The Crown Room, an event and wedding facility located in Rogers, Minnesota has released their new website from Five Technology.  The Crown Room is a premier event and banquet facility with a full offering of event services to accommodate groups up to 400 people for weddings, meetings, conferences, dinner galas and more.

This website design project involved:

• Custom web design
• Built on the SMC for content management
• Photo gallery and video tour
• Search engine optimization
• Custom WordPress blog
• Various flash elements
• Custom drop down navigation menu

We’re excited to work with The Crown Room’s exceptional offering and staff.  Check out the new website and consider their facility for your next event location.

• http://www.thecrownroomrogers.com

Five Technology is excited to announce the launch of TheHuntingAuthority.com web project.  This hunting community website combined a great web design interface with a ton of features.

Bringing Social Interaction To The Duck Blind
The guys behind The Hunting Authority came to us with the goal of being the best website an avid hunter and outdoors person could find.  Great design, great content, great features and most of all, a voice for the hunter.

We jumped at the challenge to build user profiles so that visitors to the site could create their own profile and interact with each other.

Here are some of the social features we built into the website:

• Account creation with screen name
• Ability to add/edit a bio
• Ability to designate hunting interests, areas and the ability to search other members with similar interests
• Status area to announce what you’re up to
• Bulletin board to leave comments on other members profiles
• Photo gallery to add your own hunting photos
• Ability to embed YouTube or other 3rd party video players
• Ability to write your own blog articles and comment/respond
• Ability to rate and review guides, outfitters and gear
• Ability to show your favorite web links

We packed a ton of great interaction and community tools into the initial launch of the website and already have more features slated as the website takes off.  We built out all of these features on our content management platform.

Hunting Blog
The site features a hunting blog that already is packed with great hunting info, wild game recipes, dog training tips and more.

Setting up a custom blog design isn’t a big deal for us, but the fact we integrated the profile account creation and log-in with the blog was pretty great.  This made the user profile creation just a single log-in for the site and simplified their ability to comment on blog articles.  It’s nice to have your CMS and WordPress play together so nicely, for everyone’s benefits.

Guides & Gear: Give Your Review
Once registered, the website users have the ability to add, rate and review outfitters, hunting guides and the hunting gear they use to hunt with. Users can search for hunting guides and outfitters by searching states or Canadian provinces and then view detailed information.

Working Footer
Lately we have voiced our thoughts on website footers being important.  On this website we put both first, second and even some deeper levels of links and pages into the footer.  You’ll see more of this as we feel its a great usability feature.

Success In The Crosshairs
As you can see, this web design project was no small creation.  The website has many more features than what we touched on here.  If you are a hunter, we encourage you to check out TheHuntingAuthority.com and create a profile. We enjoyed the challenge of the project and look forward to continuing to build out more great features.

We can vouch that these guys are dedicated to having the best hunting website on the Interweb.  Great content, great features and giving those with the passion and knowledge a voice; that’s what The Hunting Authority is about.

We recently released a website redesign for OutWest, a family-friendly horse ranch, show and horse event organization in Minnesota.

OutWest had been on the Site Management Console web platform for over 5 years, but the growth of their business and interest in new web features brought them to explore a web redesign.  In meeting with OutWest’s owners and staff, we learned the new additions of horses for sale to their offering and their desire to further interact and push event information to their audience.

With the new web design we pushed more of the romantic western feel.  Earth tones, torn edges and leather textures were used to create a warm, inviting and western feel for the interface.

The website project entailed:

• Full interface web redesign
• New features for events, horses for sale
• OutWest Blog & RSS Feed
  
• Email marketing integration
• Enhanced on-page SEO

The client has already let us know their excitement with the site launch.  We think it’s always great to see our long term clients become even longer term.  No matter the need for a new design, new features or additions, the SMC can scale and adapt with them.

We’re looking forward to the great things OutWest will do with the new website.  Check it out at OutwestArena.com and give it a big “Yee-Haw!” for yourself.

Our latest website redesign brought a new design, stronger platform and business blogging to Iron River Construction out of Waconia, Minnesota.  Iron River is an exterior, remodeling and storm repair contractor servicing the Twin Cites, MN and greater area.

Iron River realized their past web design wasn’t cutting it.  It lacked in many areas so Five outlined a web redesign project to give them easy navigation, a clean design, enhanced content, an online quote request form and more.  The new site is well organized, search engine friendly and built on the SMC for easy management and content updates.

Iron River also realizes the benefits of business blogging and will be putting out great blog posts on their company, industry information, products, construction materials and more.  What a great way to build trust and interact with potential and current customers of your construction services. Make sure you check out the Iron River Construction blog.

Five had a great time remodeling this website and the owners and staff at Iron River were great to work with. Check out the new website and keep them in mind for your siding, roofing, window or construction needs!

I came across a blog post recently that stated web analytics should be called business analytics (sorry I forgot where!) and I couldn’t agree more. Yes, the tool is producing statistical information from your website, but it truly is providing stats, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses of your business.

I’m still amazed at the number of conversations where a business is asking for help in improving search engine rankings, but has no idea if they even have an analytic tool on their site measuring their current efforts. Wow. Businesses that have had a website for 10 years, but not one number to provide any measure of success or failure.

I can write on and on about how silly it is to IGNORE the valuable data a website statistic tool can put out, but let’s just look at these features and benefits if you’re on the path to correcting this for your website and business.

Analytics – Reasons & Tips to Start Now

1. There are many tools out there. Your web host likely has a basic one, Google Analytics is free and their are many forms of paid services and tools out there to get you started. Here is a big list of them.

2. Go past just the number of visitors and stop talking “hits”. Most tools have over 100 filters to begin with, but make sure you take a look at where you traffic is coming from, keywords used to reach you by search engines, the pages your users visit most, the pages users leave most and trends in click paths (what path users take moving on your site.)

3. Have more than one person tasked with viewing or reporting on your web statistics. Get it out in the open for questions and discussions with your staff. If you have a web provider, engage them in meetings on it.

4. You can advance quickly. Most analytic tools have so many features it’s unreal. Tracking just about everything you can imagine. With one of the tools we use, we can even track the  companies visiting and revisiting the website because I have tagged their IP addresses. (No , you can’t see what person, whew!)

5. You can track process. As I stated in mentioning click paths, you can see the most used routes and where users are getting lost. While this is VERY important with e-commerce sites, it also works for service oriented websites. You can build a funnel/path and track it so you can improve it.

So here is your plain English takeaway: Business Analytics are a voice, start listening to them. You obviously don’t ignore your financial data, sales data or employees performance, so don’t shut out your analytics! Listen to them, they’ll tell you great things to help your business succeed.

+ If you need help, of course we’re here for you.