After months of work, you are finally ready to present your new web site to the world. And you’re also pretty excited to have that big project finally done. Unfortunately, you need to budget for continual attention.
Read More...Category: Web Design
Information Sells: Give Customers Enough to Complete the Sale
This weekend I spent time at what may become one of my favorite spots in Maine. It was an apple orchard + bakery + home-roasted espresso bar. Those are three of my favorite things in life. However, their lack of information in the bakery nearly made me overlook several items. The more I knew, the more I wanted to buy. The bakery case was filled with different goodies. I knew from reading their web site that they were supposed to have many items that featured their own, organic apples. So I wanted to choose one of those. But nothing was labeled. So, I started asking: “What is that?”, “What is that?”, “What is that?” as I pointed to anything looking apple-y looking. My first two guesses were incorrect, and as I sensed the line growing behind me, I was feeling some pressure to make a decision. I knew the donuts were cider donuts (they had been advertised on the web… Continue Reading »
Read More...Are Branding and SEO at Odds?
Several items have crossed my virtual desktop recently that had me wondering: “When did branding and SEO become opposing goals for a web site redesign?” For example, I recently read Hub Spot’s materials on Web site redesigns. I also listened to a podcast by SEO Rockstars called Branding versus SEO on Corporate Websites which used the Target web site as a case study. Both of these presentations seem to suggest that branding and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) were at odds with one another, and that SEO should be of primary importance. Let’s start with what we all agree on: You should build a web site so that search engines can easily find you. This means use of key words in content, titles and tags. Key content should be searchable. Which means it should not be embedded in graphic files or within a flash presentation. Content matters. You need to have lots of fresh and inviting content. Don’t redesign without good… Continue Reading »
Read More...Twitter Would Have Failed Without Design
When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was pretty stupid. I didn’t care to read the banalities of someone’s Tweets as they ate, waited, shopped, etc. I’m not alone in questioning its merit, there are many, many articles wondering what the long term impact of Twitter will be. However, in the short term, Twitter is growing like crazy, with more than 32 million accessing twitter.com in April of this year. So it is obviously appealing to some, at least enough to set up and test it out once or twice. Picture Twitter Without the Design Recently, Twitter has experienced frequent outages and over-capacity issues. The other day, I went to twitter.com and the page content (HTML) loaded but the CSS style sheet did not. Below is what the login screen looks like without the benefit of design. If you thought Twitter was mundane when it’s working correctly, it’s much worse without the benefit of design. Seeing this twitter.com… Continue Reading »
Read More...5 Tips for More Readable RSS Feeds: Good Typography & Design
If you write a blog or have other content that people subscribe to in an RSS feed, read these 5 tips to make your feed more readable. Before the tips, ask yourself whether you want to have the entire post available in the feed, or if it will be truncated. If it’s truncated, readers are forced to click to your site to finish reading. Reasons to truncate: To increase revenues for advertisements that are only seen on your site To increase the chance that a reader will move from your blog post to another part of your site Reasons to provide a full feed: It is more likely that readers will actually read your content, as there is a significant drop off whenever you ask people to click through to read the full post If you are working to provide expertise and build brand presence, it’s more important that people actually read your thoughts, regardless of where they do it… Continue Reading »
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