Netrist Solutions Blog

Charleston Foreign Affairs Forum launches their new site

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:48:00 -0400

Congratulations to the Charleston Foreign Affairs Forum on the launch of thier new website! The Forum hosts at least six speakers each year who present on a variety of international affairs topics. The new website lets members and visitors view information about upcoming events: including speaker bios, the chosen topic, and event dates. As a volunteer organization, the updating of the site's content needed to be simple and shared by multiple volunteers.

The new charlestonfaf.org features a dynamic featured event area that pulls key information about upcoming speakers to display on the homepage. The site updates itself by automatically moving speaker information to the "Past Events" area once the event is concluded--with no input required from an administrator. After an event, the web adminstrator can easily add photos from the event and other materials the speaker may have presented.

The website provides ample opportunity for members and visitors to communicate with the forum. Through the website, users can sign-up for membership, sponsor an event, or send feedback and questions.

Keeping your site Current

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:06:00 -0400

Having a website is essential for any business or organization. Its how your potential customers find you, and research your business or organization. Once your have a site, your next challenge will be to keep it "current."

Its important to show visitors that you are updating your site on regular basis, this helps give visitors confidence that the information they find on your site is up-to-date. There nothing worse than visiting a site that has a calendar posted on it, listing "upcoming activities" for dates already past, or a photo gallery with pictures from from the organizations "recent events" that occurred years ago.

On technique we recommend to our clients to keep their site up-to-date is to incorporate a blog into the site. A blog is term that is short for "weblog" and works similar to a diary. Every entry to a blog is dated, so visitors know when it was posted. While the content of your main site rarely changes, the blog is where you can share "current" information such as news and announcements and highlights from recent events.

One example of a Netrist website using Blog functionality within its site is St. Joseph St. Thomas Parish. All postings to the blog are featured on the main page of the site under "News and Announcements." They use this feature to post pictures, upcoming events, and news about the parish.

If you decide to add a blog to your site, its important to develop a strategy for updating on a regular basis. This will not only give visitors confidence that your site contains current content, but it will encourage them to return on a regular basis for the latest information on your business or organization.

I suggest that a post should be added to the blog at least once a week. You can have more than one contributor to a blog, which makes it easier to accomplish your weekly update strategy. You might have one person responsible for posting about upcoming events, while another can post pictures of the events after it happened. Or one person posts about new items in your store, while the other posts about the their favorite product lines you carry. It doesn't have to be earth-shattering news or a long post, Just by a post, you are letting your visitors know your site is up-to-date.

New Site for St. Joseph St. Thomas

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:02:00 -0400

We are pleased to announce the launch of St. Joseph St. Thomas (SJST) parish website. The new site essentially 4 sites in one - with each major part of the parish (School, Parish, Religious Education and Sports Programs) each having its own subsite, managed by various "content owners." Among the many benefits of the the new site is its easy to use content management system. New pages can be added with a click of a button. This allows the site to grow with the needs of SJST. The site also includes a blog feature, which make is easy for users to post news and announcements, which appear as dated entries on the main pages of the site, and helps to keep the site fresh and relevant for its visitors.

Congratulations St. Soseph St. Thomas Parish!

Top Google Result for AccuTrak

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:36:00 -0500

When we re-launched the AccuTrak website, we created a content-hub for each franchise location. When potential customers search for "Inventory Services" plus a location name, we wanted to make sure the franchisee's content was displayed high in the search results. Our strategy seems to be working: Searches for our target keywords bring up the franchise page in the top result in over 70% of the searches!

AccuTrak wanted to use their website to gain more visibility in each of the local markets they serve. We decided on the content-hub approach, the target keywords and markets, then went to work on optimizing the new site. The hubs use a content management system that is easy for franchisees to use. The hub strategy is critical because we use those pages to talk about local clients, the main cities served, provide the address of the local office, etc. All of this information turns out to be critical in location-specific searches.

As more hubs come on-line, the impact of the hub strategy should be cumulative. The more hubs that rank well in local searches, the better the overall site does--which, in turn, helps the search visibility of the individual hubs.

Martin House Plans

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:17:00 -0500

MartinHousePlans.com is a site dedicated to selling architectural drawings for eco-friendly homes that fit into tight, urban lots. The houses look great inside and out and are designed and make the best use of the space available.

Martin House Plans created their own site design and turn to Netrist to set-up a flexible, easy-to-use content management system with a custom-developed module to manage the house plans for sale. Netrist used the SilverStripe Content Management System to make it easy to add and remove pages and update content without needing the help of a webmaster.

Additionally, Netrist custom-developed a module that manages the various house plans and images. The module uses the SilverStripe framework, so it seamlessly integrates into both the site and the administration tool.

AccuTrak Relaunched

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:22:00 -0500

AccuTrak has re-launched the AccuTrakInventory.com website with an updated design and the ability to give franchisees their own "Site within a Site".

AccuTrak is a franchisor of inventory services. In 2005, they created a proprietary, voice-activated inventory system called VoTrak to provide unparalleled accuracy and detailed inventory reporting to retail stores, grocery, and convenience stores. AccuTrak's network of franchisees use VoTrak to provide inventory services to customers within their region.

AccuTrak wanted to give each franchisee the ability to add their own content, run Google AdWords campaigns, and optimize their pages within the corporate site for search result placement. The new site design provides a "Site within a Site" for each franchisee's territory. The main territory page contains all of the important text for search optimization, including the main city names within the territory, types of services provided, physical address and phone numbers for the office, and logos and links to local customers (as well as incoming links from their site). Each territory's site fits nicely in the About Us section and leverages the corporate content about the services provided, example reports, as well as information about VoTrak.

Prospective clients that find the franchisee through search results will see a polished, professional presentation and know there is some substance to the service, not a "Mom and Pop" organization.

Easy Newsletter Creation

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:33:00 -0500

In the last blog entry, I wrote about how to collect e-mail addresses on your site and use MailChimp.com to manage the e-mail lists and sending of newsletters. In this entry, I'll show you how easy it is to create a professional-looking e-mail MailChimp can send with no additional work on your part.

The goal is this: all of your newsletter content needs to be stored on your site. That way, people who have discovered your site for the first time can read past newsletters, and google can crawl that content and show those pages in search results, increasing your site's traffic.

After creating the newsletter page on your site, you can quickly turn it into a specially formatted e-mail template that MailChimp can use as your newsletter. Here's an example: Charleston Financial Advisors recently created their November newsletter by creating the Newsletter page on their site. Once created, the person creating the e-mail campaign in MailChimp will simply point MailChimp to that page, adding a small extention to the URL to tell the site to show the page formatted as an e-mail:

The newsletter page on the Charleston Financial Advisors site:

Now, the same page, but formatted as an e-mail (and easily used by MailChimp):

No more time-consuming campaign building in MailChimp!

Working with other Services

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:38:00 -0400

One critical part of every business' web experience is their e-mail / newsletter program. We recommend that our clients work with MailChimp.com for e-mail list management and newsletter delivery. The service sounds simple enough, but with CAN-SPAM laws, over 20 different kinds of e-mail clients, whitelists, blacklists, and even more intricate issues that can prevent e-mail from getting through, MailChimp is fantastic value for the money. And if your list has less than 500 addresses, it's free!

At Netrist, we connect with MailChimp behind the scenes. Your users never have to leave your site to sign-up -- the sign-up form is embedded in the page and and the result is shown just below the form.

MailChimp's administration interface is clean, simple, and full of great information about your list, how many people opened each mailing, and how many clicks your website received. It even integrates with Google Analytics so that when you look at your site's traffic through Google, you have integrated reporting from Newsletter data.

Next week I'll show you how Netrist makes it easy for you to send an e-mail campaign that reflects the design of your site without any work on your part!

How do you rate?

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:06:00 -0400

We recently helped Charleston Financial Advisors launch an interactive quiz that rates a potential customer's chances of being a good fit for financial planning services.

The quiz serves as a fun way to interact with Charleston Financial Advisors, and helps them generate new leads (even filters out people who would not be a good fit for the company).

And it looks great! The quiz uses sliders to rate the response to each question. The score is based on a weighted average and displayed with a gauge:

We used a guage from the Bindows library and customized it to display nicely in the results area.

FUEL, Refreshed

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:13:00 -0400

We are pleased to announce a re-design and re-launch of FUEL Charleston, a restaurant in downtown Charleston on the "Four Corners of Food". Besides serving great food, one of FUEL's strongest features is it's outdoor patio. The new website design makes heavy use of pictures of the patio and FUEL's food. We have also integrated FUEL's twitter feed into the homepage and created a dedicated URL for FUEL's fan page on Facebook.

Fill Up at FUEL!

Too Flashy for the iPhone?

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:57:00 -0400

Does your current website use flash? On the iPhone, your site might look like the one below (the names have been blanked out to protect against embarrassment!)

At Netrist, we make sure our Clients' sites display nicely on the iPhone:

...even with animation and other neat effects. Just take a look at Netrist.com's home page slider on the iPhone.

Use Windows Live Writer With SilverStripe

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:00:00 -0400

At Netrist, we favor using SilverStripe CMS because it provides our clients with an easy-to-use interface to update their websites. That said, sometimes it's easier to use a desktop program. One of our clients is a regular blogger (2 to 3 times per week) and sends a newsletter twice per month. He makes updates to the other parts of the site only as needed. For him, we created an interface that let's him use Microsoft's excellent (and free) Windows Live Writer software to post and edit blog entries.

Microsoft Live Writer is a desktop program that can work with most common blog systems. It's easy to use because it accepts pasted content from Microsoft Word and other sources, it let's you see how the post will look as you are writing it, and makes it easy to insert links, pictures, videos, maps, etc. In fact, I'm using the tool to write this blog entry as you can see from the screenshot below. (The drop-shadow added automatically by Live Writer gives the image a nice touch!)

We now offer our clients an alternate way to post and edit content on their SilverStripe-powered blogs. Clients can also use Live Writer to edit key pages on their site, such as the entries used later for e-mails. Contact us to help you create a site that can be used with tools like Microsoft's Live Writer!

Fast Sites Are Better

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:08:00 -0400

How fast does your website really need to be?

Now that most use DSL or Cable connections, you might think that all sites are fast enough. However, most aren't. Jakob Nielsen, one of the foremost usability experts, reports that computer systems (websites or otherwise) need response times of less than 1 second for the "user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted".

Very few websites can claim to serve the next page within 1 second. Most small businesses use less expensive hosting packages that set-up their servers to serve a large number of clients--not to serve pages fast.

The most important page of the site -- the Home page -- is often the slowest. When a browser visits your site for the first time, it must load a lot of files that it doesn't have to load on subsequent pages or visits.

At Netrist, we recently optimized our homepage for speed (and although we have faster servers, we're running this site on a shared server to prove our point). Here's how we decreased the Netrist page load time from over 6 seconds to about 2.5 seconds:

Combine and Compress Javascript

Sites today use Javascript libraries to achieve nice-looking effects. On the Netrist home page, the case study slider effects are all done with javascript. We need to load 6 files for everything to work. Instead of loading each of the files, we used a technique published on the rakaz.nl blog that combines and compresses 5 of the files, saving 4 file requests and decreasing the size of the script.

IMPACT: We decreased the time required to load these files from 1.7 seconds to under 0.4 seconds, a savings of 70% to 80%!

Load Javascript Last

This was a small thing that made a huge difference. Normally, browsers make multiple connections to pull web content from your site in parallel. However, while a browser is loading javascript, it stops loading everything else! Many sites put the javascript at the top of the page, so the rest of the content has to wait until the script loads. By placing the script at the bottom of the page, all of the content and graphics are loaded as fast as possible (and the site is usable) before the javascript is called.

IMPACT: We save around 2 seconds on the first pageload.

"Lazy Load" Images

Netrist's Case Studies slider uses 5 medium-sized images, but only one of those images appears on first view of the home page. Combined, the 5 images make-up about 70% of the total amount of data that needs to be downloaded. Using javascript, we made sure these images are loaded after all of the other page elements are in place. We replaced each image with a slider, so that the user knows something is coming.

IMPACT: About 1 second.

Need your site to load faster? Hire us for your next web project.

Welcome to the New Netrist.com

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:25:00 -0400

We refreshed the design of Netrist.com to make room for a blog, newsletters, and more space for us to outline our recent work. At Netrist, our goal is to help businesses effectively reach their customers online. Our featured work provides examples of how we've done that for other clients, and our blog and newsletters will provide helpful hints for improving the effectiveness of any site (whether we've built it or not).

Take advantage of us! Subscribe to the blog and the newsletter. Learn from the success our clients. Hire us to create your next site or integrate your site with existing systems like QuickBooks.