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You want the pleasure, not the pain. Projects finished, not meetings scheduled. Ideas, innovations, and the toughest technologies served to you on a silver platter. You want more than a website, you want results. You want visicswire. We've got skills in spades, a team that delivers, and the bottomless pot of coffee to make it all happen.
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Jim Krantz is one of our favorite people. He is great to work with, has cool ideas, and has A TON of work. Check out the new jimkrantz.com to see the latest (commercial) addition to his web presence.
Like a true Chicago DJ, Johannes Lidl spins (new)house. Check out his latest schedule of events and his freshest tracks at djdeliniate.com.
Jon Greene took the design and development reins on Krantzworld. This site allows Jim to show off his editorial travel photography with a bit of flair and interactivity. Send one of your friends a postcard from the site!
Article
Writing...Worth It. Thursday May 3, 2007
We’ve got some pages on our site that see a lot of traffic but had high bounce rates. ( Bounces are when a person visits one page…and that’s it. They don’t bother looking at any other pages on the site. ) These pages are the landing pages for our advertising campaign.
We were seeing bounce rates of eighty to ninety percent. This is bad. That’s one or two people out of ten who actually bother to view anything beyond our landing pages. We became curious: Was the content not interesting? Did the page look bad? We decided to change some things.
The pages didn’t look bad (I think) but they didn’t have anything that really grabbed the user’s attention. We made some changes. We made the layout more horizontal and we added a nice automated flash slideshow to pull in the latest work from our portfolio. We tweaked the slideshow’s change rate and its “current item” action until we felt it provided context and moved quickly enough to catch the attention of the one-second viewers.
That still wasn’t quite enough. We were displaying our work, a contact form, and our logo, but had neglected our main copy block. That content is important; it should let the reader know that we’re there for them.
We asked a good friend from Digital Web Magazine, Carolyn Wood, to work on our copy blocks.
Never had it been so readily apparent to us that focused copy is just as important as the look and feel of a page. Carolyn helped us transform our pages. Take a look for yourself:
After re-working our landing pages, they’re seeing a 45 percent reduction in bounce rates. The writing, along with the flash slideshow and the new layout, all came together to give our landing pages that extra bit of oomph.
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