First and foremost, we are very proud to have placed #1151 on Inc’s Top 5000 List for 2010. Our hard work and innovation is the driving force behind our company and network, and we are honored to be recognized for this distinguished award. 2010 was a great year and we look forward to an even better year in 2011!

Last month, our Usability Department also released its most extensive report to date with a focus on sitemap and navigation. Through a card-sorting activity and our Tobii Technology eye tracking system, we were able to produce “The Ideal Sitemap” for our customers. The report also addressed the most efficient main navigation style, best sitemap structure and best practices for content – just to name a few.

Last, but not least, we’d like to congratulate Laura Mulvany and Tyler Olmsted for winning Idea of the Month and Employee of the Month, respectively. A big thanks to them for their dedication to Active Website!

To read more about our team, several new product releases and other related news, check out our August Newsletter.

The first company in the real estate technology realm utilizing Tobii Technology’s eye tracking system, Active Website can walk you through a live demonstration to see how users interact with your website. This technology has helped make companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon number one in their respective markets.  Below are the results of a sample usability test for Where’s Waldo? conducted by Active Website earlier this year.

And, having just released our first usability study through The Active Usability Lab, we can give you a sneak peek into our findings as it relates to real estate.  Launched earlier this year, the goal of the lab is to collect data to enhance The Enterprise Network platform and keep members ahead of the competition.

Want to see a short demo? Watch our Active Community video below for a demonstration.

If you like what you see and you’re going to be at Inman in July, this is a great opportunity to learn more about Tobii’s eyes tracking technology and other web solutions that Active Website has to offer your business. With a limited number of openings available, schedule a private meeting today to hear about the advantages of being an Enterprise Network member!

Contact
Kendal Greer                                                                                                                                                                                           303-396-0103                                                                                                                                                           kendal@activewebsite.com

www.blog.activewebsite.com

Because Active has access to Tobii Technology’s eye tracking system, we can now scientifically evaluate how users are navigating our sites making us better equipped to consult with Active Enterprise Network members on the best placement of components on their websites.  For our next usability study, we will be taking a closer look at the navigation pages and site map in order make our sites easier to navigate  for the user. Once the study is completed, we’ll be releasing more information to you on our blog.

As we wrap up this session on Active Community, we continue to make our way down the funnel. We started Active Community discussing search and the importance of getting customers to our sites through keywords, content ,etc. Then we moved to usability and the importance of keeping customers on our sites. Now, our next step is to discuss eBusiness and what we need to do to turn online leads into sales.

Active Website is excited to share with everyone our LifeCycle online inquiry management product and how we are helping our clients convert inquiries into sales. Watch our video for a wrap up on usability and for a preview of what to expect for the next few weeks of Active Community.

Related Posts:

Active Community: Introduction to the Active Usability Lab

Active Community: Usability Lab, Part 2

By John Sable

Because we released our results to Active Enterprise Network Members today, we want to give you a little insight into our findings through the online surveys we conducted as well as our eye tracking focus groups. 350 users participated in the surveys and over 60 people were tested using the eye tracking system. Because the information we collected is so valuable, we’re only releasing the full results to our clients.

However, we’d like to give you a sneak peek. This week’s video presentation focuses on four main of our study: the homepage, certain components on the homepage, content and branding. But what we really want to emphasis is the different perceptions of what the broker wants verses what the user wants.

At our October Enterprise Network Conference last year, we focused on the importance of moving to a more customer centric model. The results of our usability studies really drives this point home. With a user’s experience on our websites playing such a vital role in the success of our companies, it’s time we’re aware of their needs in order to meet their demands.

These results are crucial in helping the Enterprise Network move toward a more customer centric approach. With these findings, we’re now able to consult with our clients from a scientific standpoint when it comes to usability.

Below is the animation discussed in today’s Active Community session.

Related Posts:

Active Community: Introduction to the Active Usability Lab

10 Blog Usability Tips

Becoming an “Inside Out” Business

By John Sable

At the end of last year, Active Website teamed up with Tobii Technology, so we’ve spent the past few months developing our Active Usability Lab. By having access to Tobii’s eye tracking technology, we can now measure how customers are using Enterprise Network Members’ websites. Because we can take what we’ve learned from our usability lab findings and make improvements on our sites, Members are given a huge advantage over their competitors.

Tobii’s eye tracking is less intrusive than traditional usability testing and we’re able to get more accurate results through tracking and recording a user’s eye movement. With the ability to see the direction and duration of a user’s gaze, we can dramatically increase our efforts for efficiently marketing products and services via the internet.

The Active Usability Lab has 3 main areas of focus including data collection through online surveys, analytics and of course, eye tracking. This year, our goal is to produce quarterly findings for our clients based off the results of our studies. To find out more about what’s been happening at the Active Usability Lab, watch our video presentation below. Be sure to come back next Friday for an inside look at our results!

Related Links:

Active Website Teams Up with Tobii Technology

Eye Tracking ROI in Market Research

Three Simple Rules to Remember

By John Sable

blog.activewebsite.com

Today, we want to begin our discussion on usability. This is a hot topic for the Active Enterprise Network as we continue to evolve in order to meet the demands of our customers. We need to remember that usability is crucial to the success of our websites and we must have a plan of action. Understanding how users are interpreting our sites will help us adapt to their needs.

Just like our websites, we need to keep our customers in mind when it comes to our blogs. A few weeks ago, we did a video presentation on How to Write an Effective Blog for our Active Community Series that covered guidelines for writing a post that will most appeal to your readers. Today, we want to take that a step further and discuss the importance of your overall blog site.

Gaining the attention of your readers through your post is essential, but following certain usability rules for your site is important as well. When creating your blog, keep in mind the following questions:

1.    Are past posts easily accessible?
2.    Is your text readable?
3.    Is it clear where your links are leading your readers?
4.    Are your headlines relevant to the post?
5.    Is it easy for users to follow your blog?
6.    Are users able to share your blog on other social media sites?
7.    Does your blog encourage interaction through comment fields?
8.    Is the most critical information above the fold?
9.    Do you have an area where readers can contact you?
10.  Are you publishing posts consistently?

By asking yourself these questions and adjusting accordingly, your customers will better understand the site and your company. If your blog is easy to navigate through, you’ll give readers a reason to return. Nothing is more frustrating to a user than not being able to find relevant information on your website – including your blog!

Related Posts:

How to Write an Effective Blog

Blogging is Like a First Date

By Amanda Stephan

blog.activewebsite.com

Keeping the customer at the forefront of their design, Milestone believes they are now better positioned to be the leading real estate company in the region. The new website features a variety of user friendly enhancements including advanced Individual Property Websites, the integration of multimedia services, and the ability to access real time data from mobile devices.

Milestone’s website platform also includes:

1. The integration of the “Where do I Go Next?” button that provides users with a pre-engineered path option for relevant browsing.
2. Established Agent Websites to aid in each agent’s individual branding while utilizing features from the home site.
3. The inclusion of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and a corporate blog.
4. The ability for customers to create a Property Alerts account in order to receive emails when properties match their listed criteria.
5. Tour our cities videos that stream community overviews directly from the homepage.
6. Community information pertaining to neighborhood statistics, school information, and links that may be of interest to users.
7. Syndication to numerous top real estate sites, including Zillow, Trulia and HGTV’s Frontdoor.

By focusing on the customer’s needs, this one-stop shop real estate company is dedicated to providing quality service. From their real estate division to their rental and relocation divisions, these experienced professionals will help consumers find a home with the help of the new website while increasing their SEO standing. To find out more about the company, visit www.milestoneky.com.

This is an important reminder for the Enterprise Network. It’s sometimes easy to take for granted that the most crucial aspect of a website is the ability for users to navigate through it and accomplish their goals. If a website is difficult to use, fails to explain clearly who the company is and what they do, or if it’s content isn’t easy to read, there is a good chance the user will leave and not come back.

As Nielsen so clearly states, “If a user cannot find the product, they cannot buy the product either.”

Nielsen lists 3 key components to improving usability:

1. Get hold of some representative users, such as home buyers and sellers.
2. Have the users perform representative tasks with the design.
3. Observe what the users do, where they succeed, and where they are having problems with the user interface. Be quiet and let the users do the talking.

By focusing on the consumer, we can address these above concerns in an effort to deliver what users want, and in the process, create happy, loyal, return customers. When we prioritize the needs and wants of our users, in the end we guarantee a higher success rate and higher ROI on any website efforts.

To read more from Nielsen’s column, sign up for the bi-weekly newsletter, and to read about some misconceptions about usability, go to Jakob Niesen’s Alertbox.

CNN recently wrote and article about these new search engines, “Instead of trying to be Google killers, these sites have more humble aspirations: to be alternatives to the industry giants. ” After all, Google does remain the no. 1 search tool on the web today with “nearly 64% of U.S. online searches”. I mention this to say that although there are newer search engines out there, our seo strategies for now will continue as we currently see best. But also, that we are watching these new forms of search engines, with interest and caution.

Want to take a look at these new search engines? 

Twine- Twine is a smarter way to keep up with what you’re into; A new way to collect content and connect with people who share your interests. Use Twine to track, find, and share what interests you. Twine ties it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place. To get started, find a twine of your interest through search or explore, then join!

hakia- Semantic Search; hakia’s semantic technology provides a new search experience that is focused on quality, not popularity. hakia’s quality search results satisfy three criteria simultaneously: They (1) come from credible Web sites recommended by librarians, (2) represent the most recent information available, and (3) remain absolutely relevant to the query.

Searchme- The First Multimedia Search Engine; Find exactly what you are looking for by clicking on one of our unique category suggestions. View search results grouped into logical and easy to use categories.

Kosmix- Kosmix is a guide to the Web;The site lets users explore the Web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the Web even if they don’t know exactly what they are looking for.

WolframAlpha- Making the World’s Knowledge Computable;Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

scoopler- A Real-Time Search Engine;We aggregate and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. We do this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, we give you the most relevant results, updated in real-time.

OneRiot-  A Real-time Search Engine; OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the real-time web.

Read the CNN Article- New Search Engines Apsire to Supplement Google

 What you get:

• Unlimited Listings on Elistit.com
• Profile Advertisement
  • Your Picture
  • Contact Info
  • Link to Website
  • Company Logo
• Listing App. on Facebook…and more