Category Archives: Website Design

Launching our client’s website soon: NEGPRI

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We had this great opportunity to work with 3 engineers (Entrepreneurs to-be) from BOEING in developing this group-buying website, similar to but better than Groupon and LivingSocial.

The website will be launched in March-April of 2011.

A little bit about NEGPRI:

Negpri is a website that helps incorporate collective buying power. Collective buying works when a certain number of people sign up for a similar offer, then deal becomes available to all. If the predetermined minimum is not met, no one gets the deal.  In an effort to provide access to targeting potential buyers, businesses can post deals as well

With NEGPRI, subscribers can make offers on products or services they are interested in and have a need to buy. Once a product or service is recommended, users can then vote via a “thumbs up” button (we call it RAVE) on what deal they would like to see.

Creating a Remarkable Strategy

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One night as I was listening to one of the audio books, I heard this passage: “Watch your competitors, but don’t follow them.”

Within your marketplace, unwritten rules form that you and all your competitors implicitly agree to and fight along. These rules are typically set by the current market leader who educates the customers—who then force the rules upon new entrants like you.

There are two ways to create a winning strategy in an era where remarkable ideas spread virally and you face more competitors than ever.

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The TRUTH about your website

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The reality is that most web sites look perfectly fine. The colors are fine, the menus are fine, the logo is fine, the pictures are fine, and so on. You personally do not like the look of your web site because you look at it so often. Your visitors, on the other hand, think your web site looks just fine and are not particularly interested in your site’s colors or the type of menus used.

Your visitors are looking for something interesting they can read and learn about—which is why it makes sense to focus on getting people to consume Web content through other means such as e-mail, RSS, and social media sites.

Save the thousands of dollars and countless hours you were going to spend on the redesign of your site and do three things.

First, add something collaborative to your site like a blog (which is easy to update on a regular basis). Second, start creating lots of compelling content people will want to consume (see following chapters on how to do this). Third, start focusing where the real action is: Google, industry blogs, and social media sites.

Is Your Web Site a Marketing Hub?

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The history of the company web site began with the paper brochure that was handed out at trade shows and stuffed into envelopes for mailing to unsuspecting prospects.

When the Internet came into play, this same brochure was handed to a Web designer who turned it into a beautiful web site. This made sense at the time: brochures were static, the Web was new and mostly static, and companies had spent lots of money to have these brochures designed. However, having a “brochureware” web site is where the trouble starts for many businesses today.

If your web site is like many of the web sites we see, it is a one-to-many broadcast tool—think megaphone. We find that people visit these types of sites once, click around, and never return. Why? Because nothing on these sites—which arefilledwithsales-orientedmessages—compelthemto stay.

The Web was originally built to be a collaboration platform by Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s and while it took a couple of decades to get there, the Web is now truly collaborative. Instead of broadcasting to their users with a megaphone, the top-ranked sites today have created communities where like-minded people can connect with each other. In order to take full advantage of this collaborative power, you must rethink your web site. Instead of “megaphone,” think, “hub.”

What we want you to do is to change the mode of your web site from a one-way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub for your marketplace.

Big Picture: What a Web Site Does?

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Big Picture #1:

A Web site must do at least one of two things, but probably both:

• Turn a stranger into a friend, and a friend into a customer.

• Talk in a tone of voice that persuades people to believe the story you’re telling.

Big Picture #2:

A Web site can cause only four things to happen in the moments after someone sees it:

• She clicks and goes somewhere else you want her to go.

• She clicks and gives you permission to follow up by email or phone.

• She clicks and buys something.

• She tells a friend, either by clicking or by blogging or phoning or talking.

That’s it……

If your site is attempting to do more than this, you’re wasting time and money and, more important, focus.

Effective Business Blog Designs

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The design of your business blog has a huge impact on how it is perceived by your visitors. A great design instills trust, makes you more credible and invites your readers to participate. A poor design can make your blog and your company look unprofessional.

Just as with regular website design, there are certain best practices you should keep in mind when working on the design of your blog. The best practices of regular website design still apply, of course, but there are also important blog specific considerations:

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How to Get your staff involve in your company’s blog

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A corporate blog provides a forum for your company’s leaders and employees to discuss topics of interest with your prospects, customers and the people who influence them. A corporate blog can consist of several individual blogs, each written by different employees (“specialists”). It can also have a summary company blog that incorporates all of the individual blogs.

Organizing a blog in this fashion creates many more opportunities for your company to be found online and to generate new business. So how do you get everyone in your organization on board?

1. Get commitment from the person in charge

Require key employees to write a weekly post. As you can imagine, this announcement may receive some objection from certain members of the team. There may be doubt that another blog could bring value to the market or target audience but everyone should still be encouraged to blog. Over time, more employees will become excited about blogging. In order for the entire firm to be committed to blogging, the leader of the company must also demonstrate his or her commitment.

2. Appoint a blogging administrator

Dedicate a specific resource to manage the blog. This person’s top responsibilities include:

  • Monitoring that everyone submits his/her blog posts on the assigned day.
  • Keeping everyone excited about blogging,
  • Educating on blogging best practices.
  • Sending out a weekly report to keep bloggers motivated and aware of the value blogging brings to the business.
  • Making sure that subject matter experts are involved to review posts in their areas of expertise.
  • Everyone should be enthusiastic about blogging but you can’t assume that everyone will communicate in a way that the readers will easily understand. Enlist the aid of an editor to build consistent logic and structure.

3. Share the results

People get discouraged if you don’t show them the fruits of their labor. If you get 25 new leads as the result of a blog post, let everyone know! If a thought leader re-tweeted one of your employee’s posts, let everyone know!

4. Write for your target

Before you start blogging you need to determine and personalize your target audience. Think in terms of a specific persona or multiple personas that identify segments within your market. Personas can help companies develop effective marketing messages and useful products. Think: Who are you writing to? Who do you want to read your blogs? Visualize the answers.

Sizing up Type Sizing

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Different people come at the problem of CSS type sizes differently. Some tell you never to size type, period. Others tell you to stick to the length constants. Still others suggest that sizing is all right as long as you use relative units.

Based on the overwhelming number of people surfing the Web with more or less recent browsers, it seems that type sizing with relative units is safe enough for general-purpose Websites. This conclusion assumes that most Web surfing happens by way of Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows desktop or laptop computers. This isn’t a product endorsement. It’s simply a fact of life. The last couple of versions of IE for Windows handle CSS pixel units pretty well, so the problem is, for all practical purposes, solved. However, if you expect a larger-than-usual proportion of visitors coming to your site with wireless phones, PDAs, Macintoshes, Netscapes, or older Windows browsers, you would be wise to heed the warnings of the more conservative type-sizers among us.

The first goal of a Website is to present content. This content must be accessible and usable, and therefore it must be legible. Any aesthetic or design concerns must always defer to usability, no matter how it pains your inner arteest.

Of course, the correlation between effective design and usability is not trivial. You’ll find no argument here about that. But it’s one thing to strive for an effective and intuitive graphical layout, and it’s another to split hairs over online typography. So if type sizing has to go to make your site more usable to more of your audience, then go it must.

JavaScript Links or onClick Links?

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JavaScript links, or links with javascript in the href attribute, cause problems for visitors who either turn off or don’t have JavaScript support in their browsers. Not to be callous, but, in almost all cases, this percentage of your audience is small.

As a compromise, you can always use self-referential links that respond to onClick events. These links are easier for non-JavaScript browsers to handle, but then you have the problem of the browser jumping back to the top of the page. This inconveniences a larger cross-section of your audience than it helps.

If you really want to court the HTML purists, don’t use JavaScript on your site, period. However, if you want or need the extra functionality, JavaScript links work better than onClick links for the majority of your visitors.

Embedding or Attaching?

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You have two methods: embedding and attaching. Which is better?

The answer is, attaching. By far.

I like attaching scripts and style sheets. It allows me to use the same script file or style sheet on as many Web pages as I want, which is invaluable for frequently used functions like rollovers or popup menus and sitewide styles. If I tried to embed these things, I’d have to copy and paste the same blocks of code over and over again onto each and every page that requires them. This seems to me like a waste of time, not to mention bandwidth. The visitor’s browser has to load the embedded stuff again and again, while the browser caches attached files.

Even more importantly, if I want to change something late in the process, I only have to fix it once, in the attached script or style sheet. When you embed everything, you have to go through every instance of the code and make the same corrections over and over again. Another needless waste of time.

Besides, for those who strive for per-spec implementation, the W3C recommends that you attach rather than embed.

Bottom line: Embedding is fine for quick, one-shot functions and styles. For anything you might want to reuse, attaching is the only way to fly.