websites Archives - Peter Grandstaff

Engage Your Audience with Online Video

There are hundreds of places to share your video online. Click above to search for them.

Video is huge. It’s all over the web these days. There’s nothing new about that, but what I see is a lot of small businesses that still aren’t using it. It wasn’t that long ago when having video play right on your website was a difficult and expensive task. Today, there’s simply no excuse: video sites handle the technical side for you and affordable HD cameras can make you look like a pro.

In the average US home, a television is turned on for over 6 hours a day. No matter how familiar someone is with the web you can be sure they’re used to video. No matter how complicated your website is, video is simple. It takes a click to play it, and then your visitor can just sit back and consume your message.

There are a variety of ways you can put video to use effectively.

Welcome Videos — These are really good at getting the visitor’s attention and making sure they feel like they’re in the right place. Ideally the video will show a person talking, but it could also just be a slide-show with voice over.
Product Videos — If you’re doing eCommerce then product videos can really boost your conversions. Looking at pictures and reading about a product can only make it so real for us. When we see it in motion, with a real person using it and talking about it, a product becomes much more real.
Virtual Tour Videos — Show off your facilities and offerings with a video tour of your business. Be sure to highlight things that make your shop unique and get someone passionate to narrate the tour.
Sales Videos — Use video on a sales page to drive home the benefits and wash away the objections of your prospect.

You can pick up a pocket sized HD video camera for less than $150 plus the cost of a memory card. I got a Kodak Zi8 for my birthday this past week, and I think that’s the best option out there, right now, for web video.

If you’re camera shopping, make sure it has a microphone jack so you can upgrade your audio equipment as your budget allows.

You can edit your video in iMovie or Movie Maker then just upload it to YouTube, Vimeo, and tons of other sites. Then, just look for the “embed” link and send that code to your webmaster or paste it into your site. Don’t forget to post links to your video on your social media sites as well.

So, when you’re out doing your weekend shopping why not pick up a cheap camera and start playing around with video. Your website will become instantly more engaging for users and you’ll benefit from the increases in visit depth, time on site, and conversions.

This post first appeared in my small business e-mail newsletter.

Obama is President Elect Website Roundup

Well, moments after I posted my last entry everybody declared Obama the winner. Looks like I need some more practice with the whole live blogging thing, but tonight was a fun start.

I took screenshots of many many major news websites’ front pages, interesting to see that the NY Times changed their headline after about five minutes. That’s one of the great things about publishing on the internet. You can make a change instantly.

North Carolina still can’t be called, but Obama leads by a fraction of a percent. Indiana is the other really close one. Figures, the Grandstaff side of my family lives in Indiana, and my folks and I live in North Carolina.

It is always exciting to see Democracy in action, and the world wide web has brought us a lot of amazing technologies to watch it all unfold. Stay tuned and I’ll post some screen shots with web design critiques in the next few days.

Now it’s time for me to watch an episode of something funny over on Hulu.com and retire for the night.

Latest Election Website News

I neglected to mention last time that guardian.co.uk formats their summary graphs in a very attractive way. All the US websites seem to be a horizontal bar with the win point of 270 electoral votes marked at center. The Guardian is using circular, or arcing bar graphs for electoral votes and popular vote.

a good example of displaying data on a website

[Read more…]

Some Website Diamonds in the Rough – Election Update

Google is doing a nice job. A clean clear interface with graphs and tallies in the right sidebar and breaking news stories in the center of the page. Google seems a little less conservative with their projections than others, I’ll stick with the New York Times for numbers I can trust.

Over in the UK The Guardian has something I haven’t seen elsewhere. There is a tab on their map that lets you see a map where each state is drawn such that its area is proportionate to the number of electoral votes it represents, very cool. Additionally they offer three shades of coloring on the map to indicate varying degrees of leads in addition to wins. Very nice web design and programming!

Current NY Times count, Obama: 159 electoral votes and McCain 49. Google and The Guardian agree on 202 for Obama and 80 for McCain. Blue is up 3 seats in both the house and senate.

Congrats to Fox News, their online map now shows color on states, but just one shade. Strange thing is that they are showing zero electoral votes for either candidate. Looks like they should put some more money and talent into their web development team.

Election Update & Website Roundup

Since my last post, Obama has climbed to 118 electoral votes while McCain is only up to 17. Obama took New York and Maine while McCain picked up Alabama. I’m using the New York Times website for my numbers here. Google is saying Obama: 195, McCain 70.

I’ve got to start off by giving kudos to Fox News for having the most useless election coverage I’ve found so far. As is customary they give a US map, but where you expect to see color coding based on current reporting there is but one color to the whole nation. You have to move your mouse over a state to see the results.

So far I think I’m most impressed with the NY Times site, you get great color coding of states and counties with light coloring indicating a lead and dark coloring indicating a “victory.” Of course, these are victories being called by the news media based on the polling results as they trickle in. The NY Times site also gives you all the local info you could want by letting you zoom in to state level. This is a great example of a quality web application.

Covering the Web Coverage of the Election

I remember the first election that I followed the results of entirely online. It was the 2000 election. CNN was so bogged down with traffic that it took minutes for the page to load. I was using a T1 connection, so I had no shortage of bandwidth.

Tonight, there are a wide variety of very high tech approaches to covering the election on the web. I’ll be posting as I come across things as I work here in my Situation Room. I’ve got two computers running three monitors all displaying something different. At the moment, I have the New York Times on my secondary monitor. I’m surfing on my primary monitor, and I’m using my laptop to blog here.

At the moment, Obama has 87 electoral votes to McCain’s 8. The democrats have gained a seat in the House, and three in the Senate.

Here in North Carolina it looks like Kay Hagan has beaten out the incumbent Elizabeth Dole. In my district David Price has beaten Lawson. The North Carolina gubernatorial race is still too close to call, but Bev Perdue has a slight lead.

Here’s the nicest looking widget I’ve found so far for those of you keeping score at home: