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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