Filed under: Click Optimize
Every now and then, you’ve got to do a little bragging. At Click Optimize, we’re lucky to have clients who we could be bragging about all the time. But that would get a little tiring for you guys, right? Right. So we try to hold it in until we have some serious news to share. And today we do.
Mungo Homes, one of our longest standing clients, has just been named America’s Best Builder by Builder Magazine. The award, which is voted on by a panel of past winners and other homebuilding pros, means Mungo stood out in customer service and quality, community and industry service, finance and operations, home design and construction as well as marketing.
Click Optimize is proud to provide the following marketing services for Mungo Homes:
- Facebook ads
- Pay-per-click
- SEO
- Social media consulting
We’re honored to have Mungo Homes as a client and congratulate the company on this well-deserved distinction. Way to go, Mungo!
Filed under: Click Optimize
Click Optimize, LLC is looking for an experienced full-time designer to create beautiful, compelling and engaging online experiences as part of our outstanding team.
The ideal candidate should have a high-end online portfolio, preferably with established client work. Experience in web development or front-end knowledge of HTML and/or CSS coding is a plus.
The full scope of responsibilities are:
- Design and assist with production of current and new web projects
- Design a wide range of creative assets — web design, e-mail marketing, landing pages, web related ads, print etc.
- Collaborate with other members of the design team, marketing department and external resources in the development of impactful design solutions
- Develop site architecture and recommend new website structure to meet online marketing strategies
- Contribute ideas and expertise through the marketing process from ideation to implementation
- Post web site content and digital assets using established standards
- Conduct testing of site pages and content in a variety of environments for browser and platform compatibility
- Collaborate seamlessly with members of the interactive department, as well as other teams within the creative department.
- Manage your time between multiple projects with an efficient and professional approach.
- Communicate effectively with project managers and clients to explain technical matters in a relatable way.
Required skills and experience:
- Proven ability to apply the principles of typography, layout, interactivity and color theory to brand visualization, online experience and print design.
- Experience designing interactive experiences that drive action.
- Strong visual style with a conceptual ability for large-scale interactive ideas.
- Experience maintaining existing websites with content management systems or HTML/CSS editing.
- Advanced knowledge of Photoshop
- Proficient in Illustrator, InDesign
- Development knowledge and basic HTML and CSS editing
- Bachelor’s degree in design
- Online portfolio
- 2-4 years experience
What’s in it for you?
- Competitive salary
- Fun atmosphere
- Paid vacation
- Health care compensation
This is a full-time and on-site role, so you must live near or be willing to relocate to Raleigh, NC. When applying, please be sure to include your resume and a link to your online portfolio. No phone calls please.
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
Today’s post was written by Josh Kinney, our Search Engine Marketing Manager.
If you search the web enough, you’ll notice Google implementing changes within its search results — and if you’re really lucky, you might just catch wind of an experimental change that could shed light on future permanent changes.
Last week I noticed something on Google Maps that stood out significantly. In the screenshot below you’ll notice a “place” appear on the map as usual, sans the usual red marker. This time, the marker is a bold purple color. This minor change took place only briefly. It was gone by my next search.
We can easily speculate that this difference in color is a new way to classify listings that appear on the map. For example, maybe Google is working on a legend to classify a local company versus a national chain with a local listing. Or perhaps Googlers are working on some other indicator that could be easily recognized by a color-code.
Of course, I can’t verify this. There’s nothing matching this on the web except an index of varying color markers that I found here. On the linked page, you’ll see a list of icons that can be used on maps, likely for the Google Maps API.
It’s understood that map icons can be changed in Google Adwords with location extensions. For instance, blue can be seen as the default marker with an Adwords ad that uses location extensions. But the purple marker is a bit of a Google phenomenon. I’ve personally never whitnessed a purple marker like this before.
Small blips like this make the job interesting for an SEO or online marketing firm. Nearly every day there are changes made or slowly being rolled out. Once you think you have it all figured out, Google will change their algorithms or throw something else into the mix. Just a couple months ago I first noticed signs of extended site links in organic results. These used to be simple links, but now include a mini description of the page, destination URL and full-sized link text. This feature, seen in the next screenshot, was initially something that popped up only periodically…now it’s a regular staple in the search results.
The moral of the story is, don’t get too comfortable in this industry. Adaptation will be one of the only constants.
Filed under: Click Optimize
Do you have a love for language? Geek out about words and grammar? Are you a stickler for spelling? We’re talking to you.
We’re looking for a full-time, in-house SEO Copywriter (emphasis on writer). While we expect our new wordsmith to have SEO experience (know and love keywords, titles, tags, URLs, etc.!), this is a writing job.
As one of our SEO Copywriters, you’ll be responsible for content development—creating website copy, press releases, blog posts and more. As we are an internet marketing company, web writing experience is expected.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
- Bachelor’s degree in journalism, communications or related field preferred
- 1+ year of SEO experience
- Understanding of SEO, SEM and social media
- Ability to manage and meet multiple deadlines
- Exceptional editing skills required
- Familiarity with AP Style preferred
- Experience with content management systems preferred
You can apply online…send us some writing samples too!
Filed under: Click Optimize
Big news: Yes, we’ve been busy building new websites for clients all over NC, but we’ve also been spending our time on something else — moving! We’ve said goodbye to our old offices on Creedmoor and have moved on (and up!) to a new office building on Blue Ridge Road. We’re still clicking and optimizing in Raleigh, just with more space to move around in as the company grows.
So, while we had many good years in the old office, there’s a lot to love about our new one. Here are a few of our favorite things:
- More space! Instead of doubling up in offices, we now have room to add some new faces to the team.
- All the exercise we get by walking laps around the office. Rolling-chair races, anyone?
- That new-office smell. Kind of like new-car smell, but less automotive and more…professional?
- How close we are to the State Fairgrounds — pretty sure we’ll be able to smell those deep-fried Oreos from here.
The new office address is 700 Blue Ridge Road Suite 107, Raleigh, NC 27606. Below we’ve included some photos of the new place – for more, stay updated via the Click Optimize Facebook page.
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Michelle and Heather at the Creedmoor Road office, packing for our move
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The entryway to the Creedmoor office in the process of being packed and moved
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Tim and Heather in the lobby of our new office
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Our new kitchen office in progress – we swear it doesn’t look like this now!
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The lobby area at our new Blue Ridge Road office
Filed under: Web Design
We’ve been seriously busy over here at Click Optimize, designing, developing, writing, SEO-ing and all that other good stuff we do daily. And thanks to all that hard work, we have some new websites to show off and share with you.
If you head over to our website portfolio, you’ll notice that there are quite a few new additions, including:
We update our portfolio every few weeks, so check back soon to see what we’ve been up to! We also announce new website launches on the Click Optimize Twitter feed.
Filed under: Branding, Click Optimize, Web Design
In a world where an online presence can make or break a business, you can’t afford to leave your internet marketing on autopilot. Cut-from-the-cloth websites, ads and marketing copy doesn’t set your company apart, especially when your competitors are using the same pattern.
You need a whole new approach. Custom-made marketing materials inspired by the way your company works. A website that reflects your company’s unique appeal, targeted to your specific audience, with detailed reports on marketing performance. A traditional print company can’t deliver that. It’s time to cut the Yellow Pages from your marketing spend.
Click Optimize has created cutyp.com to expound on our firm belief that the Yellow Pages can’t offer your business the online exposure it needs to succeed. In the web’s rapidly-changing environment, your marketing strategy needs to evolve. Adapt. Stand out.
We can help you get there. Visit cutyp.com to learn more.
Filed under: Click Optimize
It’s time to meet another member of your marketing team, this time from Click Optimize’s creative end.
Name: Andy Waldrop
Title: Art Director & Head Web Designer
On Twitter: @andy_waldrop
Hometown: Hillsborough, NC. Been in Raleigh-Durham, NC for 6 years now.
Education: Degree in Communications and Advertising, with a Marketing minor, from Appalachian State
Favorite blogs: Web Designer Depot and Techi
Favorite music to listen to while working: When designing, the Black Keys’ “Brothers.” When writing something, Andy McKee.
When not working at Click Optimize, what are you up to? Grilling, golfing, guitaring, spending time with my wife Amanda, skiing
Favorite local spot: The Station/The Southern Rail in Carrboro, NC
Favorite book: Into the Wild
Favorite movie: Motorcycle Diaries
Favorite food: Tom Yum Chili Oil Noodle Soup
Favorite gadget: iPod touch and gargantuan iMac
Best part of your job: Coming up with new ideas for clients and businesses and seeing them work. I like coming up with the design, but seeing it at work is even better.
One piece of design advice you’d like to give clients: Don’t try to do to much with your website. Clear communication is best — it’s important to know who your clients are and find the best way to reach them in a short amount of time.
Some of Andy’s favorite website designs:
For trickery: http://pomegranatephone.com/
For clean ecommerce: http://shoeguru.ca/
For branding: http://mailchimp.com
Favorite example of a successful marketing campaign: Nike World Cup commercial
Filed under: Uncategorized
In this series, I walk you through the basics of using your shiny new Drupal website. In part one, I explained what Drupal is and why it’s awesome. We’ll get into working with Drupal in the next section. Before we can walk the Drupal walk, however, we need to learn to talk the Drupal talk.
I have to learn a whole new language?
Not at all. Just a few terms. Drupal’s got its own parlance, a dialect, if you will. Some of it make sense; some if it takes some getting used to. If you learn it before diving in, though, you’ll have a much easier time navigating the maze and understanding how things work. Here are some terms to know:
- Node
- A node is a piece of content. It could be a page or a product, a blog post or a forum topic, or anything else you might think up. You can configure your site to have many different kinds of node types, and many modules creates new node types for you, but they’re all fundamentally the same: Discrete pages of content.
- Block
- If a node is the main course, blocks are the side dishes and appetizers. These appear around your content, often in sidebars, headers, or footers, and feature snippets of useful or interesting information. They may be menus, calendars, random pictures of your house cat Snuffles, you name it.
- Region
- Regions are places that blocks can live, such as the sidebar or header. These are defined by your…
- Theme
- A theme is a site design. Once themes are installed, they can be switched out with the click of a button without affecting the content.
- Module
- “I know kung fu.” Modules are packages of extended functionality for Drupal. For example, Drupal does not support ecommerce out of the box, but the Ubercart collection of modules allows it to do so. If you ever need your site to do something it couldn’t do before, you probably need a module.
- Taxonomy
- The taxonomy system controls how content on your site is categorized and tagged. Any time you need to organize products into a catalog, tag a blog post, or classify a suborder of nematode, you’ll use the taxonomy system to do it.
- Vocabulary
- A vocabulary is a set of taxonomy terms. In the previous example, we might use Catalog, Blog Tags, and Orders of Nematode as our vocabularies. Each vocabulary is configured separately and can describe any number of content types. You can even have more than one vocabulary for a content type (e.g., Catalog and Designer for products).
- Term
- Let’s ignore the irony of defining the term “term” for a moment. In Drupal, a term is a specific taxonomy descriptor that exists within a vocabulary. Extending the examples above, Dazy Dukes, Articles, and Mesorhabditis (a genus of nematode that exhibits an unusual form of parthenogenesis; see, you learned something today) might be some of the terms in each of our vocabularies.
- User
- Anyone using the site is a user. Users not logged in are called anonymous users. Users who are logged in are called authenticated users.
- Role
- Roles are groups of tasks and privileges given to specific users. For example, you might have a Site Administrator role. Any user with this role might then have the permission to modify the site as he or she sees fit. Any user may be assigned any number of roles.
- Permission
- A permission is a specific task or privilege a user is allowed to perform by virtue of their role(s) on the site. For example, a user with the Forum Moderator role might have the “administer forums” permission. Permissions are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users.
- User #1
- The very first user account on a Drupal site, created when the site is set up, is a special account called User #1. User #1 automatically has every permission, regardless of role. This way, there’s always a user on the site who can access anything that might need to be accessed.
- WYSIWYG
- What You See Is What You Get. This describes text areas on a Drupal site that have been enabled to act like word processors. If you make text bold in a WYSIWYG editor, it will appear as bold within the editor as well as on the page.
Note that this is only a partial list. Check out the Drupal website for a more complete (and technical) list of Drupal terminology.
My head hurts. The room is spinning.
Sit down. Take a breather. It’s a lot to take in, I know, but that’s it for now. So just rest, assimilate, and come back for the next installment on how to manage content in Drupal.
Filed under: Uncategorized
It’s shiny. It’s new. And it’s totally mind-boggling how much you can do with it. The only trouble is, you have no idea where to start. In this series, I’ll walk you through all the useful bits and bobs in your new Drupal site, how to use them, and all of the situationally useful extra stuff you can safely ignore 99% of the time.
But before we dive into that, let’s start with the basics.
“Drupal”? What in the world is a “Drupal”?
Yes, the name sounds silly. Apparently, it derives from the Dutch word for “drop”, which was the original name picked after “dorp” (the Dutch word for “village”) was unavailable as a domain. Yeah, I know; it doesn’t make the name any less silly. Just bear with me on this.
It isn’t the name that matters. It’s what Drupal does. Drupal is a full-featured content management system, or CMS, which is just a fancy way of saying it’s a platform for building large, dynamic websites that anyone (even mere mortals who lack vast computer mojo) can manage. You can create new content, manage user accounts, change out menu items, and do all sorts of other neat things without ever having to leave the comfort of the Drupal administration panel or mess with a lick of code.
Okay, sounds neat. But aren’t there a bunch of CMS’s out there? What makes Drupal so special?
It’s true. If you’re shopping around for a CMS, you have a lot of good options to pick from. And some of them are better than Drupal in some ways. WordPress, for example, is the best blogging CMS out there, and beats Drupal in the usability department hands down (sorry, Drupal, but it’s true). For smaller, simpler websites or straight blogs, WordPress is probably a better choice.
That’s just to say Drupal isn’t the only fish in the CMS sea, and that it isn’t the best fit for every website. It is, however, one of the biggest, best, and most badass. It’s like the great white of CMS’s. Here’s why:
- It’s feature-rich. Straight out of the box, Drupal handles a lot of the basic functionality any good website needs, like user management, version control, error logging, and site search. It does a great job of the mundane stuff; all you have to do is worry about customizing the pieces that make your site special.
- It’s modular. If there’s anything Drupal doesn’t do out of the box, 95% of the time, somebody’s built a module that handles it. Think of modules as packages of extra functionality. You upload them to your website, enable them in Drupal, and now Drupal knows how to do something brand new, like build webforms, track pages with Google Analytics, or let users send private messages to one another.
- It’s themeable. Okay, “themeable” isn’t necessarily a real word (or so my word processor is telling me). The idea is, in Drupal, design and content are separate. If you want to completely change the look of your site, all you have to do is modify the theme; the content stays right where it is. This makes your life easier and your site more agile
if changes ever need to be made when changes inevitably need to be made.
- It’s open source. Chances are you’ve heard the term but never really had a chance to appreciate what it means. Open source basically means that a piece of software is free for anyone to use and customize (i.e., the “source” code is “open” to the public). This means Drupal is free to download, install, and upgrade, keeping development and maintenance costs down. It also means that there’s a worldwide community of unpaid enthusiasts constantly bug-checking and extending upon Drupal. That’s where all those nifty modules come from. Did I mention that most of those are free, too?
- It’s got a fantastic ecommerce engine: Ubercart. As if it didn’t already do a lot, Drupal is a terrific ecommerce platform when paired with Ubercart. You can make catalogs, manage products, process orders… the whole shebang. Like Drupal itself, it’s hard to list all of the things Ubercart does right out of the box.
Drupal sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?
Like I said before, Drupal’s great, but it’s not the end-all, be-all. For all of its versatility, the backend can take some getting used to. In fact, the word “labyrinthine” comes to mind. It isn’t that you can’t do a lot with it; it’s that it isn’t always clear how to get in, get the job done, and get out, all while avoiding the minotaur.
Don’t worry, though; that’s what the rest of this series is for. Now that you know what it is and why it’s awesome, I’ll walk you through how to use it. Next up, learning to speak the Drupal lingo.
Posted on January 6th, 2012 by Hannah
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