What do you think about the look of your new site?

It's what we were hoping for. The initial design really wowed us. The graphics and just the look of the site itself was really great.  When I spoke with Ben and we talked about how we wanted the site to look and (4WARD Websites) did a great job in conveying that. As we started getting our information in, we started realizing the marketing potential that a site can have so we got really excited about it.

 

How do you think your new site will be effective? How do you think it will appeal to potential visitors?

The whole nature of marketing is changing in the business world; the financial services industry is probably a little slower than most industries because of the age of our prospects. We've noticed an increase though in clients who are active email users and active web searchers. We've actually done some events where people have wanted to know where our website is. So as people who become more and more acclimated to the web and using it to compare our services with other people, it's extremely effective. Of course, it's only as effective as we make it to be. We have the tools in place now to tweak it and to do what we want to.

 

What do you think about the content management system? Is it easy to use?

It's very user friendly. The whole support staff is very helpful. This is a little more involved but again it's a better product. We have another person in our office who's doing some marketing things, so eventually I want to be able to teach them how to go in and make changes and add things.

The event manager in and of itself is totally user friendly, and that's really the main thing that we'll be doing. I'm very very pleased with that.

When someone comes to our site they can say ‘hey look, they're going to be here on such and such a date,' and we can keep that current. One problem I think with a lot of industries is you'll go to their website and you'll see that the last time they posted something was like '08. To me, that's ineffective. It's a very strong indicator of efficiency. I think a current, up-to-date website speaks volumes about what a company is doing.

I was out this week and we have some events that we booked so what I'll do is I'm going to go to my event manager, I'm going to take just a few minutes, I'm going to add what I need to do, and then when someone goes to look at our site it's there. It's current. It's up to date. When we run an ad in the paper so people would go and look at our website, they'll see that it's current and it's up to date, and in this industry that's powerful.

 

What was the process like working with 4WARD Websites to build your site?

I liked it because 4WARD Websites listens. They wanted to know what we wanted. They took our request and the things that we wanted and they worked around us. 4WARD Websites was very supportive. From that initial process, once the design had been done... as we got to that point of getting this information out, I think my boss, my brother, and other people realized that this is a very powerful tool.

 

Would you recommend 4WARD Websites to other people or businesses and why?

Wholeheartedly. I would, with no hesitation, definitely recommend you guys because my experience was a ten out of ten.

Even on the learning curve on the early part of it, they were very patient, very succinct. I never felt like I was troubling them or bothering them. Over all, it was just a very pleasant experience. This day and age we always here about negatives and stuff like that and I don't believe we have enough positive reinforcement in business situations. In our case, it was a win win.

 

Is there anything that you'd like to add that we didn't touch on?

One feature that we wanted to add that would have been powerful was client testimonials. We even had a tab for that, but we've since found out that in this business you can't put down client testimonials. And again, that wasn't any fault of you guys. We thought it would be great, we even had a tab on our menu bar and I added them and everything. It looked great. So what I did, when I found out that we couldn't do it, was I went to my menu and I disenabled it. I didn't delete it or anything like that. So it's still there and if changes happen and we can do something like that then all I have to do is click a button and they're there.

The event manager is really easy to use.

I think that in the future it will be even bigger. There are other types of industries where a website's invaluable, and I think that really in a sense that ours is invaluable. We'll actually start to see more stuff generated. I'd like to get to a point where we start seeing information requests come in through email.

Great experience overall. You do great work.