"Business Creative" Web Design

Stu Macik, Broken Sky Studio Web Design and Development, Denver, Colorado

One Waterloo of business web design that I’m very careful to avoid is the cram, jam, thank you mam website. We’ve all experienced websites with so much “stuff” on them that our brains experience information overload and almost immediately go into shutdown mode.

What happens next is entirely predictable in that we go back to the Google search results page and move on in the hope that we’ll find a business who’s site doesn’t remind us of Barnum & Bailey.

The reason for this problem, in my opinion, is that business owners have a natural tendency to believe they need to tell EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING in the smallest space possible. They’re (rightfully) proud of their business so they think that if they can tell a potential customer everything about them that they’ll be sold on doing business with them and pick up the phone.

The reality though is that TMI (too much information) on a webpage works about the same as it does when your neighbor comes over and TMI’s you about their latest visit to the doctor. You really just want to run away. The difference being that when you TMI someone with your website they’ll just move on to the next one which could be your competition across the street.

Take your homepage for instance. In my mind the goal of any well thought out homepage can be narrowed down to just three things. What, Why and a “Call To Action”. That is, WHAT is it that your business is does (in exact terms), WHY should I choose you to provide this good or service for me and, of course, some type of call to action i.e. “Call Today To Find Out About This Months Specials”.

Since many visitors never get past your homepage what and why become the only information that really matters. Don’t get caught up thinking you need to reveal details that are better left to another page. That’s where a solid IA (Information Architecture) comes in and that’s a subject that I’ll be writing more about soon.

In the meantime, think basics (for all your pages) and you’ll be well on your way to increasing conversions and growing your business.

-Stu

Stu Macik_Broken Sky Studio Web Design and Development, Denver, Colorado

I had a client ask my opinion the other day if I thought that his business needed a mobile version of the website that we had done for him. We design and develop mobile sites at Broken Sky (which is why he asked) but that led me to thinking about what kind of businesses could really benefit from a mobile site and which ones perhaps not as much.

It’s been estimated that by 2015 nearly half of all internet traffic will come from “mobile” devices in the form of smart-phones and other devices running some flavor of mobile OS (operating system). Besides smart-phones this would include tablet devices (such as Apple’s iPad) as well as netbooks running the upcoming Chrome OS that Google is reported to be releasing later this year. There are also reports that Google’s Android OS will be deployed on some tablet devices from other manufacturers that would compete with the iPad.

In my view, tablets and netbooks are still able to view “normal” websites so I think what we are really talking about here is “smart-phones” and the need to accommodate their smaller displays…not necessarily all “mobile” devices.

So, keeping in mind that 2015 is still five years away, I think a simple rule of thumb is to consider how it is that your customers do business with you. The most important question to ask is, do my customers come to me for my goods and/or services or do I go to them?

If your customers come to you, then my belief is that you would absolutely benefit from having a mobile version of your website. That way people on the move could find, contact and get to you easily using their smart-phone. A map to your business on a mobile site is just one way that you could benefit from “going mobile”.

If you’re a business that only goes to your customers home or business to deliver goods or services, then my thinking is that you probably won’t benefit quite as much from a mobile site. Your customers are probably going to find and contact you from their home or place of business using their traditional computer/laptop and so in this case I think that a mobile site would be more of a luxury (to cover all the bases) than a necessity.

At any rate, I hope this helps some of you small business owners out there thinking about a mobile site. Oh, and as for my client, he fell into the “goes to his customers” camp and so we decided that his marketing budget would probably be better spent in another area. Not great for me as far as another project goes, but an honest assessment…something I really believe in.

-Stu

Stu Macik_Broken Sky Studio Web Design and Development, Denver, Colorado

When I’m considering “content” in relation to a potential customer’s attention span on a site, I like to think of the situation using a “billboard” analogy. Your potential customer is a driver making their way down the highway (in this case the information superhighway) and your site is the billboard. When they see your “billboard” it’s only going to be a few seconds before they pass it and so the way your message is presented is critical to making them slow down and stop to take a more in-depth look.

When you think about it this way you begin to understand the fact that you only have a few seconds to get the “driver’s” attention before they’ve moved past your “billboard” and on down the road to your competitor.

The question then becomes how do we grab their attention and make them slow down and stop at your site so you can interest them in your goods or services. Well here are a few ideas that I take to heart with every site that I work on that may help you as well. Remember that we are talking about business websites here, not artists sites or other non-business sites, we’re talking about branding and growing your company.

First off, have a professional looking logo that invites attention. Not only is this important as an overall branding practice but I feel that it can be something that very quickly says “hey, this site feels professional, maybe I need to check it out”. It’s been shown that most site visitor’s attention goes to the top-left of the page initially so that’s always a good place for your logo although I have used a top-centered approach as well with good results.

Second, have a concise statement telling what you’re all about offset in some way from the other text/content on the site. Remember you only have a few seconds so don’t make it too long. Make sure it stands out by either using a larger font size, a different color or by having plenty of “white space” around it but make sure that its the first thing the potential customer notices and reads after seeing your logo.

Also, make sure that the site is clean and uncluttered with plenty of white space and a general feel of having some sense of order to it. This is very inviting and professional to customers but is also one of the hardest things to accomplish in design because the natural instinct is to try to cram as much content as possible into the available space. Resist it though and you can get that internet “driver” to park and stay for awhile…and that’s half the battle!

-Stu

Stu Macik_Broken Sky Studio Web Design and Development, Denver, Colorado

It’s seems that many of us have had our attention spans shortened with the advent of so many “instant” technologies and nowhere is that more true than on the web. I’ve seen research that indicates that a website has anywhere from 3 to 15 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention with the majority of site visitors falling into the under 10 second range. I would say from talking to others as well as my own personal experience that 10 seconds is probably about right.

This accentuates the need to provide core information on a site in a way that will maximize those precious few seconds that you have to make that all important first impression. I’m going to cover “content” in part 2 of this topic but first I want to talk about page-load because, in my mind, page-load is half the battle when it comes to the attention span problem with website visitors. People just don’t want to wait for a website to load. Here are a few ideas to help speed up page-load times that I use personally in my own web design and development business and have been very effective for me.

First, assuming that you have a decent hosting provider (and most of the better known ones are ok) the first thing that you want to do is to have as few HTTP requests as possible on your webpage. An HTTP request is whenever your web browser fetches a file (a page, an icon, a picture, etc) from the web server. HTTP is a request/response protocol, which means your computer sends a request for some file (i.e. get me the file ‘home.html’”), and the web server sends back a response (“here’s the file”, followed by the file itself).

While all of this only takes a fraction of a second, the number of requests along with the size of the files determines how long your page will take to load. This is critical to consider because pages with large numbers of requests combined with graphics (images) that have not been optimized for display on the web can lead to those very slow loading pages that we’ve all experienced at times when browsing. Several simple ways to cut down HTTP requests are to combine multiple images into one (when possible), use graphics judiciously (only when needed to enhance content) and keep page lengths reasonable (this also helps with cutting down on page scrolling as well).

Second, as mentioned above graphic (image) size is very important to page load time. All graphics should be “optimized” for use on a web page in a program like Photoshop or Illustrator using the “save for web” function that these programs provide. I take optimization of images one step further however in that I’ve found that I can cut the size of most images another 10-20% from the Photoshop/Illustrator output and still have effective quality for web display. This would be done with a more specialized program but suffice it to say, all images should at least have some optimization to speed up their display on the page.

Third, an often overlooked factor in page-load speed is the use of “valid” HTML in the development of a page/site. HTML is the “mark-up” language used by developers to display your content to the visitors of your site. When the page is not coded to agreed upon (by browser makers and developers) standards set by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), it can slow down page loads as the browser tries to figure out what the code is attempting to tell it to do. One way to check if your pages are “valid” HTML is to use the Validator at the W3C located here. The validator is a very useful tool because it will even tell you specifically which code is invalid and often how to fix it.

Last, I would like to take a second to mention that the use of Flash can also be a problem in the “page-load” category because Flash is a comparatively slow loading technology compared to HTML/CSS/Javascript development methods. We’ve all been on a Flash sight and watched the little progress bar telling us that it is “loading” and been frustrated at having to wait for it to finish. It’s for this reason that I use Flash sparingly (video embeds mostly).

Anyway, hopefully these tips will help your business have a faster loading site and help with at least half of the attention span problem. In the next post I’ll cover “content” in relation to attention spans and how you can help customers stay on your site long enough to create interest in your product or service.

-Stu