Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Web design is a great occupational field. It’s full of opportunity. At times it’s overwhelming due to the high demand for good, quality driven web designers. But I’m just wondering…doesn’t it ‘irk’ you sometimes when you have put together a great looking, customer oriented, feature packed website only to see the client fill their web pages with junk? They paid for a great website and killed it with poor content. What can you do about it? One suggestion is to add the ability to create web content for your customers too.
When you do a search on Google for ‘web content’, it generates close to 200,000,000 results. It’s obviously an important topic. Because of this, my recommendation is to seek out and team up with a good copywriter. Look for and secure the services of a qualified writer who can create relevant, readable, well formed text that will complement your web design services. Keep in mind that the text they create needs to assist in keeping customers on the website. I’ll discuss some of the critical components of content in another article soon. Add appropriate pricing and encourage clients to let you help them create verbiage and content that works well for their company. There are a myriad of companies out there that post their prices for creating content on their websites. Make sure your pricing is competitive and ensure the customer that putting together an entire package all at the same time is beneficial to them.
As an example of how well great design and great content work together, I wanted to use a friend’s site to point out the effectiveness of this approach. PrintBusinessCards.com is a site that has been around since 2000. This site re-launched in 2006 with a completely new design. At the same time, they immediately started publishing good, relevant pages full of good content related to their industry…business cards. Over an 8 month period their page rank has increased, their Alexa ranking has dramatically increased…breaking them into the top 100,000, and their pages come up higher in Google searches across the board. All of this is a result of huge organic growth and has ultimately boosted sales dramatically at the same time. This site is a prime example of filling a website with great, relevant content. At the same time, they also launched a blog where they have consistently published good business cards related articles, relevant tips, announcements about new pages, and press releases. The blog has become another good contributor for attracting customers to their site. The blog is well written and always points readers to various features of their main website. Again, this is a prime example of creating good content that benefits the customer. Blogs are a great way to build long term results for clients. It takes time though. The general consensus is at least a year of good, consistent articles on a blog before the main site starts seeing results. This is true for PrintBusinessCards.com too. Their blog now has a page rank of 3 and is climbing on its own through the rankings while at the same time funneling quite a few potential customers every day to the main site. Design, function, and content. These 3 critical components are all displayed on this site. Their presence on the web is increasing everyday. It’s a great example of how teaming up with a good copywriter can enhance the design and function of a website.
So, as web designers, my recommendation is to include the creation of good, relevant, quality content as part of your pricing and services. In doing this, you should attract more customers while creating more satisfied customers at the same time. Again, as I mentioned before, I plan on discussing some of the critical components that are comprised in quality content for any website. If you have other examples of websites where content, function, and design work together very well, please let me know. I’d like to check it out!
Posted in Content/Text | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Here we go again, a list of navigation styles. Navigation is one of the most important elements on a website. If it’s not right all the effort that you put into the site may be worthless. So here’s five major styles that I came up with. I know there are many more out there but these are the most common ones that I see.
One
The source site for this is: http://www.trustile.com
An example of a simple graphic based hover style navigation. It is simple to impliment and is easy to use. Got to remember that most times simple is best - KISS (I won’t even go into it) 
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Two
The source site for this is: http://www.amazon.com
We’ve looked at this one several days ago in the Recipe For Effective Navigation post and again this one made the list. It is complicated to build but once done, it’s worth the effort. It eliminates two clicks from the visitor’s search which raises the conversion rate.
Three
http://www.boite-a-musique.org
A text based navigation is the simplest one on the list but on the effectivness scale it may or mey not be better then the image based navigation. Again the KISS element, simplicity works well.
Four
The source site for this is: http://www.lexus.com
Now we’re getting into some serious, multi-function navigation. Here, we’re looking at a Lexus website’s navigation bar. Each “section” has multiple hot areas that trigger diferent drop down menus, I guess in most cases it’s not a menu that drops down but a sort of a mini web page. Personally I think I’d stear away from navigation like this.
Five
The source site for this is: http://www.32round.com
Ok, this one may not look cool or impressive (I am talking about the navigation) but once you click one of the buttons it’ll get your attention. Another way of getting your visitor’s attention I guess. I like the site, nice scrolling effect on it too.
I’d love to hear some of your opinions on these.
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Monday, January 21st, 2008
I decided to take the top 10 sites from Time Magazine’s 50 Best Sites of 2007 and briefly review each of them here. I think we can all benefit from analyzing each of these sites. In doing so, perhaps we will glean some ideas that we can incorporate into web designs for our clients in the future.
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Mozy.com – Awesome concept. I’m going to check this one out further. This is a very user friendly, informative website offering a fantastic service for a low price. 2gigs of storage online for $4.95/month is a good deal! |
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StumbleUpon.com —This is a site I use myself currently. As a social media site, it allows you to tag and recommend sites to other people. It will also generate recommendations for you based upon your interests. It’s inherently user focused and a great way to promote sites or particular pages on a website. |
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Last.fm – Finally, your own customizable radio station on the web. Last.fm allows you to type in the name of your favorite artist and be listening to them in just a few seconds through your browser. As long as your browser stays open…the music keeps crankin’. To gain the full experience, you need to register with them which will allow you to further customize
the system for your listening pleasure. It’s a great site full of features for their listeners. Their site has a nice clean look to it. Their logo is a simple, yet effective design too. |
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Weebly.com – This is one we won’t necessarily refer our customers to visit. This is a free website building tool. It gives people the ability to create websites and build blog platforms in a WYSIWYG style. There are templates, formats, designs, and functions here that might be helpful and useful to check out. |
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Etsy.com – Here’s a niche marketing website that’s a good example of putting The Long Tail philosophy into action. Etsy is dedicated to selling products that are handmade. This is an extremely popular site for artisans and crafters looking for a way to ply their wares globally. Its design is simple, easy to navigate and pleasing to the eye. It’s definitely an appealing
website which justifies its position on this list. |
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Wotartist.com – Another niche site. Wotartist is dedicated to promoting abstract art from artists all over the world. It’s a beautifully designed site. All of the navigation for the site is reduced to one corner in order to free up space for displaying artwork on the main page. I like the design of this site a lot. This site is full of awesome artwork. This simple design let’s the artwork be the focus instead of the site. Awesome concept. |
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Fatsecret.com – This social networking site is dedicated to helping people drop unwanted weight. By capitalizing on a universal problem, this site has created a huge following by allowing people to discuss what works for them, swap recipes, and encourage each other to their goals. The site is completely geared towards interactivity and information. People can get really personal
by sharing their journal entries, charting their weight and goals publicly on their member page. It’s a site that encourages people to step out, be bold and share their desire to lose weight. There are some good ideas that can be derived from its design and its ability to let users create charts and graphs to track their success. |
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Netvibes.com – This is a cool site. Netvibes puts everything you want from the web onto one very customizable page. Customizable modules allow the user to check email, display RSS or Atom feeds, display news sites, weather, and just about anything else you can think of. Netvibes is a prime example of Web 2.0. Everything about the site is focused on the user. It’s completely customizable allowing everyone the ability to create their own, unique home page for the Internet. There are many great tidbits here for designers. Great site! |
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Chow.com – A tasty website all about good food. This site covers food, recipes, food culture, and basically everything you can think of that involves food. It allows users to receive their content in multiple ways (audio, video, photos, blogs, podcasts, boards, etc.). It’s a “themed social networking site” that gives users the opportunity to interact with others revolving around a common subject…food. |
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OhDon’tForget.com – For all you text messagers out there, this is an easy way to keep your friends and contacts up to date with what’s happening in your life. Probably the neatest feature on here is the ability to schedule a time and date to have specific messages sent out to specific people. The site has some pretty cool features. Its scope is pretty narrow by only focusing
on text messaging. But, the services it provides for users is excellent, which is why it’s a top ten finisher on this list! |
Each of these sites is unique and extremely focused on achieving a particular task or service. Every single one of them is full of user friendly features. The combination of focus, use-ability, and excellent design is what makes each of them successful in their particular niche. Each one of them has something to offer the web designer as well. Designers should take a look at each of these sites as prime examples of how to create websites that are beneficial to the end user.
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Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
While surfing the web to come up with some ideas to write about this morning I stumbled onto this Study of Website Navigation Methods Paper that Fidelity Investments firm in Boston Massachusetts did while developing their website. So I did some more digging around on Website Navigation and found some interresting studies and ideas.
The Yahoo-style and Drop Down menu, both, scored low on the error report. That is a good score, in case you’re wondering. I personally would agree that over the other styles, I’d preffer these two. Honestly, I never thought about the Yahoo-style navigation while designing a website before but this actually is great, the visitor gets to see all the sub-directories, which gets him one click closer to the destination.
Drop Down menu is very easy for a fellow visitor to find their way around, the sub-categories are visible without having to click or change the page, and remember, web surfers are lazy, less clicks, less pages to go through, equals more conversions. There are some negative things about the Drop Down menus if you are not an advanced drop down menu creator. The problem is broken menus, which turn into lost business. I’ll talk about that in a bit.
According to the Clickstream Study done by University of Hamburg, top-left half of a web page is premium realestate - this is where over three quarters (76.5%) clicks happen. This also is what happens with eye tracking studies done by Hotchkiss and Nielsen. They both follow a simmilar F-shape pattern. This tells us that the best place to put our navigation is within that area, top-left half of the page.
A few other issues come up when designing navigation is the speed and functionality. The navigation style that you choose has to keep up with the speed of web navigation. With the high-speed internet acces available to most now-a-days, the hover buttons, pop-out and drop-down menus have to be lightning fast to keep up. Before the site goes live it should be tested, re-tested and tested again. Run it in several browsers, on various operating systems, make sure it works before it’s unleashed. There are so many broken navigations out there, so much resources wasted and business lost when it is so easy to prevent it by testing.
Lots of discussion going on about what a navigation link or just a link on a page should look like, many strong opinionated individuals will tell you that they religiously believe that their way is right. From what I’ve seen on forums and around the web the standard underlined link is the most effective. Using a pale dotted line to underline is another nice way to specify a link. There was time when leaving a link without the underline, looking like a “small sentence” was cool but that time has come and gone. I think that you have to use your own judgement and decide what will look good and do the job it’s intended to do. What will speak to the user, make their “trip” through your website memmorable, deliver what they are loking for and make them come back later for more. When it comes to in-body links, someone suggested placing links in the footnote, to keep the user from leaving the page before reading it to the end. Personally, I don’t know about that, it sounds like an annoyance to me.
When designing a website, it helps to remember to apply the (KISS) “keep it simple stupid” element.
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Monday, January 14th, 2008
I have mentioned Amazon many different times in previous articles and now I want to start analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. Tackling such an e-commerce giant can be a bit overwhelming in some respects, however it’s necessary to look at their successes and failures to see what should possibly be replicated in projects that come up for us as web designers. Amazon is one of those web giants that is loved by some, hated by others, but used by all whenever necessary. So, how does Amazon do it? What makes them such a massive, successful presence on the web? Let’s find out!
Amazon has built its business slowly and methodically (founded in 1994 and launched in 1995, posting their first profits in 2002). The original concept was simply to sell books online; however it quickly branched out into other diverse products. In fact, many other large retail companies now use Amazon to power and host their websites (Borders, Virgin Megastores, Target, Sears and many more). It seems that these companies have adopted the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em strategy.” In a nutshell, the Amazon system works. It works so well that Amazon.com attracts over 50 million visitors every month from just the United States alone.
Even though the Amazon website is so humongous, they create a personal feel for every user. Every time I log in, they have suggestions for me based on my previous orders or searches. Sometimes I think…’how nice’ while at other times I think, ‘I’d never buy that item.’ The point I’m trying to make here though is that they are engineering their site toward one thing…THE END USER. The list of ‘benefits’ offered to the customer is pretty lengthy. Yes, all of these benefits are geared toward the goal of making money for Amazon…but isn’t that the reason capitalism and free enterprise exist? Yes, they are trying to make a buck…but their approach is user friendly. Customer product reviews, shipping discounts, their own credit card with bonuses, Amazon Prime membership, 1-Click ordering, product forums, etc. are all great ways to get the customer involved. Amazon’s goal isn’t just to be a place to purchase items. Their goal is to make it an experience…a good experience. They want it to be an experience that people will want to be involved in over and over again.
Amazon has become a ‘one stop Internet shopping destination.’ Because of their appeal, they now have over 900,000 associates (their term for affiliate marketing companies). Simply put…you can buy almost anything on Amazon. You can usually get it at a reasonable price too. With their adherence to The Long Tail economic principle, they also give people easy access to hard to find items as well. Sometimes these are specialized products that aren’t available in your nearest brick and mortar store. This ability to offer people hard to locate items simply by searching on one website is of great comfort to millions of people around the world. “Can’t find it at the store? Look on Amazon.” I know of several families who live in remote areas of Alaska within the Arctic Circle who use Amazon as their grocery store…because they don’t have a local grocery store. They order their supplies through the Internet and pick them up at the airport. It’s a pretty awesome setup for them. This is just one of many different niches that Amazon fills. The cumulative total of these small niches results in posting revenues like the ones they posted in 2006 ($10.7 billion).
From the customer end of things, Amazon’s site is simple in appearance and simple to use. The order process is easy. This is the most critical component of their entire site. Keeping the ordering process uncomplicated is what really makes customers return. If you were to only use two key components of Amazon’s site and replicate them into your own site or your next customer’s site, they would be customer features and simplicity in giving the customer results. Whether those results are retail oriented or information oriented, keeping the process simple will in the long run create happier visitors on the site. Whether you love or hate Amazon, you have to recognize the fact that they are successful as a website. In recognizing that, look at what you can use from their example to make the next website you design a successful one.
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