A New Home Page
When The Washington Post Company’s “New Homes Guide” made the
decision to develop a new and unique web presence for its New Homes
directory, to have a new-generation site that stopped unwanted
marketing interruptions like pop-up ads, it turned to Mediapulse in
Knoxville for the solution. And a solution is what the Post Co. got
– and more.
Today, the award-winning website –
www.newhomesguide.com --
is Metropolitan Washington’s highest-ranked new home website in
terms of both usage and in ease of use since it opened for business
in July 2003. As the Post Co. writes in the “About Us” area of the
site, “…The current site is not only a step forward in design, it
will find your new home communities literally 10 times faster than
before and allows visitors to register in order to receive a
multitude of benefits.”
In a nutshell, this was our challenge in the creation and
development of this web site:
New Homes Guide wanted to find better ways to reach consumers with a
web site that is unobtrusive and yet functional for everyone, and to
find a way to prevent the annoying pop-up ads prevalent on many
Internet sites. They wanted a site which offered a new form of
advertising that would give the visitors to the site the necessary
information they are interested in based on their criteria with a
straightforward, informative-driven presentation.
To meet the challenges, Mediapulse’s staff established the next
generation of ads designed to match the content of the site, making
it completely inconspicuous to the visitor. The ads change with the
demographics of the user or based on the user’s choices on the site
as they input information. With the new advertising in place, the
site is bringing in dollars without losing credibility with its
users because the content and the ads are consistent and there is
relevant information no matter where the user looks on the site.
Basically, the site allows advertisers to target specific audiences
through a proprietary ad-targeting system, which is beneficial to
the user and to the advertiser.
The New Homes Guide website has brought three major awards to
Mediapulse. It was honored in October with the 2004 International
WebAward Competition for its New Homes Guide website, winning the
prestigious Best of Industry award in the Publishing Website
category. And a month earlier, Mediapulse was honored with a Major
Achievement in Marketing Excellence (MAME) award in the Best Web
Site category for unique design and useful marketing techniques for
the New Homes Guide. It also won a gold ADDY award from the
Knoxville Advertising Federation for the New Homes Guide website in
the category of “Business-to-Consumer” competition.
Mediapulse’s president and chief executive officer is Scott Spaid,
who accepted the awards. His brother, Brian, is the firm’s senior
vice president of operations and creative director.
The advertising on the site combines the needs of visitors,
advertisers and the publisher, New Homes Guide, and is virtually
undetectable as “advertising.”
“The advertising we’ve developed isn’t obtrusive or flashy. It
conforms to the content of the site so users aren’t bombarded, but
rather provided additional information relevant to them,” said Brian
Spaid. “Users get more information on a topic that they’re already
interested in and advertisers are better able to target each
individual visitor, making it a win-win situation for everyone.”
“An Internet Ad Revenue Report, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers,
states businesses spent $5.95 billion in Web advertising alone in
2002. To ensure everyone gets their money’s worth, the ads need to
be effective and reach the right audience,” Spaid said. “In every
other type of advertising, ads are cultivated to target a specific
group of consumers, but the Internet is a new frontier, and it’s
taken a while to figure out exactly how to advertise to people
without clobbering them over the head with it.”
The versatility of the new ads benefits the Web publisher in a
number of ways. The site doesn’t lose credibility with visitors
because site content and ads are consistent and there’s relevant
information no matter where the visitor looks. The site also
integrates with the New Homes Guide’s other materials, including its
very popular print guide.
“Internet marketing has evolved in numerous ways, and companies that
are truly benefiting from their Web sites have learned that it must
have the same look and feel as their other marketing pieces,” said
Spaid. “When a site includes numerous ads from a variety of sources,
the design is often destroyed. But with this new style of
advertising, the Web publisher retains aesthetic control and the
look and feel of the site remains consistent.”
Scott Spaid said the biggest difficulty Mediapulse had to overcome
was how to increase the speed of the database look-ups for the
listing results. “The database is pretty big and with several search
criteria selected, we had to develop an engine that was fast and
efficient,” he said.
He added that they learned two lessons from this project, which was
three months in the definition and design process and six months in
the development phase.
“The first lesson we learned is to not assume that mail clients
adhere to standards properly when sending HTML emails to people who
use Macs. The other lesson was to increase the communications with
the client during the development process,” he explained. “Clients
typically don’t see anything new for weeks at a time when we are
deep in the process, and that can cause client anxiety.”
Mediapulse has also ensured that the site advertisers know exactly
where their advertising dollars are going.
“All New Homes Guide advertisers have the ability to log-in to a
dedicated area to see real-time reporting on the effectiveness of
all of their advertising. They can make decisions based on the
popularity of specific ads and integrate that information with their
offline marketing efforts,” said Spaid.
The site also allows advertisers to target specific audiences
through a proprietary ad targeting system. On the New Homes Guide
site a visitor looking for new homes in a specific area within a
chosen price range would, of course, see all the expected new homes
listings, but they would also see advertising catered to the same
area and price range criteria, all factors determined by the
advertiser.
As for the other features of the New Homes Guide Web site – it has a
fresh look, which includes Flash animation, vivid photographs and
neighborhood maps, all components that greatly improve the online
experience for visitors. Also, the site’s interactive features, such
as a mortgage calculator, mapped directions to properties and a
place to save customized searches will revolutionize home searching.
“This is definitely taking Internet advertising and Web site
usability to a new level. The consistency of the Web site ads
provide visitors with information they are looking for, but doesn’t
bombard them with flashy, ineffective ads--and the advertisers
connect more readily with their target audience,” Spaid said.
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