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Archive for October, 2008

Credit Union ONE Launches Online Member Center

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 by Rob W

Congratulations to Credit Union ONE for launching an enhanced website which provides members additional features and benefits.

CU ONE approached Extractable to help design a website that would “provide exceptional value to CU ONE members by delivering outstanding products and services anytime, anywhere.”  By having the website function as a 24 hour online member center (by empowering members to do more of their financial tasks online and by organizing information on the website more clearly) the website is poised to be a success!

Some great CU ONE site features include:

  • Secure loan and mortgage applications
  • Ability to open and fund an account online
  • Wide array of financial calculators
  • Numerous online forms
  • Detailed online map
  • Numerous online forms
  • Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions
  • Print and send-to-friend features
  • Online help demos
  • Online chat support

In the next month CUONE will be working to implement RSS feeds on their website and dynamically pull in rates into specific webpages in order to ensure their members have the latest rate information possibly available.

If you live in Michigan (or surrounding states) and are looking for a stable financial institution that still feels “personal” please make sure to visit Credit Union ONE.

Posted in Our Clients, Marketing, Online Financial Services | No Comments »

“QA-ing” Your Analytic and SEO Strategy

Saturday, October 11th, 2008 by Rob W

When developing a new website, most companies (or web development agencies if the project is not being done in-house) go through an exhaustive “Test Plan” or “QA Checklist” before the site is launched. This document tends to focus on checking for broken links, spell checking site copy, testing site features like search or online forms, verifying the presence of 301 redirects (on the old website), making sure the site is free of (CSS, JS, etc) errors, ensuring the navigation is consistent, checking cross browser compatibility and so on goes the list.

When of the areas that I believe that is most often overlooked when “QAing” a website before it is launched is verifying that the sites analytic and search engine strategies are in place.

  • Have you created a new profile and added your analytic code to the new site?
  • Have you setup goals and funnels based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your website? (If not, how will you be able to prove to your boss the redesign was worth all the time and money the company spent on it?)
  • Has analytic code been added to any 3rd party applications you are using? If not, are you at least tracking the traffic that is clicking over to your 3rd party applications/sites?
  • Have you submitted your XML site map (http://www.sitemapdoc.com/) to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer so search engines can more effectively index your website? Have you also submitted your website to free directories like dmoz.org (which Google has a relationship with)?
  • Have you thought through your meta-tag strategy? Search solutions that you use on your website and public search engines like Google evaluate meta tags when returning results and often use the page title tag and sometimes the description in the search engine results pages that your site visitors will need to understand.

So just because your QA team believes the website is free of errors and ready to be launched don’t forget to verify your analytic strategy has been addressed and you’ve taken the necessary steps to make it easy for search engines to find and understand your new website.

Posted in Coding, Searching and Finding, Web Services, Quality Assurance | No Comments »