www.bilengua.com
Founded in 2001, Bi-Lengua offers custom-designed language and cultural services for professionals, college students, community groups, educators and more. Their main goals are to help clients to make life more enjoyable either at home or when traveling abroad, to compete effectively in the global marketplace and to create more productive workers.
They had a problem, though. Their website was ineffective and it was causing problems. According to Nikki O’Dell, Bi-Lengua’s founder and president, their original website was getting average to mediocre feedback and wasn’t giving them the response they were looking for: “We even had one upset potential client call because she could not locate the information she wanted from the website. She was frustrated with the difficulty of the navigation and she never did register for our classes.”
They knew they had to make some changes, and that included switching to IPOWER for their hosting services. “I wanted something where I could go in and make changes myself,” O’Dell says. “Plus, IPOWER offered a large number of email addresses, which is something we use.”
The new site and hosting has taken their website and business to new heights. “We now can direct clients to our website with the confidence that they will find what information they need,” O’Dell says. Before, visitors to the website would spend an average of ten seconds on the homepage and then either leave or they would go to one other page and then leave. Now, people are looking at around five pages per visit. They also only had about two people per month who spent more than one minute on the site. “Now people are getting on the site and looking through everything,” O’Dell adds.
Current records show that people now routinely spend 15-20 minutes on the site: On average, 24 people per month are on the site for 5-15 minutes, 18 people per month are on 15-30 minutes and 18 people per month are on for one hour or more. “We’ve been getting great feedback,” she says.
O’Dell says that being able to change things on her own has helped immensely. She can now go in and update the calendar and schedule whenever she needs to. “It’s really easy – all you need to know is how to type. Plus, since the calendar is the most viewed page on our site, this ability has been a great asset.” In addition to the calendar and schedule, she also keeps up with a “Word of the Week” as part of the youth link on the page because now she can update it herself instead of having to call a web designer to do it for her.
The new site has only been live for less than a year, but they have seen a dramatic increase in business – O’Dell says there has been an influx of calls from the types of clients they are always looking for. She attributes this to the ease of the site. “Clients use the site to find out information, to check on class schedules and to register for classes,” she says. “Today people like to do as much stuff as possible online and with our site they can do it all online which makes everyone’s lives easier.” It has also made things easier for the people who answer the phones: “When we try to offer client or prospects information about our services, they often stop us and tell us that they already know the information from the website.”
One of the new features on their site is the document translation services. “We believe the absolute key to the success of our website, in regards to translation and interpretation, has been the ‘document translation request form’ and the ability for visitors to learn about the services we offer,” O’Dell says. “Since August 2005, when we launched the new site, our translation and interpretation sales have increased 186 percent.”
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