Coast Radar was faced with a problem that many other websites are also struggling with. The whole idea that visitors are using different sized devices and expect a tailored experience. At first we worked on a main website, mobile website and iphone application but this just became too expensive and complicated to keep in sync.

After listening to what the users were saying we decided on a completely new version of the website.

The beta is a mechanism where we can share our new vision and still have time to take on-board people’s comments.

At a high level the changes of the new website are:

• Clearer navigation outside of maps.
      We have provided a new text link navigation system where you start at a continent, then look at countries, then states, then actual listings.
• People who enter at a beach listing from the search engine said it is long winded to see other elements close by.
      We have added a breadcrumb at the top of a page labelled “You are at :: ” where the green parts are links to allow you to easily move backwards and forwards. This means you can easily move up from an entry to the region, from a region to the country, etc.
• People only want to be told about the area they are looking at rather than maps of the world with 1000′s of markers.
      We have changed the whole site to show information based on the context. For example, if you are looking at The United Kingdom you will see the regions/states, where as if you are looking at a state you will see the listings within it.
• People want a mechanism whereas they can ask businesses and other people for advice on a coastal area.
      We have expanded the community to provide a full social environment where people can freely ask questions and share experiences.
• People wanted a mechanism to plan plan and record a trip.
  We have allowed FREE travel Blogs within the community to plan, record and share a trip.
• People want a single website to map to the device they are using, a laptop, tablet or mobile phone and don’t want to have to swap between mobile, desktop and mobile application versions.
      This was a complete re-design to provide a responsive website that adapts to the screen size being used. We will discontinue our iphone and mobile website versions.
• Businesses wanted a mechanism to communicate with other businesses and people interested in the coast.
  The new community website allows people to discuss topics within what we calls groups. Groups can be PUBLIC – open to everyone, PRIVATE – people have to request membership of the group Admin or HIDDEN where people have top be invited. Anyone can start a group.
  
• People wanted a faster site.
  Although the beta does not use it, when the new website goes live it will use an international Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide faster access to content.

Why not go and have a play at beta.coastradar.com

Technology wise, the main website is a custom HTML 5 fluid design and the community makes use of WordPress and Buddypress.

Any questions then just drop us an email or give us a call at +44 (0)20 8123 8159

One tool that can help is from Social Mention (see socialmention.com). This will give you a scorecard of your current position across a big selection of social media sites and tools. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

You can submit a query on the web page and also ask for daily reports to be emailed.

In Praeparo’s terms this is a must have in your marketing toolset and part of your brand monitoring efforts within your internet marketing strategy.

If you think about reality TV programmes it is all about the programme makers seeding enough information to gain momentum outside of the programme. Each programme wants people to spend the week promoting an act or contestant on the programmes behalf and even better if they then say bad things about the competition.

So when looking at marketing we want to seed just enough about our brand, services or products to get “a community” discussing it on our behalf. This means the community is defining our brand and obviously this does bring advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage is that if people recommend then it is well known that people respect personal recommendations but and it is a big but you need to manage those that don’t like the brand. If done well then those that like will help with those that don’t.

In summary we can learn a lot from this with social marketing.  For some companies it is critical to identify “a community”  to market a brand and/or product marketing and along with that the importance of making sure your are monitoring your brand.

Why not start today by becoming a fan of our page and getting a FREE website marketing analysis for any two keyword phrases.

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