It’s amazing to me how something you start doing for inspiration can become beneficial for clients. Since I was a child, I loved playing with color; primary colors, pastels, warm tones, cool tones—I used every crayon in my Crayola 64 box with the sharpener in the back. In high school art class I studied the color wheel and learned how to make colors from scratch—adding a dash of blue here, a little red there. Later on while majoring in both Fine Arts and Computer Science, I learned the principles behind utilizing color successfully in the digital world, for example how colors are translated on a brightly-lit monitor as opposed to printed materials, which colors are more or less irritating to the eye, and how different cultures view the same color. 

I believe people are born with an eye for color, yet learning the basics early and understanding the varying tones of color aided me in honing my skills as a colorist, consequently enabling me to become Beacon Technologies’ resident color specialist. Dynamic color schemas that look great online were hard to find a few years ago, since computers and monitors had limited color space or range of colors available. But as technology advanced, color availability for the web changed too. As a testament to the possibilities of color on the web, Adobe Labs launched Adobe Kuler in 2006, a website for creating and sharing color themes. I first noticed Adobe’s online color tool in November 2006 and I created a few swatches just for fun. A few weeks later when I visited again, one of the color schemes I created, Herbs and Spice  was on the first page of the site dubbed as one of the highest-rated, most downloaded swatches. I’ve created more than 100 themes since then, mostly in spurts and always inspired by the world around me. For example, feeling sad stimulated the color swatch, Quiet Cry which maintained the top spot on the Highest Rated page for over a month, and was downloaded almost 100 times a day during its reign at the top. Last summer, Adobe Labs included Herbs and Spice, in a Kuler promotional campaign.Through my affiliation with Kuler, I’ve been able to network with artists and designers from around the world and some are now my friends on Facebook.

Through my use of Kuler, I’ve been able to create outstanding, beautifully colored website designs for Beacon’s clients in various industries, from law to furniture. And I’m not talking about just the standard corporate blue with black font, but chocolate brown gradients, accent colors of green and orange, and easy-to-read charcoal gray or brown text—all of which you can see in my swatch, Furniture and Fabric II that I created and used for the new design of AC Furniture’s website that the client felt was, “elegant and sophisticated.” If you want to learn more about how Beacon’s creative services can improve your site, contact us.

The Greensboro Grasshoppers are a Class A minor league baseball team in Greensboro, NC, USA. If you’re a local in the area, chances are that not only have you heard about them, but you attend games regularly. The Grasshoppers have welcomed over 1,250,000 to the ballpark, the only Class A team in the history of Minor League Baseball to draw over 400,000 fans and grow its attendance for 3 consecutive years in a new ballpark (the stadium recently renamed to NewBridge Bank Park). Not surprising to see the figures, if you’ve attended a “Thirsty Thursday” before, you know what kind of crowd they draw!

We’ve certainly been drawn to them as well. As the official technology partner of the Grasshoppers, Beacon designed, developed and hosts the Grasshoppers website. Beacon Technologies also sponsors the “Beacon Blast”! (You didn’t see that coming did you?) Each time a Hopper hits a home run, a Beacon Blast is showcased on a monitor and fireworks fill up the sky – lighting the whole stadium!

Most importantly, we love attending the games and supporting the team. We love them so much we actually acquired a box at the stadium. Located in lower right in this seating chart, you’ll find us on some nights enjoying the game with our family and friends. You’ll know it’s us by the placard that says Beacon Technologies on it. Come by and say hello to our team!

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you changed a button on your site? Would your users respond well or just abandon you forever? Ever wanted to put your showcase image on the right side of your form instead of the left, but were afraid to because your users already have an expectation for your site? What about changing your contact form? But…what’s the right combination to get more people to fill it out?

Well, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) lets you try all that and more without making permanent changes to your site until you’re sure which one is the best!

I love GWO! It’s like playing in the sandbox when I was a kid. I built some castles with two towers and others with three. Sometimes I made makeshift flags built out of leaves. Sometimes I would use pebbles for windows or to create a stone cap for the towers. Would I have had more fun with two castles at the same time? What if I had built three castles each with different attributes like short towers, tall towers, round towers, rectangular windows, square windows, round windows or even arched doors! Wouldn’t that have been great? When I was a kid, I was only interested in one castle at a time. Now that I’m older and see all the possibilities out there, I want tons of castles.

What history shows us

I think that the history of website design has followed a similar path from its infancy to a now more mature and robust capability of what we can do with a website. Do you remember when everything on the web had frames with the navigation on the left side in its own frame? Wow! How things have changed. Now, everyone wants all the castles they can fit into their site. However, it’s increasingly important to discover what motivates your visitors, not just your market segment, and not just what looks good.

GWO lets you try out different scenarios and measures which variation has the best performance in getting your users to do what you want them to such as filling out a form, adding a product to your shopping cart, or registering for an account on your site. Let’s take a look at a sample case study for an e-commerce site that changes out a button. Take a look at the seven buttons below. Can you guess which one caused more people to click on it?

Amazingly enough, the large red button has out-performed all the others. I chose to use the red one just to be a little silly, while maintaining a professional look and feel. I had no idea that it would perform so well!

Since we used GWO, we have the proof!

For a total of 4521 visitors during the experiment period, the Red Large button was displayed to 645 people and 50.1% of them performed the action that we wanted. It is still showing an observed improvement of 3.88% while all other buttons are dropping in effectiveness.

The Moral

So, the moral of this story is to get back in your sandbox! Build as many castles as you want with as many variations as you can come up with! There is no limit to the number of tests you can do. There is no limit to the designs and layouts that you can try. One of the best parts about it is the tool is already out there to compile your data and prove to yourself, your designer, or your boss which one is really the most effective in persuading your visitors to take the plunge.

You know you’ve thought about it.  Your business needs a Web site.  Or worse yet, you have a Web site, but its content is about as fresh as a carton of milk in a college dormitory fridge.  Sure, people will visit your site, but as time gets further away from its expiration date and nothing changes, they’ll eventually give up on it.  Then you lose potential customers.  Not the best sales model, huh?

What are your reasons for not keeping your site’s content fresh?

• I don’t know how to do it.
• It’s too expensive to pay someone to maintain it.
• I know how to do it, but I don’t have time to mess with it.
• I don’t want to have to buy special software.
• I send my changes to my Web site provider, but it takes them too long to get my changes posted.  I want change to happen yesterday!
• I have access to edit my site, but I’m no programmer.  It takes me forever to figure out how to add one page.

All of the above used to be true.  You want your site updated, but it’s expensive, it’s not done immediately and on your schedule, and you just don’t know how to do it.  You have to leave it up to the tekkies.  But in the past few years, new tools have emerged that allow you to be a Web site programmer.  Welcome to the new world of Content Management Systems.

So what is a Content Management System (CMS)?  In short, it’s an application (preferably Web browser-based) that allows you to maintain your site’s content (text, images, documents, etc.) using a friendly and familiar interface.  Using a personal login, you can access your entire site to do the following (and more):

• Add, update, or delete pages;
• Upload and manage images;
• Use it as a document management system to maintain all of your PDFs, Word documents, videos, and other files;
• Maintain frequently-updated sections of your site, such as press releases, product updates, and photo galleries;
• Produce RSS feeds.

And now, the icing on the cake:  a good CMS will use a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get), which looks and functions just like your everyday word processing program (I probably can’t mention the name, but we all know what I’m talking about).  Using this editor, you can format your content and images just like you would with your favorite word processing tool.  Font sizes, colors, styles, linking, images, tables:  they’re all at your fingertips.  When you’re done, you click a few buttons, and your Web site is updated!  This same CMS can also publish out multiple formats of content:  HTML for everyday Web browsers, formats for hand-held devices, PDFs, Word documents, and print-friendly versions.

Intrigued?  Beacon Technologies offers all of the above with the CMS that we’ve selected, Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server.  We can import your existing site, or create a whole new site for you in Cascade Server.  Then, after a short training session, we turn the reins over to you, and the site is yours!  You can keep your site up-to-date within a matter of minutes, any time of the day, from anywhere you can get your hands on a Web browser.  There’s no extra software to buy and install, and you don’t have to know fancy computer programming languages to maintain your site.  (But if you do know HTML, there’s an interface for that, too.)

Don’t think you have time to maintain your site?  Using Cascade Server is a real time-saver.  To add an already-written press release would take you about 5 minutes.  Updating a page with some current-year figures?  5 minutes.  Creating a new page from scratch?  15 minutes.  Those few minutes you spend will keep visitors coming back to see what you’ve come up with this time.

To learn more, get in touch with us to discuss your current needs and customize a CMS implementation for you.

And by the way:  Welcome to the CMS corner of the Beacon Blog!  Here we’ll explore CMS and how Beacon is using it to help any kind of company grow and showcase your business, all while maintaining it yourself.  Even if you’re not a tekkie.

In such a new and expanding field, where do you go to find true enlightenment? You could go online and wade through countless blogs to find the latest search marketing wisdom. But books (remember those things that look like paper sandwiches) offer another informational avenue that have gone through the process of editing, fact-checking, and peer-review. Plus, you don’t have to worry about dropping them or throwing a thousand dollars away if you spill a drink on them.

Some books I currently have at my desk:

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau
When you worry about duplicate content like I do, turn to this book to get you through the day. The same very short tale is rewritten ninety-nine times in various styles. The author was a member of the famous Oulipo group. Another favorite of mine by a member of the same group is A Void by Georges Perec. The book is an entire novel written without the letter e. Unique and original.

Google’s Page Rank & Beyond by Amy N. Langville & Carl D. Meyer

Written by fellow Carolinians, it is an extremely in depth look at the mathematics behind Google’s Page Rank. The book contains some very interesting tidbits, is extremely heavy on the math, and has a great section on why webpages are ranked by their popularity.

Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
Online advertising has its roots in direct mail advertising. So many of the principles of writing effective ad copy and ad testing can be found in this book. David Ogilvy wrote a gushing forward to the book calling the author “an indomitable analyzer and teacher of advertising”.

Professional SEO with PHP by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie
Comprehensive and well laid out, this book covers a long checklist of optimization techniques to take advantage of. One of the most up-to-date SEO books that contains a wealth of information. Kudos to the two seo-eggheads who wrote it.

Winning Results with Google Adwords by Andrew Goodman
Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, recommended this book on his blog. Although the book needs a second edition, it was published in 2005, the book is solid and Mr. Goodman is an entertaining writer.

Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres
I picked up this book because I like the fact it was written by econometrician Ian Ayres. I have a degree in economics and it is a subject of great interest to me. Not a how-to book, but it gives you a good indication of where the future is heading as more data is collected about your searching and buying habits. Marketers, web developers, and statisticians are coming together to use the information age to their advantage.

Welcome to my first blog on Web hosting. Since I’m a big sports guy, I relate this “blogging” debut to a rookie getting called up to big leagues. So, forgive me if I have “opening day” blogger nerves but I hope you’ll find the post informative when choosing a hosting option.

There are several aspects to having a successful web site, but one of the most important components is having a dependable web hosting company. Once you’ve made your investment developing a great looking site, and you’re running your entire business on-line, the last thing you need is for your site to be down or hacked or be incredibility slow. So, it’s important to choose the right hosting company that has the features you need for your web site to be running efficiently 24x7x365. Here are three important factors when evaluating hosting solutions:

• Reliability
• Redundancy
• Scalability

So, let’s break down each of these items to identify the important features of each one.

Reliability Features

• It’s important to utilize the same company who developed the site
• 24x7x365 Technical Support & Monitoring
• Web Analytics to provide important data about your site’s usage and traffic patterns
• Test and Production systems so you can review/test your site prior to releasing it to production (Live)
• Industry leading hardware and software providers – some companies use “white boxes” which are custom built servers made from scratch.  You want good warranty support on your servers and your software from industry leaders

Redundancy Features

• State-of-the-art data center that includes multiple Internet connections, redundant air conditioners, UPS, diesel generators
• Daily, Weekly & Monthly backups
• Offsite backups
• Dual power supplies in your server
• Dual firewalls
• RAID systems for disk storage in your servers

Scalability Features

• Web and application servers that are separate from your database
• Your bandwidth can be expanded to meet your site’s evolving needs within a few business days
• The ability to go with dedicated servers
• A Content Management System (CMS) which allows you to have multiple authors for your web content

The bottom line is that your hosting company needs to be able to grow with your business as well as having all of the features needed to manage and monitor your web site.  So, when considering hosting options don’t forget these handy tips, and if you need help just gives us a call.

This is my first post on the Beacon Blog and because I will be posting for the Google Analytics Category I thought there probably isn’t a much better way than to start out with the top 10 reasons why I think you should give Google Analytics a serious consideration. Over the next period I will probably write post that go into more detail about these individual areas but here is a high level overview of what I think are the 10 most convincing reasons to give Google Analytics a try.

1. It’s Free: Google Analytics a very comprehensive website analytics package that provides a clean, user friendly design interface. The charts are very easy to understand and make data collection and analysis much easier. Providing business owners and clients with meaningful information is a necessary business function but when Google takes on a task, improves it, and makes it free to everyone, how can you not give it a try?

2.Reporting Interface: The way the metrics are displayed provide a very easy to understand format, namely charts and graphs with several view options for every report. Even if you have absolutely no statistical or analytical background, you can easily understand the good and bad and measure performance improvements or losses due to the data or site comparison chart options. Google Analytics also shows the good numbers in Green and the bad (negative) numbers in red.

3.Imports Adwords Cost Data: If you have ecommerce turned on and apply your cost data, you can view your cost and revenue associated with every Adwords campaign, Ad group, and all the way down to the keyword level. This makes ROI analysis much easier than constantly having to go back and forth between Adwords and a web analytics program. You can sort your groupings by goal or Ecommerce conversion rates, or even the provided ROI field and focus on the strong performers or remove the weak ones. The ROI field does not take into consideration the cost of goods sold, so you may need to export to excel, add the new field and recalculate to get a truer form of your ROI but nonetheless, this would be much more difficult if you had to collect the data from several sources.

4.Customizable: There are many options that you can easily control by adjusting the Google Analytics tracking code embedded on pages you’re tracking. You can control the session timeout, campaign timeout, set keywords to ignore, add organic sources, set custom campaign fields, and much more. For other options you can’t control with the GA tracking code, you can easily manipulate through the control of filters. Filters allow you to include/exclude based on dozens of options giving you the ability to provide profiles as specific as you need. The GA tracking script out of the box provides most businesses with what they need but if you have special tracking requirements, you there are several ways to customize the tracking code to allow you a completely custom tracking solution.

5.Event Tracking: The recently released Event Tracking feature provides a new level of flexibility in website analytics. Gone are the days of not being able to track on page activities without skewing your pageviews. Event tracking allows for tracking actions associated with flash objects, dynamic rotating content, movie players, interactive buttons, complex forms, and much more. You can build custom tracking solutions for almost any type of activity on a site and associate site usage, Ecommerce, or goal conversion data with those activities providing a whole new level of traffic and visitor usage data analysis.

6.Support: There is a wide array of support options available from reading one of the Google help forums, reading one of the many books available, engaging in one of the several Webinars, or consulting with a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) to help you setup a custom solution, interpret and understand meaningful data, or to provide ongoing consultative support. Because of the nature of it being free, there is such a large community of users so that you are not likely to be the first to encounter an issue and chances are high there is already some great information available online to help you.

7.Site Search: One of Google’s newer features is the ability to track your internal site search. This is a great tool for understanding what visitors are trying to find on your site. As with most of the reports in Google Analytics, you can associate goal and ecommerce data by selecting one of the several reporting views. This provides you with an incredible source of keywords that you know your site’s ability to convert for your organic campaigns, PPC campaigns, or other targeted marketing campaigns. This feature also allows you to adjust your internal navigation to place items, articles, or objects that your visitors are trying to access closer to high view areas of your site ultimately creating a more user friendly website that will make conversion a little easier for your visitors.

8.Segmentation: This feature is critical to understanding your website’s user behaviors. Most websites have a target audience but within that target audience, there are often several sets of users with different behaviors and being able to identify these additional sets and isolate their behaviors is the first step in truly understanding your target audience. From there, you can take it in several directions to provide a much better user experience which will lead to higher conversion rates, better branding, higher volumes of repeat traffic, more page views, and a stronger web presence. There are several ways to segment traffic but the easiest is with the user-defined segmentation Google Analytics provides almost out of the box. There are some additional snippets of code that have to be embedded and you can setup filters to isolate these segmentations once triggered providing you with detailed unique website stats for these variations in your users. As you can imagine, this provides you with the ability to measure testing and marketing success at a very detailed level.

9.Competition is doing it. Google Analytics is the most widely used website analytics package available and is providing high level of insights to your competition. If you aren’t using a detailed analytics package such as Google Analytics with a resource allocated towards analyzing it and taking action, you are handicapping your company’s web capabilities and might as well start handing over market share.

10.Benchmarking: No other website analytics package can provide as much insight as the beta benchmarking feature will provide. This feature allows you to compare key performance indicators with like businesses in similar industries so you can benchmark your success against your competitors. This new feature builds value as more people sign up for it because your ability to specify your industry will become much more in accurate. You can see your traffic, bounce rates, pageviews, and other great metrics in relation to competitors to determine your weak or strong areas and can build website optimizer testing to strengthen you site’s presence on the web.

I know my list is not comprehensive and probably leaves additional questions but that is what some of the future posts are going to be dedicated towards. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

“We need to redesign the website”–  Now what??? 

Many marketing and IT departments are faced with the sometimes daunting task of taking on a wholesale redesign of a website, without much guidance as to where to start.  Before the more glamorous tasks of selecting colors and graphics begins, it is a good idea to take a step back and carefully analyze the purpose of the site and its audience.  This analysis phase pays deep dividends later because, in many cases, consensus and allegiance among a company’s disparate departments can be achieved, even before one line of code is written.

Here are some questions that we often use as part of our Needs Assessment projects in order to guide our clients in their redesign plans:

Audience

• Who is your target audience?
• What are the goals of your target audience?
• How can we help them achieve their goals through this website?
• Make a list of competitors websites and determine their degree of success in achieving their goals

Design

• What kind of design and graphical presence are you looking for?
• Are there company-wide graphical and/or marketing standards that must be considered in the new design?
• Make a list of websites inside and outside of your industry that have appealing designs and note specifically what attracted you to them

Functionality

• What works well on the current site?
• What could be improved on the current site?
• What kind of feedback do you get from current site visitors?
• Make a list of websites inside and outside of your industry that have particularly good functionality and/or navigation and note specifically what attracted you to them

Administration and Maintenance

• Who will create the content on the new website and how will the site be maintained?
• Who will host the new site?  Are outside vendors or consultants required for the site hardware setup?
• Who are the stakeholders and decision makers in the process?

If carefully considered, these may lead to other, more complex, questions.  A carefully prepared analysis phase is the first step towards a well designed website and will help to avoid “surprises” later in the process.  Then you’ll be ready to take the next step—Development!