Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’

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While this session was largely dominated by Daniel Goldman’s Opera discussion (which was marked with many mysterious references to the Nintendo Wii, or more specifically the Opera Browser contained therein), there were a couple of interesting bits that I captured from the panelists:

• Even those that evangelize the use of well formed CSS and HTML still find tabled designs acceptable.
  I personally agree, at least until we get some cooperation between browsers.
• Reducing code bloat brings discipline to an unordered arena.
  If the unordered arena is WYSIWYG generated web pages, then I wholeheartedly agree with this concept.
• Using well formed, streamlined code strengthens semantics.
  I have been saying this for a few years now and was pleased to hear some support from an expert panelist.

To insure that we got the most out of PubCon, our fearless leader assigned sessions to each team member. My first session was SEO & Big Search, moderated by Jake Baillie.

This was an interesting session in that it was primarily an opportunity for some of the primary search properties to discuss their own in-house SEO campaigns. This is what each had to say:

AOL: Represented by Melanie Mitchell, Director of SEO/SEM. Melanie gave a detailed account of AOL’s SEO initiatives. She described their approach to SEO as focusing on 3 key areas:

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Over the last several weeks I’ve been working on a new version of our website and was able to finally rolled it out. Its not a complete re-design, just a minor upgrade over the previous version of the site. Take a look at it here.

Here’s what’s changed:

• Left Nav Removed: All navigational elements are now encompassed in the drop down. Any sub-navs are found in the body on the pages to which they are necessary. I have been wanting to get rid of the navigation for some time, and even with the last re-design I contemplated it but just couldn’t figure out how to lose that without losing usability to essential pages. A slight re-organization of our sections fixed that problem.
• Right-Side Info Panel: For the most part the “nav bar” has been moved from the left side to the right side but its been cleaned up a bit and is no longer a navigation bar. Instead of a gray background setting it apart from the body area it now is fused in with a white background. This looks much cleaner and gave me room for some cool stuff I wanted to do. More on that below
• New Top Nav Menu: The old top nav menu was justified to the right but I moved this one over to the left. Made sense since there is no left nav anymore. I also restructured our main service categories and combined some old categories into these. Instead of a “services” drop down that had about 20 links, I’ve got our main services across the top and each drop down containing six or so links. For those that browse with JavaScript turned off I made sure that the category buttons link to pages as well. That was a problem with the old site, when JavaScript is turned off the drop downs downs don’t work. Now the navigation bar still does regardless.
• Colored Nav Buttons: I added a script to swap images in the top nav depending on which section of the site you’re in. Previously, these were always black and the drawback to that is it made the top navigation difficult to locate as id kind of blended in a bit. That was another reason why I kept the left nav. But now, the buttons turn yellow for the section the visitor is in. Not only does it make it immediately apparent that this is a navigation menu, it helps letting visitors know where they are in the site.
• Rotating Testimonials: I always liked having testimonials visible but putting them in the nav bar made them static. I’ve changed that by putting the testimonials in the right-side information column and adding a script that pulls a new testimonial with each click or refresh. I also added some stats to rotate in and out of here as well just for a more rounded experience. Below the testimonials is a link to read more which takes visitors to the testimonial page.
• BBB Membership: I’ve made my Better Business Bureau membership more visible. This is an important usability issue and helps give visitors some confidence. Instead of being lower on the page it is now prominently displayed at the top.
• Updated Footer: I updated the footer to be consistent across all pages. Previously the four images were only on select pages but I incorporated these into the site wide footer. This also allowed them to spread out across the entire bottom of the page rather than just as wide as the body area. I like this better.
• New Tag Line: I felt it was time for a new tag line. The old, which I liked very much, was “Position Your Business First”. A nice play on words with positioning and the meaning of “Pole Position”. This time I wanted something a bit more aggressive and many ideas were bantered around. Ultimately I settled on one I like very much, “Velocitize Your Web Marketing”.

  Tag lines can be hit and miss. Like I said, I really like this new one, but what do you think? Did we hit?

While the debate on the Grand Sierra Resort logo has been raging, one commenter was kind enough to point out that this blog might have its own logo issues. I was reminded of Luke 6:41 which says

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

OK, fair enough. Let’s take a look my own plank: the EMP logo. Now, I have to say that I absolutely love this logo, but that’s because I get it. I know what it represents, or at least its my own interpretation of what I want it to represent. But before I spill the beans on that, lets upon this up to see if anybody else gets it.

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I’ve been doing SEO for years and I can’t get past the fact that optimization continues to be the “after thought” of website development. This was all well and good in the late 90’s as SEO was just beginning to come onto the scene, or even in the early 2000’s when SEO was moving into it’s prime. Back then websites were always developed first and then considerations for online marketing came later.

But in the past couple years, as online marketing becomes more and more important to the success of any business, online or off, it simply no longer makes sense to wait until after a website has been developed to start thinking of how best to market it on the Internet. The two are so completely intertwined that doing one before the other often times causes you to have to go back and redo, or worse, undo things in order to create a compatible synergy between the website and its marketing campaign.

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Stanford’s Guidelines to Web Credibility:

Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.

We all make mistakes. The worst are the little things that are often overlooked but easily correctable. Before publishing new content on your website, take a few extra minutes to run the content through a spell check program. Even if you’ve made a only few minor edits, don’t assume that you don’t need to double check your work.

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Stanford’s Guidelines to Web Credibility:

Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).

If possible, avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct, and sincere.

Let’s set the distinction here between commercial sites and informational sites. Ads on informational sites and blogs are fine and a great way to create an additional source of income. Of course, this only goes so far. Even informational sites can lose their credibility if you have too many ads or utilize annoying popup/popunder windows.

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Stanford’s Guidelines to Web Credibility:

Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).

People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or reviewed.

Have you ever been to a website and you could just tell the content was old and stale? Maybe it wasn’t obvious right away, but as you browse through the site you begin to see things that perhaps don’t align with other things touted on the website. Or maybe you see a “Valentine’s Day Special” still hanging around a week AFTER Valentine’s day.

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Stanford’s Guidelines to Web Credibility:

Make your site easy to use — and useful.

We’re squeezing two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.

How do you make your site easy to use? Clear, concise and consistent navigational elements.

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Stanford’s Guidelines to Web Credibility:

Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose.

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