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.

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!

Our client’s challenge:

Adobe Systems wanted to present its Acrobat solutions to enterprise customers, university professors, higher education IT personnel, and K-12 educators. Adobe also needed to provide effective messaging and strategies to the field reps and distributors who interact with customers.

The Scott Design solution:

Scott Design has developed numerous print, web, and online pieces that focus on the benefits that speak most convincingly to the targeted audience for each campaign. Scott Design also created a series of animated Flash product demos for Acrobat on document sharing, feedback and approvals, and protecting information. The imagery, graphics, headlines, copy, and narration always keep the specific benefits front and center in the customer’s mind.

Awards:

• Gold Award, Horizon Interactive Awards—B2B Interactive Multimedia
• Silver Award, BMA Beacon Awards—Multimedia Product or Training
• Silver Award, Silicon Valley ADDY Awards—B2B Interactive Multimedia
• Bronze Award, Silicon Valley ADDY Awards—B2B Interactive Multimedia

When launching a new web design project, there are four main steps to picking the right design firm:

1. Look at the firm’s portfolio and client list.

The web design firm’s portfolio should show a range of styles and websites, each well-designed, professional, and attractive. The portfolio should show that the firm has experience working with clients your size or in your industry, and that they can successfully design sites with specific target audiences and marketing objectives in mind. And, make sure the agency’s own website is professional-looking and shows that the firm has the creativity and expertise you need.

2. Make sure the firm has the expertise you need.

The design firm you choose should have experience in creating websites from start to finish, so make sure they can provide all the services you need, from design and copywriting to production and maintenance. Find out which team members will be working on your web design project so you can make sure they have enough experience to ensure that your website gets built the right way from the start.The firm should have a history of successfully creating websites similar to the one you have in mind.

3. Check references.

The agency contacts should be responsive right from the start of your relationship. If they don’t respond quickly to phone calls and requests before your project has even started, they might not be good at meeting your project deadlines. Ask for client references and contact them, and ask for client testimonials if you don’t see them on the agency’s website. Check out the principals on LinkedIn or by searching online to see if they have any online recommendations or reviews. And, meet face to face, if possible, to see if your organizations are a good fit.

4. Agree on a price.

Get project estimates from a few design firms—the ones to which you have talked to and feel there’s a good fit—making sure that the services covered and the pricing structure (per hour, fixed price, per page, etc.) on each estimate are the same. The estimate should spell out the goals, deliverables, and schedule for your website. Don’t select a firm simply because it offers the lowest price. A low price might be a sign that an agency emphasizes quantity over quality or outsources your work to less-skilled workers. Or, a low-bid firm may hit you with additional charges once the project begins. In the long run, it’s usually worth the extra budget to have an experienced, professional team work on your site.

There are thousands of web design firms that you can choose from, so make sure the one you select is the best fit for your company. Keep these four main steps and you should find the right creative firm for your website.

Last month we got the opportunity to help Adobe celebrate the 20th anniversary of Photoshop, and this month we’re helping Adobe get the celebration going for the 10th anniversary of InDesign.

Scott Design just launched the new anniversary page for InDesign, the design and publishing software that all the designers at Scott Design have been using since it was first released. Before that, we all got our start using Aldus PageMaker at the very beginning of the desktop publishing revolution, which was the precursor of InDesign.

Take a look around the InDesign anniversary page, download the commemorative book, and take a look at how far desktop publishing has come since the early days!