What's new, what's next, what's best, and how it all fits in to a successful digital marketing strategy… Get inside our head with these helpful resources—from blog posts to best practices guides—written by our team of experts.
When we embark on a web project and begin to discuss content planning and organization, one of the terms we often throw around is “taxonomy.” What does that mean, exactly?
My first introduction to the concept of taxonomy came in middle school, when we learned the following mnemonic device for the taxonomic order for biological classification:
King Philip’s Class Ordered Five Green Sandwiches
Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species
I love that our work affords us access to lots of smart and charismatic leaders. They have great depth of knowledge, are experts in their field, and are fascinating to engage in conversation. Partnering with them is an incredibly enriching experience.
Okay, we have a confession to make: not all of the photography on our blogs are created by us. What? This is madness! Before you go out rioting on the street, let us explain. Having eye-popping, unique visuals can truly make or break posts regardless of the content. Lucky for us, there are a handful of great websites that want to put in the hard work for us. The following are some of the websites that make us look cool.
Around here, we talk a lot about content strategy and how important it is to a successful website redesign. While “content strategy” refers to a much bigger umbrella than copy alone, copy is incredibly important when it comes to communicating your story, your offer, and your value. It works in conjunction with your site’s layout, photography, typography, and other components to offer site visitors an engaging experience that drives them to take action.
Just like your wardrobe keeping up with the coolest new fashion trends, your website should incorporate cutting-edge features that wow your visitors and give them a reason to tell their friends about you. Remember, your website redesign project isn’t actually finished the day you launch, there’s lots to do on day two and beyond, including making small enhancements that keep your design current and innovative. Consider adding some of these hot trends to your website design.
“We need to fix the website” is a common refrain. But why? To what end? And how? A redesign project is no small feat, requiring significant time and resources to pull off. But how can you ensure that the effort will result in an appropriate, sustainable solution that won’t just feel good on day one but also works well on day two and beyond?
Remember the storyline on Seinfeld where George Costanza passes himself off as an architect? It’s a classic, not to mention very entertaining. But really, if George ever did try his hand at architecture, I suspect his buildings would have ended up requiring the help of a firm like Simpson, Gumpertz & Heger (SGH).
Making your website look pretty is an important part of web design, but even a nice looking website can fail if it is not user-friendly. If you are looking to improve the user experience of your website, we’re here to help. Below are 13 common UX mistakes and how users may react to them.
Just say no to this - almost always impossible to read.
Some of the most important components of our website don’t show up in its visible, designed area. One of those is the uniform resource locator, commonly known as the URL. Simply put, a URL is the “location of a file on the web.” The two components of a URL with which we are typically most concerned are the domain name (e.g. oho.com) and the path (e.g. /work/).
Page views, session duration and bounce rate provide a solid health check for your college or university website. But this is only the beginning. We recommend setting up conversion goals in Google Analytics. A conversion goal typically measures a completed activity such as:
We call it a conversion when a user reaches the “thank you” page after submitting a form.
With the launch of each new higher education website, our client asks: What’s a good benchmark? How are we doing compared to other peer schools? Are we doing better than the old site?
We believe typical measures – sessions, page views, time on site and bounce rate – are good starting points for analytics. These show the overall health of your website, but in order to tie success to business goals, you’ll need to dig into conversion goals.
Previously, we shared some of the best web tools that we thought practically everybody could use. This time, we thought we would step it up a notch and show you some of the coding, web development, and performance applications that make our lives a whole lot easier at OHO Interactive. Whether you’re an experienced developer or coding noob, one of these tools could surely help you in the future.
Facebook is so, like, yesterday. At least that’s what all the kids are saying. Yes, Twitter is still cool, but it’s crowded out there, prompting the rise in popularity of tools to cut down on the noise. That leaves higher education marketers scrambling for creative new ways to reach prospective students with social media savvy.
When you give a bunch of tech nerds useful gadgets that they can use every day, you get a power combo of creativity and efficiency. Here at OHO Interactive, we love our web tools. At first we thought we’d keep these tools a secret in an effort to take over the world, but decided we’ll share them with you instead. Here are our favorites:
When you embark on a responsive web design project, you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at how designs resolve from one browser experience to another, and wireframing layouts across devices. But you should also devote a hefty amount of time to examining and planning your content.
The list of to-do’s during a website redesign project is miles long. Launching a new site is a huge undertaking, but it’s really only the beginning. To stay as fresh and relevant as it was the day of launch, a website needs lots of love and attention. And rules. That’s where governance comes in.
As colleges and universities seek to improve their websites and the prospective student journey, the push toward a responsive website and a “mobile first” approach usually top the list. To help university marketing departments better understand mobile trends for higher education websites, we’ve compiled benchmark data collected over the past year.
As Brain Traffic represents in their content strategy quad, half of what makes content strategy happen comes down to people -- that means workflow and governance. Brain Traffic defines workflow as the which “processes, tools, and human resources are required for content initiatives to launch successfully and maintain ongoing quality.” Within workflow, there are roles and responsibilities defined to help the process move along smoothly.
When it comes to websites, we can make a lot of things. But how do we know if they’re successful? And how do we define success? That’s where developing a measurement plan comes into play, and that’s what we will discuss in this third installment of our “fountain of youth” series.
One of the great things about working with so many higher education institutions on website redesigns is having a uniquely shaped knowledge about the issues they face as a whole. When considering key factors that play into a higher education website redesign, we’ve found a number of common challenges emerge regardless of institution size, geography, student population, or religious affiliation. A typical challenge is a disconnected brand across the website, particularly when multiple schools or campuses are represented.