One of the goals in redesigning the site was to improve the "stickiness" of our search engine traffic. Analyzing search engine traffic shows that, aside from when people are looking for us by name, most search traffic enters the site through sub-pages, not the home page. This makes sense since sub-pages usually have more detailed content on them than the home page. In these many cases the sub-page where they happen to land acts in a sense as a surrogate home page (for more on this dynamic see our newsletter Who's Your Homepage?) since it is the first page they hit. We wanted to take such instances and make sure that we capture the visitor's interest with our overall message, especially if they happen to be a potential client or agency partner. So we have added the right column on every page to encourage next steps in exploring the site. This section always contains the Web Smart newsletter widget because we like to keep in touch with site visitors by adding them to our email list. The right column also contains a couple other widgets, sometimes a link to one of our videos, or some other widget that speaks of our key messages.

Aside from Web Smart, the most frequently used widget is the Content Management Included video because it's so fundamental to what we do. There are hundreds of pages in the site with this widget on them. Imagine, however, if I wanted to change the content in that widget--site wide. No problem. With our new content macros I can create content like the CMS video widget and simply add a macro link to the side bar area on the pages where I want to include it. If I change the macro content, it changes across the whole site. We also implemented a system that searches all content areas, like this paragraph, for content macros. I can drop the macro in anywhere in the site and it will display properly.   next >