Energizes Web Sites

  How We Create an E Mag
  How CBC Supports E Mags
  E Mag Creation and Support Team
  Reprise of E-Mags Strengths

The best web sites not only steadily pull in new visitors but inspire previous visitors to come back again and again. How? By continually updating material to keep content fresh and making it easy for visitors to find new things. They quickly become accustomed to the idea of signing on to the web site regularly if they want to keep abreast.

But most web sites have static home pages. They will have many hyperlinks but little or no explanation of what the important links are. Or how the web site sponsor ranks the importance of the information presented.

There’s a simple way around this problem. It’s called E Mag ("electronic magazine"), and it is CBC’s customizable solution for keeping a web site so interesting that it will build and inspire a consistent repeat "readership." That’s because an E Mag, like its print counterparts, combines timely content with strong graphics. The effect is similar to the contents pages of such publications as Time or Newsweek, with their quick summaries and clear directions where to find things. Visitors encountering an E Mag become virtual subscribers, quickly learning the E Mag’s layout and how to follow it through to topics and departments of recurring interest.

The E Mag format, by "billboarding" certain topics, allows for the unfolding of continuing stories that are almost like sagas or serials. These kinds of stories attract regular readers who begin to form an emotional attachment to the web site. They are interested in seeing how things turn out, whether the stories concern persons, products, ideas or the industry surrounding them.

Besides functioning as a changing, dynamic introduction to a web site, an E Mag can also serve as a bonding agent within a company. By following a clear template provided by CBC, a company can assign various staff members as reporters to cover "beats" at regular intervals and file their stories with someone – internal or external – who will insert them into the web site. Making a company’s staff members directly responsible for E Mag content allows them to become owners of the web site, motivated to maintain it at a high level of content.

Of course, a company may decide that it would prefer to have CBC develop and maintain E Mag content. We can assign an editorial director to the web site who can assume any level of responsibility for it, up to and including total content.

How We Create an E Mag

• Research: Like a newspaper or magazine, an E Mag has a distinct personality. Its graphics, layout and language all impart a certain message. To ascertain what that message will be, CBC thoroughly reads through a client’s sales and marketing literature, speaks to and interviews its principals, learns the company’s culture and mission, and studies competitors’ publications and web sites.

• Initial Concept: From our research, we propose an initial E Mag concept, including frequency, look, format, layout, content, suggested editorial calendar and alternatives for handling editorial maintenance and contributions.

• Design: Once the initial concept is approved, our design team, composed of a network builder, graphic designer and editorial director, comes together to create an E Mag prototype. That prototype includes bitmapped graphics, representative editorial content and working hyperlinks.

• Construction: When the prototype is approved, final construction of the E Mag goes pretty quickly. We use the most current web site construction software to build in, taking into account a final appearance that must look good on various browsers, platforms and monitors.

Our first E Mag was for Deposition Sciences, Incorporated (DSI) of Santa Rosa, CA. DSI manufactures high-tech industrial coatings, laying down incredibly thin metallic "mists" on surfaces to give them unusual optical properties. In 1992, one of its divisions began experimenting with laying down thin metallic coats on white topaz. The resulting enhanced gemstones, called Tavalite, were beautiful enough inspire formation of a consumer products division. In 1997, DSI hired CBC to design a consumer and business-oriented web site that would allow Tavalite to be marketed on the Internet (www.tavalite.com).

Faced with the problem of how to direct web site visitors to the proper links, and how to explain Tavalite and its marketing effort quickly and clearly, CBC created the E Mag concept as a sort of traffic manager. After seeing its effectiveness in directing and holding the attention of the Tavalite web site’s varied visitors, we realized that E Mag was something that could be applied to virtually every web site we design.

How CBC Supports E Mag

• Maintenance – We monitor both the look and content of web sites we create, either onsite or from a remote location.

• Training – We can quickly train client staff to do routine minor corrections, edits and copy insertions into an E Mag. We can also set up a more sophisticated in-house process for information gathering, writing, editing and web site insertion so that a client company can completely direct its own E Mag updates with no need for assistance from us.

• Content – Clients can create their own content or contract with us to do it – or any combination in between. But no matter what the arrangement, CBC monitors every E Mag its creates to alerts clients to possible problems with content or presentation.

Our E Mag Creation and Support Team

• Network, Server and Web Site Template: Tony Valente, CEO of CBC, an experienced network designer and electronic commerce consultant.

• E Mag and Web Site Graphics and Look: Edward Berland, Art Director, a noted Sonoma County graphic designer with extensive experience in web site design.

• E Mag and Web Site Editorial Content: Patrick Totty, a Marin-based business writer who created the E Mag concept.
  

• For the construction of U-7 web sites, CBC offers the services of Reed Guest, Esq., a San Francisco business attorney who has been affiliated with us for five years.

• It looks likes a magazine table of contents page, combining short summaries of new developments with sharp graphics. Visitors click on the summaries to jump to more detailed articles or departments.

• It allows for the unfolding of continuing stories, almost like serials, that draw site visitors back again and again.

• The format allows DSI to rank which items it thinks are most important for people to view and set up links that take visitors further along those paths.

• The format allows DSI to contract with CBC to update the web site or follow a template that shows it how it to turn employees into a reporting staff that can regularly update the site.