Three Tips to Make Your Website Shine

Have you taken a good, hard look at your company website lately? You should. The vast majority of your prospective customers use your website to decide whether or not to work with you. So pull it up. What do you see? Is it completely current? Visually appealing? Is it clean and easy to navigate? Most importantly, does it tell your story? Based on your website alone, would YOU want to work with your organization? Or do your competitors’ websites outshine you?

Here are three key questions to ask when looking to improve your website:

Can our site be more user-friendly?
There are seemingly endless ways people find information on the Web. If your website is the place they choose to find that information, but they can’t, then they likely won’t be coming back. A well organized, consistently formatted, easily navigable site can become a reliable resource for your audience and increase the chance that they’ll not only return, but share the site with others.

Can our site make better use of visuals?
When someone is looking to buy a product or enlist a service, they often start with a Web search. If that search results in your site and it doesn’t match the visual quality of your competitors’, that visitor may not even consider your product or service – regardless of its quality. A sharp design accompanied by prominent photos of employees, volunteers, etc. can add an authentic, human element – allowing potential consumers to “see in” to your company. Videos can do the same. And with the low production cost of video, incorporating it can be a cost-effective way to bolster your website’s modern, visual appeal.

Can our site reflect clearer messaging?
Clear and simple language is crucial to effectively communicating your organization’s message. Check your site to make sure there’s no jargon, complex sentence structure, confusing language or unnecessary information.  Simplify sentences whenever possible and break up thoughts with new paragraphs to ensure your site’s copy is easy on the eyes. Here’s a little insider tip: assume that people don’t read. Pack as much information as possible into headlines and snippets, allowing those who need more information the opportunity to click or scroll to read more. If your website appears too copy-heavy, some prospects will click, sigh, and move on.

Five Tips to Enhance Your Site with Social Media Tools

There’s a lot of buzz in business right now about social media, and for good reason. Many organizations are now using the social Web to interact directly with their audiences, drive conversation and influence action. But as social media gains popularity, it’s important to remember that the shared purpose of these tools should be to drive traffic to your website. The corollary is that if you are involved in social media, let people know about it through your website.

Here are 5 tips to consider:

1. Make It Easy to Connect – Grab your choice of free social media icons and ensure that you place them on the home page of your site. If you’re confused about which sites you should be using, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube are a safe start.  We have to do this on our website before this goes out.
2. Make It Visual – Photos and video are a great way to capture a visitor’s eye on your site. Flickr offers some basic display widgets and YouTube makes it incredibly easy to place a video on your site using the “embed” code. In addition, by using the embed code for a video you will capture viewer information through YouTube Insight. If you need a cleaner display for your video content, try Vimeo.
3. Try a Fan Box – With 350 million users, you’d be hard-pressed to find reasons not to take advantage of marketing on Facebook through a Facebook page. The site also provides a simple widget to embed your page’s news stream on your site and makes it easy for visitors to become fans of your page.
4. Start a Blog – Blogs continue to be a strong tool for fresh content distribution to help draw new traffic to your site. Understand that a solid blog requires a well-defined blog strategy and plan of action to keep content fresh and engaging.
5. Create a Social Media Landing Page – If it is difficult to position everything above on your home page, keep it simple and develop a “Connect with Us” social media landing page. This will not only help with search engine optimization but more importantly, provide a one stop shop for visitors to find other locations to stay engaged with you on the Web. Example:  Illinois Bureau of Tourism
   

Case Study: Building a Website, Enhancing a Brand

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative (Cities Initiative) is a bi-national, non-partisan alliance of U.S. and Canadian mayors working to protect and restore the vitality of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River and improve the quality of life for the residents of the region. Cities Initiative mayors are working to strengthen the value of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence by improving the quality of the water and developing new opportunities for economic prosperity.

As the Cities Initiative continued to grow in both size and scope, the need to enhance the organization’s brand, increase its membership base and improve its communications capacity swelled. In 2008, the organization partnered with CG&A to create a marketing and communications plan, and develop new materials and a new website.

First, CG&A conducted a messaging session in Toronto with Cities Initiative staff and mayors who serve on the Board of Advisors. This session yielded a wealth of new message points and served to reposition the organization relative to its growth and increased focus on a more holistic approach to the bodies of water and the people who rely on them.

With new messaging in place, CG&A is now concentrating on the redesign and redevelopment of marketing materials, including annual reports, brochures and the Cities Initiative website, www.glslcities.org. The site design was recently refreshed to better illustrate the organization’s important work, to highlight the member cities and mayors, to provide incentive to become a member, to improve user experience and to clearly convey the organization’s mission.

CG&A worked with the Cities Initiative to create a new visual interface, develop fresh content and improve the overall organization and navigation of the site. One of the more unique site features CG&A helped to implement is the Member Cities Map, which utilizes a custom Google map application to pinpoint members and provide information about each city. Cities Initiative staff were later trained to manage the site via a user-friendly content management system (CMS), allowing them to administer the site internally.

Friday 5

From Twitter streams, citizen journalism, Google Reader, blogs and hyper-local news sites, news is hitting us from myriad sources. Occasionally, you are bound to miss a helpful or interesting article. Here at CG&A, we’re constantly keeping our eye on all things news. We’re putting our Google Readers and discriminating eyes to work for you. Each week, we bring you a new edition of Friday 5. Carefully selected by CG&A team members, Friday 5 features a roundup of news articles and blog postings covering a range of subjects including communication trends, local government, social media and a fun diversion to end the week. Become a fan of CG&A on Facebook to be informed of each week’s edition.