How to Choose the Right Web Design Firm
Once you recognize the need for a good web design firm, how do you choose from among all the available companies?
Know Yourself
Before you begin looking for a firm to design your website, think about the image you want to portray for your business.
What is the first impression you want customers or visitors to have about your company, and what do you want your site to say about you?
Do you want clients to think your company is modern and on the cutting edge? Creative? Dependable? Traditional? You’re website portrays that image in a few micro seconds.
Popular Android Apps
The top android application a few months ago should give a very plain message to developers – Namco’s PacMan (yes, the classic arcade game) was the top Android download.
Although android smartphones can be powerful web browsers and business tools, many users like to utilize them for gaming as much as anything else, so free games that collect customer data, promote your brand or give customers access to products for purchase are popular development solutions.
MySpace mobile is another highly popular android app, as is the Weather Channel. But what about non-proprietary kinds of apps, the kinds you can develop to promote your business?
Look at the Free Dictionary, another highly popular download, and consider what other similar services customers might like. Translation dictionaries and phrase translators are extremely useful and popular, for example. Provide G1 customers a quick service they can’t get somewhere else, or they can get better from you.
Google Map API
A great website with superior content goes a long way to getting your business recognized. But if you want to convert that customer contact into a sale, some businesses require a customer to find the brick and mortar place of business. Other customers need to know where to bring items for repair, and others just ...
Content Management System
The current explosion in eCommerce has highlighted the advantages of and excellent Content Management System (CMS) like Sitecore.
For businesses that consider their website and their customers who contact them online to be an integral part of their business, using a content management system is only logical. It will allow those businesses to provide a seamless, high quality online experience that open source or low-end solutions simply can't provide.
For many of our customers, their website is a strategic part of their business. The added security and performance features of a CMS allow these businesses to focus the website and the usability features that make the customer experience truly superior.
By giving developers and content providers a simple to use and intuitive system, a CMS allows the marketing department or the sales department to create website content and design elements of the site. These professionals understand the customers and their needs better than developers or IT departments. With a CMS, the control goes to the people with the ideas, not only to the people with the programming expertise
Web Analytics
Web Analytics, as the name suggests is the process of colleting, analyzing and interpreting the data about the activities of online users accessing your website. This has become an integral factor in almost all online businesses as it optimizes your business by providing meaningful data about how your site is being utilized.
The Pre-Cyber Monday Shakedown: Is Your Ecommerce Strategy Optimized For The Holiday Rush?
Across the globe, retailers are bracing for a challenging holiday shopping season. If you run an ecommerce site, what can you do to be sure to get the most out of “Cyber Monday” (the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States which falls on Dec. 1 this year) and beyond? At Agency.com we have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s strongest online retail brands, all of which are as concerned as mom-and-pop retailers about how they will fare during this holiday shopping season.
In anticipation of Cyber Monday and in preparation for the few weeks of consumer frenzy that follow, here are some of the global brand marketers strategies for making sure that ecommerce environments are ready to make the most out of the smaller opportunities that this season will inevitably afford.
Holiday specials content: launch it now. Although I cringe every time I get hit before Halloween by an ad for holiday shopping, now is the time to be launching your seasonal content. It is important to get your calls to action properly indexed and ranking in search results in anticipation of the interests of potential shoppers. Look back over last year’s analytics to see the seasonal search phrases that were driving high-conversion traffic to the site and build content to target that behavior. Get ready with your “holiday gift ideas” and plan ahead for people seeking “last minute holiday gifts” or looking for “gift ideas for mom.” Get this content featured on your home page so that you can contribute maximum link popularity to these specials as quickly as you can.
Another Intro to Sitecore
Content Management Systems are everywhere. Marketing analysts, subject matter experts and website administrators are all switching over to CMSs in unison for a lucid separation of presentation from content on their website and/or web service, with more control on the latter. This in turn facilitates reduced IT expenditures for your organization, ensures steady yet consistent content life cycle management and streamlines the target audience to desired areas. Sitecore is one such flexible CMS that seems to fit the above requirements.
Sitecore is based on the .NET technology. Setting up and deploying Sitecore is quite straightforward and you can get started with creating your new website rightaway. Sitecore is totally committed to the .NET framework and hence provides regular stable releases and updates thus complimenting the latest releases of .NET, Visual Studio, SQL server and Windows server.
