Ideas, insights and inspirations.

Macro forces often drive micro actions. This certainly holds true for manufacturing website design trends for the coming year. Our agency sees three primary forces impacting the manufacturing environment: First, there has been a generational shift from Boomers to Gen-Xers, Millennials, and Gen-Zers. By 2025, 75% of the global workforce will be largely comprised of Millennials and Gen-Zers. Not only are they digitally savvy, they care deeply about climate change, sustainability, and corporate values. Second, in-sourcing and bringing manufacturing back to the US is in full swing.  In 2021 and 2022, we saw the passing of three key pieces of legislation: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Domestic manufacturing is hot again. Third, the era of Industry 4.0 powered by smart factories fitted with AI, robotics, 5G, IoT, data analytics, and cloud computing is here. These forces are re-shaping the entire manufacturing sector. … Continue reading

Posted in:

Websites are the digital soul of manufacturers and industrial companies. Constructed well, they are effective conversion machines for new business development and become their #1 sales tool. In the past 30 years, Elliance has designed and developed more than 150 manufacturing websites. Following are four success stories of our website design and development clients: 1. Underdog Wins: Sophisticated Alloys Located in Southwestern Pennsylvania, an hour from steel-and-aluminum-famed Pittsburgh, Sophisticated Alloys takes pride in solving the toughest customer challenges, fusing the most unlikely elements to create new custom alloys. We rebuilt their website and started a blog which has given them a decade long Google page one positions for “custom alloy manufacturer”, “specialty alloy manufacturer”, “Simonds alloy manufacturer” and “alloy manufacturer”. This has transformed them into a preferred alloy supplier for many enterprise clients. The website development project went through the usual process of starting with discovery and strategy development, leading to information architecture and user experience design, followed by website … Continue reading

Posted in:

Elliance, a higher education website design and SEO marketing agency, helps universities with redesign and SEO projects. Here is a glimpse of our recent work for UNC Charlotte which resulted in top rankings in North Carolina.

Continue reading

Posted in:

The Elliance higher education marketing practice has grown enrollment, endowment and reputation for over 100 colleges and universities including 10 medical schools and healthcare institutions in all 4 major medical traditions o western medicine. Included below are a few samples of our agency work we have enjoyed delivering for each medical tradition: O S T E O P A T H I C     M E D I C I N E   Transforming Lives. Transforming Generations. University of the Incarnate Word (UIW), a leading Hispanic-serving institution, owes its existence to the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, a congregation from France that responded to urgent public health and education needs in South Texas following the U.S. Civil War.  San Antonio and South Texas face severe shortages of culturally competent health professionals — primary care doctors, optometrists, pharmacists, physical therapists and nurses. That shortage, along with entrenched socioeconomic disadvantages, combine to produce a 20-year life span discrepancy between … Continue reading

Posted in: , , ,

Today, more than any other touch point, a website is the digital soul of an organization. All roads lead to it. As one of Pittsburgh’s longest standing website design agencies, Elliance has been delivering prosperity with websites for regional, national and global clients for the past 30 years. Our arsenal of best practices includes: 1. Start with the Wise Strategy Revenue Strategy, Communication Strategy and Search Engine Ranking Strategy are the three building blocks of Website Strategy. Bake each of them into every stage of website development. 2. Make it Beautiful Strategy is invisible. Good design makes it visible. Milton Glaser, the iconic designer, once said “There are only three reactions to a piece of design: no, yes or WOW! Wow is one to aim for.” We couldn’t agree more. Create a beautiful website with contemporary aesthetics. And like retailers, refresh it periodically so if reflects the most current aesthetic. 3. Delight Prospects and Customers You can’t bore people into … Continue reading

Posted in: ,

Making a business case for investing in a comprehensive website redesign to ROI-minded, quant-driven cabinet members is vastly different than making a case to marketing leaders who intuitively understand the value of a great website. For quantitatively inclined cabinet members, here are five ROI metrics that we have used to justify the investment in a comprehensive website redesign: 1. Better Student Quality: Fortifying program pages and the “why us” pages motivates better-fit students to raise their hands, dissuading wrong-fits from applying. You should expect to see conversion rates improve by as much as 25%. 2. Reduced Bounce Rate: Improving page architecture results in engaged traffic to your website. This should reduce your website bounce rate so it sits between 20% and 30%. The industry average exceeds 50%. 3. Stronger Google Rankings: Baking search engine thinking into every phase of redesign enhances your website’s Google rankings. One year after relaunch, you should see an increase in search engine traffic by 25% … Continue reading

Posted in: , ,

In a recent post titled “ADA Accessibility Compliance for College and University Websites,” the question of how to ensure WCAG 2.0 compliance was covered briefly. In this post, I will expand on a couple of the challenges of making an existing website compliant. A trip to the theme park Bringing an existing website into compliance can be extremely tedious depending on the technology it was initially created with, any subsequent patches to this technology, and any themes, plug-ins, or modules which extend the site’s functionality. For example, let’s consider an existing website using WordPress, which by some accounts powers 26% of the Web, and commands almost 60% of the Content Management System (CMS) market share. While WordPress is a great open-source CMS, and affords you lots of control over the content being generated, their ecosystem does not come without caveats. On top of WordPress’s back-end core of functional code and database, sits the visual design in the form of theme … Continue reading

Posted in: ,

In order for a web page to be successful, a user must visit the page. Getting a user to visit the URL is a great struggle, but after they make that decision there are dozens upon dozens of reasons why they will leave, and sometimes leave before you can get a chance to make an impression. Page loading speed, an intriguing design, and engaging content will help keep your viewers on the page, but for user with accessibility needs (be it visual, auditory, or physical), reasons for leaving your site may be overlooked. Part of ensuring accessibility to all users means following web standards which value proper use of HTML elements, using CSS responsibly, and designing for all types of users on all types of devices. Most development teams have milestones in the software life cycle where they check for accessibility issues—this usually falls near the end of the project. We use several software tools at our disposal that can … Continue reading

Posted in: ,

In redesigning websites for 25 years, we have come to realize that a website is a machine for liberating prosperity and realizing institutional destiny. However making a business case for to ROI-minded, quant-driven business leaders (such as chief operating officers and chief financial officers) is trickier than it sounds, and is vastly different than making a case to marketing leaders who intuitively understand the value of a website. For ROI-minded business leaders, we begin making the case by showing them the following diagram: Next we unpack each point with quantifiable measures as follows: 1. Expected Increase in Right-fit Demand: stemming from improvement in historic website conversion rates, higher rankings on search engines, and reduction in website bounce rates. 2. Expected Increase in Brand Value: realized when the brand is modernized and strengthened as an integral part of the website redesign initiative. Stronger brands not only create brand distinction but also deepen brand equity. For higher education brands, this can be … Continue reading

Posted in: ,

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990/2008 (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 require colleges and universities to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to programs, services and activities. This extends well beyond making sidewalks, entryways and classrooms accessible. It includes websites too. Why has this topic become important lately? Growth of non-traditional student population, people spending as much time in virtual environments as built ones, legislation catching up, and ready availability of assistive technologies are all fueling interest and greater scrutiny in this area. A recent New York Times article covered the story of individuals and law firms from around the country who have begun to make a lucrative business out of demanding compliance from public institutions, and taking legal action against those who don’t. Education Week featured a story about a disability advocate in Michigan who filed 500 complaints with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which is mandated to demand compliance when … Continue reading

Posted in: , , ,