CoreIP Solutions, Inc. came to us in urgent need of a website. Their new company had taken off and they had a big PR push they couldn’t launch without a web presence. They had an idea of what they wanted their new website to include, some suggestions for design, and they needed it done quickly. In web design, a smattering of ideas and a rushed timeline is usually a formula for disaster.
When you are trying to communicate a specific message to your customers and craft something that is beautiful, informative, and functional, it takes time and expertise. Throwing something together does not yield happy results. For example, most of us know the pieces that make up a car. You have the wheels, the body, the engine, a steering wheel, some seats, etc. But if we were asked to put one together, most of us would have a hard time creating something that actually worked. (We might be able to make it look like it works, but try starting it and having it function and it all falls apart.)
The same is true in the world of website construction. So the Synotac team put our collective expertise together to carefully create a new site for CoreIP. The new site includes best practices in usability and visual design as well as a robust content management system that will let CoreIP staff update their content and post news on the fly.
The partners at CoreIP are smart folks with no doubt a lot of technical expertise between them. Maybe they could have pieced together a website, but they recognized that for their new site to be functional, usable, and easy on the eyes, calling on an expert team would pay off.
Can there be harmony between the earth and the geek?
EarthTechling, a green technology blog, seeks to inform it’s readers about “eco-tech gadgets, electronics, automobiles and in-home technologies, which, in some proven manner, help a person live a more green lifestyle.” They came to Synotac looking for help creating an online presence that would give off the “green vibe”, not look like every other blog, and function exactly how they imagined. We were really excited to accept the challenge.
This was the first “true”, “professional” blog that we have created. Our staple Content Manager that we use is WordPress, an application that is meant for blogs, although most of our projects since we started using WordPress have been business or personal sites where WordPress was being used to update content on static pages rather than power a dynamic, fluid, robust blog.
See, the thing about blogs, is that they are “theoretically” never ending. With non-blog sites, you know, to a certain degree, exactly how much content is going to go on any given page. You create a certain number of pages and you put content areas that may grow a little bit, but are relatively contained. But with a blog, you have to compensate for the fact that content will continue to be created, potentially forever, and that created content needs somewhere to go and systems setup for organizing it.
This is what makes designing and programming a blog so challenging: you have to imagine ahead of time how the site will function when it is brimming with content.
Luckily, with EarthTechling, content was being created even before we got to programming the template. But planning began well before programming in the design phase. Design Guru David came up with a design that not only looked amazing, but which took into consideration the fact that content would literally be oozing from each section.
A Simple, Polished Design
David was able to create something that was sleek, but not too glossy. The buttons and gradients used on the site are very fresh and “web 2.0″, yet it is not overdone and leaves space for the content to breath and really stand out.
The article slideshow on the front page is a great example of this.
These slideshows are a great feature for the front pages of websites, and you can immediately see why on EarthTechling. The image preview is the first thing that catches your eye, and then the title of the article is nice and big and bright. The excerpt is short and to the point, and the links for reading more, comments, and ratings are right there tucked nicely under the excerpt. The title, the image, and “Read More” all link to the article, making it super easy to navigate. The subtle directional arrows on the bottom right allow you to easily navigate through the slideshow.
Taxonomies: Nothing To Do With Money
Another important thing to think about when designing and planning a blog, is the use of taxonomies. Taxonomies are the organization of the articles into things such as types, categories and tags. EarthTechling splits their articles into three main categories or types: Reviews, News and Features. Features is broken into four sub-types: Buying Guides, Previews, Interviews and How-Tos. From there, the articles are divided even further based on tags and topics.
The use of taxonomies makes it super easy to find exactly what interests you. Say you come to the site looking for green gadgets for your ipod. It’s possible that there could be reviews on those gadgets, or news articles, or even features such as a buying guide about such products. But rather than searching through those individual sections, you could simply click on the Gadgets topic in the list of topics which shows on each page. Alternatively, you could use WordPress’ powerful search and see all the articles pertaining to “green ipod gadgets”.
You can see that you don’t have to even view the entire article to see what tags and categories are on specific articles, allowing you to broaden your search by clicking on one of these links which will take you to the tag and category list view of articles.
What we tried to accomplish through the use of taxonomies, was an assortment of ways to find and categorize articles to make them easy to find.
Being Social Isn’t Just About Being Social
“Social Networking” is a hot topic in the business world these days. Everyone seems to be talking about the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Business’s of all sizes are creating accounts with these social networking sites to promote themselves; and it’s working.
By connecting your business, or in this case, blog, to a social networking site, you are ensuring yourself masses amounts of free advertising. Here is how it works:
You create an account for your business through a social networking site like Facebook.
You connect your blog to automatically post updates to Facebook everytime you make a change
Everyone who is attached to your account sees the update and potentially passes it along
OR
People visit your site, click the facebook icon, and share the article or page with all of there friends… and the free advertising begins!
Even before EarthTechling’s blog launched, as I was testing the Share feature for Facebook, I published an article to my facebook account and within minutes was receiving comments from friends who were trying to go to ET’s blog, and were having trouble because it was password protected (because we hadn’t launched yet). Social networking really does work.
And so we built social networking right into EarthTechling’s blog.
You can DIGG articles, or share them through a number of social networking sites. ET also created profiles through some of these sites and we displayed their links right in the navigation bar on the site.
ET Phone Home
As I write this, we are on the eve of deploying ET (EarthTechling) into cyber-land, and seeing first hand how all of our planning and implementation of building a better blog goes. We are confident and happy with what we built, and we wish EarthTechling the best as they blog away about a brighter tomorrow using green technology.
Search engine marketing consists of promoting your website through increasing its visibility in search engines. This can be accomplished through organic search engine optimization and/or pay per click search engine marketing. Notice the screen capture of a search engine results page. Pay per click advertisements are outlined in red, while organic listings are outlined in yellow.
Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to determine the credibility of your website, and the quality of its content. Getting other websites to link to your website will build its credibility. Such links are viewed by the search engines as third-party stamps of approval. When writing your website’s content, it is important to consider length and keyword usage. Search engines are interested in the amount of information your website provides and the keywords it relates to. Providing the search engines with an adequate balance of these two factors will drive your website toward the top of the search engines.
Pay per Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing
MSN, Yahoo and Google allow you to select keywords that are related to your businesses, and pay a fee to have your ads displayed when users search for them. The search engines decide how high to display your ads based on a function of your websites quality, the quality of your advertisement and the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click. Contrary to common belief, your position in the paid listings is not solely based on the amount you are willing to pay per click. If managed properly, your ads will be displayed above your competitors at a lower cost per click.
Quality of Search Engine Traffic
When a user conducts a search he/she is expressing interest in a topic, product or service. As a result, the visitors your website receives from search engines are already interested in your offerings. The selling is already done for you. Furthermore, when using pay per click search engine marketing, you only pay when you receive an actual visitor. With most conventional forms of marketing you pay a flat rate to broadcast a message to a loosely targeted audience, regardless of the results it generates.
We have been experimenting more and more with ways to work videos into our designs. Several studies have shown that video can greatly increase the conversion rate for visitors to your websites. It helps to engage your visitors who are more visually oriented and do not process information as easily from large chunks of text, and it also lets you engage your audience with two of my favorite topics: right brain thinking and visual learning.
Below is our first attempt, inspired by the excellent book “The Back of a Napkin,” by Dan Roam. In this short video we tackle the topic of coming up with a solid internet marketing strategy, which is often made far too complex and obscure for a normal person to grasp. While the details may be complex, you only need to master the basics and hold your web design and internet marketing vendors accountable to achieve success. The web design industry has a (deservedly) terrible reputation for trying to obfuscate basic business objectives with a bunch of jargon and tech-speak. Basically, it all comes down to a good slice of pie…
Most of our clients come to us with a eye towards a redesign for aesthetic reasons, but we feel like it’s also an opportunity to foster an environment that supports them revisiting their business goals. In our Portland web design firm, we’re constantly pushing to take site conversions another step. We started with analytics and heat mapping, which are great tools, but lately are focusing more on web design itself.
One of the interesting parts of working in custom web design is creating specific calls to action that actually produce the desired results. We definitely haven’t nailed down the process yet, but we believe it is our obligation as a professional web design firm to give our clients the best possible return on their investment. We identify key site goals with our clients through our Discover and Define process, create unique calls to action to funnel visitors, while maintaining usability and putting the visitor experience first.
A recent example is our redesign of the Julie Lawrence Yoga Center site. By pairing images of the yoga classes to develop visitor interest, with large orange buttons that guide them through the site, we hope to maintain the design aesthetic our clients are looking for, provide the portals that the site visitors are looking for and turning that visitor desire into action.
We have been getting a lot of questions about website usability testing recently from our clients, so I thought it would be good to explain how we use it and why it is so useful. In a nutshell, what usability testing refers to is sitting a user down in front of a computer and asking them to think outloud as they try to complete tasks on that website. Web design is no different than any other industry in one very basic respect: we fail to pay enough attention to how real human beings use our products. It is a lot more fun to sit around and come up with fun ideas that you or your client love than to deal with actual user feedback on how well your product works.
There are several different methodologies that are used in usability testing. The one that we prefer is a hybrid of techniques recommended by Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com), the self-appointed guardian of usability on the web, and Mark Hurst, the head of the influential usability company Creative Good (www.creativegood.com). The idea is to get unbiased users who match the different audience segments on your website and observe them while they “think” outloud. Both the user’s face and their mouse movements are recorded on a single video feed, giving us a powerful bit of evidence about how well the website we are testing works.
Usability testing can be useful in several different ways. First, it can uncover obvious problems with your website that can greatly improve its usability and therefore its overall conversion rate (making or saving you more money!). Usually these problems can be fixed for a nominal cost, but they were “hidden” from both your website design company and yourself because you are too close to the product to see it as a new user will. Second, usability testing can help you to find large, strategic issues with your website. Often these take the form of, “oh, users don’t understand that our company does X.” Or, “our users don’t understand that the point of page A is for them to contact us for a quote.” As we repeatedly emphasize, you can never make something too easy on the web. Lastly, usability testing can help to depersonalize the design, copy-writing and development components of your website. While most people are rarely short on opinions about how something should be done, there is nothing quite as useful as real user feedback to get everyone thinking again about what the customer wants.
I’ll leave you with some sample quotes from some of our usability tests. These are often the most effective way to summarize the findings of a series of usability tests:
“I don’t know my flight number, I’m filling this out because I need help finding [a flight]. I’m confused!â€??
“At times I thought it was too messy. I couldn’t find things on the homepage. I like sites that are simple and clear. Everything was so flashy that nothing grabbed my attention. I clicked on a tab to get away from the homepage.”
“Text is very small – with a lot of text to sift through, it may be challenging for older eyes. I know I struggled. Link colors are also a little light.”
“Website is messy at times…too many things happening at one time. Homepage had many things happening. I looked for something to grab my attention, and nothing really did on the homepage.”
Today we’re going to look at a report that is guaranteed to show you something that you can change to improve your website’s performance. Why is this so hard? Well, the trick with web analytics is to find the report that tells you what to do: the internet throws off more data than any other medium in history, and as a result we are drowning in non-useful, non-actionable data.
Here are some typical web reports from typical web analytics tools:
Why does your website exist? Think about it for a moment, and you’ll realize that it’s not an easy question to answer. If you can’t give a concise, fifteen-word answer to this question, you know you have a problem. Once you know why your website exists, you can start to figure out what actions you want your website visitors to take. After all, if your site exists to generate leads for your service company, and none of your thousands of monthly visitors ever pick up the phone or send you an email, is the website a good investment of your time and money?
There are two big problems with conversion rates, however.
A while back we wrote an email newsletter that talked about bounce rates. Due to the clamoring for more information, I have decided to expand this into a post.
First, what is a bounce rate? Depending on your analytics tool, bounce rates are defined slightly differently:
Any visitor who stays on your site for less than a certain amount of time (usually 10 seconds).
Any visitor who only looks at only one page on your site before leaving
While the definitions are slightly different, the end meaning is exactly the same: you got absolutely nothing out of those visitors. Zilch. They don’t even remember your company name or what your logo looked like.
Posted by Cameron @ 11:32pm on September 18th, 2007
One of the most common questions I get is, What does your name mean? Well, it’s actually a bit of a long story…
Back in 2003, when I was pretending to have a plan for my life, my Dad, my Mom and I were all sitting around the dining room table talking about possible company names. I don’t remember what my Dad suggested, but my Mom wanted names that were very “Oregon,” such as Big Green Tree Design, or Sustainable Rushing Water that Contains Happy Salmon Web Development. (She’s very sweet, so she won’t mind me writing this. Plus, she does amazing art. Actually, she often makes comments about being in labor with me for 48 hours.) Anyway, I wasn’t really happy with these names, because I felt like they were too limiting.
A brilliant idea
Brilliant, that is, if you like our company name. I decided to look up “father” and “son” in a bunch of different languages and paste them together in as many different ways as I could think of to see what we would come up with. After struggling to figure out how to do this for a while, I found the solution in a great website that will look up any word in English in hundreds of other languages: Logos Language Services. After coming up with such memorable combinations as Wawabab (Quechua and Romansch), Fizzupie (Sardinian and Galician), and Buwafi (Nepali and Wallon, whatever that is), we settled on Synotac, which comes from the Polish word for son (syn) and the Croatian word for father (otac). What do you think – how’d we do?
Why does your website exist? Think about it for a moment, and you’ll realize that it’s not an easy question to answer. If you can’t give a concise, fifteen-word answer to this question, you know you have a problem. Once you know why your website exists, you can start to figure out what actions you want your website visitors to take. After all, if your site exists to generate leads for your service company, and none of your thousands of monthly visitors ever pick up the phone or send you an email, is the website a good investment of your time and money?
