The Ocean Agency

Our web design agency is proud to present our latest site to launch: NNPResidential.com. NNP Residential is an apartment and condominium management service that rents and maintains the properties of Magellan Development, one of Chicago’s biggest development firms. Including luxury buildings like the new Aqua, The Tides, The Shoreham and 2555 N. Clark, the highly functioning website had to have the same simplicity and allure of the company’s properties.

The NNP Residential site features guides to Chicago’s nightlife, art scene, shopping districts and other citywide highlights. Additionally, the site presents tons of information for the properties’ potential buyers, renters and homeowners, but it’s organized in a way that allows even the newest user to become informed without getting overwhelmed. Complete with photo galleries, a blog and a rewards program, the site embodies the experience of the company’s brand. The ultimate Chicago rental experience begins at NNPResidental.com.

It’s Friday the 13th, and there’s a full moon out tonight. But our web design company is bringing you links to bring you good luck in your web design endeavors!

If you’re a design and copy writing isn’t your stronges suit, Web Designer Wall offers some good tips to help you write right.

Pro Blog Design shows you how to market your own blog by showing what’s coming up next, and we like it. 

We Function gives tips on how to use Wordpress to your best advantage. We’re taking notes– you should be, too.

Get inspired by Six Revisions, who this week shows us some great retro and vintage web designs.

And finally, if typography is your thing, check out this post on Just Creative design; it documents the 100 best fonts of all time.

And that’s it folks. Have a lucky Friday the 13th!

Small businesses should be driving new customers towards their business in any way they can, these days. So why are so many small business foregoing the best way to market themselves on the local level? Creative web design and a reserved online marketing campaign expose potential customers to your website in a way that no other medium can rival. This article explains why small business owners might be missing the opportunity.

The wildest part about it all is that small business owners themselves use search engines (or at least 82% of them, according to this blog).  So why do they relegate themselves to the virutally unused yellow pages for advertising to potential clients? If you want to be found by people looking for your services, having a well optimized website that represents your small business is the first step.

Seach engines allow users to isolate exactly what they need and find who provides it, especially on a local scale, and local, highly-targeted traffic is exactly what small business websites need. If your small business doesn’t have a lot of money to spend of advertising, consider an advertising method that is more than just a business expense. Online business development isn’t an ad you just put out into the world; it’s a living and growing expansion of your business. A developed web presence elevates the quality of your interaction with customers, which eventually betters the quality of your business. 

If your small business is part of the 91% of companies that are unsatisfied with their online marketing efforts, make sure you hire a online business development company than can expand you horizons and not limit your online growth with predictable strategies.

In response to this post on Conversation Marketing, our SEOGroup discussed 10 reasons why SEO is not like bacon, but rather like cupcakes.  Well, we think creative web design is a little more like cookies. Here are our 10 reasons why.

1. Well, of course, there are tons and tons of varieties. Oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle, pecan sandie. Ecommerce, flash-based, social network. Your absolute favorite kind might not be the best choice for goal you’re trying to achieve (or the meal you’re finishing with dessert!).

2. Both run the range from simple to elaborate. Cookies can be simple (chocolate chip) or insanely difficult to execute. (Have you ever tried any of Martha Stewart’s cookie recipes? Yeah. They’re hard.) Web design can be simple, and good. Or simple and bad. Or elaborate and bad. Or elaborate and great. A practiced web design company will serve your needs better, just like an experienced cook will whip up the best cookies, no matter the skill level needed. 

3. You can buy them both premade, but they might not be as good. I don’t think anyone will argue against the fact that homemade cookies are better (possible exception to rule: Girl Scout Cookies). Similarly, you can buy a template web design, but it just fails to compare to a custom-made site.

4. It isn’t always about how pretty they are. Yes, we’d love it if every website was a beauty to behold. But sometimes, a website that is plain in design may function better for your customers. Similarly, just because some cookies may not look like they came straight from the bakery doesn’t mean they aren’t delicious!

5. Sometimes, less is more. We probably all went through the phase where we loved the cookies from the bakery that had cream filling and sprinkles and chocolate chips and ice cream on top. But perhaps, as your taste became refined, you found yourself craving a simple sugar cookie instead. Flashy websites lose their luster, too– especially if they don’t function well.

6. Sometimes, less is more, again. You know what happens when you a whole box of Oreos. Stomachache. If your company has multiple websites that aren’t tied by a common design, or too much irrelevant content on your website, you may be giving your users too much info (and a headache, too). 

7. This might be predictable, given the subject, but… you don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many people adding to your tried-and-true cookie recipe might ruin the finished product. Too many opinions on your online identity might take you too far from your established brand. Keep true to your original recipe– the brand that made your company successful in the first place.

8. In baking and online design, you need customer responses. You’ll never know if your website is functioning well if you don’t track its performance with your users. And you’ll never know if that dash of cinnamon was the missing ingredient if you don’t let your consumers (ha) give you a little feedback.

9. Have a sense of humor. On a website, a little humor injected into the design, whether on the about page or the 404 error message, goes a long way to engage your users. And cookies always taste better if you get to lick the bowl and make a mess. You may be laughing, but it’s true.

10. Finally, it’s about a complete experience. The best cookies look good, make the house smell great, and have a satisfying crunch you can hear when you take a bite. The best websites are more than just copy and design– they are an interactive experience for users. 

And that’s it! Now, can someone explain to us how online marketing is like a great steak or how quality content is like a fine wine?

Corporations are constantly tweaking their image to the public. From new advertising campaigns to logo redesigns to slogan changes, a company’s brand must be able to adapt to changing markets to survive. Our web design agency relies on adaptibility in design and in branding to make our work valuable and relevant.

This article from Instant Shift, and our own recent redesign, inspired us to rethink adaptability. If these 20 successful corporations can alter their brand so much over the past 100 years, but keep their integrity, your company should be able to as well, no matter its size. A great time to make changes to your brand identity is during the building or redesigning of your website. Your online platform exposes you to tons of new customers; making sure your image and representation is perfect in that platform is key. So what better time is there to make sure you are emobdying your brand with a current logo, design scheme, and image?

A simple web design company might not cut it for a complete overhaul of your image. However, an online business development agency can build your new identity online while also refining your image and branding. As you gain new users who can have interactive and memorable experiences with your company in their first visit to your website, you’ll show them exactly the image you want to. 

A website is simply an extension of the representation of your brand. Each aspect of a site– the design, the copy, and the experience– should reflect your business. And you should have a web design company that understands that.

You might already be aware that our online business development company has an online marketing and SEO department with their own website, SEOGroup.com.  The SEOGroup website features our popular free SEO evaluation tool, which allows you to track your site’s search engine ranking for up to three keywords.  As an additional bonus, your reports are saved forever, so you can track your progress and see what online marketing techniques are making a difference.

Unlike many other free tools available online, you can use our SEO company’s evaluation tool as many times as you’d like, so there is no need to limit your usage.  Check it out today!

After email, search is the most common online activity – 99.5% of users are searching for something on the web. Are they finding your business? And what keywords are they using to get to your website?  Our web design company understands that building a business online requires more than just a nice looking website – you need to drive traffic to that site as well.

Forbes magazine recently featured an article on the importance of building a web presence that is easy for your customers and prospective customers to find in the search engine results. According to a recent Nielsen report, 63% of consumers turn to the internet first when they are researching products or services, and 82% of them start with the search engines. However, only 44% of small businesses have websites, and less than half of them spend more than 10% of their marketing budget online.

Therefore, as a business owner, the number one way that your company can be discovered by potential customers is through the search engines, particularly the organic search results (which are the main listings on the left side of the results page, as opposed to the sponsored results which appear on the right – the majority of users recognize that these are advertisements so they avoid clicking on them).

Accordingly, optimizing your website for relevant keywords (that people actually use – avoid industry jargon or overly formal language) and developing an online marketing campaign that will position and maintain your listing on page #1 of the search results for these keywords is very possibly the most powerful way to connect with your target audience.

Our online business development agency is excited to announce the launch of our new website, www.theoceanagency.com.  We’ve always been more than just a web design company, and our redesigned website reflects all the services and solutions that our company offers, including branding, search engine optimization & online marketing, and custom web design.  Of course, our new site features our complete web design and branding portfolios as well our online marketing case studies, and we can’t forget our company blog with all the latest online business news, tips, and techniques.

Since we opened our doors in 2003, we’ve known that in order to succeed online, a business needs more than just a website – they need traffic, and they need that traffic to convert.  Therefore, they need websites that are not only highly useable and visually attractive, they need to communicate the right message to their visitors.  We believe that our new website communicates our message much more accurately than the previous design; it is sleek and intuitive, making it simple for our users to discover everything The Ocean Agency has to offer.