Step 1. Go Window Shopping

WordPress, with it’s robust features and abundance of widgets and plugins, can give your blog great features and save you the time and money in the process. Is your company public? Use the stock widget. Are you looking to connect to Facebook? Use Facebook Connect. Do you want to have users follow and friend you on Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter? Use the Social Share Widget.  Do you want users to be able to find a location? Use google maps. Need your site to go mobile? Check out WPtouch to transform your WP site to an iphone, android, you name it application. What about SEO? Try All in One SEO pack. I could go on….and on….

Step 2.  Harness the power of WP

WordPress has many features that enable you to build a more robust blog, but you have to know how to use them. This is where understanding the technology can lead to better utilization of it to meet your needs. Even by simply understanding the variety of post-types you can have (blog, event, jobs) you can use WP to create a whole host of dynamic content. Use categories to help organize information into a logical navigation structure on the front-end. Once you know what you can do, create your architecture with functionality in mind: Google maps on Contact Us page; Stock Quote widget to enhance your investor page. Moving on to step 3…

Step 3. Architect a User Interface that showcases your functionality

Organize the components of your blog and place them where the user will expect to find them. For Search functionality my mouse is in the top right area before my eyes are. Tags Clouds/Lists, Category lists and any functional tools in areas where users can access them easily. Make your site “Widget-Ready” so you can add a widget without calling up your design team.

Step 4.  Create a design that shows that “Walkin’ Talkin’ Personality”

Is your Company Personality Fun? Serious? Geeky? Extreme? Apply those design elements that you probably restricted just a little bit elsewhere on your site (go on, admit it) and use your blog to jump overboard. Your users will love it. Here, they get to know the real you.

Step 5. Ready, Set, Build! Implementation & Testing

You’ve outlined what Plugins and features you are going to implement, you’ve created your architecture around these features, you took a chance on your design to make it reflect your personality, now all that’s left to do is build it! Luckily, a WordPress blog can be up and running in no time. If you have an existing WordPress blog you can export/import content into your new site in a matter of minutes. If you are new to WordPress, it’s very user-friendly and you won’t even need a “for dummies” book. Create/Edit/Stylize content with ease. Upload images and stylize them too if you want. Are you accepting comments? Turn them on. Really, it doesn’t get any easier than this tool. All that’s left to do next is open up the hosting gates and go live!

• Prototypes allow us to show fast results to the client
• Prototyping legalizes experimentation and many revisions because it’s inexpensive to alter
• Prototypes are easy to grasp because they simulate how the final site, tablet or mobile app will work
• They can work as a common reference, and bring a disparate team together
• Users, developers and the clients will focus on content, structure and functionality, and will not be distracted by the details of graphic design
• Prototypes make it possible to get a formal approval of the design from both programmers and the client before you proceed to the development stage
• They make it possible to start usability testing at an early stage in the development process

Companies need to use digital channels to create conversations with their customers, employees, and partners. Almost as important, a strategy for empowering employees to use digital channels needs to be in place.

At Consensus we think about the heuristic needs of the Customer Experience through a strategic approach that includes four important dimensions:

- Dialog
- Relevance
- Liquidity
- Consistency

We are tuning digital channels to support fundamental brand needs. That is the higher mission of successful companies.

Whether you are an agency executive, brand manager, or IT director…if you are not thinking about how to digitize your experiences you will quickly fall behind. The Customer Experience will always be important, as well as a source of competitive advantage.

A sales lead-generation tool, the Match Your Move game is built using Flash and is fully integrated with the Sharepoint content management system. And talk about scalable – by enabling the playing card text and images to be content managed, this game can have a new theme each quarter or for special promotions.  And, don’t forget to tell your friends about the game with the social sharing links to see if they can top your score!

To overcome this hurtle there is a simple yet effective exercise that ends with what we call a User Goal Index. By the name alone you can derive two important facts about the exercise: it is about users (or site visitors) and what they want to accomplish when visiting a Website.

To create a User Goal Index with our clients, we begin with a User Goal Index Workshop to gain agreement on:
1. Who are their users (or in other words site visitors)?
2. What are their goals?
3. How can we (the IA/UX team) help users achieve these goals?
Within the workshop, client teams are created based on important user segments (i.e. customers versus prospects) and presented with pre-defined user statements (i.e. I want to find a store in my town) along with several “wild cards.” Teams are challenged to “walk in their users shoes” and over a series of several rounds make trade-off decisions to create a final set of 5-7 goals.
This set then becomes the driver for making subsequent decisions on features (i.e. a store finder) and functions, which are done using a similar process as above.

At the conclusion, teams have agreed on top user goals, how they are prioritized, and what features or functions might be necessary to support those goals. Now, all teams have a consistent set of user guidance to operate within.

So you are probably asking yourself, okay, what’s the big deal? The big deal is simplification. In the end, our clients have a clearer understanding of how to map their business objectives to their customers’ needs to design a user interface that answers the age old question every customer wants the chance to answer, “How can we help you today?”

Our firm is named Consensus because we believe this is the most challenging part. With eBusiness budgets easily reaching into the millions and digital revenues far beyond that, how can you not plan?

Digital strategy is often the combination of several inputs. For each of our strategic engagements we pick and choose from the right ones in order to diagnose, distill, and innovate. These inputs include:

• User-Goal Indexing
• Competitive Landscape Analysis
• Stakeholder Interviews
• Primary and Secondary Data Analysis for Audience Profiling
• Expert Reviews (Usability and Liquid Brand)
• Business Case Development
• Requirements Planning

Whether for a Website, broad social media initiative, or future-proofing your digital experiences, we distill the above into a unique “playbook” for each situation. This becomes your guide for building holistic digital experiences and a central point for building consensus across audiences, business objectives, and measurement.

We approach our work with rigorous methodology and a sense of client-first attitude.

Information Architecture – For years, “Information Architecture” meant some screen mock-ups on a page. Now, it is essential to combine wireframes, interface behaviors and prototyping. We work with our clients on the HotGloo platform to model what to do, what not to do, and how to get it done.

User Experience Design & Development – Customers want more than just a site these days. They want experiences that are consistent, easy to use, and personal. This takes a commitment to process, technology acumen, and keeping up with all of the changes. Whether building a micro site, mobile site or transactional Website, work with Consensus to apply best practices across the application development life-cycle.

Social Media Services – Employing social media requires a commitment to your customers, but the rewards can be amazing – better customer relationships, faster product innovations, and deeper brand loyalty. Before diving into social media learn from our experiences building social presence.

At Consensus, we don’t miss a single tech trend. We harness emerging technology — and drive results for our clients. Consensus invests our time and money in digital R&D. A result of this investment is captured in the our current technology tool set:

WordPress is an Open Source software which means there are no licensing costs and it combines content management, blogging and media management all in one smartly organized and extensible framework.

Our choice for e-commerce is one of the most respected e-commerce platforms available today – Magento. Magento provides an unprecedented administrative area providing our clients with the ultimate control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their e-Commerce sites.

If video is important to your experience (and we hope it is), our platform of choice is Brightcove. As a Brightcove solutions partner, we are experts at uploading and encoding, organizing and creating a customized video experience.

As one of Adobe’s first solutions partners, we understand the importance of a great user experience. When it comes to e-commerce, nobody offers a set of tools as robust as Adobe’s Scene7. Adobe Scene7 is a hosted solution for managing, enhancing, publishing, and delivering dynamic marketing assets to the web, mobile, email, Internet-connected displays, and print.