2113 Blog
21thirteen design: IBtimes.com
“Top U.S. Web Design Firms for 2011″
21thirteen design chosen as one of the “Top U.S. Web Design Firms for 2011″. Click to read the article in the International Business Times.
Yoga on the Web
Internationally known Yoga instructor, author, speaker and founder of Yokibics Gael Chiarella commissioned 21thirteen design to design and build this custom WordPress site for her prolific blogging activities, seamlessly integrated with an E commerce site where she offers her popular books and recordings. 21thirteen has become expert at the increasingly in-demand trick of building two separate sites, each fulfilling a needed purpose, that seem to be ONE site. One of the most important benefits of this practice is that a small to medium sized business can easily maintain their web presence without the necessity of hiring in-house web-tech personnel.
The Importance of Website Copy
Do you pay a lot of attention to the copy on your website? A lot of attention and detail goes into the design and development of a site, but sometimes, the words don’t get the fine-tuning they deserve. In terms of selling the visitor on a product or service and getting conversions, the words are extremely important.
Popular Web design blog Smashing Magazine recently published a list of “Five Copywriting Errors That Can Ruin A Company’s Website.” One of the errors, writing inwardly, seems to creep up quite a bit in business website copy. How do you fix it?
“Customers don’t have time to admire your greatness. They’re too busy searching for ways to make life better for themselves. A high-level Web page answers one question of the reader above all: What’s in it for me?”
In other words, don’t put so much focus on features and specifications. Instead, tell the reader how your product or service will make their life better. Apple does a fantastic job of this, both in their print/online advertising and on television. Instead of selling features, they sell the experience. Competitors run commercials touting features that their customers might not understand, and then they wonder why their sales aren’t as good. It’s no surprise.
There are some other great tips in the Smashing article for eliminating copywriting errors like burying a lead, or using a weak call to action. Read through and see if some of those same mistakes are creeping up in your own copy.
A/B Testing? What’s That?
What’s that, you ask? A/B testing, also called split testing, is a way to test the effectiveness of a certain design, an implementation of a feature, a string of copy, a particular image, or anything else that might possibly need to be tweaked. The test is performed between two versions, and usually, analytics stats wind up determining whether A or B performed better.
Where can you use A/B testing? If you’re testing a new button, do a split test between the old button and new button and track the results to see which button pulls in more clicks. If you’re writing a headline with a call to action, write two different variations of the headline and use your analytics software to determine which headline leads to a higher conversion percentage. This headline example is especially useful for email marketing and subject lines. Most email marketing services allow you to perform A/B tests, so create two different subject lines for your email campaign and see which one is opened more. This can help you better craft subject lines for future campaigns.
The most important thing to remember about A/B tests is this: only change one thing. If you change multiple things from one version to another and then perform an A/B test, you won’t know for sure which change affected your click-through/conversion rate.
Tips for Infographic Design
Smashing Magazine wrote an article back in October about The Do’s and Don’ts of Infographic Design. Infographics, in case you’re unfamiliar with them, are graphical representations of certain ideas, concepts or statistics — a way to convey information to a user through the use of imagery rather than boring them with a bunch of words and numbers. Some call this “data viz,” which is short for data visualization.
One of the first tips described in the article is that you shouldn’t write out in text what you can easily show in graphical form.
“As an infographic designer, you may or may not determine the concept and compile all of the research for the final design, but either way you are responsible for turning that information into a visually stimulating, cohesive design that tells a story and that doesn’t miss a single opportunity to visualize data.”
If you follow these tips, your infographic design will definitely be on the right track.
Consistency in Website Navigation
Text links in your website’s content should look different from normal, non-hyperlinked text. It’s usually a good idea to keep the color scheme that most Web users are familiar with — blue text indicates a hyperlink, while purple text indicates a hyperlink that has been visited previously.
If possible, it’s also a good idea to keep your menu system the same over all of the pages on your website. Changing the menu structure for some pages, but not all of them, can confuse the user if they’ve trained themselves to look for links to click in certain locations.
When using images for your navigation menu, it’s important to include alternative text for each image in case your visitor is using a device or browser that does not allow for images to be loaded. The alternative text will show up in place of the image and let the user know what link the missing image represents.
By keeping a consistency across your website’s navigation in these very important areas, you’ll provide a better user experience for end users who visit your website, and, as a result, you’ll likely see increased conversions or a lower bounce rate.
Increasing Your Website’s Usability
In the Web design industry, one of the most important pieces of the website puzzle is a website’s usability. Usability takes into account how well a visitor can navigate around a website and find the information he or she is looking for. If a website can be traveled through without the user having to stop and ask for directions, usability is pretty darn good.
If you’re looking to increase your website’s usability so that your end users can find what they’re looking for with the least amount of searching and hassle, here are a few steps you can take.
Add a Search Box
When users first visit your website, they might want access to something they can’t find on the front page. So how do they find it? By searching categories or tags? By clicking through every menu option until they land on the item they’re looking for? Of course not. The first thing users will do, if a search box is available, is search. If your website doesn’t have a search box, get one.
Contact Page
Nothing is more frustrating than when you need to contact someone at a company, and their website has no contact page. Bridging the gap between the online and offline world is crucial if you want to provide a good customer service experience. After all, there are some people who are just more comfortable talking to another person on the phone than they are emailing or talking to someone in a chat box. Provide your users with a contact page containing your company’s address and telephone number to make part of the experience less frustrating.
Use Images or Videos to Illustrate Concepts or Organize Information
Words have their place, but in certain cases, nothing tells a story like images, videos, or sounds. Instead of talking about certain features of your product, show them off in videos or images. Instead of describing what one tier of your service offers over another tier, put together a comparative image table displaying pros and cons. If you can create the type of visual imagery your visitors would otherwise have to imagine for themselves, you are increasing usability on your website.
Have you worked on increasing website usability on your site? If so, feel free to share some of what you’ve done in the comments.
eCommerce: The Hosted Solution vs Open Source
Do you know the difference?
Open Source means the software that is your online store was free to use and you can maintain your store online for a small monthly hosting fee. A Hosted Solution means you could be paying anywhere from $20 to $100 a month, depending on the size of your store, but you get reliability, support and security – three extremely important factors in an eCommerce web site.
When your site is up and running with everything working just the way you like it, with all your software up to date, shopping cart working perfectly and all the basics are fresh in your mind and your developer is just a phone call away then it hardly matters which one you choose. It’s all good.
Really? Don’t be fooled.
I am a business person and have had a career as an inventor of technical things. I have had 30 employees and 0 employees and I am very self reliant.
For the last three years I have run my wife’s online store through the Volusion eCommerce hosted solution. During that time I have come to appreciate the value of ever present tech support and an easy-to-use system.
To me, the biggest difference in a hosted solution versus open source as a business person is your independence. One could think at first look that you might be giving up something in going the hosted solution route but I say, “No way”! It is the path to freedom for the small or medium size business. It will help you be effective managing your website and stay sane while you’re doing it.
We have heard many times the sage advice to never keep your eggs all in one basket.
When you have yourself, or a small development team, or a single individual developing and managing your website you are violating that sage advice.
At 21thirteen design you can depend on us but we are convinced that you deserve and actually need your independence. When you let great companies like Volusion and Big Commerce be your service provider you are buying much more than insurance against the hazard of small time developers who might save you $30 per month in a hosting fee and cost you thousands in frustration or non- compliance liability problems.
Today this is my favorite topic. I’ll be writing more about it and welcome your comments and especially your call to get you started on the right foot in eCommerce.
Designing Websites
As a designer, my favorite quote has always been from Leonardo Da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” But recently I came across another quote which isn’t just about the way a site looks. I think it describes the way website design should be approached.
The famous American designer Charles Eames said, “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose”.
In other words, a website should not be about its design. A nice design is all well and good if you want something pretty to look at.
Mr. Eames is responsible for designing some of the most famous and recognizable furniture of the 20th Century. Not only was his stuff beautiful, it was comfortable. It worked!
So site design should not start with a pretty idea. A website should be about it’s content. Start with what the website is about – what the company or person is, has and does. Build the design around that, not the other way around.
Web Design
Whether you need a corporate website, a small business website, an eCommerce site, a small personal or portfolio type site or a social networking site, the design created for your web site is the face you project on the internet. It must not only convey who and what you are but it must also work – and we don’t mean just “not be broken”. We mean that the design must integrate with everything else that goes into where your business is now and where you want it to be in the future – your marketing strategy, your business needs and your image.
It must be easy to understand and to navigate. It should be in a style that is suitable for your customers. And nowadays we believe it should be accessible not just on computers but on the ever-proliferating array of hand-held devices – iPhones, Ipads, tablets and mobile phones.
In other words – in the old days, you designed and built a website. Now you can and should take into account your branding, your marketing, your promotion, your business strategies and your goals. Now you have to think about not just what the site will look like but what it will do and how it will work.
Do we think we can help you with that? Well, yes! As a matter of fact we love doing it, and your success becomes our success. Let’s talk.
