The content of your Web site is crucial and should be developed to quickly answer the basic questions and needs of your specific target visitors. Research shows that you only have a few seconds to entice your visitors to stay so it's vital that you present obvious choices for them to find the information they need. In addition clear and compelling navigation options need to be present that allow your visitors to easily recognize where they should click to proceed through the sales/information process.

If your visitors become confused about what your site is about or how it applies to them, they are likely to just leave and look elsewhere. The goal of your front page is to allow visitors to qualify themselves as prospects for your business or organization and to proceed through the sales process by accepting a call to action that you offer. Actions can include purchasing online, contacting you for an appointment, subscribing to your newsletter/blog or whatever the specific next step is in your sales process.

The Essential Questions Visitors to Your Site Will Need Answered:

• What do you do? One of the most common mistakes that sites make is not being clear on exactly what they are providing. The more complex of solution you offer the more important it is to provide this answer in easy-to-understand language. The essence of what you do should be the basis of your organization's mission statement, but answering the "What you do" question will also include the specific products or services  you're offering.
• Why you do it? This is related to an organization's vision statement but needs to be expressed in concise language free from industry jargon. Telling visitors "why you do it" is a means of establishing credibility and positioning yourself as an expert advisor for recommending a solution to their needs. 
• Why are you the best choice? This question is the most vital for new prospects and should be answered by your unique value proposition. Your unique value proposition is simply a concise statement of how you meet their need better than anyone else.  In addition to stating your unique value, you need to back it up with real-life examples. The most effective support will be testimonials, portfolio's of your past work, and third party reviews or endorsements if available.
• What can I do? This is the question you want most asked because it means your visitor is satisfied (or at least intrigued) with the answers to their first three questions. They are asking how to proceed through your sales process. This doesn't mean they're necessarily ready to buy, but they're willing to take a step closer. Your site needs to present unambiguous action items for your customers to answer their question of "What can I do?" by providing conspicuous "call to action" links in the body of your front page and the navigation menu.

How To Provide the Answers

Here are a few key principles for answering your visitors' questions : 

1. Be concise. Paragraphs of text on your front page will bury the answers to your visitors' questions and result in a high abandon rate. Your front page, and navigation bar, should be thought of as a map that clearly directs people to more detailed information on the destination of their choice, without them having to think twice about their choices. While, supporting pages will provide more detailed answers the still must avoid verbosity to be effective.
2. Communicate in laymen's terms and avoid your industry's jargon. Realize that much of the internal language your organization uses may have no relevance for your visitors.
3. Provide clear call-to-action choices for all types of visitors. The fundamental questions presented above provide answers for newly aware prospects through "trial" or first-time buyers. If you anticipate clients, customers with an ongoing relationship with your organization, to be frequent visitors you need to accommodate the needs of these visitors. Other visitor types can include press, investors or employers. The answers to each type of visitor questions need to be presented in proportion to the importance they have towards achieving the overall goals of your site.

Labels: Web-Development-Strategy

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Posted by Douglas Case @ 1/26/2008 02:20:00 PM | 0 comments

FAQ: How does Adobe Contribute compare to RisingLine's Content Management sites?

Our WebSite 2.0 sites are based on the open source application CMS Made Simple which is completely different than Adobe Contribute. CMSMS offers all the non-technical editing capabilities of Contribute (in a much more productive server side software model) plus it offers all features and capabilities to develop an enterprise class site.

WebSite 2.0 offers all the features that would be available through a developer using Dreamweaver and a content manager using Contribute with the notable differences that WebSite 2.0 is exponentially easier to use and after we configure it on your Web server doesn't require a technical expert "developer" even for many advanced features such as dynamic drop down CSS menu systems.

Here's a brief list of the major differences of Contribute when compared to WebSite 2.0:

• Contribute is client side software. This means that you will only be able to edit a website on a desktop that has Contribute.
• Contribute requires that every user be licensed. This can be a costly process if there are a lot of users set to update a website.
• Contribute is a website editing tool, not a website development tool. A web developer is still required to build the initial website design (usually using Dreamweaver).
• Contribute edits one page at a time, making complex design elements such as navigation menus hard to manage if they aren't controlled through a single source, like a database, Server Side Includes, or XML file.
• Updating a website's content through Contribute can be a much slower process than using a server side CMS system like WebSite 2.0, since each page must be downloaded (and uploaded) individually.
• User cannot access source code, therefore any function code must be edited in a secondary program such as Dreamweaver.
• Contribute is a proprietary solution that is based on the concept that other Adobe software will be involved in the production process . . . our Content Management software is open source and does not require other specific software for optimal performance. In other words, there are no additional software purchases intended for those who use WebSite 2.0

Regarding editing and adding content to WebSite 2.0 . . . any skilled user or developer can work with WebSite 2.0 at their own level so there is nothing that really can't be done, it would just depend on the skill level of the user.

We have different permissions that can be turned on for individual users depending on their expertise (or you can turn them on/off yourself). For example one user may be non-technical so we might just give him/her permission to edit the content of one page, while another may have more technical aptitude so we would give them permission to create & delete pages, move pages around in the site structure, and edit any page.

A user could also be given the ability to edit the design skin(s) for a site if they were skilled in XHTML & CSS. Also, you have direct access to the code level of the content (and even the entire page if you want it) just by pressing a button on the page edit screen.

Another significant difference is that our WebSite 2.0 sites are coded for optimization with the major search engines. There are a lot of details in the code that we optimize for the target keywords of your pages that would require much more manual coding with a Dreamweaver / Contribute platform.

In addition we configure your Web server for optimal indexing with search engines and utilize Web 2.0 technology, namely Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to increase our clients search engine profile whenever possible. We've written a number of articles on SEO that go into the topic much more: http://risingline.com/blog/labels/Search-Engine-Optimization.html

Labels: Web-2.0, Web-Development-Strategy

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Posted by Douglas Case @ 1/15/2008 09:08:00 AM | 0 comments

As you may know, Google's Gmail is the most popular, and arguably best featured, free email service available. One of the challenges that I've encountered with it however is its default text-only email signature when composing emails via the Web.

The Best Solution

For Gmail users who would like to utilize graphic/html email signatures, the best solution is to link your Gmail account to a POP client (like Outlook or Entourage). You can then install a custom designed html email signature. If you're a client of ours the instructions for installing the custom email signature in Outlook or Entourage are posted in our FAQs.

This means of course that to have your custom HTML email signature inserted in outgoing messages, you'll need to compose those messages using Outlook or Entourage.

If you would still like to use the Web based Gmail as your primary email platform, simply click on "Settings" in your Web Gmail account (in the upper right hand corner), then choose the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab, and select "Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on" then on the next option select "keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox". Make sure and hit the "Save Changes" button when you're done.

Now all your incoming and sent email (including that you send from Outlook) are accessible on your Gmail Web account. You won't have to worry about going back and forth from Outlook to the Web to find old emails, they'll all be on the Web.

Custom Email Signatures When Only Using Web Based Gmail

There are a few existing solutions for achieving this, the best probably being the Better Gmail Firefox extension . The downside here is that this only works with Firefox and with the "older version" of Web based Gmail. The newer Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension for the newest Gmail version (as of 1/9/08) does not seem to offer the email signature feature of its predecessor.

The other existing option is to drag-and-drop/cut-and-paste a section from another open HTML file displaying the formatted text and images of your email signature into the compose window of your Gmail account as described in this post at Digital Inspiration .

Using the Google Tool Bar to Send HTML Emails or to Insert HTML Email Signatures

A third option that I don't think is documented on Web anywhere is to utilize the Google Tool Bar's "Send to" button to send HTML formatting/graphics via Web based Gmail.

Note: I've tested this for Firefox on Windows XP and IE7 on Windows Vista. I does not work for me using Firefox on Windows Vista.

Here are the steps:

1. Download and install the Google Toolbar by visiting: http://toolbar.google.com/
2. Close and restart your Web browser.
3. In Firefox go to "View", "Toolbars" and make sure there is a checkmark next to "Google Toolbar". If using IE7 go to "Tools", "Toolbars" and insure there is a checkmark next to "Google". You should then see the Google toolbar in your browser, similar to the screen-shot below. Then on the toolbar, go to "Settings", "Options", "More" and make sure there is a checkmark by the "Send to" button.

   

4. The HTML file you want to include in your outgoing Gmail message will need to be uploaded to a Web server. If you plan on adding the same HTML to outgoing messages on a regular basis (such as is the case with a HTML email signature) just book mark that URL.
5. To send a Web based Gmail message with the HTML formatting, open the bookmarked URL (e.g. http://risingline.com/sample.html) then click the "Send to" button on your Google Toolbar and select "Gmail" from the drop down menu. You should see the HTML formatted page, simply type you message above that and hit the "Send" button.

   

Additional Notes:

If you're a user sending a HTML page or email signature that was already developed for you, ignore the below.

When coding the HTML page to be sent. Make sure the path to graphics are absolute, insert a non-breaking space in the title tag (otherwise a hyperlink of the page title will appear above the HTML), and add alternate text to images for those email clients that block graphics. Here's the code used in the above example:

Labels: Web-Development-Strategy

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Posted by Douglas Case @ 1/09/2008 03:50:00 PM | 1 comments