June 18, 2009

.eco would be a good domain to have.

A year and a half ago or so, I was introduced to two guys in Vancouver who were trying to start a new top-level domain for companies and organizations doing good environmental work – .eco. Their resumes and backgrounds were impressive, and they seemed to really know what they were doing, but still, I thought, what are the chances that these two guys could actually create a new top-level domain?

Cut to last week, and I run into Trevor Bowden, one of .eco founders, and they have made truly remarkable progress.

What? from dot eco on Vimeo.

They just launched their website, doteco.info, which is great blend of useful information and videos about what they are trying to accomplish, ways to participate and help spread the message, and information about their current supporters (some of whom are truly impressive). All in a very nice looking website. Pulling off an informative and good-looking website about a new concept is very difficult.

They are gearing up for a presentation in 2010 to ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers . This is the organization responsible for the Internet’s naming system.

So what is .eco?

The .eco system will display current, detailed eco-information to anyone with a browser, anytime they need it, anywhere on the planet. It will do this by collecting information from people when they register .eco domain names for their companies, organisations, products, or even themselves and then displaying that information on a standardised, open platform.

What they want to do with .eco is very impressive. They would link it to verifiable environmental action, so those using the .eco domain would be showing off a badge that they had made progress on reducing their environmental impact.

Treehugger has a great article about what they are doing.

They have one major competitor, namely Al Gore and a group who are also trying to start a .eco top-level domain. I’m a big fan of Al Gore, but it’s kind of fun to watch some guys from Vancouver put together a very different and very compelling alternative to a .eco domain and see if they can give the bigwigs a run for their money.

I think the .eco domain is useful. A company like Toyota could assume that people going to toyota.eco would be at their site for specific reasons, and they could highlight their environmental products and policies and corporate initiatives front and centre. It could be a form of built-in audience segmentation (those who choose to visit a .eco version of the site instead of a .com), and not just a redirect to a main corporate site.

So check out doteco.info and see what it’s all about. It may be coming to an Internet near you…

April 8, 2009

Welcome to the new vancity.com.

I am so happy to launch the new look of vancity.com today!

This was truly a team effort: Julie, our recently-departed designer, did an amazing job; Wendy, our usability expert and project manager, shepherded the project through usability testing and led the team wonderfully; and Roberto, one of the newest Canadians, expertly managed a lot of the content and big fixes. Our extended team at Central 1 did all the front end development and did a great job. It’s truly an honour to work with Vancity’s WEB Team (WEB stands for Web Engagement & Banking)!

I already blogged about why we made the changes, so I won’t repeat myself here.

Check it out and tell me what you think.

March 10, 2009

A sneak peek of the new vancity.com

For as long as I’ve been at Vancity, which is three and half years, I’ve been wanting to redesign our main website. We have some amazingly talented people at Vancity, including Julie our graphic designer. She has taken our current visual style and adapted it, bringing it up to a more appealing look. We didn’t want to give it a massive redesign, as the site basically works, and we didn’t want to jar our members too much.

On our current site below, our site navigation has always struck me as odd. We are one of those FIs who lump all of our products and services under the tab “products & services”. How many people think of themselves as buying a financial product or service? People need a new savings account or a loan or a credit card.

In a Forrester review of vancity.com in 2006, they pointed out that we needed easier ways to get site visitors straight to a product. So we added the Quick Links below to achieve this. When we added these links, I was skeptical they would do much. But a great percentage of the traffic hitting our main Visa page comes from this one link on our homepage. So obviously Forrester knows more than I do.

We changed the navigation so it reflects both our in-branch product literature, as well as the main products people navigate to on our website. The goal was to create a simple, attractive homepage that better reflects our brand graphic standards in offline media. We brought the site to 1024×768 because over the last two years we have seen the percentage of our site visitors who have a monitor sized at 800×600 or less shrink from about 20% of site traffic to under 5% today.

We also took this opportunity to upgrade the security certificate to EV SSL, so people on newer versions of IE and Firefox see the green bar in their browser bar when they come to the site, assuring them it is authentic and not a phishing site.

Here are some screenshots of the homepage and our new ATM/Branch Locator with Google Maps integration (click on them to a see a bigger version). What do you think?

The majority of site visitors log in to online banking, and now as they check their accounts, or pay a bill words like Banking, Loans or Investing are there clearly across the navigation. Financial products are not an impulse buy, we need to get in front of people while they are in research mode. Our new navigation should be more useful for our members as they can more easily get to information that was once obscured and is good for the company as we should see more traffic navigating through the site to valuable pages.