Redesigns, Facebook Apps, and Mobile – We’ve been busy!

Hello wisnetters. I’ve been away from Noteworthy for a bit and thought I would share with you a couple projects we’ve been working on that I’m sure you will find interesting. These include before and after screenshots of a website redesign, two new Facebook apps, and a backstage pass to see what a mobile website looks like before it goes to the development stage. Stick around as I show you what we’ve been up to!

ClientWhys New Look

ClientWhys.com provides websites, marketing products, syndicated content, and social media campaigns for the accounting industry. This has been one of our larger front-end design projects and many hours were put into it. The updates have made the site easier to navigate and friendlier for search engines, and have lowered page load times, improved site architecture, and more importantly – increased revenue for the client.

The new trendier design includes bolder colors, more gradients, and a big call-to-action button for attracting visitors to sign up for the free trial.

To view the website go to www.clientwhys.com. Here are some key improvements made with the new design:

• Each product page has a custom design.
• Added photographs of the staff.
• Stronger calls-to-action across the website.
• Easier to read blog and support section.
• Improved Site Architecture – It is now easier for visitors and search engines to navigate the site.
• Faster loading pages – way faster. Went from being 60% slower than most sites to 80% faster.

When it came to the interior pages, most visitors weren’t scrolling past the fold. With more images and catchier sub-headings, it increased the amount of visitors scrolling below the fold and to the bottom of the page. Here is a before and after of an interior page.

Behind this design lies a powerful content management system called BLASTauthor which the team at ClientWhys uses to manage content for their blog. Below is a screenshot of the frontend.

A few features of the blog include seo-friendly URLS, Popular Posts, Related Articles, and social bookmarks for sharing articles on sites such as Facebook.

Facebook Welcome App

With over 600 million users on Facebook we are not surprised that businesses want to keep adding features to their company page. To get started with Facebook, the first step is to get visitors to ‘Like’ your page, and a Welcome page can help accomplish that task. Not too long ago Facebook discontinued their Static FBML application in favor of a model that requires an iframe app. Since working with third party apps is often a pain, we created our own. A welcome app is just the start – it opens up doors for many possibilities including offering coupons, running contests, or allowing visitors to reserve a room at a hotel. Here’s an example of a Welcome page.

Clients can create their own Welcome page and add it to our app. In addition, they can make updates on the fly through our Easy Site Editor.

Scheduled Posts App

Wouldn’t it be nice to strike up a conversation with your customers when the store has closed for the day – which might be the time when most them are on Facebook? Fairly simple: without even logging into Facebook, you can create a post and schedule it to appear anytime, e.g. breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, supper, and even at midnight. It adds a little automation to what once was a tedious task of logging into Facebook and manually posting.

Scheduling posts to appear on Facebook at a specific time is very simple.

See how mobile development starts…

Mobile development starts with a rough draft created in a program such as Photoshop. (This one was done in Fireworks – my favorite.) Usually the first draft is created with wireframes, but this time, since the site was already created, it was easy to take design elements and rearrange them for mobile users.

Conclusion

As you can see, the team has been busy. Surprisingly, this is only a small portion of what has been going on the past two months. I’ve snuck a peak to see what the programmers have been up to and noticed them working on complex user interfaces and backend applications. Maybe when they’re done, I’ll upload screenshots for you to see. Stay tuned, as more exciting happenings at wisnet.com will be coming your way!