This will surely be a cool event this upcoming Saturday and Sunday, dedicated to timely topics of development, design, and business by and for the local Drupal community. (Note the ENTERMEDIA room where all the Design and Business track sessions will be held.)
Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. “Buy this now!”) or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g. “Learn more…”) that asks the user to take action.
AustinontheRocks.com is live! This brand new website is all about serving up search results for local happy hour and food/drink specials based on user submitted criteria.
Say you want to find a bar in North Austin that has a nice patio, beer and wine specials this Thursday night, a big TV to watch the big game, is “date worthy’, and allows a dog. Austin on the Rocks will deliver the skinny. (It won’t buy you a pitcher, root for your team, find you a date, or walk your dog.) This unique site actually caters to Austin bar-goers and Austin bar/restaurant-proprietors alike, because it matches up the perfect customer with the perfect local food and drink establishment. Bars can control and update their own entries on the site, too. Design cues are simple, clean, and easy to navigate, so the user experience is smooth.
From concept to creation, ENTERMEDIA made it happen for this start up custom application-based web business built in Cake, including:
brand and online strategy consulting
creating the cool logo
designing all interface and admin layers
sussing out important content strategy and user-experience decisions
setting up a database design that will allow Austin on the Rocks to scale gracefully
Our fantastic client Cathi Rustmann and her daughter Taylore Cunningham are the one-two punch signing up the hippest bars all over Austin to be a part of this. Cathi and Taylore have big plans in store for Austin on the Rocks and really perform a great FREE service to local folks who want to find the best food and drink specials in town. Be sure to follow AusontheRocks on Twitter and become their facebook fan: you’ll hear about unadvertised food/drink specials and “get ‘em while they last” promotions you won’t want to miss. Cheers!
One of our all time favorite clients is Ausley Algert Robertson & Flores, LLP, the best family law practice in Austin. We redesigned and launched their website in Drupal this summer and really enjoyed the collaboration. Then they they were kind enough to mention us in their first blog post:
” … The folks at Entermedia are professional, patient, creative, and helpful beyond anything we could have expected. If you need website help, we highly recommend Entermedia…”
Wow! Probably the best testimonial we could ask for, but we swear we didn’t ask. We are very grateful.
The scramble format proved hospitable for Ethan and Ryan’s amazing talents (another client of ours, Cuatro Groos, and his friend Matt Haney were the other two members of this fearsome foursome). A respectable third place finish was attained.
Here’s Ethan and Ryan at the ENTERMEDIA hole we sponsored:
On our first full day yesterday, we had (##) subscriptions.(Our old website averaged (#) per day.)
It’s clear that the new design and graphics have been a complete home run.
Thanks again for all your help!
Mike
Check out this Google Analytics graphic showing the impact of the new design on their subscription page traffic :
In the busy professional world, good work is simply expected and praise can be infrequently found. We always strive to make our clients happy, but it feels really good when they are moved to express their enthusiasm about the finished product. Hats off to Bryan and Ethan, who solved this redesign project in a minimum of hours and apparently to great effect.
Putting customer testimonials on your website is a time-worn practice and generally a good idea, but there is some debate over their efficacy. One argument in their favor is ‘your users want to know you have them’…like some kind of a credibility benchmark. This is not to say that they will pay any attention to them. Why? Because testimonials are generally so complimentary by their very nature as to be perceived as embellished. They are not “reviews”…so what informational value do they offer? Again, maybe just the simple fact that you can get your current customers to say nice things about you is the entire point.
It’s also possible that users might have a different bias against them…whether or not they are real. Who would know if they are or are true accounts or complete fiction? In our experience, we have sadly come across some fabricated testimonials, that go a little something like this:
“[So and so] is the only [some kind of company] in the [blank industry] that I trust to deliver [x] [with all the trimmings].”
- Kenny S. from Alabama
Thanks for that, Kenny S! Rest assured, all of EM’s testimonials are genuine. (They need to be updated to reflect more of our latest work and clients, but that’s a different issue.)
Recently, one of our clients came up with a great way to present customer testimonials in a way that is genuine, informational, and compelling. Cuatro from CuatroBenefits invited some of his representative clients into his office the other morning and shot a quick video asking them some pointed questions about their experience interacting with his service. Full disclosure, Ethan and Ryan were invited and filmed.
Anyway, we think this is a wonderful and persuasive marketing play in the age of easy YouTube style video sharing. This is going to drive business leads for CuatroBenefits. We recommend this way of presenting testimonials for similar service-oriented clients.
ENTERMEDIA cofounder Ethan Worrel and our Head Drupal Chef Nick Lewis will be the speakers tonight at the July meeting of the Austin Drupal Meetup on the interrelated topics of UX, The Client, The Project, and Drupal.
The meetup will run from 7-10p and held at UT’s ACTLab (4th Floor CMB, Studio B, corner of Guadalupe and Dean Keeton). Ethan and Nick will take turns presenting their brief remarks and then open the floor for questions and comments.
Without giving too much away, here’s a sampling of what you can expect to hear tonight from two of our own most thoroughly enlightening and well-mannered professionals:
UX:
Fully leverage everything the user already knows
Display the most valuable data…let users dig for the fine detail
Make decisions so your users don’t have to
The Client:
Guide them to think in terms of page types
Demand supporting content early and often
Most of the time, you are the client
The Project:
Making tough choices that pay off in the long run for both parties
How to use the Website Price Estimator 5000
Drupal:
Clients can figure out how taxonomy works well enough, but how taxonomy fits into the concept of view arguments? That’s a different story…
[pause for laughter...the audience will think its funny...]
People often ask us to explain the pros and cons between CMS platforms…why we prefer and often recommend Drupal for many of our client’s website projects. While we acknowledge there’s more than one way to skin a cat, generally speaking we like Drupal because it’s open source, well-supported, highly extensible, popular, and SEO friendly.
What makes Drupal SEO friendly? Features and modules like the following:
Path Module (or PathAuto Module) - allows you to create URL aliases (either automatically or manually) for your pages, rather than a default string of ugly/crazy letters and symbols (vm&ctl_nbr=2604&cid=TopNav, etc….). Search engines tend to reward human-friendly URLs–even more so if they include relevant keywords.
To sum up, properly implementing such modules into your site can play an integral role in the organic SEO process and help to automate some of the work and thinking towards getting your site ranked well in the search engine results pages for the keywords you are targeting.
The Austin City Council is set to vote this week on awarding a contract to a California company to redesign the city’s Web site.
City staff is recommending Cignex Technologies Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. be awarded the contract valued at up to $704,088.
The city council authorized staff to begin the process of redesigning the Web site in November 2007. According to background documents from the city, 228 notices were sent out to prospective Web development companies and three proposals were received back, including the one from Cignex.
City Chief of Staff Anthony Snipes said the two other companies that submitted proposals were based in Austin. However, the proposals from those two firms were both over $1.3 million, and one of the companies was later deemed non-compliant.
That’s neither smart nor cool. In fact, it stinks. Depending on who you believe, that’s from $700K to $1.3 million NOT circulated into the local economy. Isn’t that taxpayer money? Are there really no other options represented anywhere the city or state than to outsource this task to California? We think not. Looking at the comments generated by this ABJ story, a lot of local folks who care about Austin agree this is a terrible business decision and an even worse message to send to local hardworking professionals.
