Helping Career Point College With A Website Redesign

We were very excited to get an opportunity to collaborate alongside Cox Media to tackle a website redesign for Career Point College. At first glance, we knew this website needed a makeover, and we were full of ideas on how to revamp their site and promote further success for Career Point College. To begin with, they were managing multiple websites that essentially had the same information on them. So right off the bat, we knew we needed to not only develop an updated website, but also to create a way for students and prospectives to access information in a single location.

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The State Bar of Texas Website Redesign Project

The Situation:

The State Bar of Texas sought out help from our team here at HMG to revamp its online presence towards its members (lawyers) and public citizens. The site has always strived to serve as a community resource: the first place that bar members and the public go for information about Texas lawyers, the State Bar and laws in Texas. With that in mind, the goal for the redesign was to enhance the overall user experience, simplify the current web offerings and enrich the member/public value.

Detective Holmes:

We began the project with a thorough discovery phase where the requirements of the project were defined in greater detail and then the initial strategic and creative direction was established. This phase also involved an analysis across the existing platforms and performance of the State Bar of Texas website. We preformed a complete review across all available site traffic reports, dashboards, heat maps, and log files.

We also focused on the analytics of two primary factors: visitor site behavior and demographics. This analysis brought to life how users are finding the right bits of information and how we can make that process smoother and more efficient. The demographics told us who our core audience is, thus allowing us to take this into consideration as we approached the redesign.

As part of the discovery phase, we preformed an analysis of which ad placements and approaches had and had not worked in the past for the previous site. Later on in the project we balanced our findings against the user experience and visual design of the site to create the best possible ad placements without jeopardizing the consumer’s usage of the site. Continue…

The Importance of Brand Loyalty

Branding is often discussed everyday by individuals in the marketing, advertising and design industries, but rarely is it defined with a simple answer. In brief, branding is one of the most important tools a company can utilize to reach their target market, build recognition and develop customer relationships. It includes a wide range of factors such as logos, colors, patterns, typefaces, imagery, packaging, taglines, wording and more, all of which combine to create your company’s image.

Why Do Consumers Need Consistency?

In order to build a strong brand, you must stay consistent throughout all of your selected mediums. This strategy creates the opportunity to gain brand recognition among your target audience when done correctly. On top of that, consistency brings clarity and purpose that consumers then buy into. In turn, consumers become loyal to a brand. However, building this kind of trust takes time and effort.

Most consumers have to be exposed to a brand many times before they are loyal to it. So a consistent brand message has to be established so that consumers will immediately distinguish it from a competing brand. This means a business potentially loses customers, and may even help its competitors, if a consistent “look” and tone is not achieved. Continue…

What Are The Key Metrics For A Successful Website?

Everyone wants to have a successful website, but finding the right path to follow can be difficult. While you may have plenty of great ideas and goals for your website, you may have no idea how to actually achieve them. Because of this, you should almost always seek aid from a professional web design agency. In today’s digital world, it is crucial that your website reflects the current professional standards in terms of content, design aesthetics, and technology. When redesigning your website, it should contain far more than just a new design. In order for success, it is vital that your new site design and content has been carefully and strategically completed by a professional to optimize achievement of your goals.

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#4: Optimize Your Site For Social Media

If you haven’t already, please take a minute to read our previous post discussing our current blog series and what all you can expect to read over the next few weeks!

Value of Social Media

Alright, to kick things off, let’s get to talking about the value of social media. Words like “follow us” and “like this” are buzzwords that virtually drive the entire online world these days. If you are redesigning your website, you should highly consider the value of integrating your social media channels with the site. Don’t have social media? While we recommend you reconsider your decision, fear not: you can utilize a blog! We can’t stress enough the importance of connecting with your audience on a personal level, and the best way to do so is through social media and blogging.

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#3: Incorporate Appropriate and Relevant Content

It shouldn’t be a shock that having appropriate and relevant content on your website will aid to its overall success. The reason we mention it, though, is because often times people are not quite sure what “appropriate” really means for their brand, and why it is so valuable. With quality content comes not only quality engagement with your readers and target market but also increased search engine rankings for your web content as well. Sounds pretty valuable doesn’t it? Lets break it down more and take a closer look at why all of this is so important.

Consumer Engagement

The first thing you should think about when trying to write content for your website is, “Why do we have this website?” You need to understand what you are trying to accomplish with the site, and then mold your content to accompany those goals. Every time you write copy for a site, you should aim for it to entertain, inform, and entice the reader. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on SEO, if readers are not interested in reading it, they will leave the site. The reader and your goals should ALWAYS be the center of the writing, no matter what you are discussing on the page.

You see this over and over again were a company depends too heavily upon the weight and popularity of their brand to drive traffic to their site. Of course, it’s great that they have established their name or product in the minds of the public. But if you have one competitor who has done the same, and also provides quality written content on each page of their website, you’ve just lost a share of the market for no good reason.

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6 Things to Consider When Designing A Nonprofit Website

The importance of making a good first impression, especially on the web cannot be understated – especially when it comes to nonprofit organizations. Did you know that 60% of people report the first thing they do before deciding to make a donation is check out an organization’s website? To build the most effective and informative site for potential donors and the general public alike, HMG Creative recommends nonprofits consider the following features when thinking about creating or redesigning their website.
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Redesigning Texas A&M’s Student Activities Website

We can’t say enough how thrilled we were to take on this website redesign project for Texas A&M University. For the TAMU Student Activities website, we got our hands dirty right away by putting ourselves in the shoes of the site’s primary audience: the students, particularly – TAMU undergrads. These students needed an intuitive one-stop-shop to quickly gather information, sign-up, and manage the sections they were involved in. Apart from utility, a goal of ours was to update the overall aesthetic appeal of the site showcasing vibrant student life and activities in a way that would make students want to get involved and stay involved.

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Responsive vs. Adaptive Design: How They Differ and Why It’s Important

Primarily due to the ever-present nature of mobile tablets and smartphones, adaptive vs. responsive design has been a hot debate in the last few years. Because companies now need to build websites to work on smartphones, tablets, and standard laptops and desktops, understanding adaptive vs. responsible design is incredibly important.

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Per Stirling: Common Interests. Uncommon Results.

Per Stirling Capital Management is an S.E.C.-registered investment advisory firm specializing in holistic financial planning, investment portfolio management, and other comprehensive wealth management services that are as unique and varied as are its clients. However, the cool part about the company is that it’s not for everyone. Driven by the idea of “Common Interests. Uncommon Results,” the company recognizes that “As strange as it may sound, Per Stirling is not for everyone.” It is when clients hit a financial point of success or wealth that it becomes time to find the right partner to help preserve and conscientiously manage these financial affairs – and that is when Per Sterling comes to the rescue.

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