It’s not the first time we’ve redesigned hotdesign.com in the past 17 years, but we think the newly re-launched Scott Design website is one of our best upgrades yet. The latest version of the Scott Design website features more rich content, cleaner navigation, and a bold new design.

When we design websites for our clients, we put ourselves in the shoes of potential customers and determine what visitors are looking for on the site. We did the same when we started to redesign hotdesign.com. We figured visitors to the Scott Design site want to know who we are, find out what we do, and get a good look at our portfolio.

Scott Design’s home page features our tagline, a description of the type of work we do, and some information about our history of success. Our Flash-based interactive portfolio is featured front and center on the home page. On one page, potential clients can find out about us in seconds.

The interactive portfolio was designed to allow visitors to watch the portfolio as an animated slide show, flip forward or backward through the portfolio, and open up the window to find out more about individual projects. Updating the contents of the portfolio is easy, as the Flash was designed to pull images from a folder and copy from a simple text file. Changing the portfolio doesn’t require any programming, just a quick update of the contents in the folder.

The home page also includes ways to learn more about Scott Design. There are links to the blog, more information about Scott Design, social networks, and our e-newsletter sign-up form. And every page features a quick contact form so clients can contact us with questions or new projects.

Since we know that folks are often looking for information while they’re out of the office, we created versions of our site for mobile devices. Mobile visitors are automatically redirected to a version of the site that is optimized for their device. And we’ve carried the new look and feel over to all of our online pages, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, our blog, and online landing pages.

The process of updating a website is never easy. You must figure out what’s working, what needs updating, and what your site visitors are going to be looking for. You then must roll it all into a clear, effective web design. We think we’ve accomplished just that with the new Scott Design website.

We hope you’ll take a look and let us know whether you agree!

P.S. To see the Scott Design website as it has appeared over the past 17 years, check out our Hotdesign.com through the ages photo album on Facebook.

When building your online presence, you should make sure you set up analytics tools at the outset to see what works, find opportunities you’re missing, and fine-tune your website, SEO, and e-mails.

Setting up analytics on your website can be as easy as adding a free Google Analytics code to the pages of your website. And most e-mail service providers generate data and reports for each mailing that you send. The key is to get these analytics programs in place as early as you can so that you can use the data they generate to continually improve your online communications.

Fine-tune your website and SEO

Google Analytics is a free suite of analysis tools that’s widely used to capture and display information about how visitors are using your site. Using analytics, you can find out what’s appealing to your audience, pull them into your site, and get them to click.

From the Google Analytics dashboard, you can get a great overview of how your site is performing over time. Detailed reports let you drill down for more detailed information about every aspect of your site’s performance. And you can have Google Analytics e-mail you reports on a regular basis so you don’t forget.

Google Analytics will give you as much information as you want, or you can stick to the high-level analytics. To see more details on any report, just click the “view full report” link.

Reports that you should monitor regularly are the following:

• Dashboard – See whether the number of visits is going up or down, see a map of where your visitors come from, and see which pages are most popular.
• Visitors overview – See how many visitors you have and how much time they’re spending on your site, and see which browsers and connection speeds your visitors have to make sure your site is optimized for all your audiences.
• Traffic sources overview – See whether your visitors arrived at your site from searches, directly, or from links on other websites.
• Keywords – See which words visitors used on search engines to find your site, plus what they did once they landed on your site.
• Top content –  See which pages get the most traffic on your site.

Depending on your business, you may want to run additional Google Analytics reports. For example, you might want to know what country your visitors come from or what time they are visiting your site. Perhaps you’d want a visual representation of exactly where users are clicking on your web pages.

Improve your e-mail campaigns

After you send an e-mail blast, you should plan on analyzing the results using the analytics that most e-mail services provide to learn how your audience is responding to the communications you’ve sent.  You can see how many people opened your e-mail, and who they are.  You also can check which links generate the most interest, and which campaigns are most effective.

For each e-mail campaign, you should analyze the following:

• How many e-mails were sent, received, and bounced due to bad e-mail addresses
• How many people opened the e-mail, clicked on a link, forwarded your e-mail, and opted out or signed up
• Which links and graphics received clicks
• A comparison of this campaign and past campaigns to identify differences and the reasons for them

Taking a close look at e-mail analytics lets you spot trends that help you refine and improve your e-mail marketing plans. If you get too many unsubscribes, you might be sending your e-mails too often. If none of your graphics are getting clicked, many of your subscribers might have their images turned off and you should design your e-mails to rely less on images and more on text links. If your response rate for a particular e-mail was particularly good, you should see how it differs from less successful campaigns.

Test and refine

One of the great things about having a robust analytics solution in place is that you can test the results you get by updating your content or making multiple versions of your content. For example, you could take a look at which words are leading visitors to your site and create more content that concerns those keywords, and see whether that improves site traffic. You can create multiple versions of a single e-mail campaign and see which gets the most click-throughs. Or reorganize your site to remove pages that are rarely visited, or create stronger links to those pages.

The key is to take a look at analytics at least once a month, plus after every major website change or e-mail campaign.

Online business today is a two-way conversation, and you can’t participate unless you know what discussions are going on online. If you’ve built an online presence for your company, you should plan on keeping tabs on what’s being said about you and your industry on the web. By monitoring keywords, companies, and people, you can find out how your company is doing compared to your competition, monitor what people are saying about your brand, and research trends and experts in your industry.

There are some great free tools to monitor your online presence. Most of these require a few minutes to set up and then a few minutes per day to monitor. There are some that you can use once a month to track how your online brand is over time.

Setup an RSS reader

An RSS reader aggregates web content such as news, blogs, and online searches in a single location for easy viewing. A reader helps you view new information from all the sites and searches you choose on one page. Google Reader is very easy to set up and use.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts let you monitor the web for new content. Just enter the search terms you’re interested in following and how often you want updates and you can monitor any word or phrase. You should set up Google Alerts on your company, your brands, keywords, your competitors’ companies, your key employees, and influencers in your industry. You can get updates via e-mail or add the RSS feed of your Google Alerts to your RSS reader.

Twitter Searches

Twitter searches are feeds of search results of keywords, brands, companies, people, and #hashtags on Twitter. Be sure to search for @mentions of your company Twitter accounts. The results are almost instantaneous and allow for time-critical monitoring.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers lets you ask and answer industry-specific questions. You can subscribe in an RSS reader to all the questions in a category relevant to your company and your customers. You can keep track of the kinds of problems your customers have, answer questions to show your expertise, and follow discussions in your industry.

Check your social media pages

LinkedIn

Visit your LinkedIn home page to see who has visited your profile, read status updates from your connections, and answer any messages you’ve received. Visit groups you’ve joined to see what kinds of discussions are going on.

Facebook

Look at your company’s Facebook page stats and activity using the View Insights link on the pages you manage. Scan your fans and page views count. Visit your Facebook company page (or personal profile if you use it for business) and answer any questions or address comments that visitors have made on your page. If you are a member of a group, check to see if any interesting new discussions are going on.

The ongoing buzz about your company

Sites such as Social Mention and  Addict-o-matic show you the buzz on your company across a wide selection of social networks. Topsy lets you search terms on Twitter over the past 6 months (Twitter’s search only goes back about a week).

Assess the quality of your online presence

There are a range of free tools that can analyze the quality of your online brand. Use Twitter Grader, Facebook Grader, and Website Grader to get a free analysis of how your pages rank compared to others. You can run these analyses once a month to see how changes you make to your site, pages, and online conversations improve your ranking.

Monitor in real time

Use software such as TweetDeck to monitor online conversations in real time. Set up custom columns that monitor @mentions of your accounts, searches on keywords and names, and activity by your Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections.

Use the information you find

Keeping track of your company online can give you the ability to spot issues before they become problems, find opportunities in your marketplace to grow your business, and build a reputation as an expert in your industry. Responding to people that mention you or your competition can help you win new customers and build relationships in your industry.

Six Revisions has a comprehensive list of monitoring options in ”12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed.”

Link to your site from social networks

Be sure to complete all the information in your social network profiles, including URLs of your site and/or landing pages. Be sure to include links to your relevant website content on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other appropriate networks.

Add yourself to online directories

Scott Design received four Communicator Awards in a competition honoring creative excellence among professionals worldwide.

An Award of Excellence recognized Scott Design’s work on the website for CTW, which provides resources for church leaders. The website, created in WordPress blogging software, won in the Cultural Blog category.

Scott Design received an Award of Distinction in the Financial Services category for its work on the website for New York-based venture capital firm Braemar Energy Ventures. The website features an interactive timeline and pop-up portfolio.

Two additional Awards of Distinction recognized Scott Design’s Augmented Reality Snowstorm, an online application featured in the firm’s own 2009 holiday greeting. This Flash application, which lets users put themselves in an imaginary snowstorm using a computer webcam, won in the Motion Graphics category.

With thousands of entries received from throughout the United States and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring the creative excellence of communications professionals. The Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. Please visit www.communicatorawards.com for more information.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Design Awards page.

At last week’s Northern California Business Marketing Association marketing strategy roundtable, Lorie Loe, President of Eccolo Media, shared best practices for optimizing your marketing strategy, based on insights from the Eccolo Media 2009 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report. Her company surveyed B2B tech buyers on which content buyers use most often and are most influential, how they like to receive the information, and how decision makers differ from influencers.

A few highlights from the report that you can put to work today:

1. Create a variety of content in a variety of formats.

White papers were a highly used collateral type, were considered the most influential in the buying process, and were the most frequently shared type of content. Product brochures and case studies were next in line in use, with case studies being more influential than brochures. Video and podcasts trailed, but video consumption is definitely trending up and should be a part of your content strategy whenever possible. Most important is to provide a variety of formats to capture all types of customers.

2. Write copy of the highest quality.

Technology purchasers find high-quality writing to be very important for all types of content, even more important than content written by an analyst, which can often be a huge expense. Well-written copy created in-house or by a qualified vendor is more influential even than third-party sources. Content is most heavily used during the pre-sales cycle, long before anyone contacts your firm, so make sure your collateral puts you on the customer’s vendor shortlist.

3. Provide all of your content on your website, where it’s most often used.

Be sure that it’s easy to locate, access, and download your content. And since content forwarded by a personal contact is the most influential channel for technology purchasers, make sure everything on your website is easily shared by keeping file sizes small and including automatic sharing technologies whenever possible. Also, be sure to include e-mail marketing and social media as outlets for your content as those channels continue to grow.

Bottom line?

You should provide high-quality information about your company, your products and services, and what it’s like to work with your organization in a variety of formats to help your B2B technology customers connect with you in the way that works best for them. This means creating white papers, case studies, podcasts, videos, brochures, and other pieces that are easily shared via e-mail, are available on your website, are part of e-mail marketing campaigns, and are posted on your social media sites and blog.

Our client’s challenge:

Zahm Gems wanted to reach a larger audience while setting itself apart in the extremely competitive luxury jewelry industry. The company sought rebranding and marketing that would reflect its dedication to acquiring the highest-quality colored gemstones in an industry often over-focused on diamonds.

Philip Zahm had attracted considerable attention by recounting his travels around the world in pursuit of exotic gems. Our creative professionals helped Zahm Gems devise a campaign that would bring Philip Zahm’s true tales of foreign gem-buying intrigue to resellers and individual customers.

The Scott Design Solution:

Focused on portraying an adventurer who would stop at nothing to acquire the best, most exotic colored gems, Scott Design created a logo and overall advertising look highlighting Philip Zahm’s danger-tinged travels to acquire stunning gems in exotic places.

Scott Design’s solutions include an updated corporate identity system,  a series of ads, and a high-level “romance” brochure, designed to appeal to jewelry stores as well as high-end customers.

Inside Adobe InDesign featured Scott Design and our real-world example of business collateral as an example that they felt represented the epitome of our profession.

Scott Design won Silver and Bronze Summit International Creative Awards for two recent website redesigns. Sometimes a redesign is done to make a website look better, fresher, and more appealing. But in the case of CTW and Braemar Energy Ventures, their website redesigns involved creating a new site look and feel,  re-examining the content, and improving the navigation through the site.

Scott Design received a Silver Award for the website redesign for the CTW website. The website is the online resource center for books, DVDs, CDs, webcasts, information on speaking engagements, and a travel blog for Dr. Daniel Brown, church leadership mentor. Scott Design’s redesign of the site featured a bolder look and feel, cleaner site organization, and improved access to the wealth of resources available on the site.

Scott Design was awarded a Bronze Award for the website redesign for venture capital firm Braemar Energy Ventures. Braemar sought a new look and feel to reflect its standing as a bold, well-established backer of innovative ventures. Scott Design created an uncluttered website with an energetic, upbeat feel of a modern company in a conservative industry. New features include an interactive history of Braemar’s investments, interactive portfolio, and interactive industry diagram.

The Summit Creative Awards were created to recognize and celebrate the creative accomplishments of small- and medium-size advertising agencies and other creative companies throughout the world with annual billings of less than $30 million. Over the past decade, the competition has established itself as the premier arbiter of creative excellence for firms of this size. Using rigorous evaluative criteria, it is the only competition rewarding those firms truly deserving of top recognition for creativity. Submissions are evaluated based on the strength of their big idea, the quality of execution, and their ability to communicate and persuade.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Design Awards page.

At Scott Design, we’re always looking for cool, new ways to use technology. That’s why we’re excited about a couple of ways we’re using augmented reality in web design.

Augmented reality snowstorm

Our first augmented reality project was built simply for fun. Every year, we create an online, interactive application that we share with our clients during the holiday season. In 2009, we created an augmented reality snowstorm app that uses  a web cam and a “marker” (in this case, the Scott Design logo printed on our holiday cards). When you launch the app, you put yourself in the middle of a snowstorm that you can control with the marker.

If you don’t have the holiday card, you can print out your own marker and use that instead.

Augmented reality business cards

During the process of creating the snowstorm app, we tried out a few other augmented reality ideas that we really liked. We kept those ideas on the back burner, waiting for the chance to use them.

In early 2010, we launched a new version of our website that presents a cool Flash portfolio with spinning “cards,” each displaying a featured project. It’s a quick and easy way to show off our portfolio.

At the same time, we redesigned our business cards to go with the new web look, and we put the augmented reality marker on the back, knowing we would be making some sort of augmented reality app triggered by the cards.

What we came up with is a version of our portfolio that works with a web cam and the augmented reality marker. If you launch the augmented reality business card and face the back of the business card to the web camera (or print out your own marker and put it in front of the web cam), the portfolio launches. You can move, tilt, and zoom the spinning cards, just by moving the business card in front of the camera.

It’s a great way to turn a regular business card into a 3D portfolio. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Your website should lead visitors to the information they want as quickly and easily as possible. This information should be organized into the main sections of your global website navigation. Most company websites have the same six main global navigation options: Home, Products or Services, About Us, Contact Us, Custom Information, and Dynamic Content.

Home page

Your website home page should provide an introduction to your company, letting a visitor know right away what services or products you provide and how you’re different from your competition. The most important and most frequently performed tasks should be available from the home page.

Products or Services

Include some information about your products or services on the home page but include details about exactly what you do in a separate products or services section. Provide enough information to allow visitors to see the range of products or services you provide, and create sub-pages for each individual product or service if there are lots of details to cover for each product or service.

About Us

This is the place to tell more details about your company, such as more information about your team, your company history, how you fit in the marketplace, and your mission statement or company philosophy.

Contact Us

Include as many different ways for customers to contact you as possible, including phone and fax numbers, e-mail addresses, a contact form, the physical address of your business, and a map, if applicable.

Custom Information

Your company’s website might include information unique to your company, industry, or functionality of your site. Some examples are pages for support, developers, partners, an online store, an image gallery, or a reservations page.

Dynamic Content

You should include a section in your website with content that changes often to encourage visitors (and search engines) to keep returning to your site. A blog, news page, videos, and a forum are great ways to keep your site fresh.

Keeping your global navigation to six sections can help you organize the information about your company and help visitors find the information that they seek. If you don’t have a lot of content to justify a section, feel free to include that information elsewhere. For example, you could combine your contact information in your About Us section. Before creating a new section on your site, make sure the information you’re adding couldn’t fit in one of the six main sections listed above. And don’t hesitate to create sub-pages under the six sections to take care of additional detailed information you might want to provide.