December, 2010

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December 2010—Winchester Trails, a non-profit educational site for school children in Winchester, MA (where Radar Media Group is headquartered), needed a website to post its announcements and attract volunteer trail guides to the organization. To help out, we designed and built a new site for them that provides basic posting ability for not just news, but photos as well. Links to maps and trail guides that that the organization sells to help finance their work are also provided.

To add interest to the photos posted for various woodland trails, we used some new slide show rotators that provide a number of interesting effects, all without the need for Flash. Click here to see an example of the “Ken Burns” effect for animating slides.

November, 2010

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November 2010—Selling online is increasingly important even to our business-to-business customers, and this month we completed two major e-commerce projects for clients.

For International Poster Gallery, a brick-and-mortar gallery on Boston’s prestigious Newbury Street, selling its world-class collection of poster art is just as important online as it is in the store. With many of its customers overseas, Internet commerce is the only way to reach them. While IPG already had a basic shopping cart set up on its site when it first engaged with Radar, the cart was limited to PayPal sales only. The cart worked, but forced customers to have a PayPal account in order to do business and provided no linkages back to IPG’s wish list or other functions. The new Radar cart replaced the old shopping function with a new credit-card payment system that works all over the world. It includes customized shipping logic that automatically calculates shipping costs based on shipping location, quantity and size of shipping frames. Equally important, customers can now save favorite posters in their wish lists, and then move the items to their shopping cart at any time.

The second e-commerce project was for long-time Radar client, Covaris, Inc.

Here again, Covaris already had an existing shopping cart, but certain functions were limited. Covaris wanted its customers, for example, to be able to easily find scientific supplies by not just looking up product categories as before, but to be able to search on names, part numbers and descriptions. Being able to accurately calculate sales in states where the tax amount varies by city and town, like California and Illinois, was also critical.The new Radar store not only provides all this functionality, but the redesigned cart also displays well on mobile devices such as smartphones and Apple iPads.

Three Reasons to Hire an Internet Marketing Firm

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When it comes to the world of Internet marketing, it’s becoming increasingly hard to stand out. With sites like YouTube, Twitter, Blogger and Facebook, people everywhere have the immediate power to broadcast themselves to the world. How can you stay competitive with everyone shouting to the masses?

Here are three major reasons you should hire an Internet marketing firm to help you:

1.Time is Money. The more time you spend focusing on the aspects of your business that you’re not professionally trained in, the more money is going to drain from your pockets. It can be tempting to try to learn SEO in an afternoon. Don’t. Focus your energy on the core of your business and let people who do this every day for their clients handle it for you. You’ll have peace of mind and better search engine rankings, and you won’t throw your laptop out the window in frustration.

2. Nobody Knows Your Brand Better Than You. This probably sounds backwards, doesn’t it? If nobody knows your company’s values and services better than you do, shouldn’t you be the one branding everything? The answer is usually a big fat NO.

We don’t want to let go of control of our companies because they’re a part of us. Sometimes, you’re so closely involved with something that you’re unable to remove yourself and look at it objectively. Having an Internet marketing company help you step back and see your business in a new light will help you to feel less caught up in its image, and you may actually feel less burdened by being able to pass over the responsibility of coming up with the ‘right’ image or marketing approach.

3. Doing Everything Is Ineffective. It can be all too easy to feel sucked into the Internet marketing/social media vortex, signing up for every new service and site you can get your hands on that promises networking, backlinks, or traffic.

Sometimes, less is more. In addition to the “time is money” mantra from above, there comes a point when trying to attack from all angles isn’t effective. There are only so many bases you can cover before you can’t focus on anything wholeheartedly.

If you want to really use Twitter as a business tool but would also like a blog and Facebook page, pass one to a professional so you’re not juggling so many things. Don’t be afraid to delegate, and don’t feel pressured that you have to participate in every new Internet marketing channel just because it exists. Different approaches work for different businesses, and it’s important to find the ‘right fit’ for you.

What do you think? Do you agree with these reasons for hiring an Internet marketing company to help you? Do you have any reasons you’d like to add to the list? Leave us a comment by email!

September, 2010

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September 2010—Next Computing (www.nextcomputing.com), right up the road from Boston in scenic Nashua, NH, engaged with us in late spring to completely redesign their site. As a specialized manufacturer of portable and powerful computers, the company relies heavily on its website to reach a niche audience of users in such industries as defense, entertainment and computer-aided design. The new site, which went live this month, includes a new design to showcase the company’s products and a complete rewrite and reorganization of the content and messaging. Needless to say, Radar’s contribution was a team effort involving our top design, writing and project management talent.

Also noteworthy is the site’s back end. It is based on an open source content management system that streamlines and simplifies site maintenance at Next Computing. The CMS will also make it easier to extend the site in the future with new content and features.

August, 2010

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August 2010—This month we welcome new client Acacia Communciations to the Radar family. Based in Maynard, Mass. in the famous Digital Equipment Corp. mill building, Acacia is pioneering super high speed subsystems that will ultimately be targeted to major telecommunications suppliers. Radar designed and produced the company’s first web site and used a modern, open source content management system for maximum flexibility and ease of maintenance.

Acacia is a startup company still in major growth mode and wanted a site that could grow along with them. Planned functionality for future releases includes a private client log-in section where registered users will be able to download proprietary technical and marketing documents.

Metatags – Rankings Essential or Search Engine Has-Been?

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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a term that more and more businesses are familiarizing themselves with, and if your business hasn’t yet, it’s about time! SEO has been a real hot topic for marketers, web designers, and web writers who are working to help their clients (or their own companies) climb the ranks of the search engines.

Beyond optimizing page content with relevant keywords and long-tail focused subject matter, there’s been quite a bit of debate over the effectiveness of metatags.

In the earlier days of SEO, metatags were a big deal. Plugging important keywords and descriptions in that precious ‘head’ space in your HTML page meant that you were leagues ahead of the competition that didn’t know to do that. Search engines learned where to categorize your page from your metatags, and that directly impacted your rankings. What a simple solution!

But there’s been a shift. As you can imagine, as search algorithms have evolved and the very way users navigate the web has changed, many of the earlier effective SEO techniques are no longer valid. Some were quick to write off metatags altogether when they realized that metatags aren’t all that responsible for rankings anymore, but don’t be so quick to abandon them!

While including your most competitive keywords in your “keywords” tag won’t guarantee you a #1 spot on Google anymore, strategically fleshing out your meta section can do nothing but help you reach your target customers online.

SEO gurus at SEOMoz.com provide some great tips for approaching metatags in a modern SEO environment and say that the only metatag that is still really relevant is the description tag, which serves 3 main purposes:

  1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
  2. To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
  3. To display targeted keywords,not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

By crafting your description like an ad, you’re customizing the message that’s shown in search results to your target customers, and you’re helping them to determine whether your website is the place that holds the information they’re looking for.

SEOMoz urges readers to not immediately assume that the meta description should resemble a PPC (pay-per-click) advertisement, as often visitors that are likely to click on that type of ad aren’t the same as visitors who are searching organically. Making sure to include key terms in the description without keyword stuffing will promote a higher likelihood of clicks because when a user searches in Google, search terms in the results descriptions are bold, catching the searcher’s eye.

So, while writing that perfect meta description might not trick search engine spiders into catapulting you to the #1 spot in search results anymore, don’t abandon your metatags! Taking a few extra minutes to customize your meta description could be the difference between getting passed by in the search results, and making that next big sale.

March, 2010

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March 2010—In December, we welcomed FieldView Solutions (www.fieldviewsolutions.com), an Edison, NJ-based software developer, into the Radar fold. Since then we’ve been busy designing and building the company’s website, which went live this month on March 5. The new site, www.fieldviewsolutions.com, is the company’s first website as FieldView Solutions itself was formed late last year as a result of a venture capital-based spin-off from parent Energy Options. The FieldView Solutions software aims squarely at helping managers of large data centers better manage their electrical power, cooling, and other assets. The potential to save money is huge, and the software is already successfully running at multiple Fortune 400 companies worldwide.

The new FieldView Solutions website is based on a modern, open source content management system. The CMS separates content from design and enables content administrators at FieldView Solutions to update the site on a regular basis using simple web editing tools that run in a browser. In addition, the site utilizes several forms allowing users to download product brochures or to request additional information from FieldView. That customer information is captured in a database and easily accessed at any time by FieldView’s content team.

The entire website was design and deployed in just over two months thanks to a concerted effort by the content, design and production teams.

February, 2010

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February 2010—The Radar team put the final touches on the interim site for VacationPhotos.com and launched the site live earlier the month. The VacationPhotos.com site (www.vacationphotos.com) previews what’s coming for the full site, which we are currently building and will be launching live in the spring timeframe.

VacationPhotos.com is a Burlington, MA-based startup coming aiming to become the premiere Internet address for taking virtual vacations on the web. Featuring top quality photographs and videos from the best professional photographers, users will be able to quickly navigate to vacation areas of interest and view multimedia presentations based on scenery, areas of interest and special attractions.

The permanent site under construction will prominently feature a number of cutting-edge web navigation tools empowering visitors to choose vacation destinations with ease. These include a multimedia global map, multiple web tools for choosing types of vacation areas of interest, and advertising from top vacation travel bureaus and travel companies all over the world.

Stay tuned for this launch; it’s going to be big.

Video Done Right

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If anyone has any doubts whether video has come of age on the web, I have a simple answer to help them see the light: YouTube.

With nearly everyone and their grandmouther routinely posting vidoes on YouTube these days, it’s clear that users not only enjoy this kind of content – they expect to see it. That’s why we, and countless other agencies no doubt, encourage our clients to develop and post short, informative and (as much as possible) entertaining videos to round out their oher marketing content.

Most web videos are created in Flash, which has the advantage of working out of the box on over 95% of the browsers out there. The Flash format works great and allows for “progressive” streaming – that’s tech talk for allowing the video to download ahead of the player. In most cases, this allows the user to view the video without waiting for the whole thing to first download.

Flash works fine for short videos that are posted at a relatively small size and where web traffic is light (say one or two users viewing the video at once). Where problems arise is when traffic increases or the video is longer or in HD format. Most small to midsize websites running on an inexpensive shared server (probably 90% of our clients) will find their videos can’t keep up.

Aside from using YouTube to host your video and simply linking to it, there’s a fairly easy and relatively inexpensive answer to this problem. Use a content delivery network, or CDN. A CDN is a hosted, “cloud” offering, where multimedia content like Flash videos are not posted on your site at all, but on a very fast and specialized network optimized for video. Use a CDN, and visitors to your site viewing a video can then see it full size, in HD and all its glory without any download problems at all.

For one of our newest clients, we are building a photo and video-intensive site, and we’ll be using the Amazon CloudFront CDN to serve it in style. More options, and video player software, are becoming available all the time.

See you at the movies. .