At Synotac, when we’re working with a client, we spend a amount of time in the define stage where we get to know our clients and their businesses so that we can create a custom solution for their web design needs. Sometimes that means understanding how a company or individual wants to be seen or understood by their customers, while other times that means understanding a manufacturing, advertising, selling or even shipping process so that we can communicate that clearly through their website.

Almost all of the time, we find that our clients have very specific needs when it comes to how their website will function, and more importantly, how it will be updated using their content management system (in most cases, WordPress).  These are some of the ways that we help them to meet their needs.

Building a Better Back-End

It is one thing to build a beautiful web site and quite another thing to build it so that it is capable of being updated by a non-web-savvy client who does not know or care to know about HTML, CSS, PHP or any other web acronym.  We understand that, and as a result we have harnessed the power of WordPress to build custom plugins to cater to our clients specific problems and needs allowing them to update their site and the custom solutions we have come up for them quickly and easily.

Case Study: Sunset Imports

Sunset Imports is a Portland, Oregon Audi and Porsche dealership who came to us in need of a few custom solutions.  There are many things we could discuss about this project (how we provided a less templatey site with more of a local feel to it, or the custom car search application) but to try and keep things short and sweet, we’re going to only focus on one of those custom solutions.

The Specials Widget / Plugin

Sunset occasionally has a number of “specials” that they wanted to present on their website.  The specials were a very important piece of getting people to go to the website as well as to do business at Sunset.

Here is what we were able to come up with them in the design:

They also wanted complete control over how these specials were displayed, where they were displayed, and the ability to add, edit, and delete specials quickly and easily.

We decided that a custom WordPress plugin would do the trick.

When it comes to WordPress plugins, there are correct ways and very incorrect ways of doing them.  The best WordPress plugins integrate seamlessly into the WordPress framework and utilize it’s extensive suite of powerful tools.  The plugin that we came up with for the Sunset Imports Specials is a prime example of how WordPress can be expanded upon to fit many custom solutions.

Here are a few screenshots highlighting the Specials plugin we wrote for Sunset Imports:

The plugin fits seamlessly into the WordPress admin area.

Click to enlarge

The “Add Special” page consists of a form which adds the special to our custom specials database so that the specials can be organized and grouped together (as well as edited, turned on or off, and deleted).  There is also a preview of the special on the right hand side that gets updated in real time as you type in the various elements (title, description, and the image).  The images tap into WordPress’ built in media manager to utilize all of the image editing capabilities and media management power of WordPress.

Click to enlarge

The “Manage Specials” page consists of a top portion where Sunset Imports was able to organize and position their specials into four separate pages and multiple tabs on each page.  The way it works is that you choose the special you want to fit into the specific position and then click save order and those specials are locked in.

Click to enlarge

The bottom portion of the Manage Specials section contains the table listing of all the specials.  This table can be sorted by column, as well as filtered by section to make it easy for Sunset to find the specials they want to edit or delete.

More “KA-BANG” For Your Buck

It’s true that you may find “cheaper” options out there in the web design world for your next project or redesign.  But what Synotac can promise you is that it is well worth it for your web designer or web design company to understand your needs, like Synotac does, and to provide you with a tool that is not only powerful, but is easy to use and gives you the power to update your site whenever is needed.

When you are trying to communicate a specific message to your customers and craft something that is beautiful, informative, and functional, it takes time and expertise. Throwing something together does not yield happy results. For example, most of us know the pieces that make up a car. You have the wheels, the body, the engine, a steering wheel, some seats, etc. But if we were asked to put one together, most of us would have a hard time creating something that actually worked. (We might be able to make it look like it works, but try starting it and having it function and it all falls apart.)

The same is true in the world of website construction. So the Synotac team put our collective expertise together to carefully create a new site for CoreIP. The new site includes best practices in usability and visual design as well as a robust content management system that will let CoreIP staff update their content and post news on the fly.

The partners at CoreIP are smart folks with no doubt a lot of technical expertise between them. Maybe they could have pieced together a website, but they recognized that for their new site to be functional, usable, and easy on the eyes, calling on an expert team would pay off.

EarthTechling, a green technology blog, seeks to inform it’s readers about “eco-tech gadgets, electronics, automobiles and in-home technologies, which, in some proven manner, help a person live a more green lifestyle.” They came to Synotac looking for help creating an online presence that would give off the “green vibe”, not look like every other blog, and function exactly how they imagined. We were really excited to accept the challenge.

This was the first “true”, “professional” blog that we have created. Our staple Content Manager that we use is WordPress, an application that is meant for blogs, although most of our projects since we started using WordPress have been business or personal sites where WordPress was being used to update content on static pages rather than power a dynamic, fluid, robust blog.

See, the thing about blogs, is that they are “theoretically” never ending. With non-blog sites, you know, to a certain degree, exactly how much content is going to go on any given page. You create a certain number of pages and you put content areas that may grow a little bit, but are relatively contained. But with a blog, you have to compensate for the fact that content will continue to be created, potentially forever, and that created content needs somewhere to go and systems setup for organizing it.

This is what makes designing and programming a blog so challenging: you have to imagine ahead of time how the site will function when it is brimming with content.

Luckily, with EarthTechling, content was being created even before we got to programming the template. But planning began well before programming in the design phase. Design Guru David came up with a design that not only looked amazing, but which took into consideration the fact that content would literally be oozing from each section.

A Simple, Polished Design

David was able to create something that was sleek, but not too glossy. The buttons and gradients used on the site are very fresh and “web 2.0″, yet it is not overdone and leaves space for the content to breath and really stand out.

The article slideshow on the front page is a great example of this.

These slideshows are a great feature for the front pages of websites, and you can immediately see why on EarthTechling. The image preview is the first thing that catches your eye, and then the title of the article is nice and big and bright. The excerpt is short and to the point, and the links for reading more, comments, and ratings are right there tucked nicely under the excerpt. The title, the image, and “Read More” all link to the article, making it super easy to navigate. The subtle directional arrows on the bottom right allow you to easily navigate through the slideshow.

Taxonomies: Nothing To Do With Money

Another important thing to think about when designing and planning a blog, is the use of taxonomies. Taxonomies are the organization of the articles into things such as types, categories and tags. EarthTechling splits their articles into three main categories or types: Reviews, News and Features. Features is broken into four sub-types: Buying Guides, Previews, Interviews and How-Tos. From there, the articles are divided even further based on tags and topics.

The use of taxonomies makes it super easy to find exactly what interests you. Say you come to the site looking for green gadgets for your ipod. It’s possible that there could be reviews on those gadgets, or news articles, or even features such as a buying guide about such products. But rather than searching through those individual sections, you could simply click on the Gadgets topic in the list of topics which shows on each page. Alternatively, you could use WordPress’ powerful search and see all the articles pertaining to “green ipod gadgets”.

You can see that you don’t have to even view the entire article to see what tags and categories are on specific articles, allowing you to broaden your search by clicking on one of these links which will take you to the tag and category list view of articles.

What we tried to accomplish through the use of taxonomies, was an assortment of ways to find and categorize articles to make them easy to find.

Being Social Isn’t Just About Being Social

“Social Networking” is a hot topic in the business world these days. Everyone seems to be talking about the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Business’s of all sizes are creating accounts with these social networking sites to promote themselves; and it’s working.

By connecting your business, or in this case, blog, to a social networking site, you are ensuring yourself masses amounts of free advertising. Here is how it works:

1. You create an account for your business through a social networking site like Facebook.
2. You connect your blog to automatically post updates to Facebook everytime you make a change
3. Everyone who is attached to your account sees the update and potentially passes it along
   OR
4. People visit your site, click the facebook icon, and share the article or page with all of there friends… and the free advertising begins!

Even before EarthTechling’s blog launched, as I was testing the Share feature for Facebook, I published an article to my facebook account and within minutes was receiving comments from friends who were trying to go to ET’s blog, and were having trouble because it was password protected (because we hadn’t launched yet). Social networking really does work.

And so we built social networking right into EarthTechling’s blog.

You can DIGG articles, or share them through a number of social networking sites. ET also created profiles through some of these sites and we displayed their links right in the navigation bar on the site.

ET Phone Home

As I write this, we are on the eve of deploying ET (EarthTechling) into cyber-land, and seeing first hand how all of our planning and implementation of building a better blog goes. We are confident and happy with what we built, and we wish EarthTechling the best as they blog away about a brighter tomorrow using green technology.

Go check it out for yourself: www.earthtechling.com

Below is our first attempt, inspired by the excellent book “The Back of a Napkin,” by Dan Roam. In this short video we tackle the topic of coming up with a solid internet marketing strategy, which is often made far too complex and obscure for a normal person to grasp. While the details may be complex, you only need to master the basics and hold your web design and internet marketing vendors accountable to achieve success. The web design industry has a (deservedly) terrible reputation for trying to obfuscate basic business objectives with a bunch of jargon and tech-speak. Basically, it all comes down to a good slice of pie…

Making Money on your Website – Easy as Pie from Cameron Madill on Vimeo.

There are several different methodologies that are used in usability testing. The one that we prefer is a hybrid of techniques recommended by Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com), the self-appointed guardian of usability on the web, and Mark Hurst, the head of the influential usability company Creative Good (www.creativegood.com). The idea is to get unbiased users who match the different audience segments on your website and observe them while they “think” outloud. Both the user’s face and their mouse movements are recorded on a single video feed, giving us a powerful bit of evidence about how well the website we are testing works.

Usability testing can be useful in several different ways. First, it can uncover obvious problems with your website that can greatly improve its usability and therefore its overall conversion rate (making or saving you more money!). Usually these problems can be fixed for a nominal cost, but they were “hidden” from both your website design company and yourself because you are too close to the product to see it as a new user will. Second, usability testing can help you to find large, strategic issues with your website. Often these take the form of, “oh, users don’t understand that our company does X.” Or, “our users don’t understand that the point of page A is for them to contact us for a quote.” As we repeatedly emphasize, you can never make something too easy on the web. Lastly, usability testing can help to depersonalize the design, copy-writing and development components of your website. While most people are rarely short on opinions about how something should be done, there is nothing quite as useful as real user feedback to get everyone thinking again about what the customer wants.

I’ll leave you with some sample quotes from some of our usability tests. These are often the most effective way to summarize the findings of a series of usability tests:

“I don’t know my flight number, I’m filling this out because I need help finding [a flight]. I’m confused!â€??

“At times I thought it was too messy. I couldn’t find things on the homepage. I like sites that are simple and clear. Everything was so flashy that nothing grabbed my attention. I clicked on a tab to get away from the homepage.”

“Text is very small – with a lot of text to sift through, it may be challenging for older eyes. I know I struggled. Link colors are also a little light.”

“Website is messy at times…too many things happening at one time. Homepage had many things happening. I looked for something to grab my attention, and nothing really did on the homepage.”

There are two big problems with conversion rates, however.

Problem #1 with Conversion Rates
Since a conversion rate is seldom higher than 3%, you can spend all of your time obsessing about how to improve that number while ignoring the other 97% of your traffic. There are usually a lot of steps that visitors go through before they will convert, and we have all been to the sites that won’t let us view anything before we give them our name, email, social security number, and the keys to our home…and we hated it. My general reaction to these kinds of sites is to grudgingly give them my info, get whatever it is a wanted, curse the company under my breath, and never return to their website.

So what’s the solution? Don’t forget that not every visitor will convert every time, and don’t try to make them do something they don’t want to do: they will never come back, just like the visitor to the used car lot who can’t afford to buy right now but is relentlessly to buy right now. And, pay attention to other metrics such as your bounce rate that are leading indicators of a poor customer experience. If you can, use exit surveys and other qualitative data to ensure that your visitors are having a good experience on your site and that they are left wanting to return in the future.

Problem #2 with Conversion Rates
Not everything can be easy to measure. Let’s say that I want to measure the number of leads that Synotac generates from our website. What if someone sees the site, loves it, but when they want to call us look our number up in the Yellow Pages online? How do we track that? Or, let’s say you want to measure the number of visitors who use your resources section and successfully resolve their problem without calling or emailing your company. Is it good or bad if people spend a lot of time on a page? What if someone looks at a lot of pages?

The solution to problem #2 is, not surprisingly, to get very clever about how you can measure these things. In the digital world that we all live in now, there very little from the web that we cannot track (one huge advantage we have over print, tv, radio, and all other forms of media). Here are my top four tips for getting the data you need to measure your website’s conversion rate.

Tips for better measuring your conversion rate
1. Get a different 800 number for your website. This can be done for $10-20 a month with a good service, and now you can track all of the calls that come from your website.
2. Rebuild any email links on your website to be email forms that can be tracked.
3. Add tracking code to your e-commerce success page, contact form, newsletter sign-up form, case study download link or whatever else you might be trying to track.
4. If you are trying to measure customer success in resolving a problem without using email or phone support, add a page-specific survey to ask if the page was useful in fixing the problem. If the answer is no, ask them for details as to why.

A while back we wrote an email newsletter that talked about bounce rates. Due to the clamoring for more information, I have decided to expand this into a post.

First, what is a bounce rate? Depending on your analytics tool, bounce rates are defined slightly differently:

1. Any visitor who stays on your site for less than a certain amount of time (usually 10 seconds).
2. Any visitor who only looks at only one page on your site before leaving

While the definitions are slightly different, the end meaning is exactly the same: you got absolutely nothing out of those visitors. Zilch. They don’t even remember your company name or what your logo looked like.

So why does this matter? Well, bounce rates represent an incredible opportunity: it’s quite hard to get more traffic, and it’s generally pretty easy to get more out of the traffic that you already have. Bounce rates are also one of (if not the) best metrics for actually giving us insight into what our visitors think about our website. Page views, visits, unique visits, and time on site don’t tell us anything about WHY the users actually do anything. A high bounce rate indicates that your visitors are allergic to that page. You can take a look at it, come up with a hypothesis as to why it might be having troubles, and make a change (or better yet run a controlled experiment so that half of your visitors see the old version and the other half see the new version). Wait a month and see if things get better or worse, and now you have feedback on your hypothesis. If you were correct, you now are getting more results out of your website without having to pay for more traffic AND you know something about your visitors. This kind of data is hard to get, and invaluable to helping your visitors to have a great experience.

What do you all think about bounce rates? Let me know any interesting experiments that you have run using them or feedback you have about how to best use it.

1. Segment, segment, segment.
Divide your lists and speak to them. It’s smart. Sure, it takes more time than sending the same message to everyone, but it’s an intelligent way to tighten the message you give the people on your lists.

2. Clean the lists.
If you get bounces, or have addresses that never become conversions, never “click through,” legacy addresses, etc., they need to be purged. It is so much better to have a clean, smaller list than a dirty, big list.

3. Test different approaches.
Wonder what people like, what works? Test it? Send two different emails to portions of your list and see what is read more, what people click through, etc.

4. Be creative and hook people.
Avoid dull, standard language. Hook people with the subject line so they are curious and want to read the content.

5. Only use opt in lists. Don’t buy and spam.
Don’t be spammerific. It’s just not okay. Encourage people to opt in to your list, set expectations for how often they’ll get these emails, provide value to them. Don’t spam people.

I will get over the fact that Alex said “I hate math, I hate reading” and tried to attribute it to being 30. For the record, the 20-30somethings at Synotac dig both reading and math and are very active online. All at the same time. His point was that people are busy and don’t want to stop and read novels and need to be hooked. You can’t count on even your biggest fan to read something they think is routine or dull. You must engage them and brevity is always appreciated.