What is the purpose of your website? Is it to tell everyone where you went to college? How many years you have been an expert? Or… is it really to convert a stranger into a customer?

Better still, your website should simply get a stranger to start a conversation with you. Once you begin that conversation - either through a phone call, email, blog posts/comments or online chat - you have a much better chance of turning that conversation into a customer.

When developing the strategy for your website, focus on what a successful conversion looks like. To us, a conversion is when someone who goes to our website either picks up the phone and calls us or completes the contact form.

With that in mind, make sure the other stuff on your website doesn’t get in the way of the real goal: conversion.

How can you benefit from Web 2.0 technologies? Here are just a handful of the many possibilities of Web 2.0 that you can harness to serve your business:  

• Blog. By starting a company blog you will be able to communicate with your customers in a more direct fashion and continue to keep in touch with them.
• Forum. Forums are an effective way to give your customers the chance to contact you with their problems, feedback or opinion about your company and its products and/or services.
• Collaboration Tools. Online collaboration tools are reshaping the way companies do business because they take communication and teamwork to a higher level, thus improving the efficiency of your operations.
• Podcasts and Videocasts. Podcasts (audio recordings) and videocasts (or simply videos) offer incredible opportunities to reach your customers. For instance, you can make podcasts and videocasts about the ways to use your products and/or services. This will help your customers understand important facets of your business and will significantly decrease the number of support calls.
• RSS Feeds for News. RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication) is another way to reach your customers. RSS allows customers to subscribe to news, so when you have something important to tell them (i.e., you have opened a new shop or launched a new product), RSS will inform your customers right away.

These are just a few of the many ways in which you can use Web 2.0 in your business. Depending on your type of business, you can use many more Web 2.0 technologies in addition to the basic ones we have suggested here.

McCallion Staffing Specialists re-launched its website with a fresh look spearheaded by a new logo, new vibrant color scheme, new layout and updated content. In addition, the website utilizes World Wide Web Communication’s proprietary content management system, ZipEdit™.

With ZipEdit™ you can edit the pictures, text and links on your website while protecting the rich framework of navigation menus, programming and design elements - and it saves the changes in real-time. It also creates a backup copy, so if you make a mistake you can “rollback” to any previously saved version of the content.

McCallion Staffing, begun in 1979, is a full service staffing agency, located in Montgomeryville, PA.  McCallion’s business philosophy is based on a client-focused approach. They take the time to learn about their clients’ individual needs and look for long term, mutually beneficial business relationships based on honesty and integrity. As a family owned corporation whose owners are actively involved in the day-to-day operations, McCallion genuinely cares about client satisfaction. Most of McCallion’s clients have been with them for more than ten years, and their number one source of new business is through referrals.

You have probably heard the term “Web 2.0” many times, but perhaps you have not paid attention to it. This is quite natural; for a non-techie “Web 2.0” does not mean much. But actually, Web 2.0 offers wonderful new tools for marketing your company on the Web, and you will certainly want to take advantage of it.

What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 has many definitions, which vary from complex to very complex, but actually Web 2.0 is a collection of trends that have drastically changed and improved the Web experience you can offer to your clients. Web 2.0 technologies include blogs (online personal journals), wikis (online encyclopedias), podcasts and videocasts, social networks, social bookmarking services, RSS feeds, collaboration technologies and many other new technologies, which have made the Web a better and more interesting place.

How can Web 2.0 Work for you?
How can you benefit from Web 2.0 technologies? In my next post I will suggest a handful of the many possibilities of Web 2.0 that you can harness to serve your business.

The Family Hope Center, located in Blue Bell, PA, is comprised of a team of child brain developmentalists, physicians and other specialists who help parents heal their children with special needs.

The Mona Leeza Spa and Salon, located in Atco, NJ, offers a spa experience unlike any other.  Close enough to the major metropolitan cities in the northeast but secluded enough to be relaxing, the Mona Leeza Spa and Salon provides its clients an atmosphere that is both convenient and soothing.

Both websites – The Family Hope Center and the Mona Leeza Spa and Salon – re-launched their sites using ZipEdit™ as the content management (CMS) system.  Although World Wide Web Communications did not design either site, it was able to take over hosting and implement ZipEdit™ into the sites. With ZipEdit™, the site administrators do not need to learn HTML or any web design software, yet they are able to edit their sites immediately in real time, keeping the content and photographs fresh and entertaining.