good time to evaluate how well your site performs on smaller screen sizes. But first a word about our own best practices here at Radar Media.

Whenever we launch a new site, we make sure it works well on multiple browsers and operating systems. We also make adjustments for smaller devices. For example the drop-down menus should work regardless of screen size, and the site should easily pinch up or down to zoom in and out without issue.

For some mostly big companies like eBay and Amazon of course, that’s not good enough. Customers expect a truly optimized experience to be offered by way of an app in the app stores from Apple, Google/Android and Microsoft. For smaller companies with more limited budgets, though, developing a custom app has never been a viable option.

Fortunately now for them and many of our clients, there’s a new option option available called responsive design. Unlike apps, which require a separate software download, responsive design refers to a new way to design and build websites so that they automatically reformat themselves to look good and perform well on all screen sizes and shapes.

When viewed on a desktop, a responsive site looks like any other web design. But when viewed on a smartphone or tablet, the graphics automatically resize themselves to fit into the smaller screen real estate available. Even more impressively, the navigation changes from, say, a standard drop-down horizontal menu to one that’s more vertically-oriented and far more touch friendly. It’s as if the site were displaying as a custom app, but without the custom app development cost or client download.

It’s still early days for responsive design, and there are some design restrictions as a result. But a growing number of content management systems and frameworks, including WordPress and Joomla, now support it. To see responsive design in action, check out the Radar site for SystemExperts, one of our newer clients. If you don’t have time to run the site on multiple browsers and devices, then just try resizing the width of the browser from “normal” screen size to about the width of a smartphone screen. And behold the magic of responsive design in action.

Until next time…

Marketing Automation: The Next Step Beyond Google Analytics

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When we launch a new website, nearly all clients opt for us to include Google Analytics. It would be foolish, really, not to. . .it’s free and offers a great deal of insight about your web traffic sources, number of page hits, what parts of your site are drawing the most interest and more.

But Google Analytics is not and was never intended to be a marketing automation platform. That is, a tool designed specifically to give your marketing (and sales) departments a way to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, track leads, and create forms and landing pages, to name a few.

However a number of powerful and surprisingly affordable marketing automation systems are now available and catching on fast. Most are sold as cloud-based services that integrate pretty easily into a wide variety of sites. One that we’ve used for several of our client sites is called Pardot. And our clients swear by its effectiveness.

So what’s so great about Pardot and other marketing automation systems? I’d put being able to track leads to marketing campaigns high on the list. Say, for example, you send out a Pardot-enabled email blast about your latest new product. When readers click through to the items in the email, Pardot automatically records this in its database. If that same reader then returns two weeks later on the site in order to read more, Pardot will track that too.

Best of all, the information becomes actionable. Because Pardot (and similar systems) are designed to easily integrate into the major CRM systems (Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.) your salespeople will always have that detail at their fingertips when they follow up with a phone call or email.

With Pardot, your whole website becomes more sales and marketing driven. Say for example a prospect never responds to your emails, but one day decides to download a white paper from your site. Once they fill out a form for the white paper, your golden. From that point forward, Pardot will track when they come back to your site; how often and where they go to visit; and whether of course they decide to download any more information.

With that kind of intelligence your sales and marketing people can better grade the quality of your leads and follow-up at the most appropriate times. And an increase in sales is sure to follow!

Until next time…

May, 2013

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May 2013—This month we find ourselves deep in the middle of ongoing new website development as well as extensions of existing sites with new features. On the new site development front, we’re about halfway through the design and development for WAVE Equity Partners, a cleantech venture capital firm in Boston. WAVE’s approach to sustainable solutions is unique in the cleantech sector, and we’re enjoying working with the company as we hone the new site to reflect how and why it’s better. The new site should be live by summer.

Meanwhile, we just completed a new extension to the FieldView Solutions site. Specifically, our client wanted a way to make it easier for visitors to easily find local FieldView partners from wherever they are in the world. They also wanted to include specific people within FieldView corporate who could be contacted as well.

Hearing the requirements, we designed an easy-to-use partner locator tool using a series of simple drop-down menus. Locating partners is now a breeze for visitors, and the new feature is easy to maintain using the backend content management system used by FieldView to maintain the site.

CRM: The Missing Link to Your Website?

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Most smaller website use forms to gather leads. Information collected by the forms is then sent via email to a mailbox (e.g., sales@companyX.com) where they are then distributed to salespeople or manually entered into a CRM system.

As sales pick up that email system can become a bottleneck. A few days may slip by before the leads get entered in. Some names and names might be entered wrong. Or worse, leads could be lost altogether. Relying on any manual system like this once a certain level of traffic is reached is risky. Here at Radar Media, we’re seeing this more as our smaller clients grow up into larger, more successful ventures.

Fortunately this problem has been solved many times before, so there’s no need for you (or your integration partner) to reinvent the wheel. What’s needed is an automatic link, or integration, between your company’s CRM system and the website forms. These days, many companies use one of the leading CRM systems such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics or Zoho.com to keep track of their leads. Many such systems are sold on a service basis and are in the cloud. They help salespeople enter customer information, track pipeline activity, set up reminders, share leads and even calculate commissions.

Getting the information from your website into the CRM is a standard request that these CRM systems have been getting for several years now. So it’s no surprise that virtually all of them have developed plug-ins and other pieces of software that make the process pretty easy, especially if your site is built on one of the popular content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. This code is typically installed on your website, often in tandem with your forms, so that the information being entered into the form is then passed automatically into the CRM.

In some cases, the form itself will reside inside the CRM system and will be “framed out” on the website. To make this work, developers typically use an “iframe.” In this way the form appears to be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site, even though the form part of it is “in the cloud” running on, say, Salesforce.com servers.

Whichever way the CRM integration is handled, suffice to say it’s been done before. If your sales department is constantly asking about the new leads in the email pipeline, perhaps it’s time to automate the problem away.

Until next time….

March, 2013

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March 2013—Under development for three months, our new website for Mirror Image launched this month. Based in Tewksbury, Mass., Mirror Image is a leading provider of highly scalable online services that speed up delivery of rich media like video and music over the Internet.  Its clients are based all over the world.

The new site involved the creation of all new content, design and functionality. Because the content is database-driven, updates made to one part of the site — the news section, for example — is automatically updated in other sections. News headlines appearing on the homepage are automatically refreshed whenever a news story is added to the back end.

The homepage design conveys the global coverage of the company with a stylistic image of the globe encircled with the company’s Dynamic Data Network. Meanwhile, Radar refreshed and modernized the company’s logo to work better on the web and in print media.