Videos offer an excellent way for explaining about services of someone or features of a product. The length and content of the video matters a lot for businesses. Depending on where the video is placed the length of the video should not be more than few minutes at the most. If it is video meant for home page then the video should be less than a minute to get visitor’s attention.

Example Video developed by Blue Marble Media for CitationAir

CitationShares overview video from Blue Marble Media on Vimeo.

Sometimes, what you provide in the Video tours is not always very easy for your site visitors to follow. You need to supplement the video content with a list of detailed blog posts. This is necessary for a number of reasons.

• the video is very linear in nature – this makes it difficult for the user to scan large content. Blog posts with pure text could be easily scanned provided they are broken down by headers and bulleted lists.
• long duration of the video – any video longer than 2 or more minutes will not keep the users focused.
• missed opportunities – Users tend to fast forward and skip through video segments. Users may loose the material that you want to get across to them when they do so. Again, it is important to keep video length in mind while presenting on the web.

In summary, creating and publishing videos has become as easy as writing text blog posts. Every business should start making use of these tools to promote and grow their business. Dont forget that it is important to search engine optimize videos too.

Short URLs

Short URLs have become quite popular these days.  Short URL is an alias to a long-not-easy-to-type-remember long URLs.  Short URLs take less space while including in emails, other web pages, while sharing on social media.  Services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com take  a long url and make it a short URL.   Short URLs are used on the popular microblogging service Twitter.com as the tweets are limited only to 140 characters and any saving in letters in including website links (urls) is a good thing.

• For example, a long URL from the DMOZ directory to the WordPress software is given by…

  http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Tools/Publishers/WordPress/

and with the use of bit.ly we can shorten it and the short url is:

http://bit.ly/9cOjOX

bit.ly service not only shortens a long URL it allows you to customize the short URL name to something of your choice. If you sign up for bit.ly service you could even track the clicks of the short URLs and get realtime stats for that short URL.

photo credit: tian2992

Friendly URLs

Friendly URLs on the other hand are useful to make a meaningful URL name to the site visitors and to the search engines.  For example, the URL of this blog post is “http://www.nenewmedia.com/blog/services/short-friendly-urls/”.  The two words right after the domain name indicate that the page is under the blog under the category services.  This kind of grouping is very easy for users to follow and remember.  But, the biggest advantages are in the areas of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, bing, value this kind of grouping and better index the sites and show the results to the users.

Almost all of the content management systems, whether open-source or commercial, support the friendly url feature and the website developer needs to enable it and configure it for various website pages and blog entries.  Even for a static brochure site that does not change much it is a good idea to group the pages to a specified structure and create meaningful and friendly URLs. For the New England New Media blog we use WordPress and it offers a lot of control in how we create short/friendly URLs.

There are many URL shortner services and Search Engine Land has an exhaustive article on this topic. If you are looking to learn more about this topic and understand about any dangers or pitfalls in using URL shortners then you should read this article from Joshua Schacter’s Blog.

Hope this information is helpful. We would like to hear back from you, our readers, about this post and our blog.

NENM Team

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Content Management System (CMS) lets you manage content on your website with not much of a headache or pain.  Without the CMS, updating a website whenever you want is not easy and you need to reach out to your webmaster.  Content Management System lets you update parts of a web page/website or add/update pages all from your web browser. So, If you are looking for an easily-update-whenever website without webmaster help then you need CMS.

Website update workflow with and without CMS:

Without CMS:

1. Identify what page/information needs to be updated
2. Contact your webmaster to update
3. Webmaster updates the content and informs you
4. You review the updated page.  If you are happy with the update everything is good otherwise you need to go back to the webmaster and ask her to update it.

With CMS:

1. Identify what page/information needs to be updated
2. Update the page/information within the CMS
3. Preview the page on how it looks and “publish” yourself

Update means adding new content as well such as blog posts or articles.

Tools or programs such as WordPress, Drupal, and other CMS software lets you manage your site content without webmaster’s help. Of course, they do take a little bit more effort to setup. But, once you have them setup for your business then it becomes super easy to be in total control of your website.

Hope you find this article helpful. In the coming days we will write about WordPress powered websites.

If you are looking for a CMS based websites then contact New England New Media to get started.

NENM Team

According to Seth Godin‘s vocabulary, “A landing page is the first page a visitor to your site sees”.

There are many resources that you can find on the web to learn about landing pages but marketing Guru Seth Godin has short one pager explaining what the landing pages are.  For example, the landing page on our website is a contact us page where we provide a way for our readers/prospective or current customers to reach us. Landing page acts as a glue (according to @unbounce) in your online marketing efforts. The team at unbounce.com put together a great blog post (http://unbounce.com/landing-page-optimization/7-elements-of-a-winning-landing-page/) on 7 Elements of A Winning Landing Page. The main purpose of the landing page shall be achieved and all your efforts in designing, developing and deploying a landing page should work to achieve this goal.

Landing Page Prototype

When you are running an email marketing campaign or pay per click (PPC) campaign on the google (http://adwords.google.com/) or other sites it is important to tie your advertising campaigns to a specific landing page and make sure the visitors of those advertisements have a specific actions to do on your website. This could be learning about a promotion and making a purchase, signing up for an email newsletter subscription, reading a product/service description, learning about new features etc. Your landing page should have one Call to Action (CTA). You might ask what is Call To Action? A call to action is one important thing that you want your website visitor to do on the landing page. It is a good idea to have only one call to action on any given landing page. Otherwise, the visitor may not take the action that you require them to take.

We are getting ready for the new year to serve our current and future customers. If you are looking to build, promote, grow your business using online marketing tools such as websites, email marketing, social media marketing then contact us. We would love to offer a free one hour consultation to get you started on the right track for this new year.

Photo courtesy: Flickr User http://www.flickr.com/photos/oter/

Web Design and Development lays the foundation for your website covering the design aspects such as how the website looks and a user could interact with the website.  Design includes the user experience and interaction design. Once the design is completed the development includes the giving the website form and function and complete the necessary programming to have it seen by the users on web browsers, smart phones, or mobile devices such as iPad and others.

• Any business website should get a professional design company help to get a design that is professional looking and meets your business objectives.
• Your website should offer a good set of features that are essential for your target audience, customers, and users.
• If you are a small business owner and just need an online presence then you may only need a one or two page website.
  • There are services that can offer standard template designs that you can use for your business.
  • Some of these services are Yahoo!’s site builder, Intuit’s Homestead, etc. We will write about these services and when and for whom these will be suitable in a separate post.

First define objectives and the purpose of your website and  make sure that your website design and funcitonality matches with your business’ goals. This is usually a one time cost unless you want to update the site on a regular basis. The cost may range from few hundred dollars to few thousand dollars depending on what you want to do.  You can always start small and start adding more features or services as you grow your business/website.

At NENM, we excel in providing strategic advice and help you in preparing a road map for your online initiatives.  Whether you work with us or not you could benefit from our services.  Please contact us to learn more about strategic consulting and web design and development services.

Related Posts:

• How to get your own Website?
• Obtaining a domain name – Part 1

• Digital design and online branding development including logos, ad banners
• Email and online marketing with newsletters and the advertising campaigns using tools such as Constant Contact, Emma, Vertical Response etc.
• Web site design and development – with and without content management systems, such as WordPress, Drupal, Expression Engine etc.
• WordPress blog setup/customization
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Social media strategy development and execution using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• Website analytics and metrics using tools such as Google Analytics, getclicky etc.
• Landing page development and leads management
• Web site hosting, backup, recovery, domain management etc.

How to use new media?

Depending on the kind of project and where your business is headed in enabling or building the web presence, we would love to work with you.   Contact us for any of your  project needs and no project is small for us.  If you have already worked with other companies and got frustrated with poor quality/service, unreasonable costs, or unmet schedules then talk to New England New Media and see how we could be different.

Best

NENM Team

Domain name is unique to your business. Just like a phone number and the street address, once you have a domain name it is not advisable to change it.  Majority of the times the domain name that you would like to obtain and register for your website may already been taken by others.  It does take a little bit of effort to research for a domain name and services like Yahoo! or godaddy.com Domain name search could help you in finding a domain name.  We could work with you to find a domain name that suits your business and secure the domain name on your behalf.

Domain name - dont dos

Photo courtesy: flickr Carston Knoch

Three things to know before you decide on a domain name:

1. Relevance to your business
   The domain name should be relevant to your business name.  Sometimes this is very easy as the domain name that matches with your business name may be available.  If your business name is longer or the domain name is not available then you should look for a short relevant domain name that is inline with your business and/or the industry.
2. Length of your domain name
   The  technical limitation of the domain name is quite long.  For example, it could be 30 characters or so.  But, that would not be easy for people to remember or type.  A good rule of thumb is to keep the domain name short and sweet; 13 characters or less is a good rule of thumb.
3. .Com, .Net or other
   For all US based businesses it is a good idea to stick with .com domain name.   If a domain name of your choice is not available then you may go for .net or .biz.  But, always start looking for various possibilities within the .com domain search by keeping the first two rules, mentioned above, in mind.

Look at our how to get your website post to learn about all the things involved in getting a website for yourself or your business.

Btw, we will be able to help in choosing a domain name or help you with the process of selecting a domain name and registering it for you.  As part of our service we will pay for first two years of your website domain name and will also host it for you until you decide to design a complete website.

Thanks for reading

NENM Team

There are many options; starting from a free websites that some companies offer to a brochure site that you can do yourself with a little bit of research from the Internet or with the help of your cousin or friend or from reading a book.

(image courtesy flickr)

We would like to provide our take on the process in the next couple of blog posts and we hope that you find this information useful.  There are basically four steps for getting started with a website for your business.

1. Obtaining a Domain Name – do a domain name look up on websites like Yahoo! or godaddy.com to see if the domain name that you are looking for is available.  Typically, a domain name is one of the least expensive things that costs you about $10/year.
2. Design & Development – work with a professional design company to get a design for your site and make sure that the website matches with your business’ marketing goals.  This is usually a one time cost unless you want to update the site on a regular basis.  The cost may range from few hundred dollars to few thousand dollars depending on what you want to do.
3. Website Content – Content is king on the Internet and you would want your website content to be searchable and findable by your target users.  It is important to keep the content of your website current.  If your website has a content management system to start with then keeping the content current could become less stressful.
4. Hosting and Management – Now, you need a place for your website.  The hosting company that you chose should be able to keep your website up and functioning throughout the year.  Yes, this is where you could get your own email boxes and back-up your website.  This is a monthly cost and does not typically cost more than $15/month.

Hope this article gave you a basic idea of getting a website.  Look for more detailed articles in the next few days. Please contact NENM if you would like to learn about our services and what you can do help you get started with your website. NENM Team http://www.NENewMedia.com – New England New Media