Web Design tips to make your life incredibly easy

Learn from the best. Leading web design experts reveal the secrets of the trade, these are now yours to learn, follow, implement and win.

Every great web designer has a true secret or two that they use time and time again to provide the best service for their clients, this insider knowledge is vital when you are looking at your own design project.

It's quite a collection. Enjoy

The Optimum Line Length

The Baymard Institute suggest that 50-75 characters per line. This sort of length energises readers and keeps them engaged in your content, and we know that the more engaged readers are, the more likely they are to stay on your page and take the action that you want them to take.


Use Video to show visitors something real

Kendra Gaines at WebdesignerDepot.com rightly argues that visitors are wanting a connection to business and brands, video allows us to do this by showing them something real and of substance. I couldn't agree more.


Use only Appropriate Images

Graham at Effective Website Design makes the sensible point that images need to be carefully selected, and the process itself shouldn't be overlooked or undertaken quickly. “Do not use images indiscriminately, lots of images can lose the page focus.” says Graham, and he's right, there is nothing off putting that images on pages that have no context to the subject matter.


Responsive Design - it's the future

Nick Pettit at treehouse wrote a compelling blog post last year about Responsive Design, and steps readers through the concepts in a very practical manner.

User Flow in Web Design

Adrian Fraguela at Silver talks about thinking about the user experience in web design, one of the more interesting areas they look at briefly is User Flow, that is the need to consider exactly how users will move around your site and ensuring that your design allows them to interact with the site successfully.

That's it for this post.  Do you have a secret to your web design success? Don't be selfish, share it with others in the comments below!

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Web Site Usability - what do you need to consider!

Web usability is all about taking a look at sites, pages and designs to better understand the customer journey - the reasons why visitors are there in the first place, understanding any barriers that stop visitors from taking their desired action.

In essence, your web site should provide your visitors with an efficient and enjoyable user experience.

Web pages should be self explanatory and obvious.

The MUM Test

When considering the basics for web page usability, I like to ask the following simple question 'Would my Mum be able to use it!'. You see my mum wasn't a tech head, she wasn't particularly well educated in these modern technologies, so she wasn't at all web savvy; and if we think of our potential visitors in this way then we will always ensure that our sites are a simple (and easy) to use as possible.

Basically, if my mum could navigate a web site and get what she wanted, then it was a good site.

Key Areas to consider

Intent - what are you visitors intending to do on your site?

Web site Structure (appearance) – what your visitors see and interact with.

Whitespace – clean space that makes your site easy to view, read, understand and use. Good use of space can draw the visitors eyes to the important parts (and links) of the site.

Noise – is information fighting for attention or does any other element vie for the visitors attention (strong contrasts next to text for example (i.e. bold graphics or images next to key information can force eyes away from this text)).

Length – short page length, visitors shouldn't have to scroll too far to get to the information that they want, information “below the fold” will not get seen as much as information above it.

Consistence – across navigation, fonts, layout, colour etc

Images – need to be relevant and compelling.

Functionality – how well the site interacts with visitors and visitors with the site.

Organisation of information – and links. Do users know where they are and where to get to the common information they might need? Can visitors get to the action you want them to take easily.  Are the web pages split into clearly defined areas.

Speed – how fast the site loads (< 2 second is ideal) as customers may leave if they have to wait to view the information on your site. Site speed is also important for good Google rankings.

Interactivity – how well can visitors interact with your site, does search work well for example?

Things visitors should never ask themselves

• Where am I?
• Where do I start?
• Where did they put ….?
• What information do I need on this page?
• Why did they call it that?
• Why is that there?

Common questions to ask

• What is the first thing you notice on the site? Is your USP clearly visible?
• Is there a clear visual hierarchy? (headers, important information etc) – newspapers do this REALLY well!
• Are the pages consistent (everyone knows instictively how to read a newspaper and what the headlines mean, bold intro text, main story, caption under images, we know to go to the back pages for the sport and somewhere close to the middle for TV listings etc). Familiarity is reassuring.
• Do you think it's too cluttered?
• Are you having a hard time finding the information you want?
• Does the site feel well organised?
• Do you have to scroll to get to important information?
• Is the site slow?
• What do you think of the fonts, colours and images?
• Can you easily search for product information?
• Can you easily find the contact information?

The Search Engine Ranking factor

I've already mentioned that site speed is important for Google ranking, but also IF your site doesn't look very good to visitors they are likely to press the BACK button on their browser quickly.  This visitors action is classed as a Bounce by Google, and a high Bounce rate will go against you in rankings!

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Learn from Politicians!

In the UK the local elections are happening this week, so it gives us an opportunity to take a leaf out of our MPs' books and raise the profile of your business and website?

Just like our politicians, you too can build a professional online brand and profile for your business with some very simple tips; and changing the way your website portrays and promotes you could do wondered for your sales too!

The Personal Statement

Just like the political parties your business should employ a personal statement. Your personal statement and the way your present it on your web site is critical as this is one of the first ‘things’ that a visitor who doesn't know you very well will seek out (whether they are aware of it or not!), and it has the added benefit of helping them understand more about your business.

Your company's personal statement simply needs to be the top 2-3 things that you want your visitors to know about your business, they should show how you can help your prospects.

For example, you might want your visitors to be aware of your huge selection of products, the fact that you are an award winner, your customer service stats, your low prices etc – whatever it is that you think your market will go wild over and that you can satisfy.

Once you've decided on what your business personal statement should be you need to ensure that it is easily and quickly seen on your site. Are these 2-3 statements obvious on your site? Are they mentioned at all or hidden in your navigation?

Put them to your homepage and make them easily viable throughout your site.

Your Professional Profile

You only need to take a quick look at any of the political parties web sites to see what views, experience and values their leader has.
You can find out about their history, achievements, what they stand for and how they believe that they can personally help you.

Does your site portray its top Directors in the same way? Is it easy to find out about them, what skills, experience and background they have, and what they think that they can do for your prospects?

If you don’t talk about the top people in your business then you are missing a trick; research constantly shows that the “About Us” pages are usually one of the top pages that prospects visit on your site and these pages can help sell yourself and your business if done correctly.

Say what you want about our political system, the parties and politicians, they do know how to promote themselves and how to get us following them and believing in them, and by following these simple tips you will be able to better promote your site and make you more appealing to your prospects.

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POTS and PANS!

What type of site so you own or manage? Is it a Pretty Ordinary Trash Site (POTS) or a Pretty Amazing Natural Sites (PANS) site?

Obviously you don’t want to own a POTS, these tend to be trashy, thin content, poorly linked to sites, where as the more superior PANS have lots of lovely content that visitors want to read and share, their content also attracts links naturally.

A site needs to have a clear and definite purpose; if this can be portrayed successfully to visitors then half of the battle has been won.

Sleek, modern design is a winner. Visitor needs and design trends change often, sites that don’t follow these will look dated very quickly and will be an instant turn-off.

Content needs to be unique and fresh and needs to speak concisely to your target market – avoid waffle and clutter and keep the messages as simple and as concise as possible.

Ultimately for any website to be successful it needs people to use it; site design and appearance are very important, but they will never replace the need for excellent usability.

A websites navigation affects how usable it is, and when developing or redesigning an existing site then the navigation (how you visitors are doing to find the great content) should be your primary concern.

In Summary

	POTS	PANS
Site Design	Designed in the 80’s/90’s. Cluttered.	Appealing Modern – fresh, clean.
Content	SEO focused. Doesn't read well.	User focused. Clear, well-written content.
Clarity	Visitors confused. Unsure what you site is about.	Purpose clear. Visitors feel happy on your site.
Usability	Confusing leaving visitors impatient. They will leave.	Simple to use. Customers stay and look around.
Navigation	Visitors can’t find what they need. No structure to site at all.	Visitors can find what they need quickly. 1-3 clicks and they are there.

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3 minutes to a better website

There are a couple of things that websites MUST DO.

1. Visitors MUST be able to understand instantly what products/services you provide. 
2. Visitors MUST be able to find products or services to buy from you. 
3. Visitors MUST be able to understand your value proposition 

MINUTE 1:

Choose a close friend; choose someone who isn't close to your business.
Get them to look at your website and get them to write down what product/service they think you provide.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

MINUTE 2:

Choose another friend; again, someone who isn’t close to your business.
Give them 4-5 products of yours to find and see if they can easily find them on your website.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

MINUTE 3:

This is about your Value Proposition.

A Value Proposition helps you to connect to your customers; it says to them ‘we know you’, ‘we know what you’re looking for’. It’s the value proposition that makes them love you and your products. A good value proposition explains how you can solve your prospects problems, it tells your prospects why they should buy from you.

Choose yet another friend; again, someone who isn’t close to your business.
Get them to look at your website and get them to write down 3-4 reasons why they think they should buy from you.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

You're done!

OK, that’s your 3 minutes. Take a look at the results and see if it tells you anything.

• Is your offering obvious?
• Can people find your products/services easily?
• Are reasons obvious as to why visitors should buy from you? 

The answers to these questions should help you to amend your website to make it more relevant to your visitors.

Good luck

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Online Lead Generation – Great Follow up Strategies that WILL lead to sales

OK, so your generating sales leads online, but it’s not working as well as you would have hoped! What’s going wrong?

Well if you want your lead generation efforts to generate decent sales, you need to build a robust lead follow up system.

Ideally what you want to achieve is for your lead follow up system to manage your sales leads automatically.

Here are the things that you need in place to help you towards your goal of online lead to sale.

Create a landing page

Hopefully you have taken this first very basic step in generating great sales leads.

This page should really hold two purposes:

1. Get them to buy online - if your prospect buys straight away then you don’t have to bother with any additional sales process!
2. If they fail to buy then you want to capture their details, in my last post I talked about great ways of capturing prospect details. The prospect capturing system could be part of the online sales process – start by asking for an email address on a single page, then if they leave the sales process part way through you have their email contact details to enable follow-up.

Prompt contact is key

If your lead leaves your page, then it’s possible that the left because they wanted to take a look at someone else’s offering before they make their final purchase decision - if you can get in touch with them within a couple of minutes then you're highly likely to retain the sale - the longer you leave this recontact, the less likely you are to get the sale.

What’s the Score?

If possible, ‘Score’ your lead.

If they have been on your site for a while or visited numerous pages or emailed you then they are probably more interested in what you have to offer.

Other factors like their geographic location may make them a better prospects - or in B2B sales did they leave you with a ‘real’ business email address or just an anonymous Gmail or Hotmail account?

Follow up by email

As soon as you have your contact details, it’s time to start following up with them. Email is easiest and quickest to do and you can automate the process.  But as soon as you can, you really need to get a real sales person trying to contact them.  Remember people buy off people, not off automated emails!

The initial immediate follow up will ensure that you are still very fresh in their mind.


Get them in your list

Many businesses mess about with having a separate list for prospects and one for customers, get them all in the same database, it’s much easier.

Ensure that you are able to track all the communications that you sent them or the name of any campaign that brought them into you (all very useful analysis).

Also ensure that you have an ‘opt-out’ field in case they decide that they no longer want to hear from you, but only ensure that you stop sending them communications if they ask.

Keep sending the updates and newsletter etc along with your regular customers.



These simple steps can help you put your lead follow up virtually on autopilot so you have time to work with clients and hot prospects rather than constantly prospecting for new business.

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Online Lead Generation Magnet

Why a magnet?
By its very definition, a magnet is something that attracts objects – in this case we want to attract leads.

There is a vast amount of traffic online, and what every single website wants to do is pull that traffic it into their website – but online traffic management mustn't end there!

What if someone visits a few of your pages and then leaves – you are likely to have spent time and effort (and perhaps money) in attracting that visitor in the first place, and they have leave your site without providing you with any value whatsoever!

Now the ultimate value is that they buy from you; but even if they don’t buy they could have left you with the next best thing – their contact details.

Many, many site and business owners never think about collecting visitor data to use as a remarketing tool, but it is incredibly important that you do; the more details you get about visitors who are interested in your product and service, the better, more profitable business you can generate.

So how do you generate these sales leads?

The best way is to provide some useful information.

We all love information on the internet that can help us – maybe help us do our job better, save or make us money, and your potential customers are no different.

Now they might not be willing to part with hard cash for the information you have, but they might be willing to leave you their email address at the very least!

There are numerous ways we can do this online, but the best ways are:

• eBooks - needn't be huge, a decent 20 page eBook can be a great way to establish leadership and authority in a marketplace
• A downloadable “kit” - worksheets, videos, articles etc
• Free quote or consultation - these could be delivered in person, my email or over the phone. The great thing about these is that the requester knows that they will need to part with a good amount of information to get the best advice or quote from you.
• Email course - send out a series of informative and educational emails. Over the course of a few weeks or a month you could send numerous emails automatically building authority and trust with the recipient.
• Free samples - if you are the type of business that can send out samples then they make a great lead generation tool.
• Activate a trial - software companies always collect visitor details if they want to download software and get a free trial. During the trial period ensure that you send out automated emails to encourage a conversation with them.
• Whitepapers - a white paper is basically a smaller version of an eBook – so if you find you can’t provide enough detail to make a convincing eBook, make a convincing white paper. They are inexpensive to develop and will add greatly to your credibility.
• Newsletters - do you have information that you can regularly send out as a newsletter?
• Invitation to a webinar - people love webinars, mainly because they are usually free to attend; they are a great way to delivery the same piece of information to a wide audience and they are very cost effective to do.

In Summary

As already mentioned, once you've built up a steady stream of internet traffic, your job is far from over. You now have to implement some type of lead generation magnet(s).

With the automated delivery of follow up emails you’ll start to see some great results and you’ll find that some of these prospects will start to known on your door.

Best of luck.

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SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

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External Links Should Open in New Tabs

It might be me, I might be old fashioned in my views on life, but I really think that web designers/developers are missing a trick with how they treat external links within their websites.

I guess going back a few years the majority of web users complained that when they clicked an external link from a particular website it opened a new window, and depending on how it opened it was at times confusing (I personally never used to mind it!); but the wonderful introduction of browser tabs this has all changed.

Instead of opening up new windows, you can now magically open links to external sites in new tabs. The big and important difference here is that browser tabs are easier for users to manage than browser windows.

I know that there is also an argument that if a visitor to your site clicks on an external link that this new link should be seen as part of a seamless customer journey and they should see this new site in their current browsing session …. Bunkum!

And surely when you open an external links in the same tab for a user and they want to continue their journey on the original site, you create back-button fatigue for them; this doesn't sound like a very good user experience! Does it?

I know this is a personal rant, but I feel that it’s an important one, I’m getting fed up of following links to external sites that interest me, for me to only need to fight my way back to the original site to follow my original journey.

And I know that I can Ctrl and click to force a new tabbed session, but that’s not the point, I bet only a small percentage of web users actually know that anyway.

Quite simply, links that take users to a different (external) website should open in new tabs. Links that take users to a different page on the same website should open in the same tab. This is the right and sensible approach to take.

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Five Tips to Search Engine Success

Tip 1 – You can’t outsmart Google

It’s a fact that if you try to beat Google by trying the latest way to force your pages into the top of the rankings then you will get found out!  Site owners that were spanked by Google's most recent updates (Penguin or Panda), will testify to the fact that you have to bide your time.

A spammy approach to gaining good ranking will hurt you and your business in the long run.  There is no automated way to the top, no quick win – only and effort will get you there.

Tip 2 – Normal business rules apply

If you owned a ‘bricks and motor’ store then I'm guessing that you wouldn't expect to attract customers for free; the internet is exactly the same, it isn't free nor easy to attract visitors to a website.

Invest time and effort and you’ll do well.

Tip 3 – ensure your site has a good infrastructure

It stands to reason that your site won’t survive for long if it had a poor design.  To get ranked well you need a fast loading site filled with pages with great content and pages that link to all the other pages within your site (needed so that search engines spiders know where all your pages are.)

If you're serious about your website, don't use the cheapest web host or designer. Slow poorly designed pages can influence the rankings of your web pages.

Tip 4 – Take Control

Stop searching for gurus or secret tricks that promise to make your site number one in Google (or any other search engine for that matter), they don’t exist.

Work with a search engine marketing professional, ideally someone who understands business and how search engines work.

With their assistance discover what your unique selling proposition is

Identify your audience and make a plan.

Create a great website with valuable content (if visitors like your site word will get out)

Advertise your site (use SEO, paid advertising, even traditional advertising to promote it)

Step 5 -  Act Now

There is always something is your business that’s more important that promoting your website (or so you think), talk to someone today (talk to me) about improving your search engine rankings.

SEO is not necessarily about getting backlinks. It's also not necessarily about getting high rankings on Google. It is about getting sales. It is about improving your business.

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Getting Your Business Online

All businesses can benefit from having a web site, they can enhance your business image, allow you to communicate with customers and prospects and even bring in new customers.

If you do not have a web site, then chances are you have considered it and for some reason dismissed the idea. Many of my clients believe that getting a small web site created that brings in new business will be expensive.

The truth is that it needn't be. A web site can be created and set up, with email accounts for upfront costs as little as £500. 

Now, if over the life of the web site, it only brings in say 10, 20 or 30 new customers, don't you think that it will pay for itself!

I can define your personalised plan for moving online, create and set up a simple web site that will be your virtual shop front, then help you to promote it.

Maybe you already have a web site, but it's not generating the sales leads that you expect it to, then I can help you to determine how the site and it's promotion can be managed.

I have worked with some of the biggest businesses in the UK in helping them to define their online presence and help them to make money, I can do the same for you.

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