Chapter 4 of Web Design for ROI is all about landing pages, and it's the best and most valuable chapter thus far. The chapter starts off with this little gem of a quote: Enter the custom landing page. It's a web site's stand-in for ambassador, concierge, and superstar salesperson rolled into one. It's been carefully crafted to meet, ...
In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus (check out their website for more information on the book). Today I thought I'd share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI. ...
I'm actually serious with the title here. This session was great. Honestly, I've been to more informative sessions here at SMX West than I've been to since Pubcon 2006, where I knew nothing about SEO and everything I heard was new. Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains had some good speakers who each provided...
Consider one of the most compelling and confusing parts of online economies -- once someone finds your website, what exactly will they choose to do with it? With a little clever planning the answer is: whatever you want them to.Let's say you've have visitors flocking to your website. They're looking everywhere, at all your pages. Now what? You need to create a clear Action Pa...
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Doing business on the Internet means you have an unlimited audience -- it also means you have many competitors. Thankfully you also have numerous options to build your personal path to success on the web. They fall into two rough groups: Traffic and Customers.Building TrafficTraffic is all the people that ...
E-commerce has, for the most part, evolved far beyond the late 1990's cliches of hair-wrenching, sanity-shattering slogs through yet another "clever" designer's take on how shopping on the web should be. Standards prevailed, usability won out, and we're now free to spend our collective $107 million (Census.gov e-commerce sta...
Yesterday, one of the most popular web design portals, AListApart, unveiled their latest project - a survey for web designers and developers. Here's their pitch: People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are ou...
Many of the large content and e-commerce sites we've worked with experience a disease I like to call "page bloat." Symptoms include pagination of content pages, creation of new pages that simply provide alternate navigation methods and site architecture design that follows the little-known usability rule from well-known guru, Wrongy McLovestoClick - "more pages are always better...
Over the past quarter as my own web development skills have taken a significant ramp-up - I know how to use CSS float styles! - I've begun taking an eye to the regard of QA and it's importance within rapid-development commercial environments. Across the board as an industry we are breaking out the latest tools (eg. UGC, social communities, ala Web 2.0!) , harnessing emerging tech...
Footers are important. Usually, they are a repetition of the primary navigation and contain anything that is considered "the fine print," such as copyright information and privacy policies. With the rising popularity of standards based design, they also have become the home for buttons that show off standards compliance. While doing a ...
You have anywhere from 4-10 seconds to engage my attention before I’m gone... Before I click away, close the window and head over to your competitor’s site for a dose of instant gratification. I shouldn’t have to piece together the objective of your page—this isn’t a TV crime drama, and even if it were, the plot would be more obvious than ...
As a follow up to Matt's How to Hire a Good Web Developer article, I thought I would expand on the subject a little more and discuss common traits good web developers have. These are things I've noticed in working with or talking to web developers at all skill levels -- from someone who still uses Front Page all the way to Google emp...
I've been doing work on a website for one of our clients, and I noticed they followed a trend with their email address that I've seen a lot. They were getting lots of spam at their contact email address, i.e. [email protected], so they replaced it with [email protected] as a last ditch method to stop the avalanche of spam.While this works, it doesn't get to the root of the p...
One of the biggest changes to homepages across the web, particularly with big brands, is the seemingly mandatory inclusion of the multiheader. Multiheaders allows multiple stories or features access to the primary visibility section of a homepage, and let visitors choose (through a click or hover) which featured piece they want to see. Let's take a walk through a few: ...