When Finite State, one of the hottest new start-ups in the cybersecurity market needed a strong visual identity and a website for its launch at Black Hat this year, it turned to Bluetext. Finite State has the first comprehensive and proactive cyber solution to the growth of IoT, which has quickly become a significant security challenge across enterprise networks. Bluetext developed a graphic approach that draws themes and connections across the business landscape, and a new website approach that educates the audience on the IoT threat while differentiating Finite State’s solution for the market.
It’s always rewarding to see a client do well and continue to grow in their market. It’s doubly exciting when two clients team up together to build a powerhouse brand. That’s exactly what has happened with CQRoll Call, one of the best-known and most widely-respected publishers of both policy content and advocacy tools, was recently acquired by FiscalNote, a Google-backed player in the governmental affairs and advocacy that has grown into a data-driven, global player and has expanded into digital advocacy and issues management.
The partnership takes advantage of CQ Roll Call’s rich history of unbiased coverage of the Federal government and FiscalNote’s expertise in technology and real-time policy data and analytics to provide a broader suite of products and services in a dynamic market. The acquisition allows both brands to identify new opportunities to adapt and grow in the digital news landscape.
CQ Roll Call chose Bluetext to design a new website for its wide selection of both policy information and advocacy platforms in order to better attract and convert target prospects into customers. We developed an approach that allows visitors to quickly self-select what they are looking for on the website and gets them to those software options with in-depth product information and pricing.
For FiscalNote, Bluetext designed a new approach for its brand and website to simplify the user experience, delivering the right content and information to prospective customers to understand the best options for leading advocacy campaigns in today’s digital age.
For both brands, Bluetext was able to take them to the next level in terms of their position in the market, transforming them into cutting-edge industry players.
The end result: A strategic acquisition that makes the new combined powerhouse brand the market leader both in the U.S. and globally.
We often get requests from clients to upgrade not just the user experience for their websites, but also the website design to ensure a rich visual experience that will separate them from their competitors. This is not an idle request. Potential clients and customers of digital services often want and expect to see a contemporary website design that looks like it is at the cutting edge of the market. Having a design that even looks three years old can make you appear to be out of date and not competitive.
At Bluetext, we recognize that for industries that are seeking a digitally-savvy audience, style and presentation are essential components of what will attract the interest of target prospects, and what will turn them into customers. For our clients, we employ a website design approach that focuses on four design elements:
- UX, Navigation, and Imaging. There are two websites in particular that exemplify the kind of experience we like to show to our clients: Stripe and Qualcomm. Both sites have the type of navigation and that really show off the software interfaces of their products, in a smart, simple, but sophisticated way.
- Visual Storytelling. It may not be intuitive to associate how to describe a product or service with telling a story, but that is exactly what the best websites do for their solutions, leveraging a storytelling approach to tell a strong brand and product story. The enterprise technology company Palantir is a first place to find inspiration. Not only is the design and layout very elegant but notice how the scroll begins with the stars and the sky, but as you move down, it takes you through the clouds to the ground in a seamless and engaging way. Another strong example is WealthSimple. Like Palantir, it is a single scroll that uses a clever and interesting rolling visual that tells the story of the product. Each scene includes just a little animation and movement to keep your eyes engaged.
- Scale. Finding the right approach to present a design that has the right scale and proportions, carries the corporate image and brand, and has a clean look, is always a challenge. This is especially true when the pressure is on to include as much information on separate software products as possible. One look at XO’s website gives a sense of how we can create a clean look that has the corporate brand and appeal as well as the right scale for what we want to convey to website visitors.
- Production Quality. How each company and its brands and products are portrayed can have a significant impact on those customers whose engagement is essential. That’s why we think high production value on products is so important. No brand does this better than Volkswagon of American. Check out its website to get a sense of how to use the highest quality of product for images, movement, and layout to give visitors a successful website experience.
Learn how Bluetext can help your brand’s website design tell the right stories with a rich visual approach.
Today, a website is the front door to your association, and every effort must be made to deliver a powerful user experience for current and
prospective members. Your digital platform must be modern and intuitive. Beyond a great design, it is important to make sure your website is addressing all of your association’s key performance indicators around member services, member retention, communications, activism, and engagement.
To this end, when thinking about your association’s website, a great design is not necessarily where you should begin. The first question you should ask yourself is, “Can our website help us achieve our association goals in the most efficient manner.” Understanding where your members and prospects are coming from, how are they accessing the site, and what tools they need to be successful all must be asked up front through a discovery process in order to maximize the impact of a new website.
With that thought process in mind, here are some recommendations to consider when undertaking a new website design for your association:
- Provide the tools and resources to help your members do their jobs more effectively. They are paying you to be their advocates, and they need your help in taking action, remaining relevant, and proving the impact and rationale for their membership. For one membership organization, we built a tool that enabled human resources professionals to directly send a presentation to their bosses to show the value and impact of their membership in that organization. It was a very effective tool for ensuring membership dues.
- Clearly communicate the value and impact you provide. Make sure your messaging and value is clear right up front. We have worked with many
associations who are going through an identity crisis and don’t understand why membership may be down or why they are less relevant
than in the past. It may be time to audit your messaging and positioning, both internally and externally, to ensure it is relevant to your
members and the communities you serve. - Don’t be afraid to brand with impact. Changing colors or changing logos can go a long way toward sending a powerful signal to your constituencies. And make sure that the design direction you take aligns with that of the industry you serve. If that’s the tech community, make sure your brand feels “techy.” If you serve the healthcare community, make sure your brand aligns. You get the picture. Modern, fresh and engaging can really make an impact in the perception of your association as you go to market with a new website.
- Content. Content. Content. Being a thought leader and delivering authoritative content is critical for success. Keep your content fresh and engaging, update it regularly, and address the current and emerging topics that are of importance to your members. Association content marketing is becoming a must for the most advanced associations.
- Make sure your content is Search Engine Optimized and your architecture is designed for SEO best practices. There is so much talk about SEO that people get confused. But that should not be the case. Go analyze what people are searching for and align your content around that. Ranking high with Google can be very effective.
- Go mobile. Look at your stats. People are accessing the web from mobile devices more than ever and the stats continue to rise. A responsive site is a must in today’s digital environment. If a user does not have a great experience with your association on a mobile device it can impact your value immensely.
Contact us Today to Discuss Trade Association Marketing in a Competitive Landscape!
There are many aspects to consider in web design, and one important feature to ponder is the user journey. There are many means to target an anonymous user, identify who they are and their needs, and direct them to the relevant content on the site. Here are a few reasons why you should allow users to select their own user journey on your new website.
Direct Traffic. By identifying the user early in their interaction with your website, the more effectively you can direct users to content they would be interested in. From a UX perspective, the user’s experience on the site is swift and efficient. From a business perspective, anonymous users are quickly identified and funneled to custom tailored content. A notable example of directing a user’s journey is Bluetext’s recent launch of CQ Roll Call’s newly branded website: https://info.cq.com/
User Personas. By choosing to define user personas on its website, a company is able to identify functionality needs on other areas of the site at a high level. Personas define every aspect of each consumer group, and by mapping out a user’s journey a company is able to understand the key tasks each persona would expect to perform on its website.
User workflow. When a company is able to understand the flow of how different users would interact with its website, it is able to use this information to ultimately inform its website interface and provide its users with the best possible experience. Web design agencies are experts in this area to implement the optimal interface specific for a company’s users.
Identifying a persona and their user journey through a website increases efficiency on both sides. Users want to view what is relevant to them and companies want to be able to tailor content to target consumer groups. Defining a company’s personas ultimately informs the user experience design for an overall superior experience.
Looking for best in class digital marketing? Contact us.
Speed is by far the most critical metric to consider when re-designing an enterprise website – it won’t matter how beautiful your new site looks if nobody is going wait an extra millisecond for your homepage to load. In addition to providing a fast loading, responsive user experience – speed has a direct impact on your ability to optimize higher user engagement, conversion rates and SEO rankings – all of which drive better brand and marketing performance.
One of the primary signals Google’s algorithm uses to rank performance is site speed – but by extension it is really page speed that Google is measuring. According to Moz, page speed can be described as either “page load time” (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server).
Page speed is also vitally important to user experience – pages with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page that result in an immediate negative impact on conversions. According to Google, 53% of users will abandon a site or web page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This also has a direct impact on search rankings – with less than half a second separating the first and third pages of Google search results.
So how do you measure site speed? Google introduced its own web-based tool, accessible via Google Labs, called Page Speed Online. It’s available as a web-based tool as well as a Chrome extension. With it, you can quickly get an overview of high priority, medium and low priority fixes that can help increase your page speed.
Here are the top 5 for your digital agency implement to add instant horsepower right out of the gate:
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Technology – AMP is a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web by enabling code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can load instantaneously —no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using. With Google splitting its index into separate versions for mobile and desktop – the time has finally come to start prioritizing mobile
- Wrangle Your Javascript and Stylesheets – Have your scripts and CSS load in external files instead of cramping up each and every web page. This way, only the browser has to load the files one time, rather than every time someone visits each page of your site. Ideally, put your external CSS in the portion of your site, and your external Javascript file as close to the tag as possible. As a result, the browser isn’t bogged down wading through all those requests for external files right from the start. The only time you won’t want to do this is if the Javascript needs to load near the top of the page – such as to display a name or load up an image carousel.
- Optimize Your Images – In Photoshop or Fireworks, you can use the “Save for Web” option to drastically reduce image size. An image quality slider lets you see the visual trade-offs between graphic file size and crispness. Also – don’t rely on HTML to resize Images – while HTML makes it easy to create a smaller version of a larger graphic it doesn’t mean it’s taking up any less room on the server. The browser still has to go through the process of loading the entire image, checking the width and height you want and then resizing it accordingly.
- Use GZIP compression – You’ll want to ask your web host if they use GZIP compression and deflation on their servers. These are two techniques that can significantly speed up a site, reducing file size by as much as 70% without degrading the quality of the images, video or the site itself.
- Caching – Many content management systems now have plugins that will cache the latest version of your pages and display it to your users so that the browser isn’t forced to go back and dynamically generate that page every single time. Plugins like WP Super Cache can take a serious bite out of page load times.
You can also look beyond your website itself and consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that serves up pages depending on where the user is located. Faster access to a server near their geographical area translates into faster load times.
While speed is the most critical metric of any re-design effort – it’s not the only metric. Working with a smart digital agency to define KPIs for the re-design of your next generation website will significantly improve performance metrics across your digital marketing ecosystem right out of the gate.
Go the need for speed? Contact us
The Bluetext Blog has been focusing on website design for the best user experience. In this post, we are examining five trends that companies need to understand as they examine the performance of their website design and whether it is delivering a successful user experience that is delivering results for the brand.
Cards are Taking Over. Card first became popular in consumer-focused social sharing sites such as Pinterest and Facebook for placing clusters of information – including text, photos, and links relating to one topic – in one place. For 2018, they are already gaining in popularity and offer a visually appealing way to organize and display larger data content in a smaller space. Cards also allow visitors to quickly assess the category of information and decide immediately whether they want to click on it or not. They are easy to manage and companies can select different arrangements and sizes to emphasize some types of content over others. Because of this obvious advantage, particularly on a smaller screen, cards are moving into the mainstream across all platforms.
Don’t neglect the touch. Mobile devices are physical objects that hit a number of our senses, most prominently sight and sound. But the feel is also important, and shouldn’t be neglected. Because of the small size of the screen, giving haptic feedback can be important and enhance the small-screen experience. Adding in well-tuned clicks as the viewer advances through a screen or a list of items also improves engagement. This is particularly true for sliders and similar types of horizontal navigation that takes viewers away from the downward scroll.
The sound and the fury. Some designers feel like sound should be an afterthought, and many find the auto-play functions that are so popular across Facebook and other social meid platforms more annoying than helpful. But when done right, sound layers will enhance the web design user experience on mobile devices. Subtle but pleasant sound layers can signal when a visitor is on the right page and can reinforce the buyer’s journey through the site. They can also add to the experience when a comment is placed, or even an emoji selected.
Video is replacing static images. We all know the appeal of video for communicating information about the brand and its products or services. As video and streaming capabilities continue to get more robust, and as screens themselves better display high-res video, it is quickly supplanting static images on mobile devices. It also better engages customers – after all, video clips are always visually more appealing than static images.
Colors and borderless display. As mobile screens, now including the Apple iPhone X, are moving their screens to be completely borderless, maximizing that display field is essential. To do that, vibrant colors are making a comeback. It was not too long ago that the trend was for muted and pale color combinations to accommodate the flat designs of mobile devices. Not only do more vibrant colors attract user attention, when used in combination with the borderless display, they allow website design to literally go outside the lines for a better user experience.
WordPress and Drupal have been the leading open-source content management systems for the past 8+ years. During this time, both platforms have created strong reputations for themselves.
WordPress has been viewed as a user-friendly content management platform, built for bloggers who need to get their information out quickly and easily without having to worry about learning how to code. This made the barrier to entry onto the platform extremely small, resulting in the landscape we have today with more than 25 percent of all websites built in WordPress.
Drupal comes from the other side of the spectrum, designed for developers as a developers platform. With this developer-first mentality, Drupal offers many more features than WordPress to provide flexibility, scale-ability, and maintainability. While the learning curve for Drupal is significantly higher than that of WordPress – reducing the adoption rate by non-technical users – this did make Drupal stand out in the enterprise by catering to larger applications with a more robust set of requirements. Yet, in the meantime, it acquired a reputation as a developers CMS that’s not as friendly for general users.
Drupal 8 changes the game for Drupal and highlights several core strategic initiatives to help break down the barriers and remove the developer-first stigma that the platform has acquired over the years. In this blog post, we will take a look at some of these core initiatives.
Fast-forward to today, with Drupal 8 in its prime
Drupal 8 opens up a new world for users. This is backed up by the fact that 5 out of 7 active strategic core initiatives for Drupal 8 relate to improving the content management experience. The goals of these initiatives are simple:
- Reduce the barriers of entry for non-technical users (Out-of-the-Box#, Outside-In#)
- Provide site builders with the tools they need without having to write code (Out-of-the-Box#, Layout#)
- Provide content managers the tools they need to be successful (Workflow#, Media#, Outside-In#)
Out-of-the-Box# Out-of-the-Box# is a strategic core initiative for Drupal 8 which focuses on improving Drupal 8’s OOTB capabilities to provide a fully-featured CMS. Phase 1 of this initiative is to provide a fully baked example site into a core destination website for Food Network Magazine. The example will provide a rich and beautiful experience for users as they navigate through the website.
This example profile will also provide a framework for other developers to do the same thing and begin creating pre-packaged site templates, similar to what WordPress does, as a way of providing a near-plug-and-play experience.
Outside-In# The Outside-In initiative is one which strives to improve the in-line editing experience in Drupal 8. With today’s landscape of website building platforms, it only makes sense for Drupal to push for this. A key benefit to this type of editing experience is that it keeps content managers in-context of the work they are doing. Content managers are coming to expect these types of slick editing interfaces which are offered by other CMS platforms and website builders such as WordPress, WIX, and Shopify.
Drupal 8 now ships with basic inline-editing experiences across its core features. The foundation is available and the “contrib” space is catching up. Many of the “contrib” add-ons support the in-line editing experience, while Drupal is adding more every day.
Layout# The Layout initiative is one which is focused more on the site-builders and power-users. The goal for layouts is to provide cookie-cutter like shells where users can drag and drop content and blocks to meet their content needs.
Workflow# The Workflow initiative is focused on improving the workflow, preview and staging capabilities for content in Drupal. Every organization has slightly different requirements when it comes to publishing content to the web. The Workflow initiative helps to strengthen the core functionality of Drupal to allow for these varied requirements by providing configurable workflows on a per-content-type basis.
Content staging is extremely important to large organizations. Being able to preview a new version of a page before publishing is significant.
Media# Drupal 8 has long struggled with reusable media assets. The objective of Phase 1 of the media initiative is to provide a simple media solution to make Drupal 8 easy to use for basic use cases. There is a focus on strengthening this feature and integrating it into the core components of Image Fields & WYSIWYG.
While Drupal 8 may not set the highest bar for a great content management experience, it is making significant strides to catch up to its competitors. This combined with the areas at which Drupal already excels, including Performance, Security, and Maintainability, make it an obvious choice for enterprise-level CMS implementations.
Looking to see how you can transform the way you manage your website? See how Bluetext can help!
Website migration – whether to a new version of your content management system or to an entirely new platform – is among the most stressful projects for an enterprise, one that will challenge the team on every assumption and analytics they have. Before starting down this path to a website migration, there are two key questions you will want to answer:
- Does automating the process save me time?
- Does automating the process save me money?
Below is our guide to go about answering these questions. Of course, every scenario is different and requires evaluation and analysis before the final decisions are made.
Determining an Approach
When determining the approach for migrating content, there are several factors that come into play when architecting out a solution to find out which one would be best.
How many pages are there? If your website is relatively simple, and there are a small number of pages (<500), it is likely going to be easier/faster/cheaper to copy/paste your content from one website to another. The number of pages will need to be determined by you, but we have found that migrating sites with more than 500 pages start to become more efficient with migrations scripts.
Importance of Site Crawls. Crawling the existing website is a critical step in determining the approach to take for a website migration. This will give you a quick summary of the volume of pages, images, and documents. Tools like Screaming Frog will allow you to export the list to a spreadsheet where you can create a more thorough inventory and conduct a ROT analysis (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) on your content to determine how much of this content actually needs to be moved to the new platform.
Where do the current pages live? Is the content that you are migrating in a database somewhere or does it live in static HTML files on a server? Where the content lives is important because it limits the options available for importing and working with the content. It also determines the structure of the content.
Database Content. Content that is stored in a database is typically more structured and logically separated. This gives more flexibility when writing migration scripts because it is already in a consumable format. It is unlikely that this will be an “easy” 1:1 mapping from point A to point B, but the first step of getting the content into a consumable format is done.
Static HTML. Content that is in a static HTML format is going to be harder to work with. In these cases, you will likely need to use a web scraper tool to break apart your pages and get them into a consumable format for your migration to Drupal. You will be faced with numerous edge cases based on how each page is built. This process may require a lot of trial & error in order to get right.
How well are the static pages structured/formatted? In any website migration, consistency is key to making the process effective. You will want to determine if the pages follow consistent patterns so that you can create a repeatable process. If the pages have no uniform formatting or consistent markup, the task of creating a repeatable process of a migration script will be difficult and more time-consuming.
Does the content have references to media (images & files)? If your content contains references to media, this adds another step in the process. Your migration scripts will need to not only handle the migration of the assets but also alter the markup to replace the links/references to these assets.
What tools are available on the platform I am building the new website on? Most modern CMS platforms provide some level of migration support for getting content from point A to point B. A majority of the work that we do is in WordPress and Drupal, below is a quick list of migration options for each platform.
WordPress Migration Options
- WordPress All Import Tool
- WordPress Import Tool (Blogger, BlogRoll, LiveJournal, RSS, Tumblr, WordPress)
- FG Drupal to WordPress
- HTML Import 2
Drupal Migration Options
Other Useful (Platform Agnostic) Tools to help with content cleanup:
Determining the right solution
Now that you have all of the information you need, you can answer the two questions:
- Does automating the process save me time?
- Does automating the process save me money?
You are now equipped to make an informed decision on the approach you should be taking. You have a good grasp on what your source content looks like, how easy it is going to be to work with and what tools you have to give you a kickstart. Your next step is to crunch some numbers and get some high-level estimates on LoE for writing these migrations.
Trying to understand if website migration is the right approach for your organization? Bluetext can help.
Annual trade shows are often the biggest events of the year for brands hoping to make connections, network with players across their industry, identify new solutions for their business, and generate solid sales leads. The Bluetext team has vast experience with association conferences and trade shows, generating attention for our clients, arranging media interviews and coverage, crafting the creative approach for their floor space, and publicizing their successes.
For our trade association clients, we work with them to help market their shows, growing their attendance and revenues through sophisticated, multi-platform outreach campaigns. One of our premier clients, the National Retail Federal (known as NRF), has been holding The Big Show for more than a century. We have worked with NRF for several years, starting with its Big Show for 2017 and this week attended NRF 2018 in New York City to see how it came off.
The theme this year is “Transformation,” and speaker topics centered around the retail industry’s need to transform itself in the wake of the digital revolution in retail sales. We developed the creative approach for the show and the marketing activities generating attendance. It is the retail industry’s largest annual gathering, and as the agency partner responsible for generating registrations and revenue, we are proud to say that this year, the show attendance was bigger than ever – and exceeded NRF’s registration and attendance goals.
As part of the creative approach to this year’s event, Bluetext created a “Transformation Ribbon” of deep red that can fold and unfold with digital GIF video that works across the show website, and through static images on emails and signs. For The Big Show itself, we designed a three-dimensional version that would pop among the attendees at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City.
On the other side of the continent, Las Vegas played host to the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which is a massive gathering of the industry to show off the latest electronic devices, ranging from big screen TVs to driverless cars to commercial and hobby drone to everything in-between. The Bluetext team was there to help several of our clients reach new audiences and get attention for their products and solutions. The one thing to say about CES is that it’s cool, and that was most evident in the variety of new consumer electronics that was on display.
