ClearRiver Advertising and Marketing

ClearRiver Advertising & Marketing launches completely new Web site

By: Keith Heustis

Web sites have become a ubiquitous prerequisite for companies, and having a powerful and informative Web site that imaginatively conveys your company’s corporate or product messaging can be a major advantage in attracting new business.

Although ClearRiver has been operating successfully online for more than five years, we felt it was time for a major update. After nearly a year of design and development, our new Web site aims to enhance the user experience, make it easier to view our diverse portfolio, and provide a more accessible and visually appealing way to explore our company.

What makes this site better?

Fast and easy access

From the outset, one of our main goals has been to maximize ease of use. One way we’ve done that is through “modal windows.” When a visitor clicks on a link to a piece in our portfolio, the samples are loaded on top of the current page, and there's no need to leave the current browser window. This user interface design feature provides a quick and easy way to view our extensive portfolio, which contains over 150 samples of our work.

Content management system (CMS)

Another big reason for updating the site was our desire to add content easily wherever and whenever we wanted. Of the plethora of content management solutions available, we found everything we needed and more in Expression Engine (EE),which has become our CMS of choice. Not only does EE make all of our updates quick and easy, it also gives our designers compete freedom in design and coding, and allows us to have a standards-compliant and exceptionally search-engine-friendly site. We highly recommend EE if you are looking for the same kind of design freedom and high level of functionality.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization has changed a lot over the years and has become a much more complex endeavor. It used to be that a developer could stuff a few keywords into some metatags and get lots of traffic. Today, search engines are much smarter. Google, for instance, uses more than 118 factors to determine a Web site’s position in the search engine’s rankings, and no one really knows much about how the search engines work because the algorithms are secret. Despite the difficulties associated with SEO, when we redesigned the ClearRiver Web site we took several time-tested steps to ensure that our site could meet the needs of current search engines.

• We made sure that our site was built with standards-compliant XHTML and CSS coding techniques that make our pages load faster, allow greater accessibility to people who may be visually impaired, and provide a very digestible format for Google and other search engines to index.
• Having developed a good foundation for SEO through careful coding, we moved on to implement the beginning of our long-term web marketing strategy, which at its heart has a commitment to build a site full of quality information and content. More than any other factor in SEO, we know that creating quality content is the most important thing we can do to drive visitors to our site. As the days and months go by, you will see the content on our site grow through informative and educational blog postings and new sections that will help you understand more about how ClearRiver can help you meet your advertising and marketing goals.
• Finally, no effort to improve SEO can be complete without solid numbers and statistics on which to base decisions. That’s why we use Google Analytics and Google webmaster tools to monitor traffic and learn more about the types of people who use our site. By compiling this data and analyzing it regularly, we’ll be able to make informed decisions about the value of our content and accurately identify areas of our site that could use a little help. Of course, the data we collect is anonymous and we would never use any of it for anything outside of the guidelines set forth in our privacy policy.

The best is yet to come

We still have a lot of content in development and plan to roll it out in the next weeks and months. Our site will change constantly, and here at ClearRiver we believe change is a wonderful thing, as long as it means that things get better. As we roll out new content and offer more useful ways of interacting with us, we hope this site will become an even greater asset to our clients and others who may need creative design services.

Let us know what you think

We invite your comments and feedback below. Look over the site and let us know what you think.

Best regards,
Keith Heustis