Your website is the face of your company. It is your first impression, and, in many cases, a primary avenue via which current and prospective customers interface with your brand. It is critical, therefore, that your website is a living, breathing entity, impressing and engaging your audience at every turn. Today, the tools and methods you use for managing your corporate website have a profound impact on the success of your site and, subsequently, your business, so you need to make sure you are taking the right steps.

A community website is a nuanced and powerful new tool for consumer companies to engage customers. On opposite ends of the spectrum, typical brochure-ware corporate websites offer limited options for two-way interaction and social media presences remain floating communities that lack a sense of brand cohesiveness, impact and depth.

 WebManager 7 is a big release with many new features and additions to existing functionality that we are very excited to offer our clients. Among these features is a powerful graphical interface allowing administrators to work with dynamic content in a new way.

When developing content, site architectures, and interfaces for websites, we focus frequently on helping users get to the content and sections of the site that they are most interested in with as little effort as possible. Extending this mentality to subscription and sharing services allow us to ensure that users are proactively being delivered content that is always relevant to their interests and needs, and via a medium that suits their online lifestyle.

Social media campaigns are evolving to not only focus on creating engaging user experiences, but also to more directly impact upsell opportunities and ROI. To be effective, social media tactics should remain entertaining while increasing the value provided to consumers. The result of this approach is not merely a corporate marketing asset, but a sought-after tool for a company’s consumers and online communities that will encourage widespread viral marketing.

Now that our digital devices prominently feature touch interfaces, the ways of interacting with the devices and the content they present have begun to displace the methods of interaction made popular via traditional methods of human-computer interaction, most notably the monitor-mouse-keyboard setup. The interactions that went from physical to digital in the late 70s and early 80s are now merging – tapping, flicking and turning our digital devices allows us to physically interact with our digital content in ways not possible before now. Furthermore, these new levels and forms of interaction allow (and perhaps require) us to re-imagine the way we produce and deliver digital content.

A tradeshow experience without supporting multimedia assets will no longer be enough to get your company the attention it deserves on the convention center floor.

I am often reminded of some of the common questions that I hear – and some more that I wish I heard more often – from corporate marketers facing a website redesign. The answers to these questions can have a huge impact on not only the process and final outcome of the project, but also on the long-term success of the site and the company behind it. We help our clients and prospects work through these issues at the very start of their website engagement to avoid complications and confusion down the road.