Posted in Design, User Experience | 2 Comments
Every user is unique, so is every website. With every website comes a new experience. And with each experience comes a new learning curve.
Each time a user comes to your website they are taking the time out of their busy life to get to know you. If it’s the first time they have come to your website, they will have to learn how to navigate you site and how to find the content they are looking for.
One of the primary purposes of the homepage is to set the tone for how the rest of the website should look and flow.
Once the user has determined the placement and style of the navigation on the homepage, it shouldn’t change as they progress through the website. For example, if the navigation bar on the homepage is located across the header of the website and has five main categories, it shouldn’t move to the left side of the website and have seven main categories (this also applies to link colors, buttons, and the location of elements such as the login or search bar). This type of inconsistent navigation may make sense when you are designing the website but consider the user first, and strongly consider their attention span.
Take the analogy of driving a car, you don’t want to learn how to drive it the first time only to find out half way down the road you have to learn how to drive the car all over again.
Posted in Email Marketing | 3 Comments
A week or so ago I was looking for an email testing service that would take an email campaign and send me back screenshots of the email in different email clients (Outlook, Mail, Lotus Notes, etc). I found several and thought I would share.
Here’s my list so far, ranked best to worst:
- Litmus (http://litmusapp.com/email-testing) Cost: Free to $199/mo.
- Campaign Monitor (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing) Cost: $5 a test
- MailChimp (http://www.mailchimp.com/add-ons/inboxinspector) Cost: $29 for 3 tests
- LyrisHQ (http://www.lyris.com/solutions/lyris-hq/email-delivery/inbox-snapshot) Cost: $299/mo.
If I missed any or my information is no longer correct, please leave a comment.
Posted in Design, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you are considering a new website or redesign of your current site? Most likely, an image of the site’s design is etched into your brain. You have ideas of what it will look like, how visitors will interact with your brand, and how you will be able to increase your sales or leads through the site. That’s great, and designers will be grateful that you know what you want, but be prepared to give a little if you want to achieve the highest level of traffic and results.
Any designer worth his salt will consider how effectively the design will be able to be Search Engine Optimized. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the likelihood that search engines, like Google, and those using search engines will be able to find your website when searching for targeted keywords. Let’s call it marketing for your website. After all, your website IS meant to be part of your marketing strategy. It’s no good to have the most glorious website in the industry if no one is able to find it through search engines. And unless you are an industry leader or you do not care about organic results, you NEED people to find your website through search engines.
As an example, Flash animation is a great way to add some “pizzazz” to your site, but at what expense? Yes, Flash can still be used in a SEO friendly manner and Google will index it if programmed correctly. But a site programmed completely in Flash is going to be more difficult to increase the rank of than a site that has HTML content for search engines to find. Your site will look great and you will receive compliments from the 3 people a month that are able to find it. Is that really what you want? Again, if everyone knows you, feel free to Flash it up, they’re coming anyway. But, if you are begging to be found, use Flash in moderation.
So before you start your next web project, make sure you ask the developer how they intend to take your message to the masses. The internet has enabled marketers to advertise their goods and services in more targeted ways than ever before. You do not really need to search for new customers. Build it right and they will come. Build it wrong, and you’ll be awfully lonely playing with all those neat Flash features.
Oh and by the way, the photo really has no relevance to this post, I just thought it looked cool.