The following post was written by Maggy Stewart, Graphic Designer & Marketing Coordinator at RMS.

February—the month when everyone is celebrating love. It’s the month of chocolates, roses and Valentines. This February, RMS is also thinking love—because we’re head over heels about our brand new website.

A website is an extremely powerful marketing tool with the ability to reach anyone in the world at any time. We began our website overhaul with a few ideas in mind: keep it simple and keep visitors engaged. We wanted to build a new platform that offered rich content, straightforward contact routes, and simplified navigation all within a contemporary design. We love our new website, and we hope you do too. We’d like to take some time to highlight the top ten things we love about our new site, which not only makes us really happy, but more importantly makes our site visitors happy too. We also think these are great tips to keep in mind when updating your own company website.

1. Simple and straightforward. With over a billion websites out there, it’s pretty easy to get lost in all the noise. Our main goal was to show visitors what we do, how we do it, and why working with us is not only a smart move, but it’s fun. At RMS, we take pride in our office culture, which stems from the fundamental fact that happy employees equals happy clients. We really enjoy what we do, and we think it shows in the work that we do (and what our clients have to say about us).We wanted to display this trait clearly on our new site, and you’re able to feel the love on a bunch of pages: check out our staff, see what our colleagues have to say about working together, and flip through past newsletters. We think you’ll get a pretty good idea about how much we love what we do.

2. Easy to navigate. User Experience (UX) plays a key role in helping visitors navigate around your website and actually stick around long enough to use it how you intended. We wanted to streamline navigation to make it fast and easy for visitors to find the information they need. We did a complete content overhaul, made our menus easier to navigate, and placed forms on appropriate pages to streamline the contact process.

3. Responsive design. It should come as no surprise that if you don’t prepare your website for proper use and display across all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet), you can pretty much guarantee quick and persistent drop-off rates. Google has even officially recommended responsive design for best SEO practices. We’ve created a professional design that both attracts a user’s eye and serves a purpose, which not only has the potential to woo visitors, but can also appeal to search engines for ranking purposes.

4. Multiple means to contact. There’s nothing more frustrating than landing on a website, reading through the information and preparing yourself to get in touch with someone, but you’re unable to figure out how to actually reach them or you can’t figure out where in the world they’re located. Whether you prefer to gather more information via phone call or email, we’ve made it painless to get in touch. We’ve included forms on numerous pages, and our basic contact information (address, phone numbers, emails) can easily be found on our Contact page and within our footer. Social channels are clearly linked, and you can always keep up with us by joining our mailing list. No need to worry about being left in the dark on this site.

5. Fresh and original content. Let’s face it—content is king. What good is a website if it offers stale information that ceases to change with calendars or computers? There’s no purpose in outdated information, and we make it our goal to continuously stay up-to-date with market trends and the necessary data our site visitors are looking for. Our healthcare research services need to stay current to coincide with mandated guidelines, and market research trends are ever-evolving. To remain relevant, you have to supply pertinent information and keep up with visitor expectations.

6. A pretty sweet blog. Keeping with the theme that content is king, our blog is the gift that keeps giving. The top hit on our site overall, the RMS Bunker Blog is constantly updated with fresh market research topics and tidbits of useful information for a plethora of industries. Because we’re familiar with our target audience and know what they’re most interested in (and what they search for most often), we’ve been able to carry over all of our previous blog posts and continue developing a useful resource for visitors.

7. Useful search bar. We’ve included a smart search bar available at the top of every page so our visitors can cut to the chase whenever they want. Not only is this a useful tool within the site itself, but it also searches our entire blog post library. We’ve also included tags, categories and archives so visitors can pick and choose topics of interest in a matter of seconds.

8. Google Analytics. One of the most useful tools for gauging who is coming to your site, what they’re viewing, where they’re coming from, what keywords they’re using and much more, Google Analytics is critical to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. It’s the easiest way for us to figure out exactly what our visitors are searching for, how we can better meet their expectations and how we can improve the structure of our site.

9. Easy panel sign-up. The RMS ViewPoint Research Panel is a fun way for people to share their opinions with key decision makers about products and services we use every day. Participate in focus groups, interviews, online surveys, mystery shopping and more. What’s better than getting paid for your opinions? And we’ve made it super simple for you to join in on the fun. Our ViewPoint page makes it easy for you to become a member. You can read up about how it works, and if you have any questions, you can always hit us up on the form at the bottom.

10. Our colorful staff and clients. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. We hope that our approach to showing visitors who we are and who we work with is a little more fun than your ordinary list and subsequent information. We know that visitors typically spend two minutes or less on a website, so we figure we’ll get to the point faster, and with a little more flare.

We hope you love our new website as much as we do and we welcome your feedback as our web presence continues to evolve. RMS is a full-service market research firm located in Baldwinsville, NY. If you are interested in learning more about our research capabilities, please contact Sandy Baker, our Senior Director of Business Development & Corporate Strategy at SandyB@RMSresults.com or by calling 1-866-567-5422.