• Facebook-like functionality: The website is easy to navigate because elements of it work like facebook, which most users are familiar with. Classroom and teacher pages are similar to facebook profile pages, and teachers can make posts on pages like a newsfeed. The bonus is that you avoid actually putting your information on facebook, and instead have your own website controlled by you.
• Parent Subscribe: Parents can subscribe to have all posts from their child’s classes sent to their email address so they don’t have to search the sight each day to see if new information is posted.
• Student Log-in: Each student has a log-in. When they click “My Classes” at the top of the page, they see a list of their classes so they don’t have to spend time searching for each class. Also, students can download worksheets and turn in homework for assignments posted to a classroom page.

]]> http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/2011/12/21/providing-a-communication-link-for-k12-the-delano-school-district-website/feed/ 0 http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/2011/12/21/providing-a-communication-link-for-k12-the-delano-school-district-website/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FiveTechnologyBlog/~3/8IcljNtZJeA/ http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/2011/11/17/new-web-design-source-5-payroll/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:11:51 +0000 Eric Mobley http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/?p=1357 Read More]]> Source 5 is an Atlanta, Georgia payroll company that offers customized payroll services for your business.

Source 5 came to Five because their old site was out dated, some pages didn’t even work correctly, and most importantly they needed an effective online marketing agenda.  Five created a modern, beautiful design, and then built their site on a foundation of solid fundamentals that will help them rank in search engines immediately.  That will not be satisfactory for Source 5 however, as we have a 12 month agenda for their internet marketing and SEO moving forward.

Site Features

• Get A Quote form to assist Source 5 to gather information quickly, and allow them to create quotes for clients.
• WordPress blog with RSS Feeds so people can stay up to date with latest payroll and source 5 news.
• Integration into CMS allows Source 5 to easily make updates to their site without any knowledge of the back end.
• Social Media profiles were set up to allow Source 5 to easily communicate with clients.
• Case studies & testimonials pages allow Source 5 showcase their work. These can be easily added and updated with our CMS!
• SEO friendly design, coding, and structure.

Visit: http://www.source5.com

Think Insights launches with 5 main categories:

• Latest Insights
• Facts & Stats
• Research Library
• Planning Tools
• Thinking Ahead

Each category breaks down into subcategories that feature interactive statistics, videos, links, and archives. Its difficult to gauge exactly how much information is included but its safe to say don’t expect to get through it all in one night.

Latest Insights includes videos accompanied by articles about various of Google’s latest insights. The videos are very well made and I expect this section to be updated often.

Research Library is a hub containing studies, videos, and many of the supporting material that seems to be located throughout the rest of the site. Particularly useful is the ability to filter by industry and marketing objective.

Planning Tools features interactive charts, graphs, and tools. What I find amazing here is the Our Mobile Planet tool that allows you to create a chart by filtering through mobile data, country, and more.

Facts & Stats give you a bite-sized look at many different statistics. Filter by industry, media platform, and more.

There is so much information available here that this only begins to scratch the surface. It will be interesting to see how often this is updated and what is added in the future.

Mobile Web Site

Mobile web browsing is on the rise with an estimate of almost 100 million monthly mobile users browsing the web. This number is certain to rise in the coming years.

Here are a few reasons to add a mobile site in addition to your main site.

• Smaller pages for smaller screen and faster loading times
• Mobile use will continue tto rise in the foreseeable future
• Searchers are often looking for a quick way to find contact details
• People are often searching for stores and businesses close to their current location, these are high conversion searches

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the art and science maximizing your website’s exposure on search engines like Google. Essentially, you are tying to increase the chance that someone searching for a product or service finds your website on search engines. Techniques include keyword research, content optimization, and making sure search engines can easily crawl and index your site.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click is similar to Search Engine Optimization but with a PPC campaign you are literally paying to get to the top. You might be asking yourself, why would anyone pay for SEO when they could just pay to get to the top with PPC?  Take a look at the image below to see the difference.

PPC’s main advantage over SEO is that you can pay to get to the top and you only pay when someone clicks on your link. The disadvantage is the area PPC ads occupy in search engine results tend to get ignored by most users and once you run out of budget you are removed immediately from the results. An SEO campaign can have longer lasting effects even after you stop paying for it and people click on those results in search engines more often. Both have their place in the internet marketing world. The key is to find out what is best for you.

Social Media

Social media is being leveraged more and more as a way for businesses to communicate with their clients and customers. People can stay up to date with their favorite stores, restaurants, and businesses through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. Having the ability to quickly communicate with your customers is a strategy worth considering.

Your e-commerce store can post promo codes, your restaurant can post daily specials, or just talk to your customers and get to know them.

The great thing about social media is the costs are very low. You can pay a professional to do social media marketing for you or you can set up social media accounts yourself. The choice is yours!

Email Marketing

Like social media, email marketing is another way to communicate quickly to your customers. With email marketing you can collect email addresses from customers, people who visit your website, people who you meet at conferences and other business gatherings.

Through social media you have to wait for people to follow you on Twitter or ‘Like’ your page on Facebook but with email marketing you can build a database of names. Of course, you want to do this within reason. Buying a list of names from another company or spamming people’s inbox will get you nowhere. Only send to people you have a business relationship with.

Analytics

Google Analytics and other analaytics programs allow you to track a great deal about your website and it’s visitors. You can track:

• Keywords that are being used to find your site
• Under performing pages or pages that are really popular
• How long people are staying and what they are doing when they are on there

You can have someone set up analytics for you but its also a great idea to have a professional review the analytics with you monthly. This will allow you to take action based on the results to improve your website continuously.

Five Can Help

We believe a complete internet marketing strategy starts with having a great website that is enhanced by these other great services. You may not want to include them all and that is fine! We can help you build a strategy and find out what is best for you and your business.

Give us a call: 763-972-5933

Web Design

Johnson-Condon’s new site features a modern and professional design that will give people a sense of trust and authority in their work. The content was updated to reflect the company, their attorneys, and their practice areas.

Take a look at their attorneys page to see how their attorneys have been highlighted. We wanted to include everything there is to know about each attorney including their practice areas, biography, contact information, and professional accomplishments.

Visit the website: http://www.johnson-condon.com

Problem

Before the project began, like most companies that do onsite work for their clients, Excel Mechanical had to haul papers with them wherever they went. Not only that but they had several steps to complete the form and send it to the customer or client. The process went something like this: 1) Fill out a paper form 2) Enter data into computer 3) Generate PDF 4) Email to client or customer. You can imagine how much time piles up weekly, monthly, and yearly to complete this process everyday.

Solution

We streamlined their approach by taking their paper forms and creating digital forms fit for their Ipad or tablet. Not only did we digitize their forms but we also created a signature capture field that can capture signatures using a stylus. This allows Excel Mechanical’s team to fill out a form, capture a signature, and then the form automatically generates a PDF version which it sends to the client’s email. Not only that but we built an administration interface utilizing the Site Management Console to view a history of each and every form submitted.

Web Apps are the Future

In the time it took to write this blog post, Five has already completed its second project with this custom web app for another client. We have always had a strong foundation of web design and internet marketing but we also believe the future is to discover new ways to leverage web apps to make time consuming tasks simple.

If you have an idea for a web app, give us a call at 763-972-5933 or visit our contact page.

]]> http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/2011/08/25/custom-web-app-digital-forms-and-signature-capture-for-ipad-or-tablet/feed/ 3 http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/2011/08/25/custom-web-app-digital-forms-and-signature-capture-for-ipad-or-tablet/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FiveTechnologyBlog/~3/rpIRuCLE0JE/ http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/2011/07/25/tracking-dynamic-sites-and-pages-with-google-analytics/#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:34:47 +0000 Eric Mobley http://www.fivetechnology.com/blog/?p=1138 Read More]]> If you have a website that has dynamic content or has multiple pages and steps under one URL (or an all flash website), you have to do a little more work to get Google Analytics to effectively track your pages.

For example, many of our e-commerce sites feature a shopping cart that has multiple steps (Address, Shipping, Payment, Thank You) and one URL (/shopping-cart/). Regardless of which step you are on, Google Analytics will track this page view as /shopping-cart/. Without some additional tracking, you cannot establish a funnel or tell where people left the shopping cart process.

Although you have to add a little bit to your Google Analytics code to track these pages properly, it is not very difficult to do.

The Code

Assuming you are using the asynchronous version of Google Analytics, the key is to find this code in your Google Analytics:

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

And change it to:

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/shopping-cart/address/']);

This tells Google Analytics to track this page view as /shopping-cart/address/. This will not change the actual URL, it only changes it in Google Analytics for tracking purposes. Create this code and place it in the template for each page or step you want to track.

This is all you need for Google Analytics to track these dynamic pages or steps as individual pages. After this is set up, you’ll start to see page views come in as the URLs you set.

Creating A Funnel

You can also create a funnel using these new URLs and it is done the same way as you create a funnel for any group or URLs.

For help on setting up funnels, visit Google Support for additional information.

Regardless of how it happened, you are going to want to get this off Google’s index ASAP.

• The site could start getting visitors who would be viewing incomplete design and information
• People might start trying to order products if it is an e-commerce site
• There will be duplicate content issues which could harm the current site’s rankings

Thankfully Google gives us a tool to request the removal of an entire website from its index.

To get started you need to make an account for the site with Google Webmaster Tools.

Once you have this setup, navigate to Site Configuration -> Crawler Access. On this page is a link for Remove URL. Plug in the root domain of your site. That’s it!

We recently had two sites we submitted for removal and both were removed in under two hours.

Now that you have taken steps to remove the beta site from Google’s index, this would be a good time to prevent it from happening again. Take a look at creating a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing your beta sites. Just remember to remove the search engine restrictions once the site goes live!

I’d like to go outside that box somewhat and discuss a corollary benefit Facebook and other social media platforms have introduced to application designers and developers.   Social media is starting to show-up in the design of custom web applications we build to help business to be more efficient (I.e. CRM, Customer Portals, Project and Task Management, Sales Management, etc.).

When a new technology is introduced, Five Technology will figure out the best way to utilize that technology and make your business more efficient (I.e. profitable).  The mobile phone or tablet PC is the device.  The Cloud is the new storage facility for all your business critical data.  The 3G, 4G, and wireless networks provide the infrastructure and access to this data anywhere at anytime.  And finally, the software developers create apps to make the interaction with this data easy and secure.  Facebook has provided the blueprint for the web developer to accomplish this.

The two things Facebook does extremely well are Communication and Easy.  You post to your wall, and everyone that needs to know about that post (your friends) is notified of a new post.  A comment is made, and all involved (your friends) are automatically invited to the conversation.  An effective communication platform that is easy to use at all levels (i.e. my grandfather has a Facebook account).  Is a post on your Facebook wall really all that different than a task or conversation relevant to a work order?

Facebook makes online communication easy!   If they only offered a “private” or “business” version of their software that could be customized to fit the needs of an organization, but that’s a whole other conversation.  :)

Quick Side Note:  In addition to platform, Facebook is also doing a majority of the training for us.  Change is difficult for any organization, particularly if there is a huge learning curve to this change.  Everybody knows how to use Facebook, so if can design a system that looks and acts just like it, the adoption rate of the new system becomes a whole lot higher.

Five Technology is an online marketing company whose solutions primarily involve some web design, web development, search engine marketing , and a powerful content management system (CMS).   Most solutions address pretty straight forward marketing agendas and don’t require a ton of customization, but there are customers that are doing a lot more online than just marketing.  As a result we are involved with mapping out business processes, and it’s critical we determine the most efficient, secure, yet user friendly way to utilize technology to accomplish the task.

Five has recently implemented this methodology into a project management system as well as a portal that K12 Schools will use to communicate classroom activity with a student’s parents.   Details of these projects will be revealed as they become more mainstream.  I’ve also noticed others have come to the same realization, as I was recently reading an article in Fast Company magazine detailing what Glam Media is doing for their authors.

Facebook, thank you for providing the blueprint for successful online communication!

Changes in technology are changing the way an online marketing firm can benefit your business.  The advent of new devices (mobile, iPad, etc.) have changed when and where customers are getting online. The lightning fast adoption of social media (Facebook, Twitter) is changing what people are doing online.  New standards such as HTML5 and their objective to make the web experience more “desktop-like” are changing how customers are engaging online.

It’s our job to pull together all these new variables and put together a plan that best suites your business.  Whether it be reaching more potential customers who need your product or service (i.e. Marketing), or finding ways to make business processes such as customer communication more efficient, your online strategy has never been more critical.

I’m not sure Online Marketing is the best choice of words to describe what it is we do today, but it’s what we have. Maybe we are online strategists?  That has a bit of a ring to it… how can we help you with your online strategy and then take it a step further and help you implement that strategy?