Extra! Extra!

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2008 was one of the best conferences I have had the opportunity to attend recently. Some of the more interesting “take-aways” I got from the conference included:

• When marketing your brand online always tell a compelling story that will make customers connect with your brand.
• Optimize pages on your website for long tail keywords while keeping the visitors intent in mind. By figuring out what stage of the buying cycle they are in (researcher, comparison shopper, buyer, etc) you have a better chance of offering relevant information to the visitor and getting them to “convert” (eg. make a purchase).
• Always be A/B testing! Test the pay-per-click ads that bring traffic to your website and test the color of the button on your site that converts a visitor.
• Reduce home page bounce rates! How many visitors came to your website and found nothing on the home page that engaged them about the site’s content?
• There are ton of free Firefox plugins that can help you with SEO like: Bit.ly/gadocs, Bit.ly/gagoals, Bit.ly/gatabs, Bit.ly/gaiceberg
• Leveraging social media sites (examples: Twitter, facebook, delicious, digg, propeller, etc) can have a big impact on increasing organic search traffic if done right.
• There is tremendous growth opportunity in the search industry outside the US.
• Understand what your visitor wants to accomplish on your site. They don’t care if your are the company Best Buy they want to purchase the iPhone.
• The “Google Dance” which invited SES attendees to drink, eat and dance was a blast!

With hundreds of Content Management Systems (CMS) on the market, how does a company identify the best one for their website?
Over the last 5 years I have created a cheat sheet that has simplied this process to 3 main steps.

1.  Create a Requirements Checklist
Come up with a CMS requirements checklist.  What do you want the CMS be able to do?  Ask as many people that will be using the CMS system fill out this checklist, ranking each factor on a “must have”, “would like to have”, or “don’t care” scale. Ideally, have at least several employees (who will be using the CMS solution) from several different business departments complete the CMS checklist since requirements tend to verify by departments. 

Some example requirements might include:
• Permissions / Roles – Some users might have the ability to write or modify content while the authority to publish might be limited to only a few.
• Rollback / Versioning – Accidently removed the biography of the CEO?  How important is it to have a CMS system that will let you revert back to an older version of the webpage?
• WYSWIG – The benefit of having a CMS system is so non-technical users can update the website.  Make sure the CMS system has a friendly MS Word-like editor that enables non-technical users to quickly and easily update webpages .

Lastly, compile a master CMS requirement checklist in Excel where you can turn on the auto-filter feature to see any requirements all CMS users identified as “must haves”.

2.  Demo the CMS
Identify several CMS systems (within your budget) that meet a majority of your CMS stakeholder requirements.  Spending an hour on Google searching for phrases like “cms solutions compared” should help narrow down your list of CMS vendors. 

Verify with your IT team that the CMS solutions you have on your list could be implemented and maintained within your current infrastructure.  Example: If no-one at your company knows how to program in Java you might not want to proceed with evaluating any Java based CMS solutions.

Contact over the phone (and screen) several CMS vendors that are willing to come on-site and conduct a demo of their CMS solution.  Ask the vendor to demo basic functionality (authoring, publishing, etc) but make sure they also address all your “must haves” and “would like to have” the requirements that you identified in your companies CMS checklist.

3.  Gain Buy-in
Ask your CMS users (that attended the demos) which CMS they preferred; which CMS would they most be comfortable using?  At this point you should have a pretty good idea which CMS solution your team prefers. Now you just need your boss to write a check for it…

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
~ Henry David Thoreau

In the high tech world of web design, everything moves fast. Projects are on tight deadlines. Technologies change and converge. Our lives are pretty busy too. Moore’s Law seems to affect more than technology. While our future depends on sophisticated technology, it doesn’t mean that it must have a complex outcome. We design and plan use cases and scenarios for experienced users, and end up complicating our designs with fringe cases and feature creep. We may be designing an advanced application, but it can still have a simple user experience.

No wonder users are frustrated by our best intentions. They crave simple experiences, easy to learn applications: a few steps, minimal instructions, obvious designs. “Don’t make me think.” And yet we (as designers) still assume that they (as users) are savvy enough to figure it out. When dealing with a complex project, it’s important to relax, take a step back, look at it from a different perspective, and remember Thoreau’s watchword: Simplicity.

The other day I was reading about more negative news on the US economy when Jay Leno came on TV and began to ask people on the streets of Los Angeles (mostly young adults) basic financial/budgeting questions. Obviously, it was funny (yet shocking) how little some of the people he talked to new basic financial concepts.

More and more leading financial institutions are recognizing the importance of educating their members of the different financial products and/or services that are available to them. Why wait until a customer asks if you offer a 401K instead of educating the value of retirement services to them up front? I took a look at some of the leading financial websites (and some smaller ones) and its evident that many financial institutions are realizing the importance of actively educating their members on financial related topics. Here are some websites that caught my eye (and actually increased my financial knowledge along the way):

Financial Education
• CEFCU: https://www.cefcu.com/learning/financial-basics.php - The site has some great financial calculators, tools and articles.
• UFCU: https://www.ufcu.org/learning/index.php?loc=menu – Educational material for students, home buyers, vechice purchasers, etc.
• Visa Practical Money Skills: http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/english/index.php - Financial literacy information targeted by user segments: School, Home and Work. The site has strong content with a personable voice and a nice range of features.
• Schwab Money & More: http://www.schwabmoneyandmore.com/toolsResources.php?nav=2#articles – Site has various financial calculators, articles and a glossary:
Life Events (mostly targeting Gen Y)
The following websites do a good job at presenting specific financial products/services based on major life events a member might go through.
• CEFCU: https://www.cefcu.com/learning/life-events.php
• Schwab: http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/planning/life_events?cmsid=P-1897641&lvl1=planning&lvl2=life_events
• WAMU: http://www.wamu.com/personal/learn_plan/browsebylifestyle.asp
• 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy: http://www.360financialliteracy.org/Life+Stages/
• Schwab: http://www.schwabmoneywise.com/milestones/ - Directly targeted at young adults or for adults who want to talk about the management of money with their kids.

Congratulations to Citizens Equity First Credit Union (CEFCU) for launching the new website CEFCU.com!

CEFCU worked with Extractable to intuitively organize information on its website for members while making sure CEFCU’s business objectives were addressed. This was done while maintaining the integrity of the website’s great visual design!

The new website has better exposure to their competitive rates (which will hopefully lead to increased applications), targeted custom marketing banners, increased number of financial tools, and a financial Learning Center section that aims to educate their members.

Congrats to CEFCU!

There are a few applications that are standard on almost all web sites. Every site should have a search engine and there are some great search engines out there from companies such as Autonomy, Omniture, Google, and Surfray (Check out SearchTools). Every site should also have an analytics application such as those provided by Omniture, CoreMetrics, or Google. Most sites have a Content Management System such as TeamSite, Rhythmyx, Ektron, or Contribute (Check out CMS Watch). For applications such as ecommerce, chat, and application servers there are many excellent options in all price ranges for each category.

Then there is the crown jewel of customer support applications – the knowledgebase, were the number of good options a web developer has narrows significantly. Application providers like RightNow Technologies and Talisma provide good solutions . But they are priced out of the range of small to midsize companies. The knowledgebase is the key to customer self service. I don’t think the average user is very pleased with the phone support they get from the majority of companies they interface with. Good knowledgebase applications allow customers to solve their problems quickly and easily without forcing them to navigate frustrating phone trees. Knowledgebase applications show customers multiple ways to solve every common problem as well as give customers an easy ruote to rate the quality of support solutions. Yet, the vast majority of sites out there don’t have any knowledgebase to speak of.

One key point to make about knowledgebase applications as a part of web development is that they are probably the easiest application to calculate a healthy ROI. Good knowledgebase tools with excellent support content reduce call center volume, increase customer satisfaction, and offer excellent opportunities for personalized upselling.
Some examples of good knowledgebase tools are below:

• RightNow Example (Plantronics)
• Talisma Example

Many financial institutions (and almost all credit unions) have their membership base defined by geographic boundaries. Most credit unions are even bounded by law that all members need to live, work or pray in the areas that the credit union is located.

When people search for financial terms in Google, Yahoo or MSN the search engines don’t put to much weighting on your physical location (by using a reverse DNS lookup) when producing the search results unless you include a geographic term in your search phrase (eg. “San Francisco credit unions”). For example, when I searched for “credit unions” in Google.com (from Foster City, California) the first 100 results included a credit union for practically every state in the USA!

Using Wordtracker, I did some further research and discovered that not many people include geographic keywords when searching for financial services/products. For example, the specific phrase “car loans” is searched for over 15,000 times a month but the phrase “San Francisco car loans” produces no searches (or at least less than what Wordtracker records).

While it is important to produce websites that are “search engine” friendly, it seems like one of the best opportunities to gain additional memberships for financial institutions that operate in a certain geographic area is to use Google and Yahoo’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services that display paid ads to only people searching for financial related keyword phrases in the areas they operate. For example, a San Francisco based financial institution could bid to display an ad on the search engine results pages for only people searching for the phrase “student loans” in the San Francisco area. The financial institution could further increase their conversion rates by optimizing the ads to speak directly to these users (eg. San Francisco is expensive but your Student Loan doesn’t have to be).

Here are some screenshots from Google and Yahoo who allow you to display your PPC ads in only selected regions that you define.

We often hear about a web site being 508 Compliant or needing to be 508 Compliant, but how many of us really understand the true meaning of Section 508? Sure, we all know that being 508 compliant means that your site is accessible by people with disabilities, but what exactly is involved in making this happen?

What is Section 508?
In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require that Federal agencies make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 lists 1194.22 guidelines specifically for web-based intranet and internet applications based on access guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that help promote accessibility.

What that means is that Web Accessibility involves the ability of a web page to be read and understood by anyone, using adaptive technologies where necessary.

Populations to consider include:

• Blind people using assistive technology such as Braille or voice screen readers
• People with weak vision who may not be using assistive technology
• Deaf people
• Color-blind people
• People with motor control weakness

Making your site 508 Compliant
The good news is that you don’t have to redo your website from scratch in order to be Section 508 compliant. Here are some easy-to-implement tips to follow:

• DO include descriptive ALT tags for all images which have meaning or content
• DO use relative font size
• DO use high-contrast text and background colors
• DO include text links in addition to or in place of image-based navigation
• DO NOT place text over distracting background images
• DO NOT use color as the sole means of conveying information
• DO NOT use animated gifs, Flash presentations, or Java Applets that cause the screen to flicker with a frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz (These can cause seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy)
• DO NOT force users to click a button or link rapidly, or to fill out a form in a short period of time
• DO NOT use frames of any sort

Priority Levels of Section 508

Priority 1
A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.

Priority 2
A web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.

Priority 3
A web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

Conformance Level “A”: all Priority 1 Checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “AA”: All Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “AAA”: all Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied

A description of the Priority Levels checklist can be found on this page: Priority Levels Checklist.

Further reading

If you’d like to get more information on the subject, these sites provide a deeper understanding of Section 508 compliance:

• 508 Site: http://www.section508.gov/
• W3C: http://www.w3c.org
• Access Board: http://www.access-board.gov

We always recommend that our clients review their site analytics with us at least once a week. Reviewing the data often requires some leg work in marrying information from disparate sources. From there, our dedicated analysts interpret the data to explain fluctuations, identify opportunities for improvement, and make predictions (forecasts). Every review and analysis results in progress towards the primary KPI’s of the site. Piece of cake, right?

The difficult step for most organizations seems to be in forming an ‘analytics habit.’ Reviewing web analytics regularly and drawing useful conclusions from it should be a requirement of every company that has a website and should be followed as web marketing 101. We frequently notice that marketing departments with limited resources managing campaigns across all channels have a difficult time giving analytics review cycles the priority it deserves. Most companies are great at starting the process and performing the weekly reviews for the first 4-6 weeks. After that, it is a battle with other priorities to get everyone’s time and commitments. It has never been difficult showing that regular analytics analysis results in huge benefits for the organization. It has been difficult getting people to sit down regularly, over an extended period of time, to gather and analyze the data. Many of our clients would prefer to outsource 100% of this work, but it really needs to be a team effort in order to be successful.

Almost all organizations perform regular maintenance on their web sites. Adding content, making updates to product information, freshening up the homepage, adding new job post and press releases have all become an ongoing part of having a web site. Performing maintenance without analyzing the analytics behind the site has the potential of actually making the site worse. Interpretation of the analytics shows what site visitors are looking for and how they want to find it. At least 20% of all updates to a site during maintenance should be focused around optimizing the content and the functionality of the site to serve the requirements of the organization and the perceived interests of visitors.

After a company has performed an analytics analysis every week for several quarters, it becomes a very healthy analytics habit. These are the companies that start to think of new ways to use analytics and integrate analytics from several channels (i.e. offline). We find that these are the clients that receive the most benefit (ROI) from their web initiatives and are the most likely to have successful initiatives moving forward.