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:
“Good Morning,” beamed the White House’s Web site in 1998. “Welcome to the White House.” (Whether this message changed as morning changed to afternoon and evening is unclear.) Beneath the cutting-edge waving flags and photo of the fountains outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., a visitor to Whitehouse.gov in the late ‘90s could learn more about Bill Clinton and Al Gore: “Their accomplishments, their families, and how to send them electronic mail.
We are getting excited about Google Wave, coming later this year.
What is a wave? A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
There will be a meetup tonight to discuss what this Google Wave thing might mean for Austin and our local tech community. Come join the discussion!
Went to buy a mattress from a local organic bed manufacturer/retailer this past weekend.Got a fair price, and the mattress and box spring set works great for the guestroom in question…but that is not what this post is about.
What was fun and unexpected during the final transaction was hearing the owner/operator enthuse about his store’s website and what it means for their small business success.
Here’s the back story.He asked us how we happened to hear of them initially, and we replied that we were just driving by the day before and stopped in to see some pricing.Later that night we visited their website and learned all about their business: how long they’d been around, how they make their mattresses individually to order, why that delivers a better value to their customers, the delivery process, etc.Standard website stuff, but competently done.This gave us a good impression and the next day we returned to the store to make a purchase.
So when the store owner heard we had checked out the website and this was a factor in our decision, the man actually pumped his fist like he had just holed a long birdie. He proceeded to share the following anecdotes about business before and after the site:
Before the “internet happened” they had to compete with everybody else trying to get on TV, radio, or newspapers for expensive advertising time.
Before, TV mattered most and good ROI was never a given…especially in a bad economy.
Now, they do no TV which saves them tens of thousands in marketing costs.
Now, they get qualified leads through organic search results and a well-maintained Google Adwords campaign (pay per click) who bring their undivided attention every day and all night.
Now, newspaper and radio have slashed their advertising rates and are almost begging them to come back.They’re not interested.
His dad, still an owner, has been selling beds for over 50 years, and has never known a game-changer like website traffic and pay-per-click advertising for small business.
70% of their annual business now comes from website traffic.
It was just really validating to hear this story offered up so freely and randomly…and that it would match so much of what we tell our small business clients about the value of having a strong web presence.I suspect that, for this savvy and adaptable business owner, having a website that converts has insulated his family’s small business from the worst effects of this recession at the very least. All I really know is there are about ten bed stores in the vicinity of this one, but the owner of this one was making an easy sale on a hot Sunday afternoon that the competition wasn’t making…and his website was a big reason why.
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.
Friends are telling us that our own Ryan Krouskup has been prominently quoted in the latest issue of the Austin Business Journal. He gave a longish interview about a month ago to an ABJ reporter doing a feature on the rising profile of open source code and it’s impact on business today. You can be sure ENTERMEDIA was humbled to be contacted and glad to offer any and all insight. Unfortunately, haven’t been able to track down a copy yet or find a link on the website–just wanted to share the news.
By the way, we had a great week. Put the finishing touches on a big website we’ve been working on for a while now…landed two exciting new website projects (one an education tool build out coming to us out of Michigan, the other a website redesign for a great local law firm)…but the biggie is that we got official word we are going to be the web team of one of Austin’s finest, most respected, and largest homegrown retail institutions! More details soon.
Enjoy what’s shaping up to be a beautiful weekend.
