All Natural wanted a website that was easy to maneuver, simple and secure to purchase from, and really would draw potential customers into the website and its products to drive online revenue. So, naturally, we developed and designed a professional eCommerce website that was organized and very user friendly. All of our eCommerce web designs are secured through third party sources that provide top notch credit card processing security; such as, Authorize.net or PayPal. We then threw in some mouthwatering professional photography to get the customers hungry and ready to buy. All of this, combined with some custom programming magic by our web wizards created a beautiful, professional eCommerce driven web design.

One of many mouthwatering photos on All Natural's custom eCommerce site.

There’s much more to this powerful eCommerce website than some fancy photos and easy-to-use “add to cart” checkouts. It contains a recipes and news page, which is managed through a WordPress blog that has been integrated into the website. This will serve as a great way for All Natural to interact with its customers. The photos throughout the recipes page greatly enhance the mouthwatering factor. The website also contains a facts page, The Facts, that explains the difference between all natural meat and the hormone injected, antibiotic fed not-so-natural meat.

When buying online, consumers have always found it difficult to determine the quality of the product they are about to purchase. A high quality professional web design helps to reassure customers that they are making the right decision, but customer reviews also go a long ways. So, All Natural contains a customer review page where they can post the raving reviews they receive from their satisfied customers. These reviews also appear on the sidebar throughout the site to give consumers that extra reassurance they need to make the purchase while browsing the website.

Ranchline All Natural is still in the early stages of growing its business, so we built its new eCommerce web design to scale so that down the road it can easily pursue endless endeavors. As of its launch, All Natural was focusing on two main products to satisfy their customers organically driven appetites:  all natural beef and all natural lamb. However, when its eCommerce website inevitably adds more business than it can handle, All Natural might pursue a wider variety of organic products. For instance, all natural salmon or all natural pork.

Also as of its launch, All Natural was focused mainly on providing its organic products to end-user clientele, or just the typical Joe Schmo that wanted to grill up some delicious all natural meat. However, down the road it may want to pursue distributing its meat to restaurants wishing to serve more organic meals. For instance, Chipotle Mexican Grill has prided itself on serving only all natural, organic meat. As organic trends continue to increase within the average consumer, more and more restaurants are going to begin serving higher quality, more natural product. If All Natural goes this route, it will be very beneficial that they already have a professional web design, which will gain the credibility needed to distribute its product in the food service industry.

This custom eCommerce web design was built to scale on our custom content management system (CMS), the Site Management Console. Through this CMS, All Natural can easily add and edit pages within its website, manage its variety of professional, mouthwatering photos, and conveniently add and edit products (description, photo, pricing). It can even grow its business further by adding entirely new product lines.

Overall, the Ranchline All Natural eCommerce website was a great project to work on. It will serve as a great addition to the Ranchline network and the Five Technology portfolio. Here at Five, we cannot wait to order some all natural meat and grill it up this summer.

If you are interested in expanding your online clientele by creating a custom eCommerce web design contact Five Technology today!

Our strategic partner assisted with all of the graphic and user interface design work, while Five took care of the CMS integration and extensive custom programming required for a site of this magnitude. Upon completion of the design files, we sliced them into CSS and integrated the website into our custom content management system (CMS), the Site Management Console. Once that was finished the Five team began the long and complicated process of entering and organizing all of this online magazine website content.

Automation.com serves as an information hub and online publication website for the automation engineering industry. Automation companies and professionals use Automation.com to post and read news updates, post and apply for job opportunities, enter and search automation directories, post and learn about new products, and even buy online training materials and books through its eCommerce capabilities. Continue reading to hear about its incredible capabilities.

Portal websites contain A LOT of information that is pulled, submitted, and managed from many different places, people, and systems. This caused a great need for us at Five to organize and design the website to be easy to navigate, but very powerful. We paved the way for easy navigation through the design and implementation of four primary things: Mega Navigation, Portals, Popular Tabs, and Related Content.

Five implemented a powerful mega navigation that remains constant throughout the entire website. The mega nav allows for easy navigation throughout the website no matter where the user finds their self. This powerful tool contains the six main components of the portal web design. It also entails a drop down navigation menu for each component so that the user does not have to click through multiple pages to finally find their destination.

Alongside the mega nav efforts, a portal bar at the top of each page supplemented our goal of easy navigation and a well organized portal website. These portals provide easy navigation to the horizontally sliced divisions within the automation industry. This way users can easily jump to their desired division, or portal, and easily find what they are looking for. Each portal contains a drop down menu containing the main components of each portal for even simpler navigation.

Five implemented a tabs component on the homepage of this portal website that was programmed to automatically pull featured and/or popular items into their designated tab so that users can easily view the most popular items from each content type right on the homepage. This acts much like the table of contents, or featured articles and items of an online magazine. This created even easier navigation for users. In some cases users will not even have to navigate through the website to find what they are looking for if it is a popular enough or featured item.

An important responsibility of an industry portal is to ensure there are minimal dead ends.  The primary navigation schemes above get the user to the information they are looking for quickly, but upon completion of reading the article we used related content to keep the user involved.  The portal software is smart enough to pull in content items related to the piece of content you are reading by grabbing others that might be associated to similar things.  For example, the same type (news, event, etc.) of content, or content that is associated to like portals, etc.  The goal is to keep the user engaged on the site for as long as possible, and related content certainly helps to achieve this goal.

Automation.com entails many capabilities and functions for both individual subscribers, who are usually automation professionals, as well as companies in the automation industry. As a highly functional portal website and online publication, it was very important that both subscribers and companies had the ability to easily search and find information, as well as contribute information of their own.

Companies within the automation industry have the ability to set up a company profile on Automation.com. Through this profile they can submit press releases, promote featured products, and offer resources, white papers, and training supplies all for a low, per submission cost. Subscribers and other companies can then share these submissions via a variety of social media outlets.

Subscribers have many capabilities as well. They can apply for jobs, be associated with a company, catch up on news and new products, and if they are associated with a company they can submit items as well. They can also post job profiles and even bookmark content. For example, if a user is especially interested in a specific company’s news updates they can bookmark its news page for easy future access. They can edit their profile and access everything from their dashboard.

Advertising is a crucial part to any portal website, or online publication web site, as they depend on advertising fees as a major source of revenue. Automation.com was not any different. We had to design a way to layout ads in an organized and professional fashion without looking too cluttered, not to mention where to place ads for responsive elements. We also wanted to provide Automation.com with an easy way to manage its advertisements. Through the OpenX application Automation.com can easily manage all of its advertisements. The website was designed to then automatically pull advertisements and featured products from the OpenX server into specified zones that were designed on each web page.

eCommerce has also been a source of revenue for Automation.com so it was important to design and implement strong and secure eCommerce capabilities into the website. Subscribers can easily purchase online training manuals, books, and other merchandise.

Other various items are also automatically pulled to the homepage based on relevancy, popularity, and promotional efforts from other companies. Featured products are submitted by companies from all over the industry and then pulled monthly onto the homepage to promote them. Companies pay for these featured product submissions through the online magazine web site’s eCommerce capabilities. White papers and events are also pulled onto the homepage based on when they were submitted, most recent appear first, and when they are occurring.

As you can see Automation.com is a very complex and powerful online magazine web design. Yet it is very well organized and easy to navigate for all users. This online publication website was a very enduring and complicated project, but we feel that it was a total success. Automation.com was very happy with it too.

If you have an online magazine website or portal website that is not meeting your standards, contact Five today to start enhancing your web presence and improving overall business performance.

Every generation, young and old, is becoming more accustomed with these products; which means that they are being used more than ever to access and research the web. This trend has heightened the importance of companies in all types of industries to have a responsive website, one that looks great on desktops, tablets, and smart phones.

Here at Five Technology there has been an influx of clients requesting their new web design to be a responsive one. Some of the companies that have recently requested responsive web designs have been Inn at Lost Creek and Hotel Madeline in Telluride, Colorado. These businesses were sister vacation rental firms. Automation.com, an industry portal for automation professionals, also wanted a responsive website. As well as Incline Ski & Board Shop, which wanted its custom e-commerce website easily accessible from any device.

All of these businesses wanted a responsive web design so that customers could easily access and navigate their websites from any device. What is a responsive web design you ask? Simply put, a it is an adaptive website that has the ability to respond to whatever device is accessing it. This provides users with an optimal web experience regardless of how they are accessing your website.

“Responsive web designs are essential for businesses that have potential customers researching their industry via tablet or smartphone.”

Designing and implementing a responsive website is not all fun and games. It involves a lot of consulting and communication and has the potential for many design challenges. However, Five Technology’s success in designing and implementing responsive web designs has proven that it can overcome these design challenges. Its past experiences have helped it realize the key to development and successful implementation of a design for mobile and tablet devices.

Communication is key in developing and implementing a successful responsive web design. Strong discussion and consulting upfront will help carve a route to success with less headaches and more progress. Five will help facilitate these discussions, as well as provide frequent prototypes for clients to make sure everything is well defined before the slicing and markup build take place.

A lot of time and energy go into creating a powerful responsive website. First the layout of the desktop website needs to be designed. This should be designed with the smaller versions kept in mind. From that layout comes the tablet and smartphone layout. Breaking points in the web page need to be defined in order to create accurate size adjustments for different devices. Once these breaking points are discovered, the layout for a tablet web page can then be designed. The process is then repeated to layout the mobile design.

As one might imagine, this could easily turn into a long and strenuous process if the client and designer are not on the same page. The client should be actively involved in the process of laying out and approving all three designs so that the final prototypes meet everyone’s standards. The final prototypes are then sliced and the buildout process begins.

Once all three of the designs have been sliced and built they are tested to make sure they look good on as many different devices possible. Not all tablet and mobile screens have the same dimensions so it is important to test on multiple sources. Once the designs are proven to work on multiple devices the website is implemented into Five’s custom content management system (CMS), the Site Management Console (SMC); and then content entry, search engine optimization (SEO), and functionality testing take place. Again it is important for the client to remain in the loop through this process, and Five Technology will make sure to do just that.

You might be wondering why go through all of this work to create a responsive web design. The answer is simple. Responsive web designs have several benefits that will help drive business results.

The primary benefit of a responsive web design is obvious:  One website is built one time, and it works effortlessly across thousands of different screens and devices.

If a potential customer accesses your website from any device other than a computer, and they find it difficult to navigate or read, there is a good chance that they will back out and move on to your competitors website.

There are many other advantages to implementing a responsive web design for your company or organization:

• Easy access and navigation from desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• Only one website and one URL is needed.
• Webmaster only has to manage content for one website.
• Reaches a greater online market due to the increase of people using mobile devices to access the web.
• Search engine ranking takes into account user satisfaction.
• Responsive web designs have been endorsed by Google.

Almost 30% of United States residents have stated that they routinely use a mobile device to access the Internet. This number increases every year. Do you want to run the risk of not being able to reach 30% (and growing) of people in America. Expand your business’s reach today by contacting Five Technology for your responsive web design.

Incline Ski approached Five’s partner company Blue Tent Marketing for a brand new responsive web design that heightened its web presence, Internet transaction functionality, and web marketing strategy. This responsive website would include not only a desktop design, but also a tablet design and a mobile design. Customers would be able to easily access and navigate the website from any device.

Left: Mobile View. Right: Desktop View.

Five was able to provide a quality custom e-commerce web design with all of the features Incline Ski needed. Customers are now able to reserve and pay for their rental equipment from their computer, tablet, and mobile phone. Five built the website and integrated it into its easy to use custom content management system (CMS), the Site Management Console (SMC). The responsive design looks great on any device and eliminates potential customers’ need to inefficiently scroll and swipe through the website when on a tablet or smartphone.

Five Technology also:

• Rebuilt its rental reservations plugin.
• Added online payment functionality.
• Implemented a Facebook picture gallery connection and display.
• Rebuild of new plugin will allow for flexible creation of a  comprehensive  equipment reservation management solution in the future.

Incline Ski realized that it was missing a huge chunk of its market by not having an organized and easy to use tablet and mobile web design that correlated perfectly with its desktop design. By having a responsive web design it was able to manage content on one website, and still have it look clean and professional on any device. A lot of potential customers might be on the go, in the airport, or already be in town without their computer when researching the web for equipment rental businesses.

By having an easy way to navigate web design that worked on any device, including on-the-go tablets and smart phones, Incline Ski created a greater probability of having those on-the-go prospects turn into new customers. You can reach a greater market as well if you contact Five Technology today for your responsive web design needs.

Such a prominent figure in the real estate industry needs to have the top-of-the-line web design and Internet marketing tools available at its fingertips. RMA Brokers approached Five Technology’s partner Blue Tent Marketing for a new custom web design to enhance its web presence, increase functionality and usability, and most importantly to drive new business and increase revenue.

Blue Tent and Five worked together to create a design, build it, and integrate it into Five’s custom content management system (CMS), the Site Management Console (SMC). This unique design is easy to navigate, professional, and it serves as a great way to showoff RMA’s elegant properties.

Other great features of this real estate website included:

• Increased content management and functionality.
• Created drag’n'drop image capabilities.
• Enhanced its search listings.

This new platform will allow Five to incorporate agents, listings, and data together for an even more comprehensive real estate website management solution in the near future.

These sister vacation rental companies were in need of a high quality web design make over. They approached Blue Tent Marketing, one of Five Technology’s partners, to heighten their overall web presence, enhance usability, and increase business revenue. Both of these mountain resorts were in need of a responsive website design so that customers could easily access and navigate their websites from any device.

Five Technology worked with Blue Tent Marketing to deliver this and even more. By designing, building, and integrating both websites into Five’s custom content management system (CMS), the Site Management Console (SMC). Five was able to provide professional designs for desktop, tablet, and mobile viewing that were visually compelling and easy to navigate to help attract revenue for each hotel.

“Responsive websites are critical for businesses that have potential customers researching their industry via smartphone or tablet.”

By having a responsive web design a business is more apt to attract potential customers regardless of what device they are accessing its website from. Without a responsive web design a website might look great on a desktop view, but it could look very unorganized and be hard to navigate for users on a tablet view or from a smartphone.

Features of these vacation rental web designs:

• Added online reservation booking ability.
• Incredible displays of the village and resorts.
• Simple to use content management system (CMS).
• Implemented SEO techniques to increase search results.

Left: Mobile View. Right: Desktop View.

Inn at Lost Creek and Hotel Madeline have gained many advantages for their web presence by having a responsive website designed and implemented. A responsive design allowed them to only have one website to manage content from a single URL. Whereas, if they had not done a responsive website, and instead had done a mobile app or mobile website, they would have had to manage content on two separate sites (twice the content management equals twice the amount of work). They can now also be assured that no matter where potential customers are accessing their website from, their web design will look clean, organized, and it will be easy for all users to navigate.

If your business is looking to reach out to more potential customers on more devices, follow in these vacation rental companies’ footsteps and contact Five Technology today for your responsive web design.

So what do you do? Many people have found success by using professional web design firms. However, there are a few things you should know before you hire and implement a professional city web design to ensure maximum functionality and satisfaction. In this post we hope to inform you with what you need to know to make sure you select a web development solution for your city that will allow you to successfully communicate with your community and staff, as well as elegantly display your city’s infrastructure, businesses, and recreational sites.

In looking for a city government website design firm that addresses your operational needs as well as professionally portrays your city, you should be looking for these things:

• Management. Make sure your content management system (Gov CMS) is robust enough so non-technical resources can easily manage your website’s content. If it cannot, you will have trouble adding day to day content such as pictures, operations info, news updates, and city emergency notifications to your website.
  
• Functionality. Ensure your solution has a way to create and online management of city council agenda and meeting minutes, permits, contact information, community notifications, and other important city information.  It is important that this is easily accessible for effective communication with members of the community, thus allowing for a more interactive city council meetings and ultimately a more transparent government.
• Usability. An effective city website design should pay particular attention to usability and navigation. Visitors to your site are generally not there to look around, but are looking for something in particular. A web design that pays particular attention to navigation and user experience will better serve your audience and promote future use.

• Social. If there is one thing today’s online world does very well it is social interaction. Whether it is social media, contact forms, comments to content, etc., use this opportunity to reach out to your community and gain valuable insight that is otherwise very difficult to get.  Social is no longer just Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc., it is everywhere.
• A Technology Partner. With technology changing at a out of control pace, you need a partner who is entrenched in this world daily.  Five Technology will work directly with you and your staff to provide a online solution for today as well as tomorrow that can be used as an effective communication tool, as well as increase productivity both internally and for the public.

A recent Star Tribune article by Mary Jane Smetanka discussed the recent surge in cities updating their website designs. Smetanka stated, “They all share a philosophy: that the user, not the city, is the priority. While the old websites were organized the way cities are — by department– that’s being scrapped for sites that reflect what residents want to know.” This is true, websites should be designed for easy navigation for the users that are going to access it most. However, and Smetanka did touch on this a bit, the internal or operations side of the website that promotes staff efficiency is a major concern that needs to be addressed.

There are a lot of innovative features available that will increase productivity, convenience, and ‘paperless’ efforts. Five’s custom agenda app, which is run through our city CMS, promotes this effort by reducing the cost and preparation time for meetings by eliminating the need to create, print, staple, and distribute agenda and meeting packets that will eventually just be thrown away. It allows for interactive features that can be accessed via computer, tablet, and mobile phone to encourage more interactive meetings. Council members have ability to add minutes, motions, and notes to the agenda from any device during the meeting. Web casts of the meetings and external links can also be embedded into the agenda. Most importantly, all this meeting data is easily searchable (not just a PDF) and a great opportunity to get the community to the site and involved in your daily activities.

In review, let’s touch on a few important essentials as well as additional features that a government web design should provide you:

• A custom and innovative user interface and city web design that is easy to navigate and will elegantly display your community.
• Gov CMS or City CMS with easy content management tools for your city staff.
• A custom online agenda app that allows for paperless city council meetings, with several interactive features that can be accessed from smart phones and tablets.
• A simple yet secure document management system for easy public access as well as organized, convenient internal use.
• 3rd party tool integration such as Google Apps and WordPress Blog to promote community interaction.
• Increase government transparency, reduce paper usage, and reduce preparation “busy work”.
• Provide database driven content that is searchable, importable, and exportable to several formats.
• Incorporate eCommerce for city government capabilities including e-payment for permits, outstanding bills, etc.

So, now that you have some insight into what to look for in a city web design, have read about a few new and innovative features that can enhance the productivity and user experience, you are ready to begin the process. Contact Five Technology today to get started. Remember, it is not just the outward appearance that matters, but also the internal tools and features of the website that can assist your city staff and ultimately reduce costs. Five Technology is the trusted partner in technology that you have been looking for, and can provide or assist you with all of your city  government web design needs at a reasonable cost.

Penguin Algorithm Update

Over a year ago, Google launched the Panda algorithm update. The Panda update was an adjustment to the rankings algorithm that placed a greater emphasis on high quality content. Sites with low quality or “thin” content saw their rankings drop with the Panda update.

Move forward to 2012, and Google has now launched a new algorithm update code named Penguin. The Penguin update aims to penalize sites that are creating webspam by engaging in certain tactics to take advantage of the algorithm rather than creating a rich user experience. Keyword stuffing, buying links, and other sneaky manipulative tactics are all targets of the Penguin update.

It’s not over, because Penguin is likely to have a few additional updates. Panda just recently launched version 3.5. Both updates will continue to receive version updates for awhile.

Introducing The New Google Shopping

Google allows retailers to upload a feed of their products for free, and those products are featured on results pages and in Google Product Feed search. Consumers can browse through products and find the lowest prices and where to buy.

Google is changing the way retailers use this in the fall of 2012. In Google’s own words:

We are starting to transition Google Product Search in the U.S. to a purely commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. This new product discovery experience will be called Google Shopping and the transition will be complete this fall. We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.

What we know: Retailers will now be required to pay to be included.

What Google says: This will raise the quality of the search results, simply because retailers will need to invest time and money to see results.

What we don’t know: Whether or not this will actually raise the quality of the search results. There is definitely plenty of skepticism.

Google Places Converts To Google+

Google Places pages were pages for your local business that you or your internet marketer could set up with Google. These would show up in search results and give people more information about your business- physical address, website address, directions, and photos (just to name a few).

Now those Google Places pages have been converted to Google+ pages and Google Places will be completely terminated. Google has likely already converted your page, so you won’t have to do anything. You still manage your page in the same place (at least, for now).

Regarding search results, the new Google+ pages have completely taken over what the Google Places page did, so you should see no interruption during the conversion.

Mike Blumenthal has this topic covered like a blanket on his blog.

How important are the reviews? Let’s take a look at some of the ways they can impact your business.

Reviews are eye-catching

In the screenshot below, the one that catches my eye the most is Aloha Chinese Takeout which has the highest score with four and a half stars with seven reviews.

It was only after studying this for awhile that I noticed Kim Huoyh Chor. It only has four reviews and doesn’t yet have an average star rating, so I didn’t even see it while scanning through the results. Kim Huoyh Chor might get lost on this page because it doesn’t have enough reviews to show an average star rating. Those shiny stars really stand out! Not many people will study the search results like I was doing when preparing for this blog post.

Reviews build trust

Not only did Aloha Chinese Takeout catch my eye first, it left an impression on me because it had such a great score. If you’re like me, you want to take this list and narrow it down to about two or three candidates. How do I do that? If all other things are equal, I will choose one of the best reviewed establishments every time.

Reviews could help your rankings

According to a statistical study by Bizible, reviews can help your search engine rankings:

Having five or more Google reviews was associated with a 1.85 improvement in rank.

Bizible does go on to say that it may not be a direct ranking signal, but that the presence of five reviews or more helps get higher click through rates which does send a strong signal to Google.

Many other search marketing professionals believe that reviews can help rankings. You can read about that at David Mihm’s yearly local search ranking factors.

There is no way to prove for certain that reviews help your rankings since Google does not disclose their ranking algorithm. But it’s generally believed that the number of reviews, sentiment of reviews, and keywords contained in reviews can help. This does not mean businesses with more and better reviews will always rank higher, it’s just one part of Google’s algorithm remember!

So what?

Simply put, the more positive reviews your business has, the better chance you have at ranking and converting searchers to paying customers. Having many high quality reviews can help elevate your business above the crowd.

Ask for reviews from satisfied customers. Even ask some friends or family members for reviews. If they have used your service and love it, that will come through in their review. Do not load your business page up with hundreds of fake reviews! A few authentic reviews is a better choice every time.

By the way, I chose Aloha Chinese Takeout. And it was delicious.

In this post, I will give you a glimpse into some of the items on our checklist. There is much more than can be added for each unique project, but this is a pretty general list that can apply to every project.

The Checklist

• Square away all domain and DNS information.
• Figure out the email situation so that there is no interruption.
• Make sure site can be indexed by Google. Check robots.txt file and Meta tags.
• For all contact forms, send a test to the client and make sure they respond back so you know it is working. Put their response in their file so that there is no question it was tested and confirmed.
• Validate your HTML. Don’t even do browser testing until you finish validation. Many browser issues I have come across were due to invalid markup that can easily be found with validation.
• Test in all supported browsers and devices.
• Make sure all links are SEO-friendly.
• Install spam filter on blog.
• Create HTML and XML sitemaps.
• Update Meta information such as Title and Description tags.
• Install Google Analytics on all pages. (Bonus: Set up goals and funnels)
• Set up 301 redirects (if this is a website redesign).

Post-Launch

• Redirect non-www to www.
• Create new Google Maps API key (or any API keys).
• Add account to Google Webmaster Tools and upload XML sitemap.

Bonus Checklist: E-Commerce

• Set up SSL for shopping cart.
• Create and test merchant account (Authorize.NET, Paypal, etc).
• Make sure taxes are being charged correctly.
• Figure out shipping options and make sure they are being calculated correctly.

How about you? What are some must have items on your checklist?