Proper visual and structural design is a crucial step in building a site that won’t kill you.

Design gets a bad rap sometimes. It’s expensive, time consuming, not needed—designers create answers that nobody wants to problems that don’t exist…yikes!

We’ve talked with many companies over the years. They’ve ranged from shoestring startups to some big names. No matter what size of company it is, many times there is someone there unwilling to make the investment on design and usability. The main complaint is that the payoff in those areas are not worth the investment.

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As acclimated consumers of the information age, we’ve come a long way from understanding how the blips and lights of the modern personal computer work. We have migrated into an all-encompassing online social grid that seeks to craft the new manner by which we consume, experience, and react to web content. Knowing this about the web, however, is not enough to fill the minds and wallets of those organizations who seek profits today and tomorrow – it takes a larger leap of faith. The key to success for any organization, to sustain a promising future in this post-modern territory, is to manage their website for optimal ROI. How, you may be asking?

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There’s an excellent post up over at Signal vs. Noise by Roby Fitzhenry concerning user paths in web navigation design. The basic argument is that website designers should think beyond the common, top-down hierarchical structure present in most websites since it may not necessarily match up with users’ desired paths. In this case, a “path” is the series of steps (pages viewed, actions taken, etc.) a user undertakes to meet an end goal, whatever that may be from finding applicable information to making a purchase. Here’s Roby’s own words explaining the concept: (more…)

We’re excited to be contracted by online pool filters and supplies company DadsPool.com to redesign the current e-commerce site.

The new strategy will take aim to increase online sales conversion through the refinement of site navigation, structure, and their customers’ online buying process.

We’re also implementing a search marketing strategy focused on search engine optimization to pull in visitors looking for pool filters and supplies on a national level.

We’ll keep you posted on the before and after case study for this project.

Website? Check. Traffic? Not sure. Conversions? Huh?

You must learn how to market your site to bring customers that convert.

GETTING STARTED:

Getting started, you need to have a plan in place, a web site marketing strategy. Without planning you have no direction to follow. So think about WHO you are wanting to target. WHAT their needs are once they get to your site. WHEN and how often will they need what your company has to offer them. And HOW you can get them to convert into a sale or a qualified business lead!

Promotional strategies will help narrow down what works for your company, don’t be afraid to try several at once, this will help you narrow down what is working and what isn’t. With the popularity of the internet you have so many ways you can test market what your company is selling; i.e. search engine campaigns, email marketing campaigns, forums, pay-per-click campaigns, web site optimization, writing press releases, social networks, blogging, etc.

YOU’RE HALF WAY THERE:
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You’ve seen it before, the common day-to-day unfolding of most organizations. They start somewhere between a second serving of coffee and a verbal rehash of yesterday’s news. Between the foreseeable dehydration and irrelevant debate, few decisions are made about the state of their web presence. What is far more daunting is that when the website is considered a topic of discussion, nothing profound or progressive pushes the rhetoric further than the aesthetic of the website.

Granted, to those involved in filling a 9 to 5 block, it may seem like time well spent picking pretty colors and finding more reasons for the website to “Pop!”. Unfortunately, these sorts of discussions are not sufficient in understanding the impact of an organizations website. Those in charge of making big decisions must come to terms with the idea that their website is an investment and should be cared for with the same amount of discipline. To those in the know, such accusations may come off as unsound or irrelevant due to the adoption rate of the internet. However, the affects of the internet along with simply having a website do not guarantee results.

I challenge you to examine your next company meeting and see if John-Doe from marketing is determine to send out his polished mailers or Jane from sales is set on buying more leads. If the latter describes your organization’s current state of investment, loosely, then I invite you to read on. On the other hand, if you’re fortunate and your company’s adoption characteristic in conversions is what Geoffrey Moore describes as pre-chasm(early adopters and or visionaries) in his book “Crossing the Chasm”, then we commend you and invite you to read for leisure. For those of us in the early majority, let me focus on the opportunity of converting a return on investment through the explorations in Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus’ book “Web Design for ROI.” (more…)

When approaching the development of a new website, project managers, designers, and application developers initially have little data to inform their design decisions and must rely upon research in order to construct successful user experiences. Research, however, is completely invalidated if the decisions it suggests end up being ineffective after a project launches. The fail safe for avoiding such an outcome is extensive usability testing, a portion of the development process many organizations sometimes wish to avoid due to perceived associative costs and resource drain. Usability testing, though, does not have to be expensive or take a prohibitive amount of time, and the changes that will come about due to interacting directly with users will reap benefits that far outweigh any costs in capital or time that is accrued throughout the process.

Keeping usability testing light and cost effective is key, and here are five quick tips on how to do just that:

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