A Guide to the New SSCS, Inc. Website

The new sscsinc.com is here. Here’s some information to help you take your first tour.

Yesterday we launched our completely redesigned website, www.sscsinc.com. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know this has been some time in the making as we’ve been teasing it over the past few months.

We’re particularly proud that this is a collaboration by SSCS staff and only SSCS staff. We had no outside help, which is becoming more and more of a rarity in business these days, especially when it comes to creative work.

That the site is “homegrown” underscores the value of having everyone in every department under one roof. The creative team could grab IT or Development anytime they needed help on a technical question. We’ve talked about how this synergy works to our competitive advantage. If you want to revisit our basic philosophy you can find it here.

There’s a lot to like about the website and we’re sure you’ll find your own favorite features. Here’s a list of some of the highlights:

• Designed for desktop AND mobile. This is the most profound advance over our previous website. As time has passed, more and more industry professionals have become tethered to their smartphones and tablets. It’s important to give these individuals the information they want at any location in the format most convenient to their hurried daily lives. It’s important to us, too, because search engines such as Google are giving greater weight to website hits generated through mobile devices. Up the search rankings we go.

• A customer-centric approach. You’ll see a lot more of our customers and their stores spread throughout sscsinc.com, as we actively engaged them to submit images and testimonials. Customers are our most valued resource, and it made sense to leverage their contribution. When you partner with the best, you might as well show them off. Special shout out to corporate partner Circle K who generously submitted over 100 photos of various sites.

• Expanded set of customer success stories. The SSCS blog has served as a source of original customer profiles, in which operators share their expertise and business strategies. These success stories, together with past customer profiles, now are colorfully organized in one departure point on the website. Check them out. We’ll be adding new entries in the upcoming months.

• Emphasis on the beauty of our location. This is another section of the website that grew out of our weekly blog. Just as our customers are the best the industry has to offer, our natural surroundings are top-notch, too, so we’ve decided to feature the beauty of our location prominently. The bottom of our “SSCS Country” page provides links to image-heavy, mini-tours of Pacific Grove and Monterey. We’ll be compiling a Carmel-by-the-Sea section based on the three-part blog post we completed last week and will be making it available from the same web page soon.
• Easier access to social media. The SSCS blog and our Twitter feed are now available on the main page of our website. They are represented graphically in an effort to catch the visitor’s eye. We’ve also pushed links to breaking news front and center so it’s easier to see the latest headlines from SSCS.

• Re-imagined product pages with a graphic emphasis, including all-new material on Transaction Analysis. Every one of our product pages is worth visiting for the attractive images that have been matched up to them, but don’t overlook the fact that our content has been updated and revised to be more succinct. And make sure you take notice of the new icons showcased on our front page, one for each of our major product lines.

The above list should be enough to get you started on your exploration of sscsinc.com. This is only the second day that we’ve been up, so we’re being cautious, but so far we have experienced only one hiccup to the rollout, so please take note: If you are an Internet Explorer user that has recently visited our old website, you may encounter a text-based version of our previous site when you attempt to access the new one. If this is the case, refreshing the page or clearing your cache and relaunching IE should do the trick. Chrome and Firefox users will not be affected.

The website is an ongoing project so you’ll see many additions and improvements moving forward. Oh, and SSCS customers take note, we’re working on a redesigned customer portal right now.