I’ve taken a position at the excellent marketing research publisher MarketingSherpa. My position as Internet Director basically means I’m responsible for -
- 3 websites with several thousand pages of content
- an eCommerce system (shopping cart)
- web analytics, traffic, sales tracking
- create a new homegrown integrated system to manage content, sales, customers, contacts, research, events, marketing, and just about every other thing we touch
- 8 weekly email newsletters
- 2 busy blogs
- and a Partridge in a pear tree…
In the 4 months (yeah I know this post is way over due) I’ve gotten my hands in just about everything.
Email Eye Tracking
The day I started I found out I had just a few hours to get 6 creative email samples ready for live user eye tracking studies by our friends at www.eyetools.com. We compared HTML email designs of things like single vs. multiple product shots, use of large graphics vs. mostly text, sidebars on left vs. right. We measured where the users looked, how long they looked, and if and where they clicked. Let me just say WOW the results were very interesting; I was quite surprised in some cases. You want the data? Well go buy the guide, we do this research for a reason. ;-)
New SherpaStore Shopping Cart - Now with Web Standards
The biggest project has definitely been the redesign of the SherpaStore shopping cart with web Standards goodness. The store launched Thanksgiving week after four months of work squeezed into two. This is the first time I’ve had to deal extensively with porting over dreadful home rolled CMS content to a new system. Does this look familiar?
<font color=black><div class=”headline”>Page Headline
<li>This
<li>is really
<li>a big mess
</div>
Yikes! I can’t praise the Xstandard editor enough for how helpful it was in cleaning up this kind of code into well-formed XHTML goodness. I like it so much that I’m even willing to put up with the fact that I can’t use it on my Mac, so you know it’s good (they say a Mac version is coming). The design was basically kept the same (we’ll fight that battle later) and won’t be winning any awards, but usability was the focus and these improvements were made.
- Pages are 30-50% smaller
- entire design easily controlled through a CSS file
- new slug based SEO friendly page names
- Much better SEO throughout
- new CMS built ground up
- template system built in the style of WordPress
- Very nice site search through AtomZ integration
- streamlined checkout process to reduce cart abandonment
- and it even validates! (at least it did tonight at 9:27pm)
The new templated content management system was built by our php genius Christian Vanek after I turned him on to the WordPress way. So now I have a set of functions calls I can manipulate the presentation layer with in very flexible ways. The business logic layer is completely abstracted and either layer can be manipulated with out touching the other. We can also do A/B testing with different templates, see live data in designs under development, and create unique Landing Pages on the fly.
Oh yeah and a few cartoons
One day it was decided that cartoons for a just about to be launched marketing campaign were actually pretty terrible. So that meant I had a week to find a new cartoonist, get 10 new cartoons drafted, and set up the campaign to fulfill as 10 days of automated emails.
Well I was lucky enough to find Dan Rosandich of www.danscartoons.com and he pulled all nighters with me to get the cartoons done in record time. The campaign ended up pulling in several thousand leads, so all in all it was a success.
Lots More to Come
I love this job. I can touch just about every kind of technical marketing/online communications arts there is. So what’s next? We’ll there is the redesign of www.marketingsherpa.com, two new WordPress Blogs to launch, HTML newsletters to redesign with CSS… and then there is always next year.
I am new to your blog, and I love what I see! Your job sounds awesome. Good luck with that! I can’t wait to see your future posts!
Just followed the link from the Sherpa email. Good write up!
It’s nice to have another perspective on the inner workings of sherpa. And it sounds like they (you) are dealing with the same types of issues that the rest of us are.
Pass on my best for the holiday season to Anne, Carol, and everyone else at Sherpa for continuing to do a great job.
The site continues to remain impressively relevant which is why we continue to recommend it to anyone we run into.
I’d like to see the search engine? I couldn’t find it on the Sherpa site. I know Atomz is good, I was just wondering where you’ve used it.
You’re like the Minister of Information for us marketers. Thanks for keeping an eye on what’s coming down the pike and what works already. Performance is the name of the game!
Congratulations!
Hi Steve, thanks for the holiday wishes. The Atomz search is only at http://www.sherpastore.com right now, but it will coming in the new year with a MarketingSherpa.com redesign. Stay tuned!
Came by following the link from sherpa email newsletter.
But its nice, i m getting a lot of information from sherpa newsletter and from now onwards will wait for your next post.
Best of luck
Nice one Scott! You seem to have your hands full, I wonder if you have a 25 hour day. Its good to note that a lot of value is coming on the table for what you do, so don’t stop Brother, not even with a gun to your Head! And don’t change your ways too. And if you must change, be like the wine that gets better with age, because like a Volvo Ad copy says: “beautiful places are often at the end of rugged roads”
All that and you STILL have time to write a blog? I’m guessing you have no children (or a very busy wife, ha ha!).
Sounds like a dream job. Sherpa rules!