2113 Blog
Take Your Logo Design Seriously
Think about the one part of your company that is a constant, no matter what. It’s on your website. It’s on your business cards. When you advertise, it’s there. It’s your visual identity, and customers can make a connection to your business simply by seeing it.
It’s your logo. If it’s poorly designed, it won’t be memorable. If you don’t have one at all, your business is very easy to forget. When your logo is done well, it can speak volumes about your company without saying a single word.
Much like your website design, your logo is a visual representation of your business. A sharp-looking logo helps your company look more professional. That’s why it’s a good idea to leave your logo to design to a company that has years of experience helping companies create and cultivate their brand identity.
Interested in talking more about your logo design? Give us a call at (646) 808-0391.
A Few Questions to Ask Your Web Design Company
When you’re on the hunt for a Web design firm, it’s helpful to have a few questions prepared to weed out the inexperienced companies who want to separate you from your money. These questions are by no means foolproof, but they’re a good starting point as you try to find the company that will ultimately design your new website.
Will my website work across all browsers?
Be wary of designers or developers who focus development on a single browser or two. There are many browsers in existence, and while most are good at adhering to modern Web standards, some still display things a little differently than others. Those issues need to be addressed so your site maintains a consistent look across all browsers.
How often can my website be changed?
Most designers will allow for revisions during the project. If your design company tells you that they’re unwilling to alter their designs after they’re completed, you might want to continue your search.
Can I do eCommerce on my website?
Good designers and developers will be familiar with major eCommerce platforms and how to integrate them into websites. Web design companies who are unwilling to handle eCommerce projects are probably not as experienced as you need them to be.
Will my new website be SEO-optimized?
Part of a new website design is not just the visual design itself, but the content that you see on the pages, and the search engine optimization that takes place behind the scenes in the code. Basic SEO work should be included with your new site design. If it’s not, move on to the next company.
Have some other good questions you ask companies when searching? Feel free to share them in the comments below.
A Quick Look at Pinterest
The hot new thing the past few months is Pinterest, a social network that is a virtual pin board, of sorts. Imagine a cork board where you pin photos of clothes you like, products you’re interested in, pictures you love, or almost anything else that can be represented visually. Pinterest is the Web version of that.
Naturally, a lot of companies are asking if Pinterest is a place they should be. Our answer: if you’re in an industry where you can show off your taste or your knowledge in a visual way, absolutely. We’ve seen city tourism offices, clothing designers, and many other kinds of companies have great success on Pinterest.
Another thing to ask yourself is this: will people want to share what I’m pinning? One of the things that makes Pinterest addictive is the activity of re-pinning great bits of content to your own pin boards. If you think the items you’ll pin will be interesting to the Pinterest user base (which is, at the moment, predominately female), then take a dive in.
We’ll certainly cover Pinterest (and any other new networks that take off) in future posts, so stay tuned!
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.
