I mentioned in my last post that I would talk about the new technologies in our site. You probably wouldn’t know these technologies are built into the site without me telling you. I think the best technologies are the ones that you don’t necessarily notice.
HTML 5
The first technology present in our site is HTML 5. Frankie Bailey, our developer, incorporated it as the solution to a problem. We never designed the pages the types of projects we work on and the various services we perform. These are usually simple and pretty straight forward pages on a website. You have to click through them to get to the meat. Most firms solve this issue by putting javascript on the home page which lists the services as you hover over the “services” link.
Frankie came up with something that I think is a little more elegant. And she used HTML 5 to create it.
Above you will see a portion of our services page. It lists our services. But instead of clicking on a service, you simply click the + button and the description of that service folds out.
The advantage is that visitors can quickly get details about the services they are interested in. If it’s not what they want, they can click on another service. They don’t have to move between pages.
There is a similar feature used with our projects. Visitors can click on any one of our services and get a quick glimpse of what we have done.
Over the next few years, I think HTML 5 will change the way we interact with websites.
Markdown
I wrote a post about Markdown a while ago. You can read more about the technology at that post. Needless to say, using Markdown saves me quite a bit of time. The plugin we use for Markdown is called Markdown for WordPress and bbPress.
Search Engine Optimization Plugin
While we aren’t hanging our hat on search engine optimization, a “SEO expert” told me that All-In-One SEO was a great plug-in for WordPress. Therefore, I made sure it was installed.
RSS
RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is by no means a new technology. However, I feel that very few firms in the A/E/C industry use it. It simply pushes your content so it can be syndicated other in other places. For example, our Ideas & Insights newsletter is completely automated through RSS. Once a new post is up on our website, it gets sent to MailChimp for distribution as our Ideas & Insights newsletter. I don’t have to lift a finger for that to happen, which is great!
Mailchimp
I spoke about MailChimp in an earlier post. MailChimp is integrated into our site. It is a great mass-email delivery service. I have lots of gripes about sending out mass emails to people who don’t want them. Our MailChimp integration is built around the concept of permission marketing. You only receive the emails if you sign up. There is a direct connection between the sign-up forms on our website and our MailChimp account.
I highly recommend MailChimp. So far, I haven’t had any problems with it. In the future, I plan to experiment more with auto responders, which is something you can create through MailChimp.
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