Sunday, October 17, 2010

Multi-Channel eCommerce with Magento

The assembled web team has the pleasure to inform you that Magneto counts a new partner in Switzerland and France: Open Web Technology.

As an eCommerce expert OWT enhance your cross-channel consumer experience and improve sales operational efficiency.

Magento provides feature-rich multi channel eCommerce platform which offers retailer complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online sales channels.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

HealthandAge.com and Drupal

Health portal provides wellness information and community for baby boomers and seniors.

Managed by HealthandAge and sponsored by Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications, HealthAndAge.com provides health and wellness resources to baby boomers and older generations. The health portal offers tips on how to communicate effectively with healthcare professionals as well as information on how to identify, understand, prevent and treat a wide variety of medical conditions.

The Challenge
In the early 2000s, HealthandAge.com was one of the top five health websites in the world, with approximately two million unique visitors per month. However, over time, it began to lose its high ranking. When Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications acquired HealthandAge late in 2007, the company embarked on a plan to fully revamp the health portal.
Boomerang executives wanted HealthandAge.com to once again become the trusted health and wellness resource for baby boomers and older generations. They envisioned social features that would allow for a strong online community, encouraging health and wellness discussions among site visitors. In addition, Boomerang saw this community as a venue to educate potential clinical trial participants about their ongoing pharmaceutical studies.

The Solution
After coordinating with Boomerang about their specific goals for HealthandAge.com — providing relevant information, increasing traffic and user engagement, and building Boomerang’s pool of potential clinical trial participants — it was determined that a modular approach to site design was the best solution.
A more sophisticated, modular CMS was assembled to help solve the technical hurdles site authors and editors faced when developing and publishing content. With modules, administrators can now organize new site pages, or update the layout of existing pages to include modules for advertisements, featured content and relevant clinical trial information.
“Major content areas of the site, like news, articles and FAQs, make up the basic framework and are linked together by health topics,” said Tito Espinoza, content management expert. “‘Add-ons,’ such as accompanying clinical trials, forums and commenting functionality were developed as modules. This gives site administrators the ability to easily customize pages as needed, and allows visitors to see all relevant information on a particular topic on one page.”
The portal includes modules that enable simple site navigation to help guide site visitors to relevant content, based on their search queries and viewed articles. Social features help connect regular visitors with like-minded individuals, building online communities for people with similar health ailments and interests.
An automated search engine optimization (SEO) wizard helps authors optimize the content in every article they submit. These SEO features help drive traffic to the portals when potential visitors are searching for relevant terms.
In addition, new analytics software allows site authors and editors to view the results of their contributions, enabling them to determine the usefulness and relevancy of specific articles to site visitors.

Results
HealthandAge.com.com was launched in July 2009, and is seeing success in its early months. Average time on site has increased 68 percent, bounce rate has decreased 20 percent and page views per visitor has gone up 28 percent since relaunch.
Visitors can easily search the site by keyword, health topics or most popular articles. They can also search their own activity by viewing favorite links, recently viewed pages and recent forum discussions. These forums, as well as portal-hosted groups, provide visitors with an opportunity to engage with others facing similar health and wellness challenges, and to share stories and successes. Online community members can create personal profile pages, participate in discussions, and sign up for email and RSS updates from the site.
“Knowing that our main audience is comprised of baby boomers and other individuals who haven’t grown up using the web, it was important to us that HealthandAge.com be easy to understand and navigate,” said Salah Benzakour, marketing director of HealthandAge.com. “The solution provided both the design and features needed to guide visitors around the website, helping them find information and connect with similar individuals. We’re really able to connect with our target audience and build a trusted health portal and online community.”
With the new HealthandAge site live and performing strong, Boomerang now plans to expand its online presence with soon-to-be-launched sites based on the HealthandAge.com platform. The portal will be restructured for European markets, translated and launched as NovoViva in France, Germany and Spain. Additionally, the company plans to launch a portal designed for healthcare professionals, where they can share information with each other in a secure environment.

Drupal CMS was used as the core open source component due to its performance as a modular platform. Leveraging the standard capabilities of Drupal modules and extending them for customization, we assembled a site framework that provides Boomerang with all of the major features that the company desired. For site authors, this includes the ability to author, organize, feature and optimize site content. Site administrators were given more controls to edit, publish and manage articles, multimedia and advertisements, as well as to moderate group discussions. For visitors, this includes the functionality to search site content, rate and comment on articles, join discussion groups, change text size and easily navigate the site.
With the health portal’s core demographic in mind, we developed several key components to aid in site navigation, including a “breadcrumb” which shows a visitor exactly where he or she is located on the site, navigation menus that change colors once they are activated and an option to increase or decrease font size for easier readability.
Clinical trial modules, which have a direct impact on Boomerang’s business operations, were designed to take visitors to interactive forms that screen potential trial participants. Visitors determined as viable study candidates, after providing their home address, are shown an interactive map with the locations of the nearest study centers.
We developed content management controls to allow site authors and editors to easily upload, edit and feature new site content — keeping information fresh, timely and relevant. Metatags and categories offer the functionality to logically organize articles and multimedia content, controlling where information appears on the site. New file systems for inserting images and video were developed that allow for simple inclusion of dynamic content.
Automated controls were implemented, offering specified levels of administrative access to personnel based on their rank and responsibilities. Articles can appear in multiple areas of the site, such as within a given topic and as a featured article on the home page, with only a few commands from site administrators.

With the support of our expertise in cloud computing, Boomerang deployed HealthandAge.com using Amazon EC2 cloud hosting.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Happy New Year

Happy New Year and best wishes for a prosperous and successful 2010 !

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Magento in Switzerland

Magento is a very promising, and rapidly growing Open Source e-commerce solution. Its incredible flexibility and control over content, functionality, and visual aspects guarantees a unique user experience that is beneficial to both visitors and from an online store management point of view.
In addition Varien offers commercial support for Magento. Varien is a US based company with a R&D center in Ukraine. But what about Magento in Switzerland?

This post is listing a few Swiss Magento references and Partners.

The main Magento partners in Switzerland are: Unic and Cross Agency. Other companies present in Switzerland are Magento partners as SQLI and Optaros. Some small player as WnG and dotBase have some Magento experience. You will also find few freelancer with some strong experience (contact me if you are looking for some).

I was not able to find many Swiss Magento references:
1. Korean and Russian eShop of Nespresso (by Cross Agency)
2. German site of QCNS Fribourg (by Optaros)
3. Wander-Ovomaltine (by Unic)
4. Vinome (by WnG)

I will try to update this list as soon as possible, keep tuned and checkout Magento Forum

To get more information on Magento contact Open Web Technology the Magento Partener

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Who do we trust ?

The search strategies are very different within Europe: while in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, people are looking for info on a concept or topic, in France they would first trust ... a media brand.

In France the top 3 searches are: Le Monde, Figaro and TF1 (the three big media groups!)
In the rest of Europe it is: Michael Jackson, Obama and the Swine Flu.

This shows clearly that in France people trust their media groups. What about the other countries who do they trust and what is the future of their media groups?

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Online Media - New generation of electronic readers

Five of the world’s (US) biggest publishers are preparing to launch a joint venture this week aimed at regaining control of their content on the new generation of online reading devices.

These 5 majors have decided to build their own digital newsstand. Cosmopolitan, Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The Wall Street Journal and many other titles and will soon be available online from a common portal where it will be possible to purchase an item, a copy or even subscribe to a magazine in its printed or virtual. Online purchases can then be read regardless of the medium of reading (electronic book, cell phone or computer). Ultimately, this service should allow the reading of books, comics and even blogs.

Will the new platform be the new standard for news content as iTune is for music. This at least is the bet of John Squires, Executive Vice President and Digital Futurist for Time, Inc.

The content will be formatted for use on the iPhone, BlackBerry and other digital devices as Apple Tablets. The new solution will create a shopping experience that people are already familiar with – “a store where you can buy new and distinct iterations of The New Yorker or Time. Print magazines will also be for sale.”

Thursday, December 10, 2009

What is your digital footprint?

It's no longer enough to think of your websites as destinations - you've got to think of the myriad of ways of getting your products, services, and content in front of users - where they are.

Individuals want to determine where, when and in what format they interact with your company. Until now, companies have been forced to take a custom, create once-use once approach for each microsite, iphone app, Facebook app, flash tool, rich media ad, widget, etc. This is a costly approach to create, cumbersome to manage and makes it very challenging to capture engagement level analytics and conduct A/B and multi-variate testing in-market.