The AWS Blog

I was fortunate enough this morning to have time to catch up on Jonathan Schwarz’s Blog (Sun Microsystems’ CEO), and he mentioned that today is System Administrator Appreciation Day!

I want to echo his praises to the people that keep the internet running. The web marketing team at Awecomm makes sure that all of the strategic pieces are in place to make our customers successful on the web, but without the hard work that our hosting group puts in, none of it would come to life. Not to mention all of the admins that work for our clients that we often interface with.

Thanks guys!

Bobby Franske, one of our Web Marketing Gurus said it best:

Awecomm presents… Real Awecomm Heroes
(real Awecomm heroes)
Today we salute you, Mister Super Secure System Administrator
(Mr. Super Secure System Administrator)
Armed with a ratchet set, a box of brightly colored Ethernet cables and an undying desire for climate control
(I can’t believe there’s no humidity!)
You make sure no man gets system errors when they’re browsing over to Bored.com.
(I looooove all the Flash games!)
We need more servers and you make sure they’re taken care of
(we don’t even know what a server is)
So take a bow and a pat on the back, oh Don of the Data Center. Thanks to you it’ll always be 40% humidity and 66 degrees Fahrenheit.
(it feels surprisingly cool in here)

Mister Super Secure System Administrator ……

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… well not the computers in the data center, but at least our workstations.

We’ve been in our hip new loft-style offices for about a year and a half now (after being in Southfield Michigan for seven years), and up until last Friday, we still hadn’t formally had our clients, vendors, and friends over for a party. Last Friday we finally put up a tent in the parking lot and threw a nice little catered affair, aptly named The First Annual Awecomm Summer Shindig.

The relaxed, summer-bbq-style event was planned by a team at Awecomm consisting of our two administrative assistants (Nicole & Jacque), my business partner Brent, and both of our Sales Directors (Jimmy & Mark). The party went off without a hitch, and it looked like everyone had a good time. Great job guys!!

Most of my time was spent giving tours of our office space and data center. I’ll admit that after four hours it started to become a little repetitive, but it was well worth it just to hear the compliments from both people that we’ve just recently met, and customers we’ve had for many years that just hadn’t yet seen the new space.

One comment that I kept hearing over and over as I walked guests past our gallery wall (a space in our office that showcases websites that we’ve developed) was: How do you get so much done with such a relatively small team?? Most of the comments came from people who are used to working with huge ad agencies on their website projects. My answer is pretty straightforward; hire extremely talented and driven individuals, and keep processes as lean as humanly possible. Hearing that over and over from people definitely made my day, and everyone at AWS deserves a huge pat on the back for cranking out so many successful projects (especially recently).

Thanks to everyone that showed up to celebrate with us. If you didn’t make it out, we’ll hope to see you next year!

Everyone here is still in the process of uploading the pictures that they took during the event, so I’ll post some links when they’re available.

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Earlier this week Google announced the release of a service that should make the task of adding search functionality to your company’s website cheaper, and easier than it’s ever been. I was lucky enough to get tipped off about this release by my friend Andy Steggles, whose website HolidayHomeRental.co.uk was chosen by Google to be a testbed for the service.

The new service, dubbed Custom Search Business Edition, is a hosted solution (meaning that you don’t need a web server or any special software to run it), and is priced at $500 for 5,000 web pages, and $500 for 5,000 to 50,000 web pages. If you’re looking to have a site of over 50,000 pages indexed, it’s probably time to step up to the Google Mini or the Google Search Appliance.

In the past we’ve been pretty stubborn with our clients with regards to implementing search on websites. Be prepared to spend the time and money necessary up front to do it right, and then also be ready to go through round after round of measurement and optimization before you feel comfortable that the user is provided with a good experience. If you want more information on how to optimize a web search experience, Gary Angel has a detailed series of posts on his blog about the process (the five-post series starts here).

The introduction of this service will definitely have an impact on the way web marketing firms like us steer our clients in the future for a number of reasons. Primarily, the cost-effective availability of a service that we know will provide relevant results will make us more comfortable suggesting that a client add search functionality to their site. Secondly, the ability to customize the look of the experience is an absolutely necessary feature (if it functioned really well, but still created a visual rift in the user’s browsing experience, we’d be less likely to suggest it).

On a more technical level, it also looks like Google grants you a fairly high amount of control over the results page that is generated (the results are delivered in an array). It will be interesting to see what kind of applications and mashups pop up in the near future that take advantage of this!

For more information you can read Andy’s formal review of the service here on his blog; there’s also a video on WebProNews about the service.

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this service and doing some test implementations to see how it really performs. I’ll be sure to follow this post up with a more in-depth review once I have some first hand experience.

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I haven’t written too many of these Case Study type posts in the past, but we’ve had some incredible success stories over the last few months, so you may see more and more of them!

We completed the development of the ItIsPossible.info website for Lombardo Homes around two months ago, and we’ve collected enough data about it to finally put together a formal case study (available here as a PDF).

This is a pretty exceptional website, so I’ll give you some background information on it (beyond just the normal webdev process stuff). Anyone around Michigan knows that the housing market in Southeast Michigan is in a big slump. If you’ve got a house that you’re trying to sell right now, you’re pretty much stuck. The marketing team at Lombardo, led by Bob Moesta, saw this whole down-turn as a solvable problem, and an opportunity to do something unique.

They came to us with both a marketing concept, and an idea for a website, and asked us to help them execute it. The concept revolved around the idea of “people feeling stuck, and unable to move into a new home.” Time and time again, the Lombardo sales staff would encounter people that were absolutely positive that there was no way that they could afford a new home, and time after time, Lombardo was able to reach back into their team (consisting of Realtors from Real Estate One, and Mortgage Bankers from Countrywide) and find a solution to make the move possible.

The concept for the website was straightforward: People are feeling trapped. We need to let them know that we can help, and provide a comfortable place for them to go to get answers. They were approaching this problem in a very Web 2.0 way (community-centric as opposed to sales-centric), and I don’t think they even knew to call it that at the time!

The website, which was architected by Lombardo and Awecomm and designed and developed by the Awecomm dev team, accomplishes the goal. Visitors enter information about their current situation and are presented with a conversational story about their challenges. At that point, it’s all about what the next steps are and how they can move forward (visit the site and try it out for yourself!).

The site was also backed up by offline media such as radio and Comcast Video-on-Demand (the videos are available on YouTube here, and here).

At this point the results are in. The site has produced an online conversion rate of over 23% in June of 2007, and of those conversions, approximately 20% have successfully purchased new homes! The site also enjoys a homepage bounce rate of under 25%.

The site was architected using Awecomm’s Deep Discovery process (stay tuned for more to come on that - we’ll be unveiling formal details shortly).

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