The Arlington Community Federal Credit Union (ACFCU) just launched a brand new website (www.arlingtoncu.org)! BLEN was selected among other esteemed organizations to design and develop a new website for ACFCU. For the past 15 weeks we’ve been working closely with ACFCU’s marketing team to reach their online goals through a highly professional and strategic website

The goals of the new website were to accomplish a couple of things; aesthetically the bank’s identity was not reflected on the old website, this had to be addresses immediately. The new website would be true to the brand, the aesthetics would create a new sense of credibility and help maintain consistency across all marketing efforts at ACFCU. The user experience also needed a boost. The goal was to develop a UI that would allow user to easily navigate the site while searching for banking tools and information. The new UI design would also deliver a pleasant online experience for the user. With more than 15K members, the navigation and usability were a top priority to our client. As part of the user experience, we integrated social media tools on the new website, affording members multiple avenues of communication with their bank.

Our team did just that! We designed a professional strategic website that looks and feels easy and tangible allowing members to feel secure and in-charge of their online banking experience. In collaboration with ACFCU we were able to deliver a site that accomplished all the goals of a strategic website and the goals of its users.

We had a great team leading this project forward, Ephrem our Creative Director lead the UI design effort from beginning to end. Nolawi, our lead UI Developer developed the new user experience and streamlined the navigation and structure. Mike our lead Web Developer worked his coding magic and developed a site that looks and performs the way a convenient yet secure banking site should. “We selected BLEN not only for their outstanding technical expertise, but also for their vendor-client relations skills. The BLEN team really understood our needs, communicated proactively, and made additional recommendations that improved the final product” says Karen Rosales, Vice President of Marketing and Community Relations.

The site was built on WordPress a comprehensive content management system, with custom PHP, JavaScript and CSS code base. The website offers customer relationship management functionality (alert box) to insure users stay informed about major bank activities. The website provides a branch locations map/ATM locator search application. Other features include; custom online banking login, financial calculators and website search capabilities.

Last night, our team attended the monthly DC Drupal meetup at Stetson’s hosted by Phase 2 Technology. As always we were accompanied by awesome presentations and quality attendees.  Following the folks at Development Seed, who presented their latest product TileMill, our very own Mike Endale presented our latest Drupal project data.ed.gov.

After the presentation, while talking to attendees, some of the discussions revolved around how TileMill can be used in Drupal, the use of the table wizard module and possible content distribution systems.

In other Drupal news, Phase 2 Technology also announced that their currently working on putting together DC’s first Drupal camp, which will to be held this summer! To learn more about this check out: CapitalCamp

drupalers at Stetson's

Mike presenting data.ed.gov

dev seed presenting tilemill

The onepage checkout on Magento Commerce cms is really complicated but from a user interface perspective it’s as simple as one would make it with ajax loading and navigational breadcrumb que for the user.

There are however too many unnecessary input fields in the billing and shipping sections; including second address lines, fax number and telephone number. The worst part is the fact that required fields increase the ‘Checkout abandonment’ in your application.

Here are the instructions to remove the required from any field; I will use the ‘telephone’ field as an example.

For both the shipping and billing section open up the file to edit the css reference as well as the required asterisks.

Read the rest of this entry »

So not long ago I blogged about social media, and digital marketing campaigns. I told you guys, I’d be blogging about the challenges and the advantages of what this new (not so new) web 2.0 world had to offer. So with out further a due let me dive right in. As you might have read in the previous blog currently @blencorp we are working on our digital marketing campaign, one of our efforts include our Google Adwords campaign. As most of you know Adwords is an online ad management system run by Google, it allows you to create an ad, assign a dollar value to your ads and Google will post your ads on the Google Search Engine. The one thing we failed to create parallel to our Adword campaign was a custom landing page for each ad. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not a day that goes by that you and I aren’t either on a social networking site, discovering a new social media tool or reading up on the latest SoMe trends. I wonder what we used to do before the Social Media revolution? Things seem like they’re not fast enough, efficient enough and there’s ALWAYS room for improvement.

In a day in age where we can’t afford to be disconnected, how do we prioritize what’s vital in our marketing campaigns? Well first of all, we @BLENCorp are dealing with this same challenge right now as we speak. We have set out to make 2010 the “digital age” for our marketing efforts. But make no mistake, we are not out to SPAM you or bombard you and only become apart of the noise. Read the rest of this entry »