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.
» Read more: Putting Together the Pieces: Quickly and Efficiently
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.
» Read more: EarthTechling: Harmony Between The Earth & Technology
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…
Making Money on your Website – Easy as Pie from Cameron Madill on Vimeo.
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.
» Read more: Usability Testing – Getting to Know Your Website's Visitors
“Elegance in design is achieved when you have removed everything possible, not when you have added everything possible.”
I love this observation found in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. When I first read this, it immediately made me think about usability testing – the process of observing users unfamiliar with a site as they try to complete specific tasks on that site.
New observers are almost universally struck by the divergence between expected and actual behavior. For me, it is a humbling experience to watch users ignore seemingly “can’t miss” parts of the page, to fail to complete the easiest tasks given to them, and become irritated with the features that were supposed to impress or help them. Running counter to the tendency and desire of most of us (designers, developers, clients) to add whizzy new features or innovative design elements, the results of usability testing constantly reinforce the importance of simplifying, clarifying, and focusing every page on a site for a specific purpose. Usability testing reminds us that design elegance is achieved by removing as much as possible, and that simple, focused sites are preferred by the only people who really matter: our customers.