This post is about how you can save yourself (or your company) money by using free services.  When you think about the cost of all the services/software you currently pay for and the free alternatives you can easily save hundreds of dollars a year.

Email

Gmail happens to be my personal email account of choice.  By using filters to automatically tag emails from certain people or to auto-star emails from clients, it provides a ton of flexibility if you are willing to learn its basics.  They provide more space than you would probably ever need and they don’t have a pesky attachment maximum size of a couple megabytes.  Savings = $60.00+

Calendar

Google Calendar is a great full featured FREE calendar that can sync to just about any phone wirelessly (so if you make an appointment on the road, it’s automatically in your calendar when you get home).  Not …

Read More...

I am proud to announce our latest product, LeadSHIFT. LeadSHIFT was born out of necessity for Connected Web Solutions.  I always thought a CRM would be a good idea but we really didn’t need another place to track communications and contact details.  I tried a few CRM’s but I quickly realized that a CRM was not the right tool.

I wanted to track a handful of things (some of which were in CRMs and some were not).

1. Leads (Open, Won, and Lost)
2. Referral Sources
3. Project Types (web design, app development, hosting, etc)
4. Contact Types (phone, contact form submission, email, etc)

By using these 4 types of information, I could figure out

• Conversion rate of new leads
• Average number of days to convert a lead to a client
• Best referral sources (based on # of leads converted)
• Highest income generating referral source
• Most common projects
• Which types of

…

Read More...

We will be launching our lead conversion tracking app in the coming months and we want your help naming it!  Just answer the poll below to help.

…

Read More...

As an established web design agency, we are the individuals that design and build websites for a living.  We are the ones that are constantly reading up on usability and user experience and how best to increase conversions.  We are the ones with an understanding of solid design principles and color theory.  All too often, I get the feeling that clients forget that they  hired us to help them construct sites to help them succeed and meet their site goals.  It’s our job as the designers to nip this in the butt early.

Educate the client
Be sure from the beginning of the project that the client understands what you can do to help them.  Before showing them anything (even a wireframe) make sure they know that any feedback and criticism should be identified as a problem.  By identifying the problem, you can then provide them solutions that will be …

Read More...

After having the same look and feel of our company site for about 2 years, I thought it was time for a fresh look.  The content and organization did not need to change a ton but I did have some good ideas to make better use of the space and provide a better user experience for visitors.

A few quick stats in the last month since the redesign…

Pageviews: +40.26%
Pages/Visit: +33.64%
Bounce Rate:  -50.51%
Average Time on Site:  +24.82

These stats are not skewed by anything since I haven’t written any blog posts, launched any sites, or had any other new links since the previous month.  These are based on average traffic.

BEFORE

AFTER

Some of the noticeable changes are

• 12 column grid based design
• Minimalistic look
• Enhanced navigation with subtle jQuery animation (with graceful degradation in IE7 and IE6)
• Current page indicator
• Info heavy footer (with contact and

…

Read More...