Know what drives your prospects.

As marketers, we need to help our sales teams with longer sales cycles face one of their biggest challenges: staying top-of-mind during a decision-making process that can drag on for months or years. At AB&C, we’ve come up with a process that uses strategy and technology to meet this challenge without breaking the bank.

Step 1: Work with your sales team to identify key drivers in the prospect’s decision-making process.

Read full post...

You’ve probably heard about “responsive web design” by now. Hopefully you’ve been able to incorporate this into any new web projects you’re working on, and you’ve already converted — or plan to convert — your existing high-value or high-traffic websites.

While responsive web design has been universally accepted and adopted, it does have a dark side: responsive images. I’ll explain what this problem is, how it’s being solved and why it’s yet another reason to let experts help you with these issues so you can stay focused on your content and ultimately your core business.

To understand the problem, we need to get a little technical. Here are some handy terms to know (refer to the diagram for some visual assistance):Read full post...

Your best bet for hot free sexy xxx content.

Gotcha! I know why you’re here. Pervert. Let me be straight with you: There isn’t any hot free XXX content here. So if that was what you were looking for, the browser back button is located in the upper left-hand corner of this window.

Now that we’ve lost 90% of the visitors to this page, I can continue with my actual subject — crafting content for your website and why you should be upfront and real with your audience. Doing this will help you build trust, and trust is key.

I bet the people who came here for porn were pretty upset to be lied to. (I know I would be. But then again, my online exploits are between me and the NSA.)

“So,” you ponder, “being honest and building trust with my audience — how do I accomplish this?”

I’m glad you asked.Read full post...

The interactive site gets young men thinking about what it takes to be a father.

Young men don’t always think ahead to the possibility of becoming a dad. Delaware Health and Social Services, Division of Public Health, teamed up with AB&C to create a life plan campaign, Man Up Plan Up, to help guys sort out their options. The campaign — aimed at men ages 19–26 — consists of condoms, posters, banner ads and an educational website. The interactive site gets them thinking about what it takes to be a father.

See what Man Up Plan Up is all about.

The problem isn't "too many clicks" — it's "too many wrong clicks".

On the cartoon show The Jetsons, Jane Jetson is a full-time housewife (although the show was set in the future, it was written in the ’60s). She would push a button, and a robot vacuum cleaner would pop out to clean the rug or mechanical arms would place a fully cooked meal onto the table. That is until, in one episode, she gets “buttonitis” — stress from pushing too many buttons. Ridiculous — or is it?Read full post...

There are huge advantages to using a CMS, but some of these features also bring disadvantages.

As a Technical Director at AB&C, I’m mainly involved in the technical production for our web projects — from landing pages for specific campaigns to websites for hospital systems. For the last few years, we’ve been doing much of this production in a content management system (CMS), a web-based application that enables us to give our clients design templates that they can fill in with text and pictures.Read full post...

The browser wars are back on!

Remember the browser wars of the late nineties? Half the online population thought “Netscape” actually was the Internet and Microsoft was just starting to take the Internet seriously.

Of course, Internet Explorer emerged the victor and whether you’re in the camp that faults Microsoft’s heavy-handed tactics or the camp that recognizes Netscape’s failure to innovate, there’s probably some truth in both.

But now the war is back on. Except it’s not a browser war, it’s a “rendering engine” war.Read full post...

Website design requires a balance.

No matter what you design — from blue jeans to loveseats to SUVs — you have to strike a balance between form and function. Thanks to the patient counsel of my interactive colleagues over the years, I’ve learned that I can’t approach web design the same way I approach print and other media. The scales tip toward functionality, which is determined by the target audience and its needs.

User experience is the number-one priority. Of course a successful website should look good, but, more important, it has to answer the needs of the audience and bring value to the user. Complicated navigation and over-designed pages only distract and confuse the audience, driving them away from the site.

When it comes to web design, balancing form and function is critical. Your design has to be engaging, interesting and compelling, but you can’t overwhelm the user with superfluous bells and whistles. Know your audience; know their needs. Let that knowledge guide you.

Award-winning work

That’s why I’m happy to report that AB&C recently won 12 awards at the 2009 Aster Awards, a medical and healthcare marketing awards program. The awards —golds, silvers and bronzes — recognized creative work in direct mail, web design, television, collateral and print. Check it out for yourself.

One gold was for our design of the St. Joseph Hospital Website. St. Joe’s old website was packed with information, but you had to take the time to dig through it. And that was the problem — especially because the good people of Greater Nashua, western New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts — the hospital’s audience — are very tech-savvy and look to the Internet as their first source of medical information. So after we impressed St. Joe’s with unique micro-sites for some of their new campaigns, they decided it was well past time to overhaul their main website.Read full post...

Search engines

The top search engines have collectively agreed on a solution to a problem that has long vexed web developers and web site owners.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo have announced support for the use of a “canonical” link tag as part of a page’s markup to help identify duplicate content. The three have a combined search market share of over 90 percent, according to several independent rating surveys.Read full post...

Thinking outside the box

So much is made of “thinking out-of-the-box” that it is beginning to sound trite. And where is the line that differentiates out-of-the-box thinking from way-out-there thinking or out-in-left-field thinking? Does that really matter?

Sometimes the solution you end up with is perfect—maybe not for the problem you began with, but for something else. I guess what matters is the process by which you arrived at that particular solution. It’s what happens when we try to reach beyond ourselves. Sometimes it works out perfectly; most often it doesn’t or hasn’t gone far enough.Read full post...