The Morrison Agency. Atlanta Advertising + Digital Agency

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been diligently working on a complete overhaul of our agency website. And last Thursday, we quietly deployed the final outcome of that two-month process. We had three key goals in mind before we got started: a scalable platform, a responsive design, and a better format for showing client work.

Scalability

At the heart of the re-design, was an overall goal of building a site that served as a foundation to build on in the future. We didn’t want to feel the need to perpetually re-design the site in order to accommodate new content, or new pages. Rather, we wanted a greater level of fluidity, and scalability within the site. We turned to WordPress in order to help make this happen. Now, all pages are editable within the CMS, allowing anyone in the office to log into the site, and make modifications to site content at any time.

Responsive Design

When we launched our last site, roughly a year and a half ago, we did it in a two-stage process: we launched our “main site” then later, designed and built a “mobile” version of the site. Over the past year since, the idea of responsive design has become a key principle when designing for the web, and we wanted to make sure we applied that method of thinking to our site as well. In so doing, we’ve allowed users – regardless of their device – complete access to our site, and all it’s content. The site will simply re-size itself, and adapt to the screen size of each user. This not only makes the user’s browsing experience significantly better, but it keeps us from having numerous sites, all needing to be updated individually as time goes on.

Client Work

In our previous iteration of the site, we had a “work” section, wherein client work was shown by client, and within those clients by campaigns. Now, we certainly do our fair-share of campaign work, however we often have requests to do individual projects as well. Within the organization scheme of the previous site, showing a new iPad app for example, wasn’t practical because it didn’t fit into the way projects were being organized. This meant that great work was being left off the site, which we certainly weren’t excited about. Within this new site, we’ve built out a “work” section, that allows users to filter work by project type (interactive, print, environmental, and motion). As they make their selection, work gets filtered out, leaving only what users have selected visible on screen. Further, this format allows us to not only show large campaigns, but also great individual projects.

We’re excited about the new site, and hope you find it markedly better than the previous one. Despite launching is last week, we’re still making ongoing updates and revisions, but please feel free to share feedback in the comments – especially good feedback!

A concept first introduced by Ethan Marchotte over at A List Apart, Responsive Design is changing the way people think about interface design.

First off, a loose definition. A site using responsive design will apply the following:

• The site must be built with a flexible grid foundation.
• Images that are incorporated into the design must be flexible themselves.
• Different views must be enabled in different contexts via media queries.

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As “apps” continue to gain popularity, there seems to be an ever-present issue, surrounding a general lack of understanding regarding the differences between the two. Many can’t tell the difference between a local application and an app running in their browser. And it gets even trickier when it comes to knowing when either type is best suited for a given situation. Here are a few ways I like to break down the decision-making process:

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A recent article published on The Economist’s website, details projected trends in advertising for 2011 – and makes some interesting observations.

• Global ad spending will increase 4.5% (this is double the growth rate of 2010)
• Online advertising leads the pack, with a projected growth rate of 16%
• Television and online advertising are set to outpace their 2007 projections, while newspaper, magazine, and radio are all set to take a step backward

Online advertising continues to be a growing area of opportunity within the digital universe. And we’re not talking about your traditional banner ad type of work either. When considering your online advertising options, keep in mind the potential of mobile, paid search, social media (advertising and utilization), rich media – in addition to banner ads, and email campaigns.

Being willing to jump in head-first, and utilize the tools at our disposal is key to taking advantage of all that the web has to offer. With 28.7% of the world’s population (or 1,966,514,816 people) currently online, I can’t help but feel like there are some stones left unturned.

Embarking into the unknown world of search engine optimization (SEO) can be a bit daunting. Finding answers to your SEO questions can prove to be even more tricky (if that is even possible). The problem is, far too many people know just enough to be dangerous, but not quite enough to properly enhance your sites SEO performance.

To give you a jumping point, here are three things you can start doing today:

Keyword Research

Content is king, in the world of SEO. This reason for this is pretty simple: search engines can’t list what they can’t read. The spiders they use read sites just like you and I, and use the content they read to determine relevance to the user – based on their search phrases. If you aren’t sure about the keywords you’re using, or want to find better keywords, check out Google’s Adwords Keywords Tool. Make sure you’re communicating using words your audience would use – rather than internal language.

Title Tags

Many don’t realize it, but one of the strongest things you can do to improve SEO performance, is to make sure your page titles (the text displayed at the top of your browser window) is in line with the text on that page. Often times, developers get lazy and have the tendency to just label all pages with the company name. For example, rather than “The Morrison Agency” title for our work page, we use “The Morrison Agency Work Samples”. The latter of the two is more descriptive of what is seen on the page.

Back-linking

One of the many ways search engines determine which sites to serve up in search results, is based on relevance – as mentioned previously. One thing you can do to establish perceived relevancy, is to let other people vouch for you. This is accomplished through getting other sites to link to your site. This tells search engines that you are a credible source of information, because not only are you saying what the user is searching for, but others link to the information you’re sharing as well.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of SEO initiatives, but it should give you a little extra ammo with which to promote your site.