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Two Hotel and Resort Groups Offer Advice on Website Design
Category: Retail/Grocery| Stevens & Tate Speaks
2 Sep 2010I watched a presentation given by the marketing heads for Marcus Hotels and Resorts as well as Morgans Hotel Group. Marcus Hotels and Resorts highlighted the Grand Geneva website and Morgans Hotel Group showcased the Sanderson Hotel in London’s website.
James Zito, VP of Interactive Marketing for Morgans Hotel Group discussed how they tried to develop a design that was unique to a boutique property. He stated “There is a unique reason why people stay at boutique property and we wanted to showcase that in our websites.” He called there websites an ‘immersive visual experience’ in trying to bring the property to life.
Some of the unique features regarding his websites includes the ability for the site to resize as you make your browser window smaller or larger. There is a lot of nightlife and social experience that goes on with the Morgans hotels and they wanted to share that using video and imagery. The calendar experience is almost full size and integrates with the blog that highlights experiences happening in the city where the hotel is located.
Both Marcus and Morgans Hotel Group used focus groups and extensive usability testing to determine the best direction to take in their design. Morgans Hotel Group spent over days watching focus groups use the new websites to see how they navigated through and made revisions that would accommodate any confusion the test user had.
Both companies also made sure their sites will built to be SEO friendly. Morgans has two copies of their website a flash and html version. The html version resides under the flash version – called progressively enhanced. The html version is used for both the search engines and for mobile phones.
What are your thoughts on both the Morgans Hotel websites and Marcus Hotels and Resorts websites? We would love to hear your comments.
Tech Trend of the Month: Mobile Coupons
Category: Stevens & Tate Speaks| Web 2.0
31 Aug 2010By 2011, it is anticipated that the number of people who own a mobile device will reach 2.5 billion. Today 80% of the US population are mobile users with 98% of all mobile handsets in the US have SMS (texting) capabilities. Cell phone penetration in the U.S. has surpassed TV, Web access and Home PCs.
In 2009, the growth rate of digital coupons outpaced the typical annual growth rate of freestanding insert (FSI) coupons by more than 10-1. Digital coupons grew 170% in 2009, compared to a typical annual growth rate of 8-16% for FSI coupons. More than 20% of consumers use digital coupons with the average user being women 25 – 54, with an average household income of $97,000.
Examples of mobile coupon applications to take advantage of:
Groupon
Groupon offers daily deals on food and entertainment in major cities. Groupon offers Personalized Deals, a service that tailors each subscriber’s stream of daily deals to their personal preferences and buying history.
Each Groupon subscriber’s deals will become more relevant over time as consumers share more information with Groupon and form buying patterns. Subscribers won’t see any changes in their Groupon interface. They’ll still receive a deal per day via e-mail, available for at least 24 hours.
Personalized Deals are available in Chicago, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle, and are slated to launch across Groupon’s more than 80 North American markets over the next few months.
Groupon has over 11 million subscribers in 22 countries and hundreds of cities.
MobiQpons
MobiQpons is a location-based service that brings consumers and businesses together when they are looking for one another. The application distributes offers to consumers by location, store or category and merchants can easily create coupons and deals to promote their business.
These coupons and offers are easily redeemed via barcode (retailer must have specific type of scanner) or cashiers simply enter in the redemption code provided on the offer.
MobileCoupons.com
MobileCoupons.com is another mobile coupon service that allows merchants to easily create coupons and deals to promote their business. There is no cost to merchants to create and publish the coupons at this time using MobileCoupons.com and MobileCoupons.com provides distribution of those deals. Merchants certify their coupons and set the expiration date and time.
Yowza
Yowza allows merchants to target their deals to shoppers who are near their store and looking to spend money. Push Notifications tell customers whenever merchants they like have added a new coupon.
Retailers that use Yowza’s mobile coupon service control offers, including expiration date, usage limits, and more. Advanced analytics let these retailers determine which offers are working and which aren’t.
Yowza allows merchants to run up to 3 coupons at a time. Retailers can change those coupons as often as they like. Yowza requires that all merchants that use their mobile coupon service have a physical store. Currently, web-based businesses are not eligible.
Remember to Consider Font and Page Size When Writing for the Web
Category: Web 2.0
4 Aug 2010Font type and size are two important ingredients in any written communication. Writing for the web uses a completely different set of rules than those created for hard copy writing. For example, when writing for print you should really use a Times-like font when writing, because the slight serifs (the small marks at the end of each leg of a letter) allow the reader to quickly separate and identify the letters more quickly than any other letter. This is part of the meta-information of a document: it facilitates meaning without meaning something itself.
However, the rule is different for the web. Researchers have found that sans-serif fonts, specifically Verdana or Helvetica, work the best. People can more easily read on the screen when using these fonts. Thus, when setting font type, these are perhaps the best used.
Maybe it has something to do with how we read online. We scan for information, when we find that information we concentrate on it, and then move on. We tend to skip to topics sentences throughout a page. Thus, perhaps words in san-serifs stand out more. And because we aren’t reading an immense amount of text, we don’t need the same strategies we use when reading hard copy documents.
With regards to font size: larger is not better! Large fonts make for awkward reading, and it is difficult to use the space effectively to find the information we’re looking for when the words are too big. A font size of what would be equivalent to 11 pt typically are the best. Sans-serif fonts tend to be larger, so scaling it back down from what we would normally use on hard copy (12 pt) is needed anyway.
You can use bigger font sizes, of course, for headings and titles, but try to limit the amount of larger font sizes used: it actually detracts from understanding and it’s hard to see the entire screen easily when the font size of any element is large.
The rules of contrast apply especially to screen. Light background and dark font need to be used to effectively communicate. Because we scan screens for information, you need to use effective contrast to highlight information. We will quickly miss important information that blends in with the background.
The size of the page, and the amount of text on it are also extremely crucial to aiding people in their task of finding and understanding information. As we graze over a web page, we are scanning back and forth for specific pieces of information. Thus, long paragraphs tend to hamper our attempts. The more information we put in a paragraph, and the longer it is, the more people have to scan.
This will cause a couple of things to happen. People will either get frustrated and leave, or they will not find the information they need because it’s buried under a layer of text they don’t need. Thus breaking up the paragraphs into smaller, more manageable chunks of information–usually by subtopic–is necessary to help people find information.
Many experts recommend what’s called the upside-down pyramid approach to organizing information. Unlike hard copy writing strategies, where we introduce a topic and gradually get to the point, we want to quickly give the important information at first and then fill in the
details. Readers will first read the important info, perhaps the first or topic sentence of a paragraph, and then determine what they want to read next.
Writing for the web isn’t hard, it just takes a different set of considerations than writing for print.
To read this article in its entirety, click here.
Top 10 WordPress Terms You Should Know
Category: Social Media| Web 2.0
23 Jul 2010As many of you probably know, WordPress is an open source CMS, often used as a blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL. Recently, SiteProNews release a list of the top 10 WordPress terms that you should know when creating and maintaining a blog of your own:
- Themes. A Theme is a collection of files that create the visual look of your WordPress website or blog. Themes are kinda like ’skins’ that you can easily download, install and start using on your site. Themes also can include some custom features to give you greater control over the presentation and functionality of your site. In general, only one Theme can be used at a time.
- Templates. In WordPress, templates are one of several specific files that control how a particular page on your site is displayed. For instance, your theme may have multiple page layouts, perhaps one with a sidebar and one without. There are also templates that control the top of all your pages including navigation, called a “header”, the bottom of all your pages, called a “footer”, and “sidebars”. Templates can also be created for a specific page or post, category, and much more.
- Plugins. Plugins are a collection of files that you can download and install to add some certain functionality to your site. For instance, there are plugins for e-commerce, Search Engine Optimization, to create specific features like a calendar, or to modify how you control and operate your website. There are 1,000’s of plugins, most of which are free.
- Sidebar. A sidebar is a section of your website that generally displays the along the left or right side of your pages, but can also appear in other places, such as the footer. You can also have multiple sidebars in your site based on the templates you have.
- Widgets. Widgets are the individual blocks of content that go into a sidebar. You can easily add, delete or rearrange Widgets in your sidebars by dragging and dropping in the WordPress admin center. Many Widgets can also be edited to give you extra control over how the Widgets appear on your site. Some common examples of Widgets are simple text, recent posts, advertising such as AdSense, etc.
- Pages & Posts. Pages vs. Posts are a bit confusing and could have its own article. In general though, you want to use Pages for any single pages of content that remain in the same place on your site. Pages generally have their own navigation in WordPress and are good for pages like ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, etc. You can easily select different templates for pages and they are not categorized. Posts on the other hand are used when you will be creating multiple entries about a particular topic. You can put Posts into various Categories. WordPress will then automatically handle creating various Category pages, which will list all of the Posts in that Category, generally showing only an Excerpt of the Post and putting the Posts in chronological order. For instance, if you had a blog on Hollywood happenings, you would use Posts each time you write a new entry about some celebrity doing something stupid.
- Admin Center. The Admin Center is where you control everything about your WordPress site. To access the Admin Center you will go to a specific URL on the internet and enter your username and password. From there, you will be able to add/edit/delete Pages and Posts, control Plugins and Widgets, manage your users, and much more.
- Permalinks. How your URL’s are formed is very important to Search Engine Optimization and making your pages more memorable and understandable to your visitors. In WordPress, you can easily create Permalinks, which are a particular structure to your site. Instead of using meaningless URL’s like yourdomain.com/?p=8, you could have yourdomain.com/my-page/. You can control the permalinks for each Page and Post in WordPress.
- Tags. Tags are similar to Categories, only they are less structured. For instance, you may have a Post about your favorite Football team, which perhaps you are putting in a “Sports” category. You could also use some tags like ‘Football’, ‘Cincinnati Bengals’, and ‘Carson Palmer’. Using the tags makes it possible to have a list of Tags in your sidebar where people can click the different Tags to bring up all the Pages and Posts that have those particular tags. If you have a Search box, then the Tags are also used to retrieve results for the users specific search.
- Custom Fields. WordPress includes a way to create custom values that you assign to a particular Page or Post. Your Theme, or WordPress developer can then use those fields and values to create custom functionality on your site. For instance, you may want to be able to have a rating system for whatever you are writing about. A developer could set-up a custom field where you just enter your rating and then the system takes that information and makes a pretty display feature based on the rating you assigned. The possibilities are endless with Custom Fields and are a powerful feature of WordPress.
To read this article in its entirety, click here.
What is ClickTale
Category: Stevens & Tate Speaks| Web 2.0
30 Jun 2010ClickTale is the industry leader in Customer Experience Analytics (CEA), providing businesses with revolutionary insights into their customer’s online behavior.
ClickTale tracks every mouse move, click and scroll, creating playable videos of customers’ entire browsing sessions as well as powerful visual heatmaps and behavioral reports that complement traditional web analytics.
Features of ClickTale Include:
1. Visitor Recordings
The Visitor Recordings feature of ClickTale allows you to see everything that your visitors do on your web page.
ClickTale captures every mouse move, click, scroll and keystroke by using a tiny piece of JavaScript embedded into your website. The whole process is completely transparent to the end user and has no effect on site performance.
2. Mouse Move Heatmaps
ClickTale’s Mouse Move Heatmaps allow you to get a comprehensive, visual representation of what visitors are looking at and focusing on within a web page based on thousands of visitors to your site.
**Independent research shows that there is an 84% to 88% correlation between mouse and eye movements, allowing us to create high-precision heatmaps based on just user’s mouse movements.
3. Attention Heatmaps
ClickTale’s Attention Heatmaps allow you to see how much attention a specific web site are gets from your visitors, what content your visitors care about, what they read and what they skip over.
Using the Attention Heatmaps, marketers can identify the boring areas of a site that most visitors skip. These areas increase visitor frustration and cause potential customers to abandon the site.
4. Scroll Reach Heatmaps
ClickTale’s Scroll Reach Heatmaps allow you to see where the page fold lies on your site and how far visitors scroll down, and at what point your visitors abandon the page.
Using the Scroll Reach Heatmaps, you can discover which pages need to be shorter and which ones could be made longer.
5. Click Heatmaps
ClickTale’s Click Heatmaps allow you to discover everywhere a visitor clicks on your site, whether it is a link, image, text or dead space.
Using a Click Heatmap you can see which links aren’t getting enough clicks and which call-to-action buttons are being ignored.
6. Form Analytics
Using the Form Analytics, you are able to discover which fields of your online forms take too long to complete, which ones are most frequently left blank, and which ones cause your visitors to leave.
7. Link Analysis
Discover how visitors respond to and interact with your hyperlinks. ClickTale reports on:
- Hovers
- Clicks
- Hesitation Time
- Visit Order
8. Custom Alerts
ClickTale allows you to set up custom e-mail alerts for when your customers complete or drop out of any business process or conversion funnel.
Alerts can be set up:
- 1/Week
- 1/Day
- Real Time
9. Real Time Monitor
The Real Time Monitor allows you to see where your visitors are coming from and watch exactly what they are doing and where they are browsing in Real-Time.
10. Page Reports
ClickTale gives users the ability to monitor unique page performance statistics.
Page Reports include:
- Most & Least Engaging Pages
- Most & Least Clicked Pages
- Most & Least Errored Pages
- Most & Least Scrolled Pages
- Slowest & Fastest Loading Pages
11. Demographics Report
ClickTale allows you to see a complete analysis of your visitors’ demographic information, including:
- Visitor Language
- Country of Origin
- Browser Version
- Operation System
- Screen Size
Benefits of ClickTale
ClickTale helps you improve the quality and effectiveness of your web site. The Benefits of using ClickTale include:
- Seeing your web site through the eyes of your visitors
- Understanding how visitors use your site
- Work towards getting a better conversion rate
- Reduce abandonment rate
- Identify problem areas on your site & work to revise them
Does your company currently use ClickTale? Contact us and let us know what you find beneficial? We would love to tell your story.
Mobile Friendly Websites
Category: Stevens & Tate Speaks| Web 2.0
16 Jun 2010With 42% of Americans using smart phones, the use of mobile friendly websites is becoming more and more necessary in order to reach more of today’s consumers.
Endora has put guidelines in place to coordinate with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Mobile Web Best Practices:
- Developing so our page/screen width will be 120 pixels.
- Page height will be determined by the size of the file with the content (20KB).
- Web pages should reside on a .mobi url .
- If possible, programming should be added to the .com site to detect mobile visitors and redirect them to the mobile site. This will be based on the detectable data provided by the users mobile phone.
- Copy should be written to be informative in order to allow the mobile phone user to locate their information quickly and easily.
- In order to maintain a quick download time the site will contain minimal graphics and not include .pdf downloads or forms.
Some good examples of mobile friendly websites include:
BBC.mobi: they offer a clean and crisp layout with easy to find content. They also offer content based on the type of phone you have to make it easier for the end user.
Delta.mobi: Formerly Northwest, Delta offers useful services on their mobile website, including flight status checks and online check in. Their application is simple to use and the low graphics make it fast to move through.
Google.mobi: Google is always a great example of how to take full advantage of online tools. They offer graphics that are well executed and provide added value to the experience.
QR Codes
Category: Stevens & Tate Speaks| Web 2.0
14 Jun 2010
What Are QR Codes?
QR code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by a Japanese automotive component manufacturer in 1994. This technology is recently becoming adopted by the marketing world.
Common in Japan and Europe now, “QR” is derived from “Quick Response” and it allows users to access additional information products through mobile devices.
How Do They Work?
QR codes work in conjunction with smartphones. Simply scan the QR Code using the camera or scanner in your smartphone and (if you have the application loaded on your smartphone) you will instantly have access to special information about the product (usually in the form of a dedicated mobile website).
QR codes can:
- Send people to a URL
- Offer coupons
- Give product details
- Provide event details
- List contact details, with links to directly connect
- And more!
Two great examples of how QR Codes are used:
- Demo video found on YouTube
- Lego video showing how QR codes work and how Lego was able to make their product uniquely relevant to the QR code itself
Benefits of QR Codes:
- Keeps you current in new technology
- Makes you a leader in your industry
- Offers your customers and prospects quick access to useful, additional information in a new convenient way
- Is a unique way to extend print/online campaigns
- Allows your audience to take your information with them and keep it always at their fingertips to easily pass it along to others
- Trackable and measurable for results
- Starting to become more popular in the U.S.; experts believe a big increase in the next 12 months
- 42% of Americans use smartphones (up almost 30% in just 3 years)
Is your company currently using QR codes? Contact us on how. We would love to tell your marketing story.
HTML5 – The Future of the Web
Category: Web 2.0
21 May 2010Steve Jobs was recently quoted as saying “No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5″ igniting interest in HTML5 and sparking numerous debates online in blogs and forums.
It’s not just Apple pointing to HTML5 as an internet revolution, Microsoft, Google, Opera, Mozilla, W3C and even Adobe themselves agree. In fact HTML5 may become historic for that very reason. It is arguably the only time Google, Microsoft and Apple have ever agreed on anything.
How HTML5 evolved was largely due to a disagreement with the W3C over Error Handling and the failure to embrace modern Internet applications. In 1997, W3C announced it would no longer extend HTML4 and saw XML and XHTML as the future. Draconian Error Handling, (Draco was the Greek leader that issued death penalties for minor offences), instructed that browsers were to treat all errors in XML as fatal. With 99% of web pages showing minor errors, and the lack of new features in XML, many webmasters ignored the new standard or continued to serve their websites as HTML, even when adopting XHTML.
In 2004, a group of developers and browser vendors including Apple, Opera and Mozilla gave a presentation to the W3C on evolving HTML4 to include new features for modern web applications. The W3C rejected their proposal of extending HTML and CSS. Those interested in evolving HTML4 rebelled and broke away from the W3C, forming their own working group called WHATWG (Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group). At the core of the WHATWG beliefs was backwards compatibility and forgiving error handling. WHATWG’s vision was to extend HTML features including form handling while ensuring that it would degrade gracefully in older browsers. While the W3C wanted the world to move to a new standard XML, WHATWG planned to evolve existing HTML to support a modern Internet.
In 2006, Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the W3C, recognized that the rebels at WHATWG had gained momentum and announced that the W3C would work together with WHATWG to evolve HTML. The W3C HTML Working Group was formed, working with HTML in conjunction with XHTML. HTML5 was officially born. In October 2009, W3C shut down XHTML2 making HTML5 the future of the Internet. The pirates had taken over the ship.
HTML5 marks a change in attitude from the W3C and seeks to support the diversity of HTML rather than just enforcement of web standards. It is an incredible achievement that HTML5 is backward compatible, meaning most of HTML5 can be used straight away albeit with some JavaScript hacks on semantics for IE. Ideas from W3C, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Opera and many other experts combine to pull the best bits out of HTML and browsers past into an exciting upgrade of the HTML language that promotes inclusion not exclusion.
In many ways HTML5 simplifies web pages, taking laborious tasks such as form validation away from web authoring and into the browser. The idea of making the browser do the work probably stems back to IE3, where Microsoft provided the first browser to build in CSS support. HTML5 introduces new tags for page structure and semantics of documents.
New markets in Typography are opening up with the implementation of “@font-face”, meaning designers at last can transfer the visual appeal of print to the web thanks to advances in CSS and HTML5. Large JavaScript libraries such as MooTools and JQuery can be slimmed down as HTML5 transfers many common tasks directly into the browser. Client side storage, session storage and client side posting are set to change how we communicate on the web. Web applications such as video are embedded by HTML without the need of JavaScript. Sites will begin to move away from Flash to deliver their video and onto HTML5, especially when current codec concerns with Mozilla Firefox are resolved.
New HTML5 API’s, such as drag and drop, are reverse engineered from Microsoft, ensuring that they are supported from the start by IE. What developers of HTML5 such as Ian Hickson (Opera) have done is to view the modern web and say, “OK that’s what people are trying to do, how can HTML5 support that”.
Unlike previous web standards based releases such as XHTML 1.1 and the never finished XHTML 2.0, HTML5 is backward compatible and is here to stay. With the involvement of people that have been critical of the W3C, HTML5 brings a standard based upgrade of HTML that is fully supported throughout the industry. HTML5 will genuinely future proof your site without the danger of your markup depreciating in a couple of years.
HTML5 timetable for completion is in 2022, which has left many webmasters confused as to its relevance now. However, any website can begin using the new specification immediately by simply changing the doc type to “<!DOCTYPE html>”, the lowest number of characters required to trigger standards mode in IE. Currently, only beta versions of browsers IE9, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera support advanced HTML5 elements. However, typography “@font-face” is fully supported in current browsers. For more information have a look at Ethan Dunham’s “FontSquirrel.com” and Jeffrey Veen’s “Typekit.com“. Other HTML5 features such as “Drag and Drop” and “ContentEditable” are also currently supported. You can follow the implementation of HTML5 in modern browsers at “HTML5Readiness.com” and “Caniuse.com“.
To read this article in it’s entirety , click here.
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