Every chance we get as designers we go out and get inspired! Yesterday during the Spring weather I rode up to 110th and cathedral parkway in New York City. I knew there were peacocks there, but this time there was a stunning white one, picture is below.
Web designers will be designing seamlessly integrated designs to all the things we want information on… amazing. I can’t wait to see what it turns into when these things are refined.
Pattie Maes says “…Maybe in ten years the ultimate sixth sense brain implant.”
This post is paraphrased from hubspot’s webinars. At the onset of every webinar or white paper from Hubspot they talk about Outbound marketing vs. Inbound marketing. The hubspot commentary is so basic to web design, marketing, and digital strategy — and it’s so important to understand that I figured I would just outline it for those of you who have not engaged in any of Hubspot’s webinars.
Outbound marketing is viewed as Interruption based. These include: telemarketing, direct mail, email blasts, print ads, TV and Radio ads. These come in the form of interruptions and nowadadys can be blocked out by caller ID, spam blockers, reading and scanning online including RSS feeds, TiVO, DVR, and commercial free SIRIUS radio.
Inbound marketing is considered Permission Based. These come in the form of magnets to people, come in contact with the people who make the purchasing decisions and include: SEO at the core of it all due to 85 % of all people starting their internet session with Google or related search engine, blogging, social media and RSS.
So inbound marketing is the new way to market customers which requires less money but more creativity in how you use some of the above strategies to get your messages to the right people with buying power. So when we as web designers are creating our web designs, and working with our creative directors and digital strategiests we need to question the means of our marketing efforts and those of our clients.
Web Designer’s need to use strategic web usability in their design, or they aren’t really doing the full job. The user experience and it’s inherent web usability is so important to guide people through information. It is even more important if you plan on creating an environment in which visitors are faced with an open-ended story — a place of engagement whereby the visitor decides how it unfolds.
Whatever type of web design you are creating, a good web usability strategy can reap big business benefits. Here’s some data that was pulled to support this theory:
• £1 invested in improving your website’s usability returns £10 to £100 (source: IBM)
• A web usability redesign can increase the sales/conversion rate by 100% (source: Jakob Nielson)
So simplicity is key in web designs and your website has to be easy to navigate. Web visitors have gradually become accustomed to particular layouts and phrases on the Internet, for example:
• The main logo is in the top-left corner and links back to the homepage
• The term ‘About us’ is used for organization information
• Navigation and layouts are in the same place on each page
• Using CSS and not tables to lay out your web page greatly improves SEO and page load
• CSS should be used at least as a back up and not images to create fancy navigation items
• Don’t use frames to lay out your website. Frames can cause usability problems
• Don’t disable the back button
• Making contact and e-mail the linking to someone else very evident and simple
• Don’t create problems with printing
• Users feel trapped if external links open in the same window
As we all know Information should be easy to retrieve. We read web pages in a different manner to the way we read printed matter. We generally don’t read pages word-for-word – instead we scan web pages. When we scan web pages certain items stand out:
• Headings
• Link text
• Bold text
• Bulleted lists
So — keep a good eye on usability when web designing, beacuse it’s not just design and it’s not good design unless there is a well thought-out plan put in place for how the content is going to be received by your web site visitor. We as web designers must have deep knowledge of the technology that is going to be used to build our beautiful designs as well as how the content and information will flow in a browser to our visitors.
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