Blog

March 27th, 2012

Content Management, Technology, Usability, User Experience Design

The hard numbers of UX can sometimes be difficult to nail down, but when they are properly identified and reviewed, they can be substantial.  A perfect example is the result of one of our Sitecore engagements with MAA, based in Memphis, TN.  The project unified and improved the manageability all of their Apartment Community sites, main site, and mobile presence.  Launched in March of 2011, the numbers are back – and they look pretty impressive. (more…)

Dustin Collis

October 24th, 2011

Technical

When developing a site that has a faceted navigation interface, it’s important to make sure it doesn’t become a content trap for Search Engines or bots.  There are dozens of ways to block bots and search engines from your site, but many people want the external links and knowledge sharing.  This can come at a cost however, as your site is bombed by thousands and thousands of page requests from incoming search engines and bots.  Enough, in some cases, to inflate your page count (and bandwidth usage) to more than 10 times your actual site usage by real site visitors.  Instead of discussing outright blocking strategies – let’s focus on how you can construct your facet pages to easily give search engines and bots what they want: your content.

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Dustin Collis

October 24th, 2011

Strategy

It used to be that the most important question in Marketing was, How do I get the word out? Marketing and communications were unilateral. Corporations would put out the word, measure success, make improvement, and try again. But no longer. Internet engagement, and most particularly social media, requires an evolution in your efforts. To be successful, you must be ready to dialogue, to engage in a give and take where you not only talk but listen, all in real time.

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Jim Keeney

August 11th, 2011

Strategy

Companies want to be front and center on the web and mobile devices by serving audiences wherever they happen to knock at their door.  A detailed roadmap to achieve this vision is essential, but in the haste to sidle up to competitors’ new features, strategic vision is frequently replaced with a “git ‘er done” mentality.  While the urgency can feel real, so is the danger of precluding future opportunities through hasty implementations. (more…)

Chris Baer

August 2nd, 2011

Insight Article, UX Design

The Student 2.0 lives and learns as much on the web as anywhere else.  Unfortunately it seems that for many universities and colleges student portals tend to be a lower priority than the donor and prospective student facing external websites. As universities invest time, effort, and dollars into their online presence, student portals should become a high priority. When a student becomes frustrated with the portal – whether because of the inability to access directories, register for classes, check transcripts, or read university news – the result can be a half-hearted user adoption that degrades the value of the interface or even worse, contributes to a negative student life experience. (more…)

Pete Rose

June 29th, 2011

Insight Article, User Research

As User Experience consultants, we spend a lot of time on extraordinary websites. There are two things we’ve noticed about these websites, first is that they belong to the most successful organizations in their industry, and second is their ability to deliver an engaging and valuable online experience across many diverse audiences. What’s clear is that they’ve taken the critical step of identifying their distinct audiences and immediately providing them with the pathways and specific calls to action that help them quickly locate the content they desire.

For Hospitals and Healthcare organizations, this “best practice” has special application. These organizations in particular serve a unique and diverse set of audiences. Understanding those groups, their needs, perceptions, and how they look for information, is essential to architecting a site that will serve each of them while maintaining brand integrity. (more…)

Chad Van Lier

June 13th, 2011

Marketing, Social Media, UX Design

Drill in hand, my dentist asked me what I was writing about today. “Error messages,” I said.

He groaned from behind his mask. “Those confusing messages with the numbers?  The topic made him nervous. “I wish I could get all that stuff. My grandkids do.”

I told him what motivated me from a content and marketing perspective: Why do some websites shoot off numbers or carelessly worded error messages, even at the risk of inciting dread in the people who help pay their bills? Why, especially, when the users who encounter error messages on a site are the epitome of a captive audience?  Instead of disregarding a visitor’s search error or a server meltdown, embrace the marketing opportunity.

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Elizabeth Gibbens

June 6th, 2011

Internet Strategy, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Technical, Technology

If you haven’t noticed yet, Google has begun to take over the world (again).  The latest in a string of popular products, both online and physical, are being rolled out in the coming weeks.  While most of us are focusing on the Facebook like +1 addition, the true nugget comes in low cost notebooks that feature the Chrome OS.

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Dustin Collis

May 23rd, 2011

Internet Strategy, Technology

Our Mobile Practice Director Doug Brashear sat down with Federal Tech Talk the other week to discuss the evolving federal mobile landscape.  Given that the Obama administration wants every agency to connect with citizens, there’s mounting pressure to push mobile apps and optimized sites live. But to what end?  Doug addresses how federal IT professionals can design sites that consider those accessing information from their smartphones and what content is best suited for this medium.

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Hayley Wilson

May 18th, 2011

Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Internet Strategy, Marketing, Social Networking, Usability, User Experience Design, User Research

Last week, our Director of Information Architecture Kelley McDonald delivered the keynote address at the American Press Institute’s “Designing the Digital User Experience” seminar.  I had the privilege to attend, hearing not only from our own Kelley, but from editorial playmakers from around the globe, including the Chairman of Folio Holdings Group, the Nigerian conglomerate attempting to build the largest media channel in Africa.  The overall sentiment in the room was clear from the outset:  publishers are in the fight of their lives, wrestling with an online space they don’t fully understand, while grappling with slashed budgets, staff, and uncertain guidelines for monetization. The two questions on everyone’s mind were the same: How do we attract visitors and keep their attention? And then how do we make money?

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Caroline Mullen

April 28th, 2011

Internet Strategy, Marketing, Social Networking

The way I see it, there are primarily three types of people using online dating sites today: the curious, the aggressive, and the desperate. 

The curious are consumed with appearing aloof.  Slightly embarrassed to have created a profile in the first place, even more ashamed to have devoted hours to picture selection and perfectly constructed sentence fragments, they marvel at the esoteric starkness of their profiles and artful allusions to Kafka and Descartes.  They don’t NEED online dating, but why scoff at such a wonderfully facile generational gift?  All of this is of course intended to mask their fervent desire to meet new people.  With this demographic, that’s just the thing: they are not concerned with the one, but with the many, and as such prefer sites like OKCupid and PlentyofFish, the distant, noncommittal cousins of eHarmony.

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Hayley Wilson

April 7th, 2011

Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, Technology, Web Content Management

Google’s increasing emphasis this year on its “Rich Snippets” program (an observation obtained directly from one of their Client Account Managers) should encourage businesses, and especially local vendors and eCommerce merchants, to start using additional “semantic markup” for their HTML. “Semantic markup” is additional tagging (or labels) using structured data that are added to help parsers and programs that read your webpage to understand truly what specific content areas or fragments are about. Google currently supports labels about reviews, people profiles, products, business listings, recipes, and events. The labels are invisible to users, but not to search engines.

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Ted McLaughlan

April 6th, 2011

Internet Strategy, Social Networking, Webinar

The evolving digital landscape is constantly changing the way we consume and process information. NavigationArts’ Senior Consultant, Mark Davenport, helps us understand how we can move sales and marketing efforts into the digital age, leveraging websites, social media, SEO and much more to attract and convert prospects into valued customers online.  In this webinar you will learn about: (more…)

Mark Davenport

March 14th, 2011

Internet Strategy, Social Networking

Groupon and Living Social and What’s the Deal are all the rage on the frontier of online advertising, representing the most successful of the quickly-growing pack of “social group coupon” merchants. They’re a very popular mashup of a number of well-known online marketing techniques, implemented in a way that clearly separates them from traditional banner ads, coupon clubs or classified advertising. They’re fun, they feel exclusive, and count on social buzz and absolutely real savings to succeed. No doubt these kinds of coupons are valuable to the users (50% off a nice dinner out? – pretty good deal); but are they beneficial to the merchants? The Jury still seems to be out with respect to reliable ROI for the businesses actually offering these “deals”.

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Ted McLaughlan

March 8th, 2011

Internet Strategy

Believe it or not, the Internet is not always clear.  Take a simple thing like the keyword meta tag: does it or does it not influence page rank?  Well, that depends on the search engine, right?  While exploring this for a client, I realized that what I originally thought about meta tags was true, but barely.  Google, Yahoo, and Bing do not look at the keyword meta tag for page rank. 

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Dustin Collis

October 23rd, 2008

Internet Strategy, Social Networking

Reggie Henry (CTO of ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership) led a terrific discussion at last night’s Web Content Mavens. The topic for the evening was how to sell social networking to senior executives.  I’ve listed the most valuable nuggets from the presentation and ensuing discussion.  Hopefully there’s something in this list that will help to shape your thinking around social networking as part of a web strategy. (more…)

Kristin Hodgson