We believe that every website should have a clearly defined purpose, provide a great user experience, and produce performance driven results.

What do you expect from your website?

More than often, businesses, organizations, and individuals don’t know how to answer the simple question: what is the purpose of your website? Websites tend to be defined by either their functionality or their design. Rarely are they described in terms of their purpose, their user experience, and the positive outcomes expected from online visitors.

Ultimately, we wish that everybody could answer this simple question and understand the intrinsic value of having a website. After more than 10 years of consulting on online strategy and web design, we have no doubt that a website can significantly impact an organization’s bottom line. Granted it has been designed for performance.

Click here to continue reading this article…

Bookmark to:

Massive adoption of social networking websites such as Facebook as well as the commonality of reading reviews and ratings on online shopping sites such as Amazon have transformed the Internet into a “Social Media” platform prone to enabling conversation between users.

In “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” published by the Harvard Business Press, Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, both from Forrester Research, state that:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

Internet Retailer just released the 2008 edition of their now famous Top 500 Guide to the most successful US online merchants.

Having purchased and intensively used the 2007 edition myself in more than one instance, I can only recommend that you purchase this exhaustive and very affordable (under $100) source of competitive information.

This guide will reveal the sales and conversion rates of the best 500 online retailers. You will be able to analyze and compare within 14 retail categories the profile and practices of the best performing merchants.

As well as forecasting major trends for 2008, the guide also takes a macro view of the eCommerce industry and points out what worked and what did not in the past year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

Online Marketing is basically the adaptation of traditional marketing practices to the online media channel (i.e, the Web). As with any new communication channel there is a maturity curve through which businesses have to experiment and figure out how to get the best value for the time and money they invest in growing their presence in that space. But at the end of the day, beyond creating awareness and growing share of voice, organizations need to build trust.

I have come across Matt McGee’s simple and brilliant SEO Success Pyramid which was inspired by coach John Wooden Pyramid of Success.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

The success of an eCommerce website greatly depends on how easy it is for customers to go through checkout and purchase an item. Online shopping carts are a feature that “brick and mortar” owners tend to take for granted but which has a huge impact on sales conversion.

It is now common knowledge that more than half of online shopping carts are abandoned before customers check out. The main reasons are usually related to usability issues but lately more price conscious consumers tend to spend more time browsing and price comparing before actually making a purchase.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to: