Flash animation, audio and video, ecommerce, targeted marketing, Podcasts and more...
Flash, photo galleries and interactive multimedia
Ecommerce
Targeted Marketing
Podcasting
Flash, photo galleries and interactive multimedia
Macromedia's Flash is a powerful animation- and application-development tool which, in the hands of a skillful developer, can provide customers with increased interactivity.
"Splash" pages: a no-no for usability
Flash is often used as an opening "splash" page to websites. Typically, splash pages have no navigation other than a "skip intro" button, and although this allows the user to enter your site, it puts one more page between your customer and your products or services. Used sparingly and judiciously, however, Flash can enhance both your identity and your website without sacrificing usability.
Attention grabbers
Sound and video files can be embedded into different applications such as Flash, or they can stand by themselves on a page. Tailor your web marketing to this hierarchy of visual focus:
- Movement
- Photographs
- Illustrations
- Text
Each type of multimedia (audio, video, animation or a combination of these with an interactive interface) are powerful attention grabbers, and can be used effectively to direct users to specific areas of your website. Remember one of the cardinal rules of design, "less is more." If your entire web page is blinking and moving, users will only be confused. Help them by providing the right hierarchy of important visual information.
Photo galleries
We have had great success with the freeware PHP-based Gallery, which allows you to upload multiple photos to different photo albums and maintain their captions, sizes and other information. We can integrate the look and feel of the application to match your site.
Ecommerce
An Application Service Provider (ASP) ecommerce model such as Nexternal Solutions is ideal for wineries and other retail ventures. The ASP has already built and configured the shopping application, which can be customized to your site's look and feel. When your customer chooses to purchase an item from your online store, they are redirected to the ASP's website to fulfill the transaction.
ASP vs shopping-cart software costs
ASPs have a one-time setup fee and a monthly fee, while shopping-cart software involves a single outright purchase cost. While the shopping-cart purchase price is often less than a year's worth of monthly ASP fees, the comparison is oversimplified. The purchase of shopping-cart software does not include installation, configuration and customization with your site's look and feel - these will cost you development time, either in-house or with a developer; either one will be expensive and challenging. Shopping-cart order processing requires an additional relationship with a payment processor such as VeriSign - additional monthly costs. Maintenance and enhancement of shopping-cart software is complicated and can be expensive, while such work is included in an ASP's monthly costs.
Bottom line: for most small- and medium-sized online retailers, the ASP model will save time, money and effort over the course of your first year.
See our wine and retail clients for examples of the ASP ecommerce model.
Be ready to compromise
Unless you're willing to lay out serious money for a fully integrated ecommerce site - like Amazon.com - you'll be trading absolute control of your commerce design and technology for the ease and relative cheapness of both ASPs and shopping-cart solutions.
- Look-and-feel templates - ASPs and shopping carts use templates so that the commerce section of your site looks like the rest of the site, but the amount of customization possible with such templates varies and there will be some differences in colors, layout and other branding factors.
- External URL - ASP ecommerce automatically directs your customers to the ASP website to fulfill their transactions. We implement workarounds to this factor with frames and Javascript to maintain the customer's experience.
- Limited features - you may have specific needs that particular ASPs or shopping carts don't include. Check with the company and use their demo to be sure you're getting the features you need.
Targeted Marketing
Mailing lists help you collect and maintain customer data and closely target customers for email marketing.
- Many web hosts offer a basic mailing list feature to their hosting plans. They typically provide a form to be displayed on your website that captures a user's full name and email address. You can often set up a number of different mailing lists within the web host's system.
- Nexternal Solutions and some shopping cart systems have a built-in mailing list feature that captures the data of all customers who make purchases from your website. This feature allows you to maintain all of your customer data in one place.
- Many of our winery clients use a company called Vertical Response to handle their mailing lists. Vertical Response has basic templates you can use for html-based emails and for sending postcards. Vertical Response's fees are based on the number of email addresses included in your email blast, starting at 15 cents per email address.
These options are "double opt-in" mailing lists in compliance with 2003 laws on email spam. They include the ability to send either html or text-based emails (Vertical Response provides templates, but others require you to build your own).
Podcasting
Podcasting is a term used to describe a collection of technologies for automatically distributing audio programs over the Internet using a publisher/subscriber model.
Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published, syndicated "radio shows," and gives broadcast radio or television programs a new distribution method.