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.

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.

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.

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.”

(image credit: xkcd.com)