How Mind Mapping Helps Smart Solutions’ Clients

For awhile now, our team has utilized Mind Mapping, from the tools from a great client, Mindjet.  Mind Mapping has assisted in organizing client’s site architecture while easily and quickly highlighting areas of weaknesses for content structure.    Recently, KM World Magazine interviewed Smart Solutions and posted an article, titled Enriching Web Sites and Engage Customers Better.

Excerpt:
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Firms that rely on advanced Internet services for their marketing, customer relations and other business processes are turning to knowledge management solutions that measure customer response to Web sites, in order to improve traffic and to identify customer preferences so they can retain them and boost sales.

Smart Solutions, a software and Web development company, was working with a local nonprofit firm that wanted to redevelop its Web site to gain new members and achieve higher attendance at events, many of them fundraisers.

mindjet“The non-profit wanted to drive traffic to the site, then have visitors engaged in a meaningful way,” says Smart Solutions President Mark Knowles. Smart Solutions was using MindManager 8 from Mindjet for meetings and to collect relevant information from the Internet and other resources. A feature of the software enabled Knowles to map the existing structure of the nonprofit organization’s Web site.

“By exporting the navigation structure of the site into MindManager, we were able to see the relationships between different [pages and elements],” Knowles says. MindManager displayed the navigation structure as different branches from the same tree, and it was easy to see that some branches weren’t grouped together properly, according to Knowles. That meant that it was difficult for users to navigate.

“The site was static. That tends to happen because Web sites are built organically, a page at a time. After a while, they become disorganized,” he says. “People would come there, but they would leave quickly.”

That’s if they found the site at all. According to Knowles, part of the organization’s problem was branding. People could find the site if they knew what to look for, but they would likely miss it if their search was less specific.

Google, Yahoo and similar services use site navigation as part of their search parameters, according to Knowles. “That’s part of the SEO [search engine optimization] puzzle,” he says.

Once the site was revamped, it was much more intuitive and easier to use, with the nonprofit organization benefiting as a result. Some wording was changed as well, helping to catch the attention of the search engines.

As a result, the site has seen a 25 percent increase in traffic and a 40 percent increase in conversions (memberships and attendance at events), Knowles says.

Full Article
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Mind Mapping, as well as the other products we use and love, help our team deliver client solutions for increased web traffic and conversions on their web sites.