According to a recent study, 48% of people believe website design is the leading factor in a company’s credibility. Based on this assumption, it’s clear that having a professional website is incredibly important. With content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, it can seem like hiring a leading web agency is unnecessary. However, agencies like Bluetext offer the expertise of top drupal consultants, WordPress design experts, and countless other web specialists to create a seamless, designed to spec, website. Needless to say, hiring a leading web agency is essential to your website development journey. Read our top 5 reasons to hire a web agency:  

No Training Required

By hiring an agency, the added stress of finding, hiring, and onboarding new employees is eliminated. Often times, companies invest countless time, money, and energy to help train new employees, just to have them leave within a few years. By hiring a leading web agency,  clients get a qualified and accomplished team ready to start working from day one and for years to come.

Work Directly with Experts

Agencies bring talent who have extensive knowledge and experience in different areas of web design. Unlike many businesses, agencies have access to a wide array of specialists like SEO experts, designers, researchers, and everyone in between. These experts can use their in-depth knowledge to help generate and report on results, guaranteeing the success of any website design and development project.

Get Access to the Latest Technology

Analytics and web development tools are costly to use for large and small businesses alike. With so many possibilities on the market, training employees to use these tools adds an unnecessary cost to any business. Working with a leading web agency can help increase efficiency and performance by gaining access to the latest tools, services, and software in the industry.

Outside Perspective

Employees within a company often find it hard to bring completely new ideas or concepts to the table. By hiring a leading web agency to help with web design, businesses get a fresh set of eyes and a unique perspective. Not to mention, agencies bring experience and data-driven results that show what works and what doesn’t to help meet the goals of businesses in any industry.

Positive Results

Agencies are constantly building and maintaining many different types of websites. From prior experience, a leading web agency will know from the very start what a website requires to generate quality results. Additionally, an agency can continue to update websites to ensure the best tools and assets are in place for long-term growth and success.

Hiring a web agency has many benefits for any business. It’s important to hire an agency that can help you meet all of your goals so your business can work more efficiently. Whether it’s to save time and money or to take advantage of the latest tricks and tools, there are countless reasons to hire a leading web agency.

If you’re looking to hire a leading web agency, see what Bluetext can do for you today. To learn more about our processes and to see our work, check out our website.

As we near the end of 2019, choosing the right technology implementation partner has never been more important. According to a recent Gartner study, through 2021, 90 percent of global organizations will rely on system integrators (SIs), UX design agencies and channel partners to design, build and implement their digital experience strategies.

Before deciding on the right implementation partner, it’s integral to choose the right technology for that partner to implement. Drupal, an open-source technology option, is known for being the top choice for creating large, complex websites. Given today’s increasingly complex threat environment, Drupal is also a great technology option because of its built-in security protocols. According to a recent report, Drupal sites are some of the least hacked sites on the web. For large, security-conscious organizations, federal agencies and government institutions, look no further than Drupal. 

Once you’ve made the decision to implement a Drupal site, the next question to ask yourself is who you should trust to design, build and implement your new site. That’s where a top DC UX design agency like Bluetext comes in. 

Here are our top 5 tips for finding the right Drupal development agency:

Look for a Partner Who Thinks Beyond the Implementation

Having a partner who focuses on the big picture of your project is integral to the success of your initiative. These days, any developer with a laptop and an internet connection can set up a website, but having a partner with a perspective on how that website fits into the broader marketing ecosystem and vision for your company’s future growth is paramount. A Drupal development company like Bluetext, with full-service capabilities, can be that partner. Bluetext, leveraging experience as a top DC UX design agency, will assess the project from a wider viewpoint and offer tried and tested solutions to positively impact your revenue streams and improve overall customer loyalty. 

For example, Bluetext partnered with Mindtree to develop the new Mindtree.com, which includes an intuitive, fully responsive user experience and leverages personalization to serve relevant content to each user. Powered by Drupal 8, the new website provides the flexibility and scalability a large enterprise needs to support its digital marketing efforts.

Is Your Team Ready for the Partner’s Style?

When working on a project, chemistry is everything. Your chosen partner might be the best in the business, but if they don’t wrap their processes around your needs, the entire engagement will be negatively affected on both sides of the table. Deadlines won’t be met, communication will feel forced and restricted, and overall, the project will suffer.  Bluetext, one of the best DC UX design agencies, works closely with each client we partner with, making sure we understand internal processes, all design and functional requirements, and priorities for the given timeframe. Bluetext adapts our processes to operate how our clients work best, employing different applications and modes of communication to ensure every client is happy and the end-product achieves set goals.

Make Sure Your Teams Fully Understand Their Roles

The key to any project’s success is communication. It is never wise to assume a member of the team fully understands the objectives they are tasked to manage and deliver. An open-source application such as Drupal can be a challenging system to get used to. Having a leading web agency like Bluetext on your side can make any project run smoothly. From week one, Bluetext makes sure every member of the team, on both sides of the engagement, has a clear understanding of their role. This means putting in the effort to define clear project objectives per phase, roles and responsibilities, a communication structure and even informal expectations. Put the work in at the beginning of an engagement, and you will reap the benefits as you toast the launch of your new website.

A Higher Price Doesn’t Necessarily Mean a Higher Quality

When choosing the right technology implementation partner, the cost of the implementation is important. Understanding how and where your budget will be spent before making your choice will lower the chance of setbacks as the project moves from start to finish. The higher-priced implementation partner will often spend longer amount of time on a project and will bring too many unnecessary team members to meetings. Contrarily, the cheaper implementation partners often lack the skill to produce consistent, quality work. 

At Bluetext, a leading web agency, we understand how ambiguous pricing may seem when it comes to implementing a new website. Bluetext is unique in our approach to pricing out technological implementations. Most digital web design agencies will conduct their business via an hourly billing budget. Bluetext ultimately views this process as inefficient and a hindrance to the client-agency relationship. Instead, we bill per deliverable, making our inefficiencies our problem. It doesn’t matter how many members of our team we bring to a client meeting or how many rounds of revisions a design takes to get right. The client always comes first and the work isn’t done until you are satisfied.

Past Track Record Counts

A company’s decision on which technology implementation partner to choose comes down to that partner’s previous experience. This makes sense, given that clients often look to case studies featuring previously executed work an example of what they can expect to receive at the end of the engagement. They also look to the reputation of agencies within their industry, so they know that that agency has knowledge of their industry and can get up to speed quickly. Bluetext, being a top UX & interface design company, has plenty of experience developing stunning, industry-leading, Drupal-based sites and has delivered on some of the most complex implementations to date.

For example, Bluetext partnered with XO on an enterprise-level Drupal 8 website deployment. Bluetext engineered a next-generation CMS re-platforming that included a first-time responsive website user-experience design. As XO’s SEO agency of record, Bluetext delivered a comprehensive SEO overlay as we dealt with the complexities of re-platforming, leveraging the Drupal content management capabilities to make XO.com an organic SEO over-achiever.

For more information on why Bluetext is one of the top DC digital web design agencies, check out our website, packed with examples of our work harnessing the power of Drupal.

Creating a successful digital web design can mean the difference between growing your customers and losing them on your website doorstep. For Clarabridge, which delivers a better customer relationship platform for its clients by leveraging artificial intelligence to sort through complex data, providing clarity with its website was critical. It turned to Bluetext to unify its various website platforms into a single customer experience.

Clarabridge’s challenge was fairly straightforward: Its clients’ own customers constantly provide feedback through a wide range of information channels, from direct contact to social media and everything in between. Yet, that same explosion of these channels and the sheer volume of data creates significant challenges on how to make sense of it all. Telling that story on Claribridge’s digital platforms had been confusing. It needed a better way to tell its story.

To address the digital web design, Bluetext used digital storytelling, brand extension, a sophisticated user experience, and aggressive search engine optimization to deliver a new website that does what Clarabridge promises for its customers – turning complexity into clarity. You can view the website live here.

The digital website design begins at the top of the home page, with an engaging animation that represents the massive amounts of customer data and feedback flooding into their clients’ systems. Flowing down the page, moving through a funnel that sorts and selects the right information at the right time, the graphic turns the data into actionable snippets of intelligence that can be fed to executives, product managers, contact center teams, and frontline staff to better serve their customers.

The creative style of the digital web design pushes the boundaries to enable Clarabridge to stand out in a crowded industry, while the linear path of the video animation delivers the product messaging in a creative way that gets attention while taking audiences through the sales funnel. To see the design in action, visit our Bluetext Hall of Fame.

“Bluetext should be at the top of your list if you are in the market for a redesign.”

Learn how Bluetext can help with your digital web design for an amazing customer experience.

B2B website design that focuses on the user experience will continue to be a top priority for brands who thought UX was only for consumer and e-commerce sites. In a recent blog post, we offered some of the best practices for developing an effective user experience on a business-oriented website. In this post, we will explore some additional best practices for the B2B website design that puts the user first in its architecture.

Write the way your targets think.  When potential buyers visit your website, they will have a level of knowledge that most often is not as deep as you. Write content for who they think and eliminate jargon or text that won’t keep their attention. Use language, phrases, and concepts that are more likely to be familiar to them.

Make sure the text you include on your site appears in a logical order, but it should be natural as well. Confer with key customers and ask them to describe what your solution, services or products mean to them. What problems do they solve, and what were their pain points before working with you?

Let the buyer maintain control. Eliminate designs that override how a prospect might want to interact with the website. Autoplay videos, which have become ubiquitous across social media platforms and many news websites, can frustrate visitors who view these are a nuisance.

Don’t assume what the visitors want to do; let them play the video only if they want to. It should supplement, not be a substitution for, good content that is in text on the page.

Automatic carousels, once a common feature on many high-end websites, have also lost their allure, for the simple reason that they don’t work. Besides the fact that motion in carousels is distracting and rarely timed at the right intervals, it doesn’t present key messages to the visitor where they will be certain to see all of them. Layer information for your website in a way that makes it easy for your buyers to discover and explore instead of using an element that is less effective.

See how Bluetext can help your brand deliver an effective user experience.

Here at Bluetext, we’ve seen our share of M&A’s. One of our first big assignments, when we launched the agency seven years ago, was to relaunch ITSolutions –  a roll-up of nine separate IT government contracting firms – into a new unified entity that we rebranded as Acentia. The brand strategy we developed worked well for the new company and Acentia achieved its management’s goal of being acquired. We have since applied our rebrand process to a variety of new M&A-driven organizations, including the GE spinoff of its Rugged Embedded Systems into Abaco Systems.

The one thing that we have learned is that M&As are tricky waters to navigate, with a wide variety of financial and legal hoops to jump through to seal the deal, and the challenge of stitching together two separate brands into one cohesive brand story – or splitting off a new brand – is a beast of its own.  But the payoff can be enormous for our clients, ranging from accelerated growth to a rewarding financial transaction.

While a successful rebrand for an M&A is not easy, given the right approach and process, it can be a gamechanger. There are four critical elements that we’ve found to be critical to a successful M&A rebrand.

Case study coming soon.

In the avalanche of 2018 predictions for marketing teams, one that should be among the top is the need for B2B user experience website design.  In the consumer sphere, user experience has a big headstart. On the B2B side of the equation, getting buyers to convert on the website takes much more information. It’s more likely you are going to explain a lot to get your buyers to convert into customers.

The higher and more complex the value of what you are selling, the more questions you will need to answer throughout your site. That makes information architecture essential to the success of the website, and a step in the process that demands significant attention. It’s easy to dismiss the effort by arguing that “our sales don’t take place on our website.” Marketers know that that attitude means falling behind the competition.

Give Buyers a Road Map. High-value products and services require in-depth information, including top-of-funnel messaging, mid-funnel details including video and other premium content, and bottom-funnel data sheets, pricing options and other data that will close the sale. As the buyer moves around the website, confusion about where they are and want to be will result in a frustrated visitor or is more likely to abandon your site for some other brand. There are ways to lessen the chances of a lost customer because of confusion. Here are some key best practices for a successful B2B user experience website design that will meet your team’s expectations:

• Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs let your visitors know exactly where they are on your website, regardless of how they got there. It’s like having GPS navigation that has a path laid out that tells them how they got there. Whether location-, attribution- or path-based, breadcrumbs are a good option.
• Page headers – Make sure that the page header is similar to the copy of the navigation items or links that have been clicked. This is a good B2B user experience website design practice that has the added benefit of being good for SEO. If the page header of the page matches what the visitor clicked on, they will be reassured of their choices.
• Highlighting selected menu options – Keep the navigation highlighted when it is clicked. It can be bolded or underlined or have some other creative way of standing out and will give the visitor instant feedback about the menu options.
• Show progress bars – A progress bar that indicates page load time will let a visitor know what’s happening if taking an action on the website, whether downloading a white paper, loading a calculator widget, or processing a form submission.
• Thank You pages – These also give strong cues about the action taken. If a visitor subscribes to a webinar, downloads a pdf, or submits a request for information, confirms the action that was just taken.

We’ll be exploring more B2B user experience website design best practices in upcoming posts.

See how Bluetext can help deliver a successful B2B user experience website design.

User experience and personalization was the top trend for website development, and it will continue to be for 2018. Designing and executing the best architecture for a website engagement and conversion, while offering the right content at the right time to improve SEO and move prospects through the sales funnel, needs to be every marketing executive’s top priority. It remains a process of emotional transformation for many organizations, as top executives push still need to be convinced that creative design alone isn’t going to make their website the business tool that it needs to be.

With that in mind, here are our top tips for creating websites with user design as the first and foremost priority:

1. Personas are evolving. It’s easy to look at personas as a type of user who fits into certain common demographic categories. In the political arena, for example, a typical persona might be the “soccer mom,” shorthand for suburban mothers in the 30-45 age range whose main concerns are focused on their children. That makes sense for political purposes, but it gives little insight into how people actually engage with a website. We are recommending grouping personas into categories according to what they want to do on the site. Is it browsing, comparison shopping, or looking for specific content in order to make a decision. Recognizing these groupings offers more useful insights about what they want from their experience, and how best to deliver that content when they want it.
2. Less is more. It’s easy to clutter up a website with tons of promo boxes and fly-out menus. But the goal is to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for and take the actions that we want them to take. Instead, design the home and landing pages to reduce the tasks required of users to the bare minimum. Make it simple, and get rid of all the clutter that doesn’t add value or that serves as a distraction.
3. Design the user experience. Remember that designers are always working on large monitors with the best resolution. Unfortunately, most users are on laptops, tablets or mobile devices. User design for that reality shouldn’t be an afterthought. Visual hierarchy, spacing, content grouping, positioning, and size should be solved in the wireframe process before a visual designer is passed the assignment.
4. Take a field trip. There’s an old adage in real estate that says the more houses a homebuyer visits, the more likely they are to know the one they want when they see it. That’s why one of the early steps in our design process is an extensive virtual field trip to explore design elements in scores of websites across multiple industries. The idea is to show the client team the wide range of user designs that are out there on the web and to react to the design elements and functionality in multiple settings. We watch their faces closely during this exercise to see what they respond to, and to give them the confidence of knowing it when they see it.
5. It’s all about the user. It’s easy to gravitate to what you like for the website based on your own preferences. But it’s not about you, it’s about your customer and the user experience. While tempting to select design elements with your own preferences and tastes in mind, that won’t help engage your target audiences if they have a whole different set of preferences and needs. Always remember that it’s about what users want to do. Our job is to help them to get the content and take the actions they want in the easiest and most intuitive way possible.

See how Bluetext can help design a website with a great user experience. 

Download the Bluetext Guide to Building for the Future.

With technology advancing the landscape of digital marketing so rapidly and personalization driving more and more customer interaction, organizations are accelerating their deployment of multiple websites and web presences. But how do you determine whether your organization needs a new website, or a digital platform?

As organizations expand, satellite and secondary websites are created—often because it’s easier and quicker than integrating with the main site, and because internal IT resources may not be available to take on the project. But that approach has its own consequences. With more digital assets, organizations struggle to keep them up to date, maintain brand consistency and implement a quality control mechanism that can take all of the sites into account. The simple tasks of changing a logo or copyrighting text turns into a complex exercise of coordinating multiple groups across different parts of the organization—and getting them to respond when you need it.

The answer is a move towards an approach based on a digital platform rather than a website, and the distinction is important.  If your organization has multiple web presences, then you need to ask yourself the question: “Would I benefit from a platform?” If you don’t explore this option, you may be setting yourself up for years of frustrations.

Need help determining whether your organization needs a new website or a digital platform?

Download the Bluetext Guide to Building for the Future.

As we have written many times, including on the Google “Hummingbird” release and “Mobilegeddon,” search engine optimization is a never-ending game of cat and mouse. The mouse–anyone with a website that they want to get noticed–is always trying to find shortcuts that make their website come up high in a Google search. The cat–the search engine team at Google–wants to eliminate any shortcuts, work-arounds or downright cheating. That’s the game that has been going on for many years, because doing it the way Google wants, which is by having great content that is fresh, original, updated and linked to by other sites, is hard. In fairness, Google has been doing a great job of reacting and responding to the evolving nature of Internet usage and protecting the integrity of its search engine, and has made it much more difficult to game the system.

So here’s where Penguin 4.0 comes in. One of the ways that Google has assessed where a particular webpage should rank in a search query is by looking at the inbound links on that page. The theory goes that if The New York Times is linking to it, it must have the type of credibility and value that warrants a high ranking. Lesser websites have value, just not as much as The New York Times. However, by making inbound links an important component in the rankings, the mice on the other side found ways to artificially have lots of websites link back to key pages, sometimes by buying links or engaging with networks of link builders. That was the first unintended consequence.

In response, Google launched a Penguin update in April 2012, to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings. At first, the Penguin algorithm would identify suspicious links when it crawled the Internet, and simply ignore them when it performed its ranking in response to queries. But sometime in the middle of 2012, Google started punishing websites with bad links, not just ignoring them but actually driving page rankings down for offenders. And that set off a mad scramble as sites needed to somehow get “unlinked” from the bad sites. Which led to unintended consequence number two: Not only did webmasters have to worry about being punished for bad links, they also had to worry about rivals purposely inserting bad links to undermine their competitor’s search results. Ugh!

So, in October of 2012, Google tried to fix the problem it created by offering a “Disavow Links” tool that essentially tells the Google crawlers when they find a bad inbound link that the website in question has “disavowed” that bad link, and therefore please don’t punish us for it any longer. Here’s how Searchengineland described the tool at the time: “Google’s link disavowal tool allows publishers to tell Google that they don’t want certain links from external sites to be considered as part of Google’s system of counting links to rank web sites. Some sites want to do this because they’ve purchased links, a violation of Google’s policies, and may suffer a penalty if they can’t get the links removed. Other sites may want to remove links gained from participating in bad link networks or for other reasons.”

And that created yet another unintended consequence, because, unfortunately, the Penguin algorithm wasn’t updated on a regular basis. So for websites trying to clean up their links, as SearchEngineland put it, “Those sites would remain penalized even if they improved and changed until the next time the filter ran, which could take months. The last Penguin update, Penguin 3.0, happened on October 17, 2014. Any sites hit by it have waited nearly two years for the chance to be free.”

Penguin 4.0 addresses that by integrating the Penguin “filter” into the regular crawler sweeps that assess websites on an ongoing basis. Waiting for up to two years for a refresh is now a thing of the past, as suspect pages will now be identified–or freed because they are now clean–on a regular basis.

What does this mean for websites? It’s what we’ve been writing now for a half dozen years. Good SEO doesn’t just happen, and it can’t be manipulated. It takes hard work, an effective strategy, and a long-term view to create the kind of content and links that elevate your brand for your customers, prospects, and the Google search engine. For more tips on navigating Penguin, download our eBook now.

Designing, developing and implementing a new website can be very rewarding, especially when design and functionality work together to deliver a great experience for your audience. But it’s not always easy. Understanding the audience, how it interacts with your site, how it likes to obtain information, and what it responds best to is complicated and takes a lot of insight and experience. We know. We do it for a living.

That’s why we are proud to show off our own new website here at Bluetext. We are not the cobbler’s kids who don’t have shoes. Our website has been a key element in our success, and we keep it both cutting edge and fresh. One of our key objectives is to show off the great work we have done for our clients.

For our regular visitors, you may not notice some of the new design changes. There are additional case studies, the information is laid out in a more logical manner, and you will see new graphics and promotions. But from the back-end, it’s a significant progression for us.

The site is hyper-optimized for search engines, leveraging the latest changes in the Google search algorithms to ensure that the site gets the most organic traffic. It is closely integrated into our analytics and marketing automation platforms so we can track how people are using and interacting with the site. It’s also focused on delivering a personalized experience so that visitors can quickly get to the content they want and don’t have to revisit the home page each time. We’ve improved the load times so that everyone should have a good experience on the site. This is partly in response to Google’s rewarding good user experience, including load times for images and videos, in its search results.

We’ve also focused heavily on mobile as more content and sites are optimized for a mobile-first experience. The site is fully responsive. The creative displays are better and will provide examples of our work in more categories so that visitors can quickly find exactly what they are looking for. We’ve also enhanced the blog for greater industry insights on trends and best practices that we are seeing in the market, and have included an Ideas and Resources section on the home page.

So check it out, take it for a test drive, bang on the doors and kick the tires. Let us know what you think, and ask us how Bluetext can help you achieve greater success for your brand.