Strategy

Business and Market Analysis

We conduct our analysis by first asking the right questions:

• Who are your customers and how are they finding you?
• What are your goals in growing your business? Who are the ideal clientele to target?
• How can we better harness your current resources?How can your website enhance your other outreach methods?
• What are some of the best websites in your sector, and what can we learn from those sites?

We take the time to understand your company’s goals and come up with a vision for how the web can help you meet and exceed them over time, all within the context of market realities.

Search Engine Optimization

Content is king. No amount of SEO “black magic” will compensate for original, rich content on your special subject-matter. However, in addition to great content, you need to implement a number of specific SEO techniques in order to make it to page one of Google or Bing search results.

You also need to be realistic. If you’re a local jeweler, we can’t get you the #1 spot on a Google search for “diamonds.” Nobody can. Wikipedia and DeBeers already have that covered.

On the other hand, we may be able to get you into the top five for “diamonds in Cambridge, MA.”

We can analyze your market and discuss feasible goals for search traffic, and develop a plan for reaching these goals. We build all of our websites with simple “White-Hat” SEO in mind. If you hire our team for writing services, we can also:

• Help develop keywords
• Write SEO-friendly headlines and subheadlines
• Gracefully weave your keywords into your text
• Help you generate well-integrated inbound links and anchor text
• Inspire you with fresh concepts and news based on your distinct sector expertise

While advertising is a continuous cost, implementing smart SEO initiatives — at no charge — will pay long-term dividends.

Social Networking Advising

In the 1980s and 90s, the mall replaced the town green as the locus of social gathering. In the 2000s and 2010s, Facebook transcends physical space to serve as our new social center. If you don’t have a presence on Facebook, you’re not only missing the new word-of-mouth marketing reality; you’re missing out on 43% of page traffic in the U.S. (Google drives another 38% of traffic.)
Setting up a Facebook page is straightforward, and with our software add-ons you can simultaneously push out Facebook, Twitter and RSS status updates without ever leaving your website’s control panel.

We also advise you not to underestimate other social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and enthusiast niches powered by Huddler and Ning. We can help you decide which of these could be beneficial for your social networking goals.

These tools can also strengthen your relationships with your existing clientele. How can we convince them to further talk you up within their networks? Hit the right note with your existing base, and you can see exponential referral traffic straight from their address books.

AdWords Online Advertising

For the minimal up-front investment required, online advertising is now a simple, cost-effective accessory to any website deployment. We’ll show you how to leverage Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter to reach your target audience based on keywords. Often, the same analysis used for SEO will translate seamlessly into a keywords-based ad campaign, and the tools offered by Google and Microsoft, who control over 95% of the keyword-based ad market share, frequently inspire new keyword approaches you may not have previously considered.

Design

Logo and Branding

A significant number of our website solutions include the design of a logo and identity. Once we have taken the time to get to know your business and researched other designs in your sector, we start brainstorming. We pour lots of coffee, come up with troves of potential imagery, take a nap or two… and then start paring things back down. We eliminate the clichés and ultimately produce a mark that is distinctive, original, and one that captures the spirit and mission of your business.

We often explore multiple logo types (wordmarks, lettermarks, brandmarks and emblems).

We take pride in distilling your brand into a mark that looks just as good in 15-foot letters on top of company headquarters as it does one-sixteenth of an inch tall on company stationery.

In general, we develop between four and six logo concepts and then refine your favorite until you are completely satisfied. A couple of our favorite designs can be found in Pastor Law Office and Newton Pediatrics.

“A great trademark is mission-relevant, dynamic, distinctive, memorable and unique.”
– Primo Angeli

Email Newsletter Design

Ever feel like you don’t do as much to keep in touch with your customers as you would like? Our web solutions strategies can change that. Email design can be tricky, and writing and coding a proper HTML email has unique challenges. Work with us, and together can help you to.:

• Create a personal, compelling tone
• Develop the right hook to avoid the trash bin
• Get around SPAM filters
• Format HTML images, fonts, and layout to display properly with all different kinds of email clients (i.e., Outlook, Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL)
• Conduct post-email analysis, including open and bounce rates
• Design a series of email newsletter templates that you can re-use for years to come

Marketing Collateral Design

Email has established itself as a universal medium for communication. In an interesting turn of events, this means that physical collateral now offers really unique value, and has the potential to make a major impact for your business. Need a new business card and letterhead to go with your new identity? Need brochures, flyers, and other branded print products? Coming right up!

Development

Content Management System (CMS)

In the year 1440, there was the Gutenberg Press. 570 years later, there was WordPress.

The millennium is bearing witness to a global self-publishing revolution. Some of the long-standing web design firms are either falling behind with proprietary, cumbersome in-house publishing software; or have been left behind by requiring their clients to ask them to make changes to their “black box” website. We specialize in and recommend the two most popular open source solutions on the market today: WordPress and Drupal. Within the last five years, both of these community-supported content publishing platforms distinguished themselves from the crowd, offering the ideal blend of robust functionality, high performance, security, and the technological edge of an active developer community. No proprietary online publishing platform can match the aptitude of these communities, consisting of thousands of developers.

Why do you need a content management system? Well, who wants to read a month-old newspaper? Visitors will be turned off if your website’s content is stale. With a CMS, you can update your site whenever and as often as you’d like. Add a new staff profile, update your contact page or events calendar, post the latest article to your news page or blog, and keep users coming back.

With the help of a dynamic and user-friendly CMS dashboard, making a change to your site is simple:

1. Log into your secure control panel
2. Find your page in your “Pages” list and click on it
3. Change the text or images in the online editor
4. Click “Save”

…and voilà, your changes are live.

Fresh content is your friend. Users love it and so do search engines. Focusing on content is focusing on results. Regular news updates on your homepage will help you climb Google’s search rankings, allowing you to bring in new customers and save big on advertising and marketing costs.

Avoid companies that sell sites that require extensive knowledge or proprietary software to edit. While having to call your designer to make a small change to a site was normal in the late 20th century, CMS have become the standard for excellent web development and currently the best ones are open source.

While there is a small up-front cost to building with these systems, they offer a return on investment that is truly unparalleled.

Dream-able Development

If you can dream it, we can build it. We pride ourselves on finding creative, efficient, and elegant ways to solve your business puzzles, whether they be internal, external, or unforeseen. Below is a list of functionality we can build into your website–items we hope will provide some inspiration as we develop a vision for your own web solutions.

Mobile and Tablet Development

We’ve seen the future, and it is mobile. Some fun facts:

• Worldwide web traffic from mobile and tablet devices is doubling year after year.
• From 2011 to 2012 alone, mobile visits to the top 500 online retailers soared from 13.4% to 24.6% .
• As of September 2012, 46% of the US population owns a smartphone.

If you do business online, you can no longer afford to leave your mobile- and tablet-based visitors stranded. From 2-inch, to 7-inch, to 24-inch screen widths, we can help. We’ll convert an existing site into one that is mobile-friendly using responsive design techniques and lightweight coding practices. We can also provide buttons and animations that give your site that “app-like” feel. If you are on a desktop, try shrinking the width of your browser window to see one of these solutions in action.

Content Creation

Writing

Bam.

That pretty much sums up good writing on the web. If you require more explanation:

Punchy. Brief. Clear. Succinct. Colorful. Brief. Distinct. And brief.

Good writing for the web is, in most cases, a compact form of good prose. Editing web copy can be even more brutal than ad copy. If a particularly minimalist print ad runs two words, consider paring the web version down to one. We are seasoned pros at text distillation and high-impact diction for the web.

A sound website is designed to guide your visitor to a goal (or a series of goals). The goal might be: fill out a sign-up form, add items to a cart and check out, or share a video with Facebook friends. Any text must be read and processed by a user’s brain. If that processing slows down or distracts the user from moving closer to the goal, then the textis actually an obstacle. It is therefore essential that your writing convey meaning as quickly as possible. That means every single bit of text — every headline, introductory sentence, and button label — should instantly resonate.

Viv Web Solutions can fulfill a number of roles in developing your online text. We will learn the ins and outs of your business to provide great web copy tailored to your brand. Alternatively, you can deliver us your own writing and we can edit it to optimize its web compatibility and readability.

Photography

Suppose you’re shopping for sneakers online. Of the items below, which would you be more inclined to purchase?

When it comes to building effective web solutions, don’t skimp on photography. The web is above-all a visual medium. For most websites, good photography is absolutely essential. It is the mark of professionalism. It sets the mood. It entices users to dig deeper.

We have a number of talented photographers in our network that can provide you with impeccable visual elements. We can also source high-quality stock photography as a cost-saving alternative.

Animation and Illustration

In certain cases, you may require a more artistic treatment. Or perhaps you want to add that extra something. Tell us about your specific needs. We can help brainstorm, sketch, and implement.

Infrastructure

Web & Domain Hosting

As a full-service web design company, we also offer fully managed and affordable web and domain name hosting to make the deployment and maintenance of your website seamless and hassle-free. You can bring us an existing domain name, or we can register a new one and manage it on your behalf. We offer all of our clients unlimited bandwidth (data transfer), FTP accounts, databases, and generous disk storage. As a customer, you also get secure access to your own web hosting control panel to manage and customize your web hosting and domain name options. Best of all, ViV web hosting is backed by a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Email Hosting

Viv Web Solutions can set up and manage all of your email accounts at an additional charge ($4 per month). Our email hosting solution includes secure webmail access as well as unlimited inboxes, forwarding addresses, and catch-all accounts. We’ll also help you configure your primary email client (Gmail, Yahoo!, etc) to incorporate sending and receiving from your new email accounts.